Finding a groove | The two men behind Maine Commercial Tire win SBA mantle
Photo/Courtesy Maine Commercial Tire
Jim McCurdy, left, and Jim Lynch, partners in Maine Commercial Tire in Hermon, credit tenacity and quick thinking for growth of their business
Bangor entrepreneurs Jim McCurdy and Jim Lynch, self-professed Harley Heads, love the ease and freedom that riding motorcycles affords them. As a pilot, McCurdy takes such experiences to even loftier heights.
But when it comes to business, both men have their feet firmly on the ground.
The two revived a commercial tire business that was in bankruptcy, helping it prosper with $1 million in growth annually, only to face a recession that threatened the company’s existence once again. Lynch and McCurdy responded by making Maine Commercial Tire Inc. more streamlined and efficient, without sacrificing its family-like atmosphere.
For their tenacity and response to adversity, McCurdy and Lynch recently were jointly named Maine’s Small Business Person of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration. The award was unexpected, say the two down-to-earth men as they sit in McCurdy’s office, liberally sprinkled with pictures and displays of motorcycles and airplanes. “That was something that caught us totally off guard,” says McCurdy at the company’s Freedom Park offices and garage in Hermon where 35,000 tractor trailer and heavy equipment tires are retreaded annually.
During the late 1980s, Lynch and McCurdy were both managers with C. E. Noyes, a successful commercial tire company in Bangor. Then Noyes’ parent company faltered and filed for bankruptcy in 1990. Undaunted, the pair took over and convinced most of the Bangor employees to stick around.
Today, Maine Commercial Tire has annual sales of about $15 million and employs 59 people, three times what it had in 1990. The company has operations in Lewiston, Augusta and Portland, in addition to Hermon, and covers a region extending from New Hampshire to northern Maine. “Pretty much any truck fleet, we do the tires for them,” says McCurdy, the company’s president.
In the early and mid-1990s, Maine Commercial Tire grew by adding locations. Then during the late 1990s, it revisited operations, reviewing and setting standards that earned Maine Commercial Tire the ISO 9002 certification in 2000, making it the first such tire company in the United States to be certified.
Lynch, the company’s vice president, says that by 2007 the company was laying groundwork for even bigger growth, and by the spring of the next year took on substantial debt in order to reconfigure its retread shop. They tripled the size of the facility. “We stuck our neck out and that was about a half-million (dollar) investment and in midsummer, fuel prices went through the roof and the economy shut down,” he says. “So we had to react pretty fast.”
Establishing an employee committee, management worked with them to identify “anything we could skim a dime off,” Lynch says. The company bought used equipment rather than new and laid off some employees, including managers.
Hunkering down and finding savings where they could paid off. McCurdy and Lynch got an SBA-guaranteed loan through People’s United Bank. Within a year, the company turned things around and recovered the revenue it had lost the year before.
Despite a 20-year history in business, McCurdy sees the past few years as defining the success of Maine Commercial Tire. “The measurement of our management capacity and our success isn’t what we did over 20 years,” he says. “It is what we did over the last two years. That has been a real challenge.”
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