Shred-it

Shred-it’s clients must be comfortable with the way the North Little Rock company goes about destroying and recycling documents: Shred-it boasts a 98 percent customer retention rate.

In the month of January alone, Shred -it destroyed and recycled almost 300 tons of paper, and the company did it without touching a single piece.

The company starts by putting collection containers called consoles at a client’s office. Workers put their documents in the consoles and don’t have to worry about taking out staples or clips.

Every few weeks, or as often as needed, Shred-it comes by with one of its six shredding trucks and picks up the consoles. The materials are dumped straight into the truck’s shredder behind a locked gate.

The client then gets a certificate of destruction along with the invoice. And it’s all done on-site.

“Our clients tend not to be comfortable with their documents being taken away,” said Dan Norman, Shred-it’s founder and president. “It’s destroyed in your parking lot, and you know that everything’s destroyed.”

Founded in 1999, the company now has offices in both North Little Rock and Lowell. With more than 1,300 regular clients and hundreds more “purge clients” who may need just one or two large destructions every year, Shred-it markets to all of Arkansas. That creates some routing problems for Shred-it’s trucks and delivery vans, Norman said, but so far he and his company’s 12 employees have kept up well enough to increase revenue well over 50 percent each of the past three years.

Shred-it’s biggest competitor remains the office shredder. It’s a device Norman advises against, naturally. He tells the story of a client whose office was filled with shredders that were rarely used. A TV news channel searched through the company’s trash and made a story of what it found.

“A lot of people who still use the office shredder do not know about the benefits of using us,” he said.