Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/187920
Company Profile What drew you to U.S. Concrete? HOW EFFICIENT IS YOUR OPERATION? I was interested by the challenge. I thought we were at the bottom of the cycle. I thought that U.S. Concrete had great potential because the markets it operated in were what I believed to be leading regional markets as we came out of the recession, with good fundamental, underlying economic characteristics. I thought that the asset base was above average. I thought that they had strategically located plants, and I had the desire to really be able to lead a public company. This was an opportunity amongst very few publicly traded, U.S. materials companies... that was very attractive to me. I made the decision to leave Oldcastle with very mixed feelings because they had been very, very good to me. They had trained me; they had nurtured me; they had given me the opportunity to grow business; they had given me the opportunity to be involved in multi-national operations — in Canada and South America — so I did not make the decision lightly. L2180 Wheel loader scales X2350 Excavator scales How did the company's stock price rise so rapidly? The regions that we've operated in over the last years — which include the San Francisco Bay Area, Northern Texas and the Dallas metroplex, Washington, D.C., metropolitan New York City, and Northern New Jersey — have had very, very healthy construction climates. Everybody knows how healthy Texas is and the San Francisco Bay Area is doing very, very well too. Over the past two years, there has been growth from a low base, but good absolute growth in all of our markets. I did make some leadership changes within the company that helped. We refocused the organization — the headquarters staff — to be more responsive to the field's needs. To that end, we closed our Houston office and moved it to Euless, Texas, and co-located the corporate staff with the regional headquarters, which has culturally realigned everyone's interests. It was very good for the corporate staff and it was very good for the field to see that we were willing to rub shoulders with them, and that the company was aligned from top to bottom. We did make some strategic acquisitions and divestitures that helped us. We decided that our precast businesses were not core, and, therefore, sold the bulk of them to Oldcastle. We used that money to buy another company in the San Francisco Bay Area that allowed us to partake of the technology boom and the ancillary growth that is taking place there. We stuck to our knitting. We were very focused on cost control, but we invested selectively in assets where we thought we C1850 Conveyor belt scales Use LOADRITE scales on wheel loaders, excavators and conveyor belts for maximum operational efficiency. For proven cost savings & increased profits, supported by our expert technical team across the US and the world, choose LOADRITE. For more info phone 1 800 560 9681, email info@loadritescales.com, or visit our website for your local distributor. www.loadritescales.com Text INFO to 205-289-3782 or visit www.aggman.com/info CompanyProfile_AGRM1013.indd 15 9/19/13 9:37 AM