With a mission to “give the customer what they need when they need it,” Dennis Leebow opened Majestic Steel USA’s operations in 1979. “(My father) worked for a family business prior to that called Baldwin Steel,” explains Todd Leebow, Majestic Steel’s president and CEO since 2012. “When Baldwin Steel was sold in the mid-1970s, he made a decision to relocate to Cleveland where my mother was from and start Majestic.” In five years, Majestic’s small customer base expanded into a lucrative business. “He was an innovator in the space, and he was really focused on building a unique business model,” says Leebow, who has set his own course for company growth via supply chain optimization. “I was fortunate at a young age that my father exposed us to the business,” he says, “from all aspects in terms of doing things in the plant, understanding the customers and understanding the product.” Not much has changed about the structure of steelmaking. However, with an increasingly volatile market, Leebow is poised to reinvent the supply side and make Majestic a leading partner in the domestic market.
When my father started the business, everything he did was about the customer and providing quality, speed and service, including his willingness to carry inventory when many were not willing to carry inventory that wasn’t pre-sold given the interest rate at that time. And so, he took a risk to carry that inventory, and that was really how the business got started and what the model was.