Business Profile: Midwest Mailing

A moving experience: mail, machines, motley materials

It’s best not to bother Stan Fredrick between five and seven o’clock every weekday afternoon.

That’s crunch time for Midwest Mailing Service. Fredrick’s staff has two hours to make sure the first class mail for the day gets sorted and delivered to the airport. When you’re handling mail for about 300 different companies, some days that two-hour window can be a nail-biter.

It’s chaotic around here then because the cutoff time is 7 p.m. at the airport, and cutoff time for our customers is 5 p.m.,” Fredrick said.

The company sorts, labels and puts postage on about 10 million pieces of mail in a year, more than 5 million pieces of which is U.S. Postal Service first class mail. In fact, the postal service says Midwest Mailing Service is among its top ten accounts in the number of mail processed.

Midwest is a pre-sort business, which prepares mail for quick distribution by the U.S. Postal Service, said Valerie Hughes, communications director for the Gateway District of the U.S. Postal Service, based in St. Louis. Because such companies have correct address lists, they are able to fold, insert, address, pre-sort and deliver bulk and large mailings to the postal service.

“Presorted mail requires less handling and reduces processing time and costs,” she said. “Depending on the level or sort, the mail could go directly to the delivery unit.”

First class mail contracts get same-day turnaround, while other bulk-mailing jobs may take three to five days, Fredrick said. Midwest is the only Columbia company providing such service; he said his main competition is a Jefferson City company, AAA Mailing Services. That may be because he has $600,000 worth of machinery geared toward his mail operation. He said he spent $65,000 on upgrades last year alone.

A $325,000 machine sprays the barcodes on first-class mail and can send it to every single address in the United States, coding it for each individual mail route. The company’s premier account status with the U.S. Postal Service allows its clients to take advantage of the post office’s quantity discounts, even though their businesses may produce small quantities of mail.  That means a small business, such as a dentist’s office, can get the same postage prices as a major employer.

Midwest picks up, sorts and meters Columbia Orthopedic Group’s high volume of outgoing mail so that the company can avoid the high personnel and equipment costs necessary to operate an in-house mailroom, said Gene Austin, CEO of Columbia Orthopedic Group. “Instead of having a mailroom with a bunch of equipment, I have a mailroom with a bucket,” he said. “Basically, all of the outgoing mail goes in a bucket; they come by, pick it up and take care of it from there.”

Fredrick opened up a retail mail outlet, The Mail Room, in 1988 on Vandiver Drive. The business relocated a couple of times before he sold it in 1990 to launch Midwest Mailing. The company has grown to employ 23 people and generate annual sales of $4.3 million, although Fredrick says that number reflects postage paid by companies in addition to his fees.

Midwest’s mail operation, at 6104 Brown Station Road, uses 8,000 square feet of space. The same building houses a second business, Mid-Missouri Recycling, which uses 3,000 square feet and employs two people. Mid-Missouri accepts and recycles about 30,000 pounds of obsolete computers, wires and electronic equipment a week.

“That’s why I’m hard to get a hold of sometimes,” Fredrick says. “I’m between two places most of the time.”

Computer monitors lie dormant on pallets in the warehouse, along with televisions, printers, telephones, paper, cardboard, screws and bins of circuit boards and power cords. Some may be resold to used computer stores, and sometimes children’s groups arrange to come and build computers out of spare parts, but most components are destined to be shredded, melted or crushed at recycling centers across the Midwest.

In the recycling center, a couple of pallet-sized bins quickly fill with aluminum soda-can tabs. Fredrick collects those for Ronald McDonald House, he said, because he spent time at the Ronald McDonald House in St. Louis when his son, now 12 years old, had two open-heart surgeries as an infant. Now divorced, he also has a 13-year-old daughter.

When Fredrick found out the local house only received 20 cents a pound for the collected pop-tabs, he took over the operation and now gets them 70 cents a pound. He usually sells about 800 pounds of pull-tabs twice a month to aluminum recyclers. That’s about 480,000 tabs a shipment, or nearly a million tabs a month.

What won’t Midwest Mailing do?  Fredrick says he stays out of the printing business, although most local print shops hire him to do the mailing side of their projects. “The customer doesn’t even know we’re involved,” he said.