Bill Strimbu, center, stands with his sons Spencer, left, and Harrison. The younger Strimbus have taken over the leadership of Nick Strimbu Inc., the fourth generation to run the trucking company.
Nick Strimbu Inc. has survived the Great Depression, numerous economic recessions, the collapse of the local steel industry and even a lawsuit that followed a horrific traffic crash involving one of its drivers.
The company is marking its 100th year this year as the leadership torch is passed from Bill Strimbu, the grandson of the company’s founder, to his sons Spencer and Harrison.
“It’s been a pretty good ride,” said Bill, 65, who retired June 30. He sold the business to his sons in a transaction that closed Dec. 31.
The Strimbu family’s connection to trucking actually goes back before 1926. Two of Bill’s grandfather’s brothers – the family is from Romania – had small trucking companies in New Philadelphia, Ohio. His grandfather, Nick, had emigrated from Romania to Canada and was a wheat farmer when his brothers, Charley and Victor, called him to Ohio, saying they had a wife for him – Bill’s grandmother, Eva. Nick drove trucks for his brothers.
“They had dump trucks and a couple (flat) beds,” Bill said. “In ’26, he split away from them and started his own company.”
The company hauled mainly bricks and clay pipe at the time, Bill said.
Bill’s father, Nick Jr., and Nick Jr.’s brother, Tom – they were twins – took over the company in 1947, following service in World War II.
“They were out on what was called the ‘Fireball Express’ on the eastern front in Europe,” Bill said of the twins’ war service. “Because they were mechanics and truck drivers, they drove fuel trucks to the front lines to the tanks. It was very dangerous because they would get strafed all the time by the Luftwaffe.”
Under the twins’ leadership, the company got work hauling steel in the Mahoning and Shenango Valleys and Nick Jr. ended up moving here.
“They moved part of the company to Wheatland, Pa.,” in the early ’50s, Bill said. “Uncle Tom stayed in New Philly and my dad came up here, where he met John Yourga and rented an office off of John at Yourga Trucking.”
“They’d get up here with the clay pipe and they’d get steel back out of here, either coils or pipes out of the pipe mills,” Bill said. “Clay pipe started to be replaced by concrete in the ’40s and ’50s so we had an imbalance of freight. We had more freight up here than we had out of there. They decided to move the whole company up to here and they established their foothold in Ohio with a terminal in Masury.”
Bill’s dad married Yourga’s sister-in-law, Julia, further cementing his connection to the area.
“They were young men and they moved it up here and that’s when the company really started to grow, with the steel industry here,” Bill said.
The twins bought farmland west of Route 7 and south of what is now Route 82 in 1965 and developed the industrial complex that includes NSI headquarters and companies such as Tenaris, UniServ and Panelmatic.
“I started in the company working here in 1975 and I came in in 1982 to work on the administrative side, in the office,” said Bill, a 1979 Brookfield High grad. “My dad assigned a boss to me, which I was not really enamored with. I didn’t want to answer to anybody but my dad, but I had to, and this guy gave me all the worst jobs that he had. I had to rate bills by counting map miles between key cities on every single load that we hauled. I had to call past dues, which was my worst job ever because this guy did a really lousy job and we had a receivables list that needed a lot of attention. All I did was argue with people for about my first three or four years here.”
Bill complained to his father, saying he hated the job and couldn’t do it the rest of his life. “He said, ‘Son, if you want to be successful in life you gotta learn what you have to do, not what you want to do’,” Bill said.
After that conversation, Bill started getting jobs with more responsibility and was sent on sales calls.
“I got a lot of experience hands on, just having to do things,” Bill said.
Nick Jr. died in 1989.
“When he passed, my brother and I bought his shares of stock in the company – he was 50-percent owner – from my mother,” Bill said. “We became partners with my uncle and his family. That all worked out pretty good until 1994 when Uncle Tom, who was then president of the company, dropped over of a heart attack unexpectedly. We ended up being partners with my cousins and we didn’t get along very good. We had different work ethics, different ideas of how things should be run here.”
