Moving Metal

Reliance learned two other hard lessons from the Mitsui joint venture. The first was that the metals service center industry was increasingly linked to an emerging worldwide marketplace. International politics and finance were going to have to be taken into consideration during strategic deci- sion-making if Reliance was to continue to grow. In his early 1983 Copper and Brass Servicenter Association speech, Gimbel observed, “We’re shifting to a global economy.” “Those who can make the change will survive and prosper,” he predicted, “while those who cannot won’t be around.” The “grow or go” philosophy of the 1960s had evolved into “change or go” by the 1980s. It was also evident that the business was becoming too complex for Reliance’s current management structure. As sales exceeded $200 million and acquisition deals became ever larger, financial matters occupied more and more man- agement time—mostly Gimbel’s. For nearly forty years, Secretary-Treasurer Bettie Littell had watched over Reliance’s finances. Littell was a fine bookkeeper, but by the 1980s large corporations needed much more than good accounting and reporting and chief financial officers were taking on the bigger tasks involving capital structure, risk management, and finan- cial planning. The Mitsui joint venture convinced Gimbel that Reliance needed a CFO to negotiate the transactions and to watch over the balance sheet. There was only one man for the job, as far as he was concerned, a young accountant named David H. Hannah. Dave Hannah was born in Detroit in 1951. When he was eleven, his parents moved the family to Indio, California, a small desert community near Palm Springs. During his high school and college summers, he worked as a grocery clerk. He won a scholarship to the University of Southern Califor-

David Hannah became Reliance’s first Chief Financial Officer in May 1981.

nia in 1969 and majored in finance and accounting. While at USC, Hannah took an internship at Ernst & Ernst, one of the original “Big Eight” certified public accounting firms. He went to work full-time there after graduating in 1973. “I liked the business world,” Hannah recalled, and “I liked account- ing.” He became a crack auditor at Ernst & Ernst and was soon on a partnership track. Reliance was a longtime Ernst & Ernst client. In 1980, the lead executive for the Reliance account asked Hannah

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