Lean Times Driving You Mad?
Take a Cab

By Lincoln Brunner

The maverick streak in Steve Benson runs longer than the gray ponytail hanging down the middle of his back. So maybe it wouldn’t surprise people who know him to find out that the same guy who went to Radio Shack to find a better way to run his press brake would find salvation from the manufacturing industry’s recent downturn in a taxicab.

Benson, 51, lives in Salem, Oregon, a town of about 250,000 that until 2000 had only one cab company. After local leaders changed a longtime city code granting that company a monopoly on cab business—passed when the city’s population was about an eighth of its current total—an old acquaintance persuaded Benson to invest in a startup service with one cab and one cell phone.

That was two years ago. Today, the business boasts a fleet of 10 cabs and 45 employees. After buying out several other original partners, Benson now owns 48 percent of the business. And business is good. "It’s growing constantly," Benson reports. "It’s truly amazing. It has grown from day one. With the exception of a couple of one- or two-month pullbacks, it’s been a constant up curve."

But figuring out how Benson, a self-taught press brake operator and instructor, moved forward with a career in the taxi business requires a look back. He got an associate’s degree in machine drafting after graduating high school in 1970. Young and somewhat aimless in his career, Benson bummed around until meeting someone in the sheet metal business—a chance encounter that ended up redefining the fate of the would-be draftsman. "The first time I saw a press brake, I just fell in love with the machine," Benson recalls. "It fit with the training I had—drafting was just the other end of the picture."

Benson hooked up with his new friend’s sheet metal shop and spent several years on the shop floor learning the details of the trade. The young man’s fascination with the inner workings of sheet bending coincided with a period of rapid advancement in the industry, when the old methods of coining and mechanical machinery were giving way to air bending, hydraulic equipment, and CNC (computer numerically controlled) technology. Getting in when he did, Benson learned old school methods from grizzled shop veterans and also got to see what new electronic technology could do for a tired application such as the press brake.

Sometime around 1981, Benson’s curiosity took him to a Radio Shack, where he bought one of the company’s first hand-held computers. Packed with a whopping 1.9K of memory—"My wristwatch has more than that now," Benson remarks—the unit spoke a simple form of BASIC language and came with a permanent-memory tape recorder that Benson used to store his grand new experiment: a program that would calculate bread-and-butter press brake numbers such as bend deductions and preferable die widths.

Benson’s tinkering met with the predictable Luddite grumblings from peers who teased that the customers didn’t care about the bend radii. "I would say, ‘I know the customer doesn’t care, but that doesn’t mean you should just be helter-skelter doing things,’" Benson says. "I kept refining it. Because I wrote it, I could refine the program as I worked with it.

"I didn’t know enough about bending metal to write a competent program," Benson says of his early work. "When I bought this, the intention was just to make me better at what I was doing—operating a press brake. I literally taught myself to be a master at it. There were no books, nothing on the subject." The books would come, though.

Besides ribbing, Benson’s tinkering gained him a reputation as the local "idiot savant" of press brakes, he recalls. The title also bought him an invitation to teach a class on press brakes at a local college. Years of number crunching and "literally pilfering everything I could find on press brakes" provided ready-made fodder for a class text, which Benson also turned into his first book, Introduction for Precision Press Brakes, which he self-published in 1991. Two more training books on intermediate and advanced press brake operation led to a fourth, Press Brake Technology, which was geared more toward engineers and was published by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 1997.

Now fast forward to the summer of 2000. Benson was enjoying a career as a self-employed press brake training consultant, working two to four sessions a month and also doing sheet metal work for a local manufacturer of computer cabinets, "just to keep me on top of the game," as he puts it. Then came the first inklings of the current economic slump. Benson’s business tapered down to one training gig every month or two, then one every six months. "It really went sour pretty quick," Benson says. "The first thing out the door was training."

Enter A-Cab Taxi Company, the product of another chance encounter, this time with a former associate named Pat Pinkerton, who, like Benson, happened to be a Freemason. After discovering their mutual lodge involvement, the two began to talk about Pinkerton’s dream of owning a cab company. Benson was intrigued by his business plan and decided to invest. "When I got in, I didn’t know anything about it," Benson relates. "But he had done such a nice job with the proposal, being in the same fraternity, it just all worked out fine. It was a risk, but it not that big a risk."

Not any more than, say, actually driving the cabs once in awhile. "I actually will go out and drive a cab on occasion if somebody doesn’t show up, or we get slammed," Benson says. "When you drive a cab, it’s like Jerry Springer Live. Sometimes it’s all you can do to keep a straight face. In general, you don’t always deal with the cream of society, at least in my community.

Benson and Pinkerton not only have been able to put up with the weirdness, they plan to make room for more of it. The partners want to double their fleet and make half their drivers employees while leasing out the other half of their cars to independent contractors to save on payroll taxes.

In the mean time, A-Cab’s bright green taxis keep rolling through Salem, which gives Benson the encouragement to stay with a business he never thought he’d be in. "Will I stick with it? Oh, yeah," Benson proclaims. "It will at some point become a very profitable affair. We’re the leading cab company in Salem. We have more cabs out there than anyone else."