Walbridge's company, National Serv-All, is a 27-year-old, family-owned garbage-collection and -disposal business, which last year had revenues of $5.5 million. In an industry dominated by the likes of Waste Management ($1.04 billion), Browning-Ferris Industries ($844 million), and SCA Services ($334 million), it is a midget among giants. And yet it has managed in the past year or so to move out from its base in Fort Wayne and establish a toehold in the national market for private garbage-collection services.
It was Chuck Walbridge's father, Glen, who launched the family in the garbage business back in the 1950s. He owned a car wash in Anderson, Ind., and used to complain so much about trash pickup that the woman in city hall who handled his complaints suggested he bid for the contract and do it himself. Walbridge took her up on the idea, founded a company called Anderson Refuse Co., and won the contract in 1957.
Anderson Refuse was, quite literally, a mom-and-pop operation in those days, and remained so until 1966 when the Walbridges landed their first major municipal contract, under which they were to collect garbage and operate a landfill in Fort Wayne. Overnight, the company quadrupled in size, becoming a serious business complete with a management structure and a significant amount of debt. In recognition of the change, the Walbridges incorporated the company as National Serv-All.
In the following years, National Serv-All continued to grow, acquiring other mom-and-pop garbage companies in the area, but -- its new name notwithstanding -- it generally confined its operations to Fort Wayne until 1983. During that time, Chuck Walbridge, who took over in 1979, concentrated on learning the business: how to deliver the service and how to keep the customers satisfied. "Garbage is perhaps the most visible public service," he notes. "The city fathers hire us, but we work for the taxpayers. . . . They are the ones who complain if service is bad." He adds parenthetically that more than one Fort Wayne mayor has given National Serv-All partial credit for his reelection.
Small as the company was, Walbridge was keenly interested in efficiency and innovation, and he constantly searched for ways to lower costs and improve service. Toward that end, he struck up a relationship with International Harvester Co.'s engineering division, which was located in Fort Wayne, and began testing Harvester's new trucks, making suggestions about improvements. He also began designing his own vehicles, trying out different bodies and control systems. In his quest to keep up-to-date with the latest advances in garbage collection, he made his first trip to Phoenix in 1975.
At the time, Phoenix had not yet begun to contract out its garbage collection, but it did use an innovative collection system designed to minimize labor costs and beat the desert heat. The system was built around a fleet of one-person trucks with mechanical arms that could pick up large, standardized containers. (Today, such containers are so big that transients occasionally take up residence in them, and Walbridge instructs his men to shake the containers before dumping them.) Walbridge was fascinated by the idea and inquired where it had come from. He was told that Phoenix was working with a system developed by a small Arizona company with the unlikely name of Government Innovators Inc.
Government Innovators is a story in its own right. Founded in 1971, it had grown out of the lunchtime bull sessions of a group of entrepreneurially minded bureaucrats in nearby Scottsdale, Ariz. For entertainment, they had often brainstormed about how they would improve their departments if they could keep the money they saved. Among the ideas they came up with was one for automated garbage trucks. The idea seemed like a natural -- so much so that they even designed the equipment and went looking for a company to produce the system.When they found no solid offers, they decided to do it themselves, building the nation's first automated garbage-collection system within the Scottsdale Publi Works Department. Subsequently, some of them left public service and formed Government Innovators.
Curious about the possibilities of such a system, Walbridge purchased one of Government Innovators' trucks and took it back to Fort Wayne. Over the next few years, he experimented with various modifications, which he discussed with people at the company. They were duly appreciative. "Chuck has a lot of good ideas, and he has been extremely generous with both his time and his equipment," says Marc Stragier, president and general manager of Government Innovators. Then again, altruism was not his only motive: Walbridge's knowledge of equipment and systems stood him in good stead in 1983, when National Serv-All suddenly found itself competing nationwide against the giants of the garbage-collection industry.
Walbridge says that the company's decision to go national was a matter more of necessity than of choice, growing out of the hard times that gripped Fort Wayne in the early 1980s. The first blow was the downturn in the automobile industry, which hurt a number of the company's commercial customers. Then came the crisis at International Harvester, a mainstay of the local economy. As the crisis deepened, Harvester began hinting that it might transfer a substantial portion of its operations out of Fort Wayne. (It eventually did so in July 1983, a move that "put the city on the ropes," according to Walbridge.) Uncertain about the company's future in that precarious environment, Walbridge took a deep breath and entered the rude, competitive world outside of Fort Wayne.
