1. R e p r i n t e d f r o m
June 25, 2012 VOL. 18. NO. 13 M A I N E ' S B U S I N E S S N E W S S O U R C E
B Y S A R A A N N E D O N N E L LY
F
ew local businesses are as inherently
green as Goodwill Industries of
Northern New England, the Port­
land-based social services agency that
resells items that otherwise would be
thrown away. But 10 years ago, it looked
like Goodwill’s retail monuments of
reduce-reuse-recycle might not survive.
Few of Goodwill’s two-dozen northern
New England stores were profitable. They
lacked consistent branding, customer ser­
vice quality or merchandise.
Getting the retail stores in line was a prior­
ity,sincethestoresconsistentlyfundGoodwill
more than any other single source of revenue
like grants or service fees. (Last year, $29 mil­
lion of the $63 million budget came from
retail revenue.) The retail stores anchor fund­
ing for Goodwill’s network of more than 60
work force, residential and rehabilitation pro­
grams serving more than 100,000 people in
southern and central Maine.
So in 2003, Goodwill hired Randy
Finamore, L.L.Bean’s former operations
manager for corporate liquidations, who as a
longtime Goodwill board member, had
watched the stores’ slow decline. Finamore
set about counteracting what he refers to as
the organization’s “general malaise” by first
making the store interiors look alike. Signs
were printed rather than hand-written and
merchandise was displayed in the same
way, as Finamore says, “to align a vision that
would look to the customer that she was in
the same store.” Finamore closed remote,
underperforming stores and opened loca­
tions in shopping centers with more foot-
traffic; and codified customer service guide­
lines to address complaints about some
stores’ shabby service. He also made sure
each of the stores offered the same type of
goods, at the same price, including brand-
new items like hats, gloves and underwear.
By 2006, Finamore’s strategy had worked.
The stores were profitable again.
Weighing in
Goodwill’s newest retail operation ratchets up
its commitment to sustainability and a healthy
bottom line
Randy Finamore helped Goodwill stores return
to profitability and oversaw the creation of its
new distribution center in Gorham
photo/tim greenway
F O C U S S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y

2. 2 June 25, 2012
Goodwill’s retail renaissance is part of a
company-wide effort to integrate sustain­
ability into all aspects of strategic planning.
The greening of the nonprofit that calls itself
“the original recycler” involves ambitious
recycling efforts, a new CEO with a history
of sustainable leadership and Finamore’s
latest passion — a bustling new outlet store.
A place for everything
The 106,000-square-foot Gorham Dis­tri­
bu­tion Center opened in February and is
key to the company’s goal of eliminating
its waste completely. From the outside,
Goodwill’s streamlined central warehouse
looks as faceless as a big-box store, just a
plain white cube atop a neatly mowed hill
deep in a Gorham industrial park. But,
inside, the warehouse hums. About 100
employees scuttle between rows of tower­
ing steel shelves to the beeping and buzz­
ing of forklifts and the gnashing of a
15-foot bailer crunching metal castoffs like
typewriters, bed frames and chairs into
tangled cubes for salvage buyers.
In one corner of the warehouse, two
women at vertical slicers that resemble
sewing machines cut sheets into rags while
two other women on work leave from the
local prison sift through boxes of old com­
puter parts, stuffed animals and house­
hold odds and ends, tossing broken pieces
into a large garbage bin.
Last year, of the more than 35.7 million
pounds of goods donated to Goodwill’s
shops in Maine, New Hampshire and
Vermont, 38% was sold back to customers,
41% was sold to recyclers, and 21% was
thrown away. It’s the part that’s thrown
away that bugs Goodwill employees like
Finamore. He sees that waste as not only
bad for the environment but also bad for
the bottom line.
“What you don’t want to do is throw it
all out,” says Finamore. “What you want
to do is increase the value of that donation
by diverting those items from the waste
stream as much as you can.”
Goods are diverted from the dump in
several ways at the distribution center.
Goodwill sells to salvage buyers in metal,
plastics, glass and even stuffed animals for
about 25 cents a pound. And thanks to
increased recycling efforts over the past
year, the nonprofit system-wide has cut in
half its trash cost as a percentage of retail
revenue from 2.4% to 1.2%. The distribu­
tion center also stores collectibles and
books to be sold for a premium on web­
sites like Amazon and eBay.
