J. Solotken & Company, Inc.

had visions of the business’s potential. “In the beginning, Jacob had started going around and picking up rags and rubber and metal. Then he concentrated on being a wholesaler, buying scrap from smaller scrap dealers as J. Solotken became larger. After Joe got involved, and these smaller scrap dealers became more independent, they found that the smaller scrap dealers were not always as loyal to us as they had once been, despite the fact that, at times, our company used to lend money to the smaller scrap companies with the agreement that they would sell scrap back to us. Well, they started selling scrap away from us. Joe saw this as an issue, and from that point on, he concentrated on what we concentrate on to this day, which is industrial scrap – forming business relationships with our manufacturing suppliers. So, no longer are we solely a wholesale and ‘peddler yard.’ “A peddler yard is a scrap yard that caters to the public, where the public can come and sell aluminum cans or sheet iron, or miscellaneous scrap. That is a very, very minor part of our business. We concentrate on forming relationships with manufacturing companies in and around the City of Indianapolis and the State of Indiana. It’s really a service-based industry for us. We have our own fleet of trucks and we provide them container service. We educate them on how to segregate their scrap so that they can attain the highest value for their material. We then send our trucks and containers out to pick up the scrap, exchange full containers for the empties, and then we bring it back to our facility where we process it. We’ve been doing business with some companies for 40 years, just on a handshake and the knowledge that we’re going to treat them right, and they have loyalty to us. “We stayed in our building from 1936 until 2010. The building was brick construction on the outside, but in the interior, it was all wood – very low ceilings, very narrow aisles, where you had to move the process equipment up and down on freight elevators. Whenever you put anything