Llc stock certificate

TRI-R SYSTEMS CORP. AT A GLANCE

PRINCIPALS: David Powelson, CEO and founder (pictured at far left); Brad Heinrich, president of Tri-R Recycling (pictured, second from left); Mike Tingle, president of Tri-R Shredding (not pictured); Giles King, president of Secondary Fiber Inc. (not pictured)

LOCATIONS: Office and main processing plant in Denver; Colorado Springs Recycling and Waste business unit in Colorado Springs; two buy-back centers in metropolitan Denver; more than 1,400 drop-off locations for recyclables

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 140 for Tri-R Systems Corp. business units combined

PROCESSING EOUIPMENT: includes two American Baler/Lindemann balers; Vecoplan LLC shredding plant; Machinex OCC disc screen; additional small balers, book de-binder, roll cutting guillotine and alligator shear; 40-truck collection fleet; four mobile shredding trucks

SERVICES PROVIDED: Commercial recycling services; processing of residential recyclables; recycling programs for nonprofit organizations; secure document and product destruction services; material brokerage; solid waste and recycling collection (Colorado Springs); Internet-based information, shredding and recycling services

The mantra "of grow or die" follows around small business owners just as it does Fortune 500 corporate executives. Like many other start up business owners. David R. Powelson, CEO and founder of Tri-R Recycling. Denver, first had to survive some lean year before even being in a position to face the "grow or die" business phase.

But having made it through the survival stage, Powelson has assembled a leadership team at Tri-R that has helped turn the company into a growing regional powerhouse with subsidiaries and operations in several segments of the recycling, secure destruction and waste hauling industries.

A GROWING NEIGHBORHOOD. A visitor to Tri-R Recycling will see a company that has grown beyond its original land and building space to absorb adjacent properties in its neighborhood near downtown Denver.

Tri-R Recycling is, in fact, just one of five business units operating under the Tri-R Systems Corp. umbrella, along with Tri-R Shredding, DataGuard USA, Secondary Fiber Inc., and Colorado Springs Recycling and Waste.

The combined companies sort, bale and ship paper in the original plant, but also accept mixed residential recyclables, operate an outdoor sorting system, run a plant for confidential shredding, broker material shipments and supervise a variety of Internet-based companies with a national reach in the confidential shredding and recycling markets. Tri-R has recently purchased another building and its accompanying land to accommodate expansions in its shredding and municipal recycling segments.

Tri-R has steadily expanded the geographic range in which it operates, but its roots trace back to David Powelson's desire to start a one-stop neighborhood recycling center.

Powelson, a native of New York City, has lived in Colorado since the early 1970s. His background includes a bachelor's degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA degree from New York State's university system.

After gaining work experience with another recycling company, Powelson started Tri-R in 1977. The company struggled at times in its early years before embarking on several strategies that helped fuel steady growth, including designing office building recycling programs and moving into document destruction services to cater to the same office clientele.

While confidential shredding has helped bolster Tri-R's presence in commercial recycling, the company has not neglected its "neighborhood" recycling roots.

Individual residents' drop offs of recylables now make up just a small percentage of Tri-R's overall business, but collection trucks (both Tri-R's and those of other haulers) loaded with mixed recyclables feed an increasingly busy material recovery facility run by Tri-R. The company also manages some 1,400 collection points to bring in material from nonprofit organizations.

This curbside processing center, along with Tri-R's acquisition of Colorado Springs Recycling and Waste, has made the company a major processor of curbside recyclables along Colorado's front range.

That presence will grow by a huge leap in June of 2005, when Tri-R becomes the single-stream processor for residential material collected in the city and county of Denver. Tri-R is currently making processing equipment plans and purchases to handle the influx of residential curbside material.

The baled and shredded material processed by Tri-R's different business units is ultimately brought to market by the company's materials brokerage arm Secondary Fiber Inc.

This combination of business activities has resulted in a company with an impressive regional presence that operates a carefully monitored fleet of collection trucks; processing and sorting capacity--some inside and some outdoors--that has spread into a growing corporate campus complex; and an information, security and communications office infrastructure that connects Tri-R's business units as well as plugs the company into its regional and national markets.

TEARING IT UP. When ranking the better business decisions made by his company, Powelson is quick to point to Tri-R's early attention to the confidential shredding market.

"During a market collapse, we realized that we would lose money recycling files if we didn't change our business model," says Powelson. "We decided to start charging customers to shred their files and to offer a certificate of destruction, pioneering this concept, as far as we know, in Colorado in the early 1980s."

The subsequent growth of this segment has resulted in Tri-R Shredding becoming its own business unit, as well as spinning off several Internet-based, shredding-related ideas into DataGuard USA, yet another business unit.

Tri-R Shredding combines the plant-based shredding operations that trace back to the 1980s along with the mobile-shredding-truck fleet acquired when Tri-R purchased a mobile-shredding company in 2000 co-owned by Mike Tingle.

Tingle is now president of both Tri-R Shredding and DataGuard USA, the business unit that has rolled out Web sites using their national reach to attract business from beyond the Denver area.

MARGIN CALL. The shredding operation has been one way to bring in material at a favorable cost, but by no means has Tri-R relied on this one source.

Brad Heinrich says the Denver area is similar to other metropolitan areas in terms of stiff competition for major scrap paper-generating accounts. Tri-R will remain on the hunt for these accounts, but is wary of serving them if the profitability of doing so disappears.

"Our niche is in serving small and medium-sized businesses," he remarks. "Some competitors want 'X' number of pounds on the dock or they are not interested. But we don't tell any customers, 'No.' We'll give them an option, possibly involving getting paid by providing shredding services or through a removal charge."

Making careful decisions on the account service side goes hand-in-band with controlling operating costs and finding profitable end markets to create a business that can survive and thrive. "We are less about volume on the collection end and more about looking at the opportunities of each account," Heinrich remarks.

If, in theory, this strategy seems like one that could limit Tri-R's growth, in practice it has instead resulted in steady and impressive growth.

Even with its practice of closely examining the profitability of accounts, Tri-R has grown to service hundreds of accounts throughout Colorado's Front Range (where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains), placing thousands of containers and operating a fleet of some three dozen collection trucks.

Additionally, material is brought to Tri-R's Denver facility by individuals at the retail center (plus at buy-back centers in other Denver neighborhoods); is collected from fund-raising recyclable drop-off sites; and increasingly is tipped by hauling companies serving curbside programs and commercial accounts throughout the region.

Tri-R's tonnage should continue to grow if plans to provide the city of Denver with single-stream processing service for curbside collectibles occurs in 2005 as planned. "I believe Denver is the last major U.S. city to not have single-stream recycling," says Powelson. "Effective 2005, that's due to change."