A decade ago consultant Barry Isenberg shed his three-piece suit and stepped into what he calls "the last frontier." Since then, a lot of junkyard dogs have had to find new homes. The last major backward industry in the country has entered the modern age. A new breed of auto salvage operators is changing the way America is burying its cars.
You don't have one of those yards," asks Barry Isenberg, scanning his audience, "where you can't tell the yardman from the dog?" The room ripples with laughter. Isenberg leans forward, cocks his head, and screws his eyebrows into twin question marks that echo: "You do?" A second wave of guffaws enlivens the group.
Timing. Barry Isenberg, the messiah of the automobile salvage industry, knows the importance of timing. It sparks not only his jokes, it also sparked his career, and it will no doubt trigger his ambitious entrepreneurial plans for the near future.
For now, Isenberg asks for a show of hands. He stands at the base of a U-shaped conference table at the front of a meeting room at Harrah's Marine Hotel Casino in Atlantic City. To his right and left sit a dozen or so owners and managers of auto salvage yards. Many are from nearby in New Jersey, a few are from Pennsylvania and New York. Isenberg, a Californian, is wearing a short-sleeved, V-neck pullover with a prominent zig-zag pattern. A gold chain glistens around his neck. His thick brown hair is parted on the right and sweeps boyishly down across his forehead almost to his left eye. He looks a good 10 years younger than his age, which is 41, and when he smiles, he subtracts another eouple of years. He is just about to smile.
"How many of you have installed inventory systems like you quit smoking?" Isenberg inquires. His smile is knowing -- and contagious. Slowly, the hands go up, as, one by one, most of the salvage operators attending his three-day seminar sheepishly admit their inability to control the very heart of their businesses. Of such admissions Isenberg has carved out an opportunistic, hard-earned, and lucrative career as the premier consultant to a sleeping giant of an industry -- the $4 billion-a-year business of automobile salvage.
Not so long ago, only grease monkeys and the most ardent do-it-yourselfers visited auto graveyards in search of used parts for their cars. Little wonder: Junkyards were foreboding places, piled high with rusty hulks, awash in mud and dirt, and, more often than not, patrolled by a snarling dog. Business practices were nearly as grim. Chances are, the inventory system lay between a yard owner's ears: "I think she's out past that there puddle almost to the big stump." Customers often pulled their own parts -- and were as likely to pocket a few as they were to destroy others. Proprietors picked prices out of thin air, then jammed their take into the closest thing they had to a cash register -- a grimy back pocket. About the only available warranty was the standard 50/50 job: 50 feet or 50 seconds, whichever came first.
In recent years, several thousand of the nation's approximately 12,000 junkyards have been reborn as dismantling and recycling centers. The name change is no hollow euphemism. A new breed of auto salvage operators is indeed changing the way America buries its cars: Most salvable parts are no longer "stored" by inertia on wrecks littering the yard. Instead, in indoor bays, workers promptly remove them, clean them, test them, in some cases paint them, and then arrange them systematically. In a growing number of progressive yards, computers keep track of inventory. Call a progressive yard, and you may hear music while the counterman puts you on hold; quite a change from the old dropped phone and ear-piercing scream: "Harry, you seen any alternators for a '76 Mustang?" Visit a progressive recycler and you will probably step into a clean, well-lighted, and perhaps air-conditioned showroom marked by colorful displays, posted prices, and notification, typically, of 30or G0or 90-day warranties on most parts.
A handful of pioneers were quietly pursuing some of these advances in the 1960s, as were many state associations and the national trade organization. The Automotive Dismantlers and Recyclers Association (ADRA) has played a considerable role. But the most important catalyst unquestionably has been Barry Isenberg.
"The man is excellent," says Bill Ellis, owner of Southern Nevada Auto Parts, of Henderson, Nev., a $5 million-a-year business. "He's brought recyclers out of the Dark Ages." Although some criticism shadows his 12-year career as a consultant, Isenberg is widely recognized as the single person most responsible for modernizing perhaps the last major backward industry in America.
Ironically, his influence began quite by accident. There came first a timely telephone cnll. When the phone rang in October 1968 in the San Francisco offices of Price Waterhouse & Co., high in the Bank of America building, Barry Isenberg was the only available consultant. Then 26, Isenberg was a senior management consultant and head of the firm's industrial-engineering department in the San Francisco area. The caller introduced himself as the executive director of the National Auto and Truck Wreckers Association (an ADRA antecedent) and announced that he wanted someone to speak for three hours at a workshop.
Isenberg took on the assignment. Considering it pretty standard stuff, he placed the requisite call to the Price Waterhouse library in New York and made his request: cost-control material for auto wreckers, enough for a three-hour presentation. Similar requests for other industries typically brought boxes of materials -- old speeches to crib from, slides for illustration, and reams of documentation. So Isenberg turned to other projects and waited for the standard avalanche of reference material. He received instead a telephone call from the partner in charge of the library who said that, for the first time in 20 years, he had "struck out." Neither the firm's huge business library nor even the New York Public Library had any listings for auto wrecking or any similar heading. His parting words to Isenberg: "Sorry, kid, you're on your own."
