For 70 years, Toronto's Greenspoon family made a living demolishing other people's buildings.
But when its own business started blowing up, the family says, it couldn't push the button fast enough on changes needed to save the company.
"It's very emotional -- it's a difficult thing to deal with," says Ira Greenspoon, who was senior vice-president of finance for Greenspoon Bros. Ltd. when the third-generation company went bankrupt in April.
The bankruptcy is a sad denouement to a company that altered the shape of Toronto and other centres around Ontario. The Greenspoon Bros. sign popped up on sites where big structures had to come down, often to make way for new ones.
Among the landmarks it levelled were Exhibition Stadium, the former home of the Toronto Blue Jays; the former Via railway station in London, Ont., and the old Victory Soya Mills site on Toronto's harbourfront.
But Mr. Greenspoon says one of his biggest kicks came from fulfilling every school kid's fantasy. "We actually tore down a school I went to once," he says, recalling the fate of an Associated Hebrew School in Toronto.
When the company started losing money on some big projects last fall, says Mr. Greenspoon, 55, he and his family couldn't move quickly enough to ease the crunch.
The speed of deterioration in the firm's finances took the demolition and construction industry by surprise. "We were all shocked," says Carmen Principato, business manager for Local 506 of the International Labourers Union, which represented most of the 200 people employed at Brampton-based Greenspoon Bros. when the trouble began last fall.
The irony is that this company, which was born in the Great Depression and weathered a number of business cycles, could not survive what one Toronto contractor calls "the best construction market we've seen since the late 1980s."
An official for a company with ties to Greenspoon said there was disenchantment among some creditors that this high-profile family would walk away from an old and respected firm that carried their name.
But Mr. Greenspoon, a chartered accountant, says "that comment sounds like it's coming from someone with not too much business sense."
He points out that the residential building market has been strong, but the industrial, commercial and institutional area, where Greenspoon Bros. was most active, was not nearly as buoyant.
The firm, which hit peak revenue of $30-million three years ago, also carried an overhead structure that was so heavy and entrenched that it was hard to cut, he says.
"It was a period when we ended up doing jobs that weren't particularly profitable," Mr. Greenspoon says. "You eat into your overhead, you eat into your surplus and before you know you're cash-tight."
The company's very longevity worked against it, he says, since it employed a lot of long-time, unionized workers who were hard to pare from the payroll.
"We were losing market share, stuck with high overheads and pretty significant commitments on equipment purchases -- that sort of thing -- and it is very tough to let people go in slow times."
He points out that the demolition trade does not parallel the building cycle exactly. It tends to be a project-by-project business with short lead times, making it hard for firms to cut overheads when they can't be sure how quickly business will pick up.
Besides, "if I had bitten the bullet six or nine months ago, and let a lot of people go, the severance pay might have done us in."
The head of a rival company said one of Greenspoon's problems is typical in his business: A heavy investment in new equipment had taken away a lot of its financial flexibility.
Besides, Mr. Greenspoon says, the industry has been changing. Non-union demolition firms are taking a lot of work away from union shops such as Greenspoon Bros.
This mix of factors ultimately sank Greenspoon Bros. A preliminary report to creditors by bankruptcy trustee Mandelbaum Spergel Inc. shows that as of May 20, the company's assets had a book value of $3.1-million, compared with claims of $5.5-million, including $850,000 by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency for unremitted payroll deductions.
Now, Mr. Greenspoon is taking time to decide what to do with the rest of his life. He's also been working with two brothers from Buffalo, Jim and Jon Williams, who have bought the company name, some equipment and certain contracts in progress.
The Williamses, U.S. demolition operators keen to expand in Ontario, will run a smaller unionized firm, Greenspoon Special Contracting Ltd., with an initial staff of about 60.
If there is a bright spot, Mr. Greenspoon says, at least the name will survive, following the tradition of his grandfather Benjamin Greenspoon, who incorporated the business 50 years ago but who had been operating 20 years before that as a collector and recycler of waste materials.