But the real revenue from the Gorham
center comes from the Buy-the-Pound out­
let store, which occupies one corner of the
warehouse. About 80% of items donated to
the stores sell in the first two weeks. After
five weeks, whatever hasn’t moved ends
up at the Buy-the-Pound outlet.
On a recent weekday, about 30 people,
mostly young mothers, rifled through bins
as large as queen-sized beds. Most of the
customers here resell items on eBay,
Finamore says, and it’s common for cus­
tomers to drive up from Connecticut, New
Hampshire and Massachusetts and spend
all day filling several bags with stuff that
didn’t sell at the retail shops. “It’s a more
rough-and-tumble atmosphere,” he says.
Purchases are weighed on large scales
built into the floor and priced by weight.
The heavier the load, the cheaper the per-
pound price. The Buy-the-Pound facility
currently sources from five Maine and New
Hampshire Goodwill stores and will likely
add three more locations by the end of July.
So far, Buy-the-Pound has achieved the
sweet spot of the integrated economic,
social and environmental sustainability
that Goodwill seeks. It’s helping the planet
— the five participating stores have
reduced their waste by an average of 70%;
it’s helping the people — self-employed
moms are turning trash into cash; and it’s
helping the pocketbook. Since opening in
February, Buy-the-Pound has grossed
$50,000 per month. During its first year in
operation, Finamore expects the Buy-the-
Pound outlet will sell $500,000 worth of
goods that otherwise would have made
pennies on the salvage market or simply
been thrown away.
Sustainable roots
Goodwill’s turnaround is due in part to
point-of-sale metrics standard in main­
stream retail. Under Finamore, the com­
pany began gathering hourly, daily, week­
ly and seasonal data on total sales and
donations by square footage and type of
product. “Now we have a sustainable
model that we can [use to] predict the
business,” says Finamore. “We can predict
the sales, we know how much we’re get­
ting in donations, and we know how much
labor it takes because we’ve tracked that
year over year.”
The data has proven reliable. For the
past five years, the difference between
Finamore’s retail budget and actual sales
figures has been less than 1%.
Goodwill’s emphasis on reduce, reuse
and recycle might be most apparent at the
Gorham outlet, but the philosophy starts at
its Portland headquarters. In September,
Goodwill hired Anna Eleanor Roosevelt,
granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor, as
president and CEO, based in part on her
work greening Boeing as its vice president
of corporate citizenship. Roosevelt had
become committed to sustainability after a
World Business Council for Sustainable
Development report showed that the
world’s population will require the resourc­
es of two Earths by 2050 if the current rate
of consumption continues unabated.
“That was what made me sit back and
say, ‘We don’t have time to just sit down
and talk about this over coffee. We have to
really do something,’” Roosevelt recalls.
Roosevelt has called upon Goodwill’s
board to add a sustainable approach to
company management to the strategic
plan, which means considering the impact
of every decision on the environment, the
community and the bottom line.
According to Vice President of Public
Affairs Jane Driscoll, integrated sustain­
ability within the company means encour­
aging its 1,700 employees to find symbiotic
internal solutions to problems. For exam­
ple, job coaches in Goodwill’s work force
programs would be encouraged to place
clients in one of Goodwill’s other commer­
cial ventures.
“When you have a lot of different loca­
tions and lots of people who have their
heads down doing their jobs, they’re not
always connecting the dots,” says Driscoll.
“It’s about educating people about what’s
going on in our own company.”
The back of Roosevelt’s business card,
beside a multi-colored Venn diagram with
circles labeled “social,” “environmental”
and “economic” fusing in a “sustainable”
center, reads: “Sustainability is the deliber­
ate integration of economic, social and
environmental considerations as the driv­
er of our business model to ensure long-
term mission fulfillment.” Roosevelt con­
siders sustainability the continuation of
the legacy she inherited from her famous
grandparents.
“I think what I learned from them
through my parents is that we have to
work at creating the world we want to live
in,” Roosevelt says. “We have to work at it
hard and we have to work at it together,
and that the focus needs to be on creating
a world for the larger community as
opposed to getting what I can get.”
Sara Anne Donnelly, a writer based in Portland,
can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
Goodwill Industries
of Northern New England
353 Cumberland Ave., Portland
Founded: 1933
President/CEO: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
Products/services: Work force, residential
and rehabilitation services for adults with
disabilities, children and seniors
Annual budget, 2011: $63 million
Employees: 1,700
Contact: 774-6323
www.goodwillnne.org