He was sitting at home with his wife, minding his own business when a text message came across Andy Carrender’s phone.

A branch manager at One Main Financial (formerly Citi Financial) with 15 years’ seniority, Andy hadn’t had any reason to expect a career change was in the wind. But that unexpected text message posed a question that suddenly blew in a fresh breeze of interesting possibilities.

The message was from Gabriel Curry. It simply asked, “Would you consider coming to work for HUB?”

Over the course of the next month, Andy became convinced that the opportunity Gabe was offering him was worth leaving behind his comfortable, if not predictable, career.

“I had reached a plateau in my job,” he says. “There was no room for advancement unless I was willing to relocate, and I wasn’t interested in doing that.”

You can tell by that comfortable smile that he made the right choice

The happily married father of three wasn’t interested in pulling up roots for the sake of career advancement. All his family, including a twin brother, lives within a mile of him. But the opportunity to make a difference in a growing company where he was more than just a cog in a huge machine (and still be able to come home for lunch) proved to be irresistible.

So he gave his notice and joined Matthew Skowron in HUB’s inventory management department.

Andy points out the differences in corporate culture are obvious,. “It’s exhilarating to work for a smaller, growing company where I have real input in decisions that will shape our destiny,” he says. “At the same time, it’s a really good experience to have worked for a big corporation and be familiar with the efficient practices that were in place there so we can incorporate the good ideas here.”

I am on the phone all day long talking with you guys and giving you advice on the best blades to use in your recycling business. We believe in the products we sell, and you guys give us enough feedback to let us know we are on the right track with the products we offer.

Still, there’s no substitute for first-hand experience. Just as most of the guys that work in Mission Control would give their right arm for the chance to trade places with their astronauts for just one mission, I’ve often wished I could trade places with you guys so I could feel for myself what it would be like using our blades in real life situations.

I finally got the chance recently when April and I went to a nearby recycler to observe a demonstration. April and I are both industry specialists who provide auto recyclers consumable supplies. Before we knew what was happening, we were geared up with safety glasses, gloves and ear protection while our “demonstrator” gave us each a turn with a Makita saw and told us to get to work on a quarter panel!

What is ordinary business for you guys was a highlight of my career. No matter how well I thought I understood what it takes to dismantle a car, I now can say that I really do know because I have actually done it. And God bless those Makita engineers for AVT technology!

Talented people seem to be drawn like a magnet to HUB Industrial Supply. Case in point: Jorge (we call him George) Sotres, our IT manager. Jorge found his way here all the way from a little mountaintop hamlet near Mexico City.

Are his dreams in English or Spanish? ...or perhaps in MS-DOS?

Since he began here at HUB in 2006, Jorge has left an indelible mark on so many facets of the HUB culture that they would be hard to list all of them on this page.

As a young man in Mexico, Jorge studied computers and received degrees in systems analysis and programming. He also had a passion for teaching, and he eventually found himself on the faculty at the University of Cancun with the additional responsibility of heading up the university’s IT department, with several technicians under his direction.

As contented as he was with his successful career, he longed for a community where he and his wife could raise their two young children in peace and tranquility. He found the place he was looking for when he visited his brother in Lake City, Florida.

Pulling up roots wasn’t easy. He worked for a time in his brother’s automotive garage before he snagged a job at HUB. Even though his English was still “under construction,” Gabriel decided to take a chance and set him up in the company’s newly-created marketing department.

From the outset, Jorge became a force to be reckoned with. The marketing department wasn’t big enough for Jorge, and pretty soon he was hard at work improving HUB infrastructure. He has been instrumental in streamlining and automating our order and inventory system, changing our phone system to voice over/IP, and a host of other major improvements.

“My passion is God, my family, computers, and cars—in that order,” Jorge says. “My interest in computers is about how they can be used to help us be better, as opposed to just playing with machines because they are fun.”

The blue bench

The front of our warehouse has an enormous table known as the blue bench. It serves as a command post and staging area for everything from weighing out fasteners to laying out returns to duty as a buffet table when we host a company lunch. At one corner of this table is a computer and a stool where you will find purchasing/inventory assistant, Joel Smollack. Depending on how you define it, he either has the largest desk in the company or the smallest.

Joel’s duties here at HUB revolve around making sure our inventory system accurately reflects what we have in our bins, crediting returns and ordering items to keep up with demand.

Anyone familiar with automated tracking systems knows that you can never quite achieve total accuracy and must constantly reconcile what the computer says you have on hand versus what is actually there. Joel performs daily cycle counts on the inventory to keep things from getting out of whack.

Joel was born and raised in Lake City and has been with HUB for three and a half years. He started out as a warehouse hand and worked his way into his present position. He has become a critical component in fulfilling HUB’s $100 in-stock guarantee; if not for Joel’s commitment to his duties, we’d be sending out a lot of $100 checks!

A guy and his truck

In his free time, Joel makes the most of his F150 XLT truck. He likes exploring many nuances of the Florida countryside, which ranges from beaches and springs to rural landscapes that look pretty much the way they did before Florida became a vacation destination. He comes from a close-knit family and he enjoys spending time with his young nieces and nephews. He also likes to tinker with his gas-powered remote control truck, but is considering trading it for an electric one. “Nitro is too annoying,” he says, citing the amount of time he has to spend adjusting the carburetor every time the weather changes.

Editor’s Note: Our industry specialists all host a column in our HUB Insider monthly newsletter, but only readers in their specialist industry get to read them. We have selected some of the best examples of these columns and posted them in this blog.

My family on my mother’s side is Cuban.

Bennett and "Mama" (his grandmother)

She was eighteen years old when she came to this country with her mom and dad. None of them knew a word of English, but by the time she married my dad three years later, she had a decent grasp of English. Her dedication to her adopted country was so thorough that my brothers and I grew up without ever learning to speak Spanish. The little bit that I know was learned on the construction site when I had to manage Mexican employees.

One custom my mother did not leave behind is keeping very close ties with family. My grandparents have always been near and cherished members of the family. It’s not always easy talking to my grandmother—she understands English better than she can speak it, but she always finds a way to get her point across. What she lacks in verbal skills, she more than makes up for with her cooking!

Every fortnight, our extended family gathers for a shared meal. No matter whatever else is on the menu, we can always count on Mama to make us some fried plantains. Plantains look like oversized bananas, but you wouldn’t want to try them raw. The way Mama makes them, they taste better than French fries.

This is her recipe:

Select green (not brown or yellow) plantains and peel. The peel is like a banana, but you need to take it off with a paring knife. Cut the plantain into sections about 1” in length and place them in boiling vegetable oil (365˚) until brown, about 5 minutes. Remove from oil and stand the sections on end so you can squash them with the bottom of a glass tumbler. You want to collapse them to about ¼” thickness and then return them to the oil to finish frying three or four more minutes until crispy. Place them on absorbent paper, salt generously, and enjoy.