Nidhi Turakhia likes taking on new projects, perhaps a little too much.
The CEO of Allied Alloys, a Houston-based recycler and trader of stainless steel and other nickel-based alloys, shares the initiatives underway at the company, which include embarking on ISO 9001 certification and implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Both are significant projects.
“One of my friends always tells me, ‘You just love taking on everything at the same time,’” Turakhia says. “I don’t do it on purpose.”
But what Turakhia and Allied Alloys are doing is purposeful.
The company’s six core values—safety, teamwork, integrity, consistency, humility and drive—shape everything it does.
“Our vision is set in stone,” she says. “We hire based on these core values.”
Turakhia says Allied Alloys uses a “people analyzer” that involves a job applicant answering a series of questions. These responses result in a rating that allows the company to see how well he or she aligns with its values and culture.
Last year, Allied Alloys was hiring to support the company’s growth, a process Turakhia found challenging for many reasons.
“Our industry’s not sexy,” she says. “Not everybody wants to work here.
“People show up and they don’t even walk in because they see the environment and they just leave; they get back in their car.”
Turakhia is working to change the perception of Allied Alloys as well as the wider recycled materials industry by sharing “who we are and what we do and why it’s important, not just for the planet but for the future.
“It’s all about perception, and I think it’s slowly changing,” she continues. “I wish it was faster.”
Turakhia adds that for a person with the right “DNA,” the industry is teachable, but she’d like more people to view the industry as a welcoming place where they will succeed and improve their lives.
An unexpected attraction
Turakhia, herself, wasn’t always aware of the recycled materials industry.
When her father, Mukesh, founded Titan Metals in Houston in 2003 to broker recycled metals to India, Turakhia was graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Texas at Austin with plans to attend law school; the recycled materials industry was not on her radar.
Her father, who had been a pharmacist before working for a scrapyard in the Dallas area, convinced her to join him at Titan Metals to help get the business off the ground. All he asked for was a year—he’s gotten two decades and counting.
“I quickly fell in love with this industry and went back and got my MBA instead of going to law school,” Turakhia says. “They say it’s in your blood. It definitely is. I’m really excited to see how I’m going to lead this company to the next level and let my dad and partner enjoy the life they’ve worked so hard for now.”
She describes Titan Metals as a pioneer that helped Allied Alloys coin the term blended turnings with solids, or BTS, a mixture of solid metal and turnings, which are chips or shavings derived from machining operations.
“We were the first ones to introduce that package into India,” she says.
Turakhia says the BTS package, which Allied Alloys uses in-house software to produce based on individual customer requirements, provides optimal blends for its customers and better yields, improving their melts.
Titan Metals currently operates out of Allied Alloys’ office, with the companies sharing synergies and working hand in hand, she notes. While Allied Alloys trades much of its materials directly, Titan Metals brokers the company’s material in certain markets.
Buying into Allied Alloys
Allied Alloys is the younger of the two companies, having been co-founded by Andy Mitch Greenberg in 2006. The company grew “overnight,” she says, from four employees to nearly 200—then the Great Recession hit.
“It was the perfect storm,” Turakhia says of that time. “They had such a good run for close to three years and then, all of a sudden, nickel tanked,” reducing the value of everything Allied Alloys had in its inventory.
At that point in 2008, Turakhia and her father bought into the company.
“I believed in what the founders were doing, so I was very happy that we had an opportunity to join and help turn the company around,” she says.
Among their early actions after buying into the company was to right-size the operations, reducing Allied’s workforce to roughly 100 and cutting expenses.
Turakhia has had numerous roles with Allied Alloys over the years, rising to CEO in 2023.
In early 2024, Turakhia took the helm of the company and Mukesh and Greenberg moved to advisory roles, stepping away from day-to-day business, which resulted in a leadership restructuring.
At age 72, Turakhia’s father is transitioning to retirement, while Greenberg is enjoying life as an empty nester.
“They both wanted to take it slow, and, at the same time, I really wanted to get the reins and steer this company to the next level,” she says. “I realized that, in order for me to do that, we were missing that middle-management layer. We have some excellent supervisors/managers, general laborers and operations staff, and then we have the owners, but we were missing the C-suite.”
It took Turakhia about six months to fill these roles, adding Chief Operating Officer Gary Hensley and Chief Marketing Officer Alasdair Gledhill to help lead the company through its next growth phase.
Hensley has nearly 30 years of experience in the recycling industry with a background in mill buying and commercial and operational management roles, while Gledhill’s 30 years of commercial experience play a key role in advancing the company’s growth trajectory and global reach.
Turakhia says she and Hensley spent the last year reorganizing Allied Alloys’ staff to ensure “the right people [were] in the right seats” to facilitate growth.
“I think that’s still a constant process. We are evaluating our team every six months now … because I’m a huge believer that it’s the team that makes the company and not the other way around. I am a firm believer in second chances, so there’s still a lot of reshuffling going on, which is in the best interest of the entire team.”
