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Daily Record Financial News &

Monday, June 26, 2017

Vol. 104, No. 160 • One Section

35¢

www.jaxdailyrecord.com

‘YOU HAVE TO TOUGH IT OUT’

Photo by Fran Ruchalski

Lee & Cates Glass Inc. CEO Tommy Lee is the third generation to run the family-owned business. Lee's grandfather co-founded the company in 1926.

Lee & Cates Glass CEO Tommy Lee has guided his family business back from the depths of the Great Recession.

By Karen Brune Mathis Editor Tommy Lee wrestled with those deadof-night worries. It was, he recalls, “when everything went south.” The third-generation president and CEO of Jacksonville-based Lee & Cates Glass Inc. was guiding the company through the Great Recession and a 2009 state investigation into fraud charges of overbilling insurance claims. “Your prayer life increases dramatically. The problem is, it increases at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning when you’re trying to figure everything out,” he said.

“It’s a lot of soul-searching.” The 2007-09 recession led to a 40 percent drop in revenue, necessitating cost-cutting, taking on debt, diversification and cutting 150 people from a staff of 300. The company worked through the legal issues and met the court’s conditions, including making full restitution. It cut five staff members and tightened controls and oversight. “You find out a lot of things about people and yourself, and that’s the difficult task, but that’s how you get through things, and so you have to tough it out,” Lee

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FIRST COAST SUCCESS

Tom Lee III

The Daily Record interviewed Tom Lee III for “First Coast Success,” a regular segment on the award-winning 89.9 FM flagship First Coast Connect program, hosted by Melissa Ross. The interview was scheduled for broadcast this morning and will replay at 8 p.m. on the WJCT Arts Channel and at wjct.org/ondemand.

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A look at 2 months of CSX cuts under Harrison We don’t normally pay attention to this, but the major U.S. railroad companies, including Jacksonville-based CSX Corp., file monthly reports with the U.S. Surface Transportation Board on their total employment levels.

Public

With new CEO Hunter Harrison taking over at CSX in March and expectations of cost-cutting, it probably will be interesting to keep up with the numbers in the next few monthly reports. Harrison officially started March 6 and CSX said the company already had cut 800 management-level jobs before he started. It's unclear when those jobs would be reflected in the monthly reports. The STB data show

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CSX cut about 400 jobs in total between December and March, bringing companywide employHarrison ment to 24,061. After Harrison came in, total employment fell to 23,482 in mid-May, according to the most recent report filed with the STB. Although CSX announced

management-level layoffs, the biggest cuts between December and March came in maintenance jobs, which fell by 260. Office jobs were relatively stable in that period. But from March through May, the level of “executives, officials and staff assistants” fell by 336 to 883 and the number of “professional and administrative” jobs dropped by almost 500 to 2,009. There was an increase in jobs in the “transportation — train and

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engine” category of more than 300 between March and May to 9,769. Other areas remained stable. Wolfe Research analyst Scott Group, in a brief note on the latest STB report for all the rails, said CSX had the largest reduction in headcount. That's not a surprise, given expectations when Harrison came in, but Group said the data Basch

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