Business View Magazine | October 2019

67 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2019 J . SOLOTKEN & COMPANY , INC . www.taftlaw.com Helping business leaders blaze a trail. Building Relationships Congratulations to J. Solotken & Company on their continued success. into stock, or whenever you sold anything, you had to bring it down to the main floor to ship it. So, one of the reasons we decided to move locations was because our old location was totally inefficient for processing scrap, especially metal, in the modern age; we did not have the room for modern equipment; we required a lot of labor to move material; and the efficiencies were just non- existent. “I joined the company in 1998, after marrying Joe’s older daughter, and after a few years, the investment was made to get out of our old, inefficient property and move into a new property. This new property is 140,000 square feet with 40-foot ceilings. It has very wide aisles, concrete floors, and it’s much more efficient than our old facility, which has allowed us to grow our business, substantially, from where we were in the mid to late ‘90s. I would say we’ve doubled our capacity by moving into this facility and by growing our account base over the past 20 years.” Alpert: “We handle scrap from many of the largest manufacturing companies within Indianapolis and the bordering counties of Marion County, and this location is extremely friendly for scrap sellers; they can drive inside our building and unload their scrap, which gives us greater flexibility in dealing with the elements.” BVM: What characteristics would you point to that you believe give your company a competitive advantage? Alpert: “Having been around so long, we’ve established a number of relationships where even when markets become weak, as they currently are now, we are able, in many cases, to consummate sales, where, maybe, our competitors are less able to do so. Also, as our business has evolved, we’ve become extremely specific in how we can identify various scrap. In many cases, we will identify alloys to .01 percent levels of purity, such as in the brass area, for instance. People want to get away from leaded brasses and move to non-leaded brasses,