2008 Business Leader of the Year: Ford Reiche
Large Company Business Leader:
FORD REICHE
President, Safe Handling
Safe Handling founder Ford Reiche has built his business by finding new ways to tackle old problems
"Old mouse traps," Ford Reiche says of a dozen miniature prison cells displayed on a rack in his office at Safe Handling's Auburn headquarters. Some of the traps, Reiche admits, look horrible. Between meetings one recent afternoon, he picks up a trap that is little more than a screw and a metal loop. Reiche, a 54-year-old former lawyer known for his sometimes coarse candor, puts the trap down and fiddles with a cage shaped like a butter dish. He says he's not really sure how it works, but after some quick inspection decides it must function like a lobster trap, where the mouse goes in for cheese and trips a lever to lock it inside the cage. He lifts a pin whittled by age that releases the cage door, pointing out that the mouse could be let free in the woods somewhere — not so horrible.
Like much at Reiche's company, this mousetrap eye-catcher is no accident. Reiche displays the dirty dozen to remind him about what's important to his business, which he started in 1989 with his former partners: his father, Howard, and environmental consultant Paul Turina. Beside the trap rack, Reiche tacked a poster picturing an unsuspecting mouse and a modern trap above Safe Handling's unofficial motto, from a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "If a man can make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will make a beaten path to his door." Safe Handling's used those pearls of wisdom in its advertising, taking a cue from Reiche's father, a former manager at the S.D. Warren Paper Mill in Westbrook, who used it to advertise the mill.
"In the marketplace, if you can find a new way to solve an old problem, you'll make a buck," Reiche explains. He shrugs. "Everyone has problems with pests."
Safe Handling deals with two breeds of pests, and Reiche's ability to find new ways to exterminate them is the reason 2007 was a banner year for the 100-employee outfit. The first pest, global competition, means Safe Handling has had to find cheaper ways for clients to stay competitive transporting the same goods. The second, global warming, means those clients also want to reduce their carbon emissions.
To handle the first, Safe Handling in recent years expanded to three locations — its 55-acre headquarters and rail and truck transportation facility on Rodman Road, a 60-acre loading and warehouse terminal near Pittsburgh, Pa., and the $10 million Port of Auburn Intermodal Transportation Facility completed in Auburn in 2006 — and established itself as a dominant New England player in the growing dry-to-wet processing and transportation market.
Safe Handling, one of only a handful of transportation companies in the country and the only in Maine with the equipment to transport dry goods by rail or truck and mix them into wet product at its plant, has added a dozen manufacturing clients since it spent more than $15 million in 1997 establishing mixing capacity. Safe Handling can mix up to 100,000 gallons a day, adding water or other liquid to turn powders like talc into a gummy mixture used to smooth paper. "It's like Nestle's Quick and milk equals chocolate milk, we'll work with Nestle's Quick," Reiche says.
Safe Handling ships products that arrive at its facility from all over the country and the world to companies in Maine and the Northeast. Shipping mostly dry, light material the longest distances, and then mixing the final product in-state for Maine companies, cuts delivery costs by at least half and curbs emissions by as much as 90%. In 2007 alone, the company made 40% of its total $18 million revenue from clients eager to hire a dry-to-wet processor, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by almost 50,000 tons — the equivalent of taking about 8,300 cars off the road. The innovation has helped revenues grow six-fold since Safe Handling started dry-to-wet processing. Reiche says processing will only become more popular if energy prices and global warming continue to worsen, as he suspects they will. In 2008, Reiche expects a 20% growth in revenue thanks in large part to processing, and says he could well double the size of the company by 2013 if Safe Handling becomes a co-investor in a local renewable energy manufacturer, which Reiche says he is currently in talks to establish.
Part of the plan
Which leads us to Safe Handling's second pest pursuit: See, 2007 wasn't all about powder. Reiche, who readily admits he's never been much of an environmentalist, is lately warming to the idea of capitalizing on, well, warming.
In December of last year, Safe Handling opened Maine's first ethanol terminal because Reiche believes companies will not only ship more dry materials, but consumers will also continue to head for green fuel. Already the state's primary importer of biodiesel, the company's new 148-acre Port of Auburn ethanol terminal allows Safe Handling to be the middle-man between corn-based fuel from suppliers in Canada and the Midwest and fuel wholesalers in Maine. In addition, Reiche decided energy efficiency and environmental sustainability were so important to the bottom line, he last year hired the company's first vice president of sustainability, Andy Meyer. The company has been certified by an international, independent audit as an environmentally sound business and in 2007 reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other business in Maine by shaving its carbon footprint by a whopping 72% over its baseline 2005 emissions. "They say none are so zealous as the reformed," Reiche says. "I just saw the need."
Safe Handling's green fuel and dry transport initiatives are part of Reiche's bet that the old way of transporting — carting heavy wet products by diesel-guzzling truck — is fading away for good. The fast-forward restlessness he half-jokingly credits to attention deficit disorder is anchored by an obsession with planning. Reiche spent six months planning and studying sustainable energy markets before committing to the ethanol facility, and always makes sure his risks are grounded by careful financial planning — Safe Handling, he says, never adds a new service without a long-term customer signed on and enough revenue to justify the upfront expense. In March, Reiche was recognized for his business savvy as the small-business person of the year by the Maine office of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
But Ford's unique brand of risk-taking and research transcends his business. In August, when he and lifelong friend Jonathan Knowles broke the speedboat record from Portland to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, racing 408 miles in 11 hours and 44 minutes, Reiche obsessively organized almost everything — the supplies, when to depart, and exactly what to do in any number of worst-case scenarios.
"He doesn't shoot from the hip and he's been consistent with that his whole life," says Knowles, who owns East Coast Yacht Sales in Yarmouth, Maine. "When he gets into a project he's really focused on it, he gets really wrapped up in it. He's very meticulous and methodical. And it has paid off in spades for him."
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