Salvaging an 80-year career

During the same year Sam Green got started in the Canadian salvage business, the U.S.S.R. exiled Leon Trotsky, Benito Mussolini outlawed Italy’s opposition parties and Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly over the Atlantic Ocean.

The year was 1928. Green, then 18 years old, was looking for a way to make the $44 monthly payment on the new Durant car he had just bought. He worried he might have to sell his car because he didn’t know where he would find the money to make his car payments. The Great Depression had just started. His father, a plasterer, and his mother, a dietician, were both out of work. Green was apprenticing with an electrician who couldn’t keep him on for a lack of business.

At this point, a relative of Ambrose Small, the Toronto theatre tycoon who mysteriously disappeared and was never found, offered to find Green work at Continental Salvage. “So he came back to me and he said: ‘I can get you in, Sam, but it’s 50 cents an hour,'” recalls Green, who is preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday on Aug. 20, 2010. “And I said,’Well, I’ll take it, because I don’t want to lose my car.'”

And the rest, as they say, is history. Sam Green has been in the salvage business ever since (with some brief professional detours along the way). For almost eight decades, Green has paid insurers for stock lost in fire losses, and then re-sold the salvaged stock. “I was the insurance company’s man,” Green says of his time in the business. “If I could save them any money, I did.”

For much of his career, Green worked on and off for Continental Salvage. He later became a partner at Consolidated Salvage Company. He then split from Conslidated to form his own company called Canada Salvage. He says he has “been out of the salvage business” for about 16-17 years, having sold his interest in Canada Salvage, although during this period he has regularly appeared between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, to help out at the Mississauga location of Canada Salvage.

Green’s entire professional career turns on a question of value. “In the salvage business, you’ve got to know one thing: What can I get for this stock? What’s it going to cost me to move it? Now what do I want to make?”

An anecdote from his early days in the business illustrates the importance of experience when it comes to thinking about value.

“From a store [that suffered an insurance loss], I got a bunch of shoes that were damaged and recovered,” he says. “I had to go in and bid on it.

“And [the man with whom Green was negotiating] said:’Well, how much is it worth, salvage man? You know, I was in the shoe business once.’

“And I said, ‘Oh, $150.’

“He said, ‘I was in the shoe business once.’

“I said, ‘$250.’ I bumped it up $100, I was so scared.

“He said, ‘Good, take them out.'” Green is obviously much more confident now, having spent many years paying insurance adjusters for products recovered from an insurance loss — objects he would later turn around and sell.

Green will tell you dishes are a lousy seller. “You can only get 25% or 30% [of the retail price] on dishes,” he says. Furs and Persian rugs are also tough sells, primarily because people may not appreciate the full value of a good Persian rug. He has recently taken a flyer on shoes, buying up 12,000 of them and selling them at a price of $5 a pair. (The retail value is $22 per pair.)

Green takes pride in knowing the value of individual items, bristling at the suggestion that someone might buy up salvaged stock at a bundled or aggregated price. “I understand that if a guy says he’s got $50,000 [worth of stock to salvage], they predicate his loss on $50,000,” he says. “I don’t believe in that. I want him to show me he’s got $50,000.”

In keeping with this philosophy, Green started insisting on seeing physical inventories around the time he was 24 years old. His method initially met with resistance from business owners, although they would eventually relent.

Also, Green says he was a pioneer in discriminating between damaged and undamaged stock, often buying up individual items and sending them to a University of Toronto lab to test for smoke damage.

He also developed a valuation method in which he would first determine the total amount of stock and then deduct the value of the undamaged stock from the total. If a fire happened in the basement of a store, for example, but the top floor suffered no damage, he would bid two different amounts for the damaged and undamaged goods.

In insurance circles, he became known as a fair and honest man who paid insurers the true value of the stock. He recalled one time in which an insurance adjuster told Green he was offered $7,000 for goods recovered from an insurance loss. “I told him I would give him $12,000, because I knew I could make 50 cents on the dollar if it wasn’t burned or soaking wet,” says Green. “I got more than that. If I said it was worth $10,000 to me, and it was going to work out that I was going to make more than $10,000, I paid [the insurance company] more than $10,000. That’s the way I built myself up. I did it honestly.”

Honesty proved to be a lucrative policy. In its day, Green’s salvage operations moved between $2 million and $4 million a year.

Green could just as easily have been an insurance adjuster, given the company he kept. He often went out with insurance adjusters socially, citing many of them as friends. “I started to learn the adjusting business, but never was an adjuster,” he says.

Insurers trusted Green enough that they allowed him to sell the goods on a 10%-15% commission basis, which was an innovation at the time. “I suggested to the adjusters that if they turned [the salvaged goods] over to me on a commission basis — it was 10% then; 15% in the later years — I would handle it,” says Green. “I would keep track of all my expenses, keep track of my sales and, subject to an insurance company or adjuster’s audit, I would charge that 15% or 10% commission, and then I would pay [the insurer] the balance and give [the insurer] a statement. And that went over very big.”

What isn’t going over very big is “retirement.” Born in 1910, Green is sharp as a whip, although he is legally blind and has some trouble with his balance while walking. Because of his ailments, he isn’t able to go out on calls, although insurance adjusters still call him to see if he is interested in making a bid on salvaged goods. He describes not being able to participate on this side of the business as “painful.”

Certainly he comes by his durability honestly: his brother Harry is 93, and his mother, a dietician, worked as late as the age of 88.

When all is said and done, Green says the salvage industry has been good to him. “You know, if I had my life to live over, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he says. “I’d stay here because I love it. I just love it.”