Going to the next level
Allied Alloys operates two yards that are within half a mile of each other.
Its bulk yard at 6767 Kirbyville St. sits on 12-15 acres and is where its solid scrap is stored. The other facility, at 6002 Donoho St., has 400,000 square feet of warehouse space divided among four buildings that house Allied Alloys’ turnings and shavings operations. The company’s headquarters also are located at this site, which occupies 12-15 acres as well.
Roughly 70 percent of Allied Alloys’ 100 employees work in operations, which includes a fleet of five trucks and roughly 300 roll-off containers that service industrial accounts within a 150-mile radius. The remaining 30 percent work in the office in trading and administrative roles.
Turakhia describes the company’s growth goals as aggressive.
“My three-year goal is to diversify our footprint,” she continues. “We’re targeting countries that we’ve never sold to, and we’re finding new homes. Same thing on the buy side. We’re finding new sources, new industries that generate our type of material as a byproduct. We’re just getting a little bit more innovative and thinking outside of the box rather than going to our normal suppliers.
“It’s very easy to get into a routine of complacency, so I love always challenging our team and keeping them on their toes.”
In the five-to-seven-year time frame, Turakhia says she wants to grow through acquisition or a greenfield expansion in the Northeast.
“I’ve been eyeing the northeast area for a while because a dream of mine is to have a facility that has access to water and rail. Currently, we load a lot of barges that go up that way, so it just makes more sense.”
For her near-term goal, Turakhia is restructuring both yards.
“I am moving all of our turnings here and here only, so there’s no double handling that will take place,” she says.
“Then we’re building out a structure so we can have the turnings still enclosed but will be able to buy a larger crusher or a larger shredder, and that’s been a process—you have to pull permits, you’re dealing with the city, etc. But we have a great consultant who specializes in these things, and he’s been helping us a lot.”“I’m really excited to see how I’m going to lead this company to the next level and let my dad and partner enjoy the life they’ve worked so hard for now.” – Nidhi Turakhia, CEO of Allied Alloys
Navigating uncertainty
Turakhia says optimism was high following the presidential election last year, with many in the recycled materials industry and manufacturing sector believing that Donald Trump’s reelection would be good for business.
“That led to some really good months for us,” Turakhia says, “and then he got into office.”
She says the uncertainty related to U.S. trade policy and tariffs on imported goods has reduced the volume that Allied Alloys typically handles.
“Our sweet spot has always been around 10,000 metric tons a month, and we’ve done in the past up to 15,000, but right now we’re at 8,500.
“We didn’t see a sudden drop in demand or supply; it has been more gradual,” she continues, adding that the volatility in nickel’s value is the more concerning issue. “Even if nickel’s trading at $10,000, we could deal with that. You know, it doesn’t have to be at $15,000, where it is [as of mid-July].”
Allied Alloys sells roughly 70 percent of its material to the domestic market and 30 percent to the export markets, with Asia being a primary destination, though the ratio was reversed in the recent past.
“Wherever the best markets are, that’s where we’re going,” she says, describing Allied Alloys as “agile.”
The company purchases material to process from throughout North, Central and South America, with Turakhia saying she herself has bought recycled metal from as far away as Malaysia.
To ensure the team of traders buying material for the company is on the same page, every morning begins with a 30-minute call, while three operations meetings are held per week.
“We used to only have one operations call on Mondays and on Wednesdays, and now we have one Monday, Wednesday and Friday—Friday to close out the week and start planning for the week after,” Turakhia says.
The company’s operations meetings include a rundown of the material it has in its inventory, what material is being sold, logistics for outbound shipments as well as a market overview.
“I’m doing the same thing on the purchase side on a daily basis and three times a week on the sales side,” Turakhia says.
She is excited for Allied Alloys to explore selling into emerging markets such as Vietnam and Indonesia and “being able to open that door.”
As part of the company’s expansion of the markets it sells into, Turakhia is planning a trip to Asia in January. For the past year, however, she has reduced her travels to focus on the projects underway at Allied Alloys, which include installing the new ERP system and obtaining ISO 9001 (quality management system certification), which is intended to open more doors for the company in the aerospace and oil and gas industries.
“We buy a lot of aerospace material, and we sell a lot. This would just be something that will open some further doors,” she says. “Most major aircraft manufactures require you to be ISO certified, and aerospace is a huge focus for India’s future, so it’s just the right timing.”
Turakhia and her team are working with a consultant to obtain the company’s ISO certification, which involves documenting Allied Alloys’ processes across its operations.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding U.S. manufacturing in the near term, Turakhia and Allied Alloys are positioning the company for growth by fostering a culture of safety, teamwork, integrity, consistency, humility and drive. They also collectively are excited about what the future could hold for the company and the people who contribute to its success.