The Linpac Legacy (CONT’D FROM PAGE 22)
me,” said Roe. “I never before had the opportunity to come to America and I was surprised as hell to be offered a job with the company. Eighteen months later, I was on a plane to somewhere called Atlanta to start a box business. The opportunity was there and I took it. I’ve now been here for 44 years and finally became an American citizen four years ago.” The opportunity Roe described was starting something called a sheet feeder, a new concept with a mission of
servicing small box plants, sev- eral of them startups owned by disgruntled former executives of integrated companies. The owners of the startups realized they had to “scrounge around” large corrugated companies (read: their former employers) for spare capacity so they could make specialty boxes for their small but rapidly growing cus-
Nigel Roe
tomer base. Evan and Michael Cornish leapt at the invest- ment opportunity to service what appeared to be an insa- tiable demand for specialty boxes in the United States. “We bought a second-hand corrugator from a compa- ny called Louisiana Pacific and I remember they were just getting ready to install it when I arrived in Atlanta,” said Roe. “We finally got it up and running in August or Sep- tember. I remember when we produced the first piece of board off that corrugator and how excited we were to be in the sheet feeder business. “The original concept was that our customers would come and get the finished board from us, but we quickly found out that they were incapable of doing that because most of them didn't even own trucks suitable for transport- ing large board! So, we came up with a system by which we hired trucks, trailers and drivers to deliver to these new box makers a guaranteed supply of board they couldn’t get from the integrateds quickly. We were there to give them the support they needed to grow their businesses. Little did I know that in many cases, it was financial support we had to give them, too!” Roe recalled a man named Dick Brown coming in as the president of the fledgling Linpac. After seeing the suc- cess the company was having in Atlanta, Brown pushed for getting a second sheet feeder started up in Greens- boro, North Carolina, to exploit the untapped market there. A few years later, Linpac started yet another sheet feeder operation further west in Dallas, Texas. “We grew quite quickly and within five or six years, we had three fairly successful sheet feeders while forging relationships with the major paper suppliers of the time,” said Roe. “Dick Brown and I got along reasonably well for a while but Dick was a very aggressive and ambitious per- son. He saw an opportunity to join Pratt, which had started CONTINUED ON PAGE 26
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December 16, 2024
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