Why this CEO moved his team from Harrisburg to Philadelphia and refocused on environmental cleanup
CEO Nicholas Grasberger says he'll have an easier time recruiting executives if they can live in the Philadelphia region.
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Starting in the 1870s, Harrisburg Car Co. -- Harsco, for short -- built industrial tools -- railcars, furnaces, scaffolding, oil and gas equipment and more -- in factories across Pennsylvania. Its factories attracted investors from Wall Street and workers from around the world.
Like successful manufacturers that thrived in small American cities, Harsco drew attention to its home district and built up the community. Richard Nixon was a director before he was elected U.S. President in 1968. The spacious public library in Harrisburg’s Mechanicsburg suburb is named for and honors the late Harsco chairman and local booster Joseph T. Simpson.
Now the company is moving to Philadelphia, shifting its focus and changing its name to Enviri.
Refocusing on environmental cleanup
Facing tough global competition, fluctuating profits, and a share price down two-thirds over the last five years, the company announced Monday that it is transitioning to the new name, which chief executive Nicholas Grasberger said ties together its sharper focus on two environmental cleanup business lines:
Steel-mill slag and scrap recycling, a global business in which the company’s environmental division serves global giants such as steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal and competes with two other locally based, privately owned giants, Phoenix Services of Radnor and TMS of Horsham;
Hazardous-waste processing through the company’s Clean Earth division, lately enlarged by the purchase of Chicago-based Stericycle’s Environmental Solutions unit and recently relocated to King of Prussia. Clients include consumer-products giants such as Procter & Gamble, manufacturers such as Boeing, and hospital chains and drugmakers.
Enviri is also in the last stages of selling off legacy units outside its environmental focus, with the proposed sale of its rail division.
Why relocate to Philly?
“We have to attract executive-level candidates,” Grasberger said. “In Harrisburg, it’s a challenge to do that.”
He added: “Philadelphia has so much to offer. The sports, the arts, the cultural part of the city. The dining. The energy. The universities,” and good airport and rail connections.
Grasberger said that last summer he was recruiting a chief financial officer, “and there was not a single candidate in a national search who was willing to move to Harrisburg.”
That’s a sober admission for an executive who built his career at central Pennsylvania companies -- not just at Harsco’s former headquarters in Harrisburg’s Camp Hill suburb, but also while serving in financial jobs at Armstrong building products, Kennametal tools, and Fenner Precision plastics, all in the Lancaster area, following early stints at H.J. Heinz and USX (the former U.S. Steel) in his native Pittsburgh.
Central Pennsylvania is “a perfectly nice place to raise a family. Good restaurants. Stable economy, with the state government,” he said.
But despite the widely reported work-from-home movement that has drawn workers to the Jersey Shore, Poconos, and other relaxed locales, C-level executives and other key staff groups continue to prefer the largest metro areas, Grasberger said.
Other moves to Philadelphia
It’s not the only corporate move from outstate to metro Philly in recent years. Drugstore chain Rite Aid, based in Camp Hill, relocated to Philly’s Navy Yard business district last year. Berks County steelmaker Carpenter Technologies made the move in 2016.
TE Connectivity, the most successful successor to the former New Jersey-based Tyco conglomerate, set up in metro Philly after that larger company was broken up in the 2000s. Its first chief executive, Tom Lynch, a Bucks County native, put his headquarters in an office park a short drive from the Paoli SEPTA and Amtrak train station, over previous business offices in the Harrisburg area, where it still has a string of factories, built by predecessor AMP.
Grasberger has assigned 60 Enviri headquarters employees to the company’s Two Logan Square offices and expects to add another 20 in the months ahead. In all, the company employs around 400 in the region, 12,000 worldwide. He promises “ambitious growth” for Enviri operations in 30 countries.
His team did consider Philadelphia’s suburbs. “We saw some nice places on the Main Line,” he said. “But when we came to the city we thought, ‘Wow! Just the energy.’ We don’t want a dentist office as our neighbor.”
With its sharpened focus on environmental business, Enviri is part of a generational switch away from a multi-business conglomerate model that companies such as GE, Tyco, and DuPont built in the late 1900s. To boost the company’s market value, “we need focus” on businesses readily understood by investors, Grasberger said.
He says the company’s environmental focus goes beyond what he calls “greenwashing,” the attempt to sweeten the sometimes costly, often controversial work of managing the nation’s industrial waste.
For example, he said, “all our competitors manage waste with landfills and incinerators. We don’t own any. So we have an incentive to recycle and repurpose these materials and avoid sending them to be burned,” enabling clients to brag that they recycle instead of burying their waste.
That’s a selling point with construction companies and other businesses that generate a lot of waste, he said.
“We’ve been an invisible partner for the building booms of the past few years,” Grasberger said. “Nothing can go up until companies like us get [contaminated] dirt removed.”