Company Profile
Cisco-Eagle was born in 1970 when Warren Gandall, a material handling specialist for an industrial supply company, went into business for himself.
Mr. Gandall had a vision of creating a chain of material handling distribution companies in the Southwest. In partnership with one of the company's first vendors, Eagle Material Handling was born.
There were only three employees in the beginning, and just a few vendor partners. The first month, they took eight orders--slightly over $8,000 in sales. But the company thrived and grew. Within the next couple of years, Eagle expanded to an office in Oklahoma City and a sales representative in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In the beginning, there was no forklift. Trucks were unloaded by hand. Warren installed a lot of rack and shelving. He said with a laugh "that was enough to last me the rest of my life." One particular installation stuck in his mind. At 6:30 p.m., New Year’s Eve, 1970, a truckload of rack showed up. The shipment was late, so in order to get the material installed to the customer’s satisfaction, they had to unload the truck by hand, reload the material on their own truck, and take it out for installation on New Year’s Day. It took six hours to unload that truck.
ACisco-Eagle's Tulsa facility gamble that paid off
1974 was a breakthrough year for Eagle. In June of 1974, a group of employees bought Eagle from its original parent company. At this point, Warren invited his lifelong friend Bill Cupps to join the company. According to Warren, he told Bill "I know you like to gamble…have I got a gamble for you!" The gamble worked, and the company grew. In 1975 Eagle Material Handling opened its Little Rock office.
Eagle grew by leaps and bounds. Along with all that growth, came change. "Change is unavoidable," Warren said. "You change or you stagnate." In the beginning, Eagle sold material handling equipment, but also sold industrial lift trucks. In 1978, Eagle decided to stop selling lift trucks and focus on the "allied lines" that lift truck houses considered secondary to their business - equipment like racks, shelving, and other warehouse storage equipment. |
About Company
Cisco-Eagle provides solutions for the movement, storage, retrieval, control and protection of materials and products throughout their manufacture, distribution, consumption and disposal. We enable clients to get the right amount of the right material to the right place at the right time in the right sequence in the right position in the right condition for the right cost in a safe manner.
Management
Cisco-Eagle's guiding principles are to empower employees to make the right decisions. We utilize total quality management and open book management to guide us. |
