BUILDING A DREAM
T H E S TO R Y O F DA N E L L A C O M PA N I E S , I N C .
First backhoe ever owned‑—Case 580CK, early 1970s.
superintendent, the dispatcher, the assistant superintendent, and the head bookkeeper, pretty much all of management, had packed up their files and quit, leaving Jim Danella pressed up flat against the hallway wall as they squeezed
past him toward the exit, cardboard boxes in hand. “Mr. Faulkner tried arguing with them,” Danella vividly remembers, “shouting at them that the information had to stay in the office and that everything belonged to the company. But they said, ‘No, it’s our private information,’ and they all went out the door.” In the span of a half-hour, the dream had turned into a nightmare. “My father looked at me and said, ‘I am in the trucking business. And my name is on the line for this. You have one year to make it work. And if it doesn’t work, you get me out of it.’ And I’m standing there thinking, Oh, my God, what am I going to do now?”
“You Are Going to Need Some Help” The day Danella bought Faulkner, it had two contracts: an infrastructure maintenance contract with a telephone company then known as Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, in Montgomery County, and a paving contract for a utility company called Philadelphia Electric Company, in Norristown. Going in, Jim Danella had judged those contracts to be a good start. He would discover, however, that the scope of Faulkner’s business under those contracts was hardly as extensive as the previous owner claimed. Fortunately, that revelation did not come immediately (and when it did, Danella was able to renegotiate the sale price). Instead, the only problem he faced that first Saturday morning was being the continued on page 6
“They just don’t build conduit structures like that anymore.” —Jim Danella
Norristown, Pennsylvania, 1980
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