Chuck Smith

Hello. I'm Chuck Smith, the owner of Northern Industries. I have been in the animal control/care industry my entire life. I am the son of the founders of Tomahawk Live Trap and National Live Trap, and one of the former owners of those companies. Many of you who have been in the animal care industry for many years know me and my family well. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of stuffing catalogs into envelopes for my parents, Greg and Mary Smith. I can remember the old rotary printing press they bought and taught me how to run. I did whatever I could to help them out. As a young child, small tasks like this made me feel important, and the small amount of money my parents gave me back then made me feel good about myself, too. My parents would also let me trap any wild animals I could, to make sure the traps they were designing worked well. By the time I turned 12, I was working in my parents' factory every summer, making live traps and cages. I would work on the spot welders, the assembly line, and the quality control lines. I even found my first love in my parents' factory, which didn’t hurt my desire to come to work every day - coming to work meant that I got to see her. I didn't get along very well with the foreman back then; she seemed to be harder on me than anyone else, maybe because I was too lovestruck. When I was 14, my parents started taking me to various industry conventions and leaving me in charge of the booth. After I graduated from high school, I went to college to learn how to program computers. However, after my second year of college, which was 1993, the prospect of going to school for another two years didn't appeal very much to my heart or my checkbook. So, that year, I designed the Tomahawk Live Trap Animal Control Pole. I developed these poles, as well as other products that Tomahawk Live Trap sold, over thecourse of many months. At the same time, I was also still working for Tomahawk Live Trap, attending many animal care, animal control, pest control, animal damage, and other industry conventions, and making great new friends and business contacts all over the country. My wife, Jacky, worked as the office manager at Tomahawk Live Trap for eight years, from 2002 to 2010. Customers who called the company in those days usually talked to her. Jacky also worked many conventions with me during that period. Many of the people we saw at those shows will remember us bringing our son CJ (“Chuck Junior”) along. He is five now, and everyone will see him again soon. I hope he follows in his dad's, grandpa's, and great-uncle's footsteps and stays in the family business. My mother sold the business to me and my two siblings in 2007. Over the next few years, I worked with my two siblings as the company's product designer, creating new products such as our Easy Set Thumb Traps, our Professional Series Live Traps, our new-style economy traps, our fully-enclosed plastic traps, our multi-use traps, and many others. I designed almost every new product we have sold over the past ten years. In addition to all that, when we moved into a new facility, I came up with new and easier ways to let anyone, regardless of sex or handi-capable status, use many of the machines, welders, and benders they couldn’t use before. I even worked in the parts room for one of the years that I owned the company. I worked anywhere and everywhere I could to learn more and more about the business, all while continuing to oversee the manufacture of the animal control poles. I soon came to the conclusion that I wanted to be on my own as a business owner again. I sold my interest in Tomahawk Live Trap to my brother, Greg Smith III, in November of 2011. As part of my buyout, I am under contract to manufacture certain products exclusively for Tomahawk Live Trap LLC until June of 2013. The products I am currently manufacturing are the same high-quality animal control poles you currently buy from Tomahawk Live Trap, and have been buying since 1993. In addition to our original animal control poles, we will also be manufa