Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/85672
contractor of the year finalist | by Mike Anderson Universal Wrecking Year started: 2000 Number of employees: 20 Annual volume: $3 million to $5 million Markets served: Industrial and commercial demolition. Steve Vesseli Brick, New Jersey "Every building has its life expectancy," says Steve Vesseli, owner of Universal Wrecking. And, when the time comes for it to come down, his New Jersey-based crews of demo- lition professionals are ready to take up the challenge. Steve Vesseli is all too happy to clean up where much of industry leaves off – and where something new is hopefully on the way. F rom the brownfi elds back home in New Jersey to the vacant Rust Belt factories of the Midwest, Steve Ves- seli deploys his Universal Wrecking crews to the corners of this country sometimes described as being in transition. As Vesseli pulls up a metal chair in a trailer offi ce to discuss the steps he's taken to build the business he started alone in 2000, the hums of his shear- and grapple-equipped Caterpillar excavators outside are outdone only by the occasional whistle of a passing train. This is cold, damp, wintertime Erie, Pennsylvania, a once-industrious town now focused on reinventing itself. On either side of choppy Cascade Street, in the middle of what was once an urban mechanical haven long silent, in-sync operators Ty Williams, Louis Estrada, Calvin Stubbs and supervisor Jimmy O'Malley are meticulously ma- neuvering the Caterpillars to carve away at buildings actually older than parts of the nation they once represented. The operators are "the cream of the crop," says Vesseli. "It's like a sports team. I've got all the best players. "Almost everything these guys do out there, I did," adds Vesseli, who caught the equipment bug aboard a skid steer at age 15, when he did summer work at his uncle's scrapyard in Florida. "That background is good as a boss, because you know how long things take. You know how hard the work is. You know what it's like to run a machine, and then at the end of the day the hose goes and you've got to crawl underneath that machine and the hot hydraulic oil EquipmentWorld.com | April 2012 53