Moving Metal

Although MCI faced tough times after moving from Cerritos to Santa Fe Springs, the company recovered, in part by adopting the latest technology. Pictured, a technician uses a bar code scanner on stainless steel sheet as part of the quality control process.

Dave Hannah disagreed. He believed that an IPO would not only make it possible to make some larger acquisitions, but that it would also provide Bill Gimbel and his family with an exit strategy. “With Reliance as a public company,” he later explained, “we felt that they could then sell their shares into the market and not burden the company with the respon- sibility to buy the shares back from them.” Knowing it was a tough sell, Hannah laid the groundwork carefully. Arter & Hadden, Reliance’s longtime legal counsel,

many. In years past, whenever the subject had come up, going public had always been dismissed. Gimbel worried about loss of privacy and control, and Crider believed that Reliance shares would only fetch pennies on the dollar in the open market due to the industry’s stodgy reputation. Ulti- mately, both men were probably just too comfortable owning their own business. As Crider put it in 1991, “The trouble with going public in metals distribution is that you have to give your company away.”

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