Golden rule: fair treatment, courtesy and honesty are at the heart of the McAvoy family's Industrial Metal Recycling company - Cover Story

Recycling Today, July, 2003 by Brian Taylor

The Golden Rule--treating others as you would like to be treated--must be easier to memorize than it is to put into practice. As Peter McAvoy says his father repeatedly told him, if everyone were obeying this one simple rule, there would be no need for the Ten Commandments or the layers of global, federal, state and municipal laws that are on the books.

While McAvoy is limited in his ability to spread his father's wisdom to the world at large, he has worked hard to apply it to the practices of Industrial Metal Recycling (IMR), the family business based in Oakland, Maine, that he now runs.

The success the company has had in the past two decades seems to show that honesty is the best policy and that, happily, nice guys do not always finish last.

EARLY SCRAP EXPOSURE. The scrap metal industry has been a familiar part of Peter McAvoy's life from an early age. Peter was one of eight children (seven boys, one girl) growing up as part of a family that followed their father where his job as a "rigger" took him. His father's work involved constructing, assembling and repairing machinery at great heights and other hard-to-reach places. "Whenever there was a tough job anywhere in the country, including Pearl Harbor after the attack, they knew they could call George McAvoy," recalls Peter.

Originally from Maine, the McAvoy family travels took Peter to different parts of the country, and spurred he and his older brothers to seek out different types of work when arriving in new cities. During a stay in Kansas, one of Peter's older brothers worked at a scrap yard, a business that intrigued Peter. "I started my career at age six, when I found out from my older brother how scrap yards pay cash for discarded metal," recalls Peter. "I joined up with two girls at my school who had a red wagon, and we looked for metal to bring to the scrap yard." Peter chuckles recalling that one of the young crew's best "sources" of metal turned out to be just over the fence line of the scrap yard's property, where pieces of scrap in higher piles occasionally fell over the fence.

"The owner of the scrap yard knew, and wanted to clean it up, but didn't have enough full-time help to do it," says Peter. "So he gave me a magnet and told me he would pay more for the shiny stuff that didn't stick to the magnet." Adds Peter, "Almost every story you read about scrap companies starts out with someone's grandfather going around with a wagon or an old truck to start the business. I guess I will be that old guy they talk about 30 or 40 years from now."

Several years after his red wagon days, while Peter was recovering from a broken back suffered while working as a longshoreman, one of his other brothers and a friend entered the scrap business in Maine, after the McAvoy family returned there.

They worked as peddlers for scrap that they took to the yards of dealers. "They would work hard for a couple of days, then spend a week enjoying living off what they had made," recalls Peter. "I wondered what would happen if you worked full-time and didn't take the time off to spend your money."

At the time, Peter was having trouble finding work while recuperating. "I convinced my local banker to loan me $500 to buy a 20-year-old one-and-a-half ton truck and a set of torches," recalls Peter. "I had no collateral, but he said he would stick his neck out because I had a job lined up to clean up an old granite quarry for the State of Maine. The quarry is now a state park, and more than 30 years later I'm still with the same bank."

Eventually, Peter and his brother Brian started a scrap and salvage business that often concentrated on harvesting the metals at abandoned industrial sites. This line of business ultimately produced the opportunity that created the company now called Industrial Metal Recycling.

CLEAN-UP CREWS. "It all kind of started in 1986 with me getting a phone call about a large factory that was once here in Oakland called Diamond Match," says Peter of the origins of Industrial Metal Recycling.

The Diamond Match facility produced matches, ice cream bar sticks and other sawmill products before being suddenly shut down by its ownership group that year. Although Peter's initial interest was in cleaning out the site and perhaps purchasing obsolete equipment, it soon became clear that the ownership group wanted an offer for the entire property.

Surprisingly to Peter, the owners accepted what he considered to be a low offer for the property. "We sold off a lot of equipment and got the money back we invested in it and started running a scrap company from the property," says Peter, who eventually bought out his partner in the venture.

The newly established Industrial Metal Recycling soon started taking on a family feel, as Peter's younger brother Brian and other McAvoy family members began playing key roles in the growing business. (See the "Family Trust" sidebar.) Peter says he still looks back fondly on the days when he could pay his younger brother in M&Ms to strip

a motor block or otherwise prepare scrap. "Brian's always been with me, and he was the one encouraging us to get into the scrap business after a three-year absence. He's always been my right-hand man."