The company board elected Bill president in 1997. Bill and his brother, Nick, bought out their cousins to become co-owners. Bill bought out Nick in 2014.
Bill had gone to college with an eye on becoming a veterinarian – the family has always had a farm – but his father nixed that dream by pulling him into the company. Bill wanted his sons to explore other options.
Bill’s oldest son, also named Bill, got a degree in biology and has since gone into business for himself, creating Black Sheep Bacon Co. Middle son Spencer got a degree in finance and accounting and youngest son Harrison got a degree in marketing.
“We never got to work inside the trucking company until we were in our college years,” Spencer said. “I went to college not knowing whether the company was a for-sure thing or not; not knowing if I would like it, either.”
Spencer interned with NSI his junior year of college and officially became an employee about 10 years ago. Younger brother Harrison, who had a degree in marketing, came in about eight years ago. Bill can’t say enough about the difference Spencer and Harrison have made in the company and how they have helped grow the company in their short tenures.
“That was the first time that I had family management that was highly educated that they were able to help me,” Bill said. “It really split the duties of the company up. I taught them everything that I know and I introduced them to all of our customers and started a new program to try and get more customers on the refrigerated side. We’ve grown the company over the last 10 years immensely. We’ve quadrupled its size with their help.”
That growth has resulted from the company seizing opportunities when they were presented them; changing what they do when they saw a benefit; trying to predict what the industry will do and planning to address those changes; hiring people with expertise and connections it lacked; and striving to set its employees up for success and provide the best service to customers.
For a company that once ran exclusively flatbed trailers, 85 to 90 percent of its cargo now is transported in refrigerated trailers. Handling the so-called reefers puts extra levels of government oversight and customer expectations on a carrier, and NSI has embraced the challenge. It’s on-time delivery rate is 95 percent or better and it has a stellar safety record, Bill said.
The company has opened its own brokerage company, Strimbu Logistics, that “takes all the freight that we get from our bid processes (that) we can’t haul and it brokers it to other companies,” Bill said. “It makes us a 10,000-pound gorilla in the trucking industry because now, when we bid on stuff – we don’t send our trucks very far west of the Mississippi – we can bid on stuff going to California and everywhere.”
The company created Brookfield Truck and Trailer Repair to service its own trucks and those of governmental entities and independent operators.
The demand for drivers remains high and the Strimbus seek to attract and maintain employees by offering financial acumen classes to help them successfully manage their money, set a guaranteed minimum wage for drivers and hired a corporate chaplain who is an ordained minister and a certified counselor to offer help for personal and spiritual issues.
“We try to do a wrap-around for all of our drivers to make sure they succeed,” Bill said.
“Dad taught us how important the employees are and that you have to take care of your people,” Harrison said. “That’s the most important thing about being in business.”
Bill’s retirement plans include fishing, golf, hunting, working on his hunting lodge in Pennsylvania and feeding his animals on his “gentleman farm” in Brookfield. He also has six more years to serve as president of the Community Foundation and is a director of FNB Corp. He said he will keep an office at the company headquarters but wants his sons to pursue their own visions and make their own mistakes.
“I want these guys to have an opportunity to do their own thing,” he said. “They want to grow the company more than I did.”
Growth would allow the company to expand its philanthropy, said Spencer, 32, who, like his brothers and father, serves as a director of the Strimbu Memorial Fund, which gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to support charities and charitable initiatives.
“We feel we can scale it (growth) and do it the right way,” said Harrison, 29. “That will be our challenge in the next generation.”
Spencer described his dad as “the perfect balance of allowing me to make changes if I could prove the logic of it. If it wasn’t (logical), he’d protect me from myself.”
Spencer’s office and his father’s shared a door that rarely closed, “I had the privilege of working next to my dad and hearing everything all day long,” Spencer said. “I’m really gonna miss that. It’s been a huge blessing.”
Harrison said the legacy of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and the other Strimbus who preceded him looms large.
“We have a strong reputation that took 100 years to build but can be ruined in a month, if you’re not careful,” he said.
