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Article Excerpt
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"NO ONE IS SUCCESSFUL who doesn't have a passion for the business," asserts Wayne Bassett, president and chief executive officer of Samuel, Son & Co., Limited, of Mississauga, Ontario.
The 60-year-old Bassett has spent nearly his entire career helping to grow the privately owned company into one of the top five metals distributors in North America. In recognition of his passionate personal approach to management and his company's long record of strong growth and profitability, Metal Center News has selected Wayne Bassett as the 2007 Service Center Executive of the Year.
Each year, MCN bestows this honor on an individual whose career and business strategies rep resent a model for the rest of the industry. Bassett has distinguished himself through his high-energy leadership style, his financial acumen, his communication skills and his ability to cultivate close relationships with suppliers, customers and employees, alike.
Since 1974 when a young Bassett joined its finance department, Samuel, Son & Co., Limited, has navigated an enormous amount of expansion and change, growing from around $50 million to about $2.4 billion in 2007 annual sales. Today, it's a huge organization encompassing 95 facilities across seven Canadian provinces and 13 American states. Its 4,850 employees sell the full range of metal products and offer extensive processing and distribution services.
Part of Canada's dominant service center duo, Samuel and its chief rival Russel Metals, also based in Mississauga, command a combined market share of roughly half the entire Canadian metals distribution business.
Samuel regularly benchmarks its performance against the industry's top service centers, Bassett says, and measures up quite favorably. "We want to consistently be among the top four or five distributors in North America profit-wise. We also want to grow at least as fast as the average of the top 10 companies in the industry. Samuel, Son & Co. has perhaps the strongest balance sheet in the industry, with very little debt."
Beyond the size and scope of its business, what makes Samuel unusual is its long history of family ownership. Founded in 1855 as a wholesale metal and hardware supplier, the company is now in its fifth generation of family management, headed up by Chairman Mark Samuel (see "Canadian Collaboration Hits Close to Home").
Mark's father and long-time company patriarch, Ernest, led the company for 38 years prior to his untimely death in 2000. Under his leadership, the company opened and acquired numerous facilities throughout Canada and the United States.
In 1985, three of the company's manufacturing divisions were combined to create a new company--Samuel Manu-Tech Inc.--which was taken public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Samuel, Son & Co. retains a 72 percent stake in Manu-Tech. Combined, the two companies have annual sales of about $3.3 billion. Both are overseen by a board of directors that includes Mark Samuel, his mother and sisters, Bassett and four outside directors.
Today, management of the companies is a collaborative effort between Bassett, who is Samuel, Son & Co.'s president and CEO, and Mark, who holds the titles of Samuel Manu-Tech CEO and chairman of Samuel's board. Bassett is the first nonfamily member ever to head Samuel, Son & Co.
Following the lead set by his mentor Ernie Samuel, Bassett has steered the company using an aggressive growth-through-acquisition strategy with an emphasis on expansion in the United States, reducing the company's dependence on the smaller Canadian market.
"When the [Canada-U.S.] free trade agreement was signed in the late 1980s, Ernie Samuel directed us to enter the U.S. market. In 1989 we opened our first branch in Buffalo, N.Y. Today, the U.S. generates more than 50 percent of our business," says Bassett.
Samuel is working to acquire a strong presence in all the major U.S. regions. So far it has 25 facilities across the country, together with 18 Samuel Manu-Tech facilities, and plans further expansion, notably on the West Coast and in the Southeast. In 2006, Samuel completed six acquisitions, and by the end of 2007 will have added four or five more. Its most recent acquisition was the purchase of the Engineered Metals Group from ESCO Corp., with branches in Denver, Los Angeles, Portland and Hayward, Calif.
Another one of Samuel's key strategic objectives is to be diverse in terms of product as well as geography. Each geographic expansion allows for product expansion as, over time, the company can migrate its full product mix to the new locations. "The strategy is to carry the entire basket of Samuel products all through the organization. Right now we are looking for acquisitions all over the U.S." Bassett...
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