The Transformational Women in Family Business 2024 are 16 accomplished women who are propelling their family enterprises into the future.
BRANDI HARLEAUX
CEO | South Post Oak Recycling Center | Houston, Texas
Brandi Harleaux likes to say her career path took her “from pixie dust to real dust.”
More than a decade ago, she was enjoying a successful career at the Walt Disney Company — where she was the head of organizational development, talent management, learning and development for Disney Interactive — when an executive coach asked her a question she hadn’t fully considered: “What’s next for you?”
At first, she was taken aback. But the coach had an idea: What about joining South Post Oak Recycling Center (SPORC), the business Brandi’s mother and father, Freddie and Angela Robinson, had founded in 1994?
It was a rare opportunity to take a thriving business from the first generation to the second, the coach said. There weren’t many others like Harleaux — a young woman with a strong corporate background — in the recycling industry.
For the first time, the suggestion intrigued her.
In 2013, after much deliberation, Harleaux left the cushy confines of Disney in Los Angeles for the decidedly less glamorous recycling business in Houston.
Harleaux, who had worked in the scrapyard as a teen, spent the next several years learning the industry.
SPORC’s business was strong, but Harleaux recognized the limitations on its potential if it continued to primarily serve a retail customer base, buying smaller quantities of items like aluminum cans, gutters and air conditioning units from households and local residents.
“I realized that, in order for us to grow and scale faster and at a higher level, we needed more volume of material on a steady basis,” she says. That meant focusing more on purchasing materials from businesses and government entities.
As she began to push to diversify SPORC’s business, it became clear that her Fortune 50 corporate world experience had imbued her with a risk tolerance that was higher than her father’s.
Freddie Robinson had been expressing a desire to transition out of the business for several years. When the pandemic arrived, it accelerated his decision to step back from SPORC.
“COVID came, he went home and chose not to come back to the office in a full capacity,” Harleaux says. “For him, [the pandemic] was an off-ramp.”
Harleaux shifted from COO to CEO and found herself firmly at the helm as the company navigated new challenges while seeking to maintain its legacy values.
“But I can look back, in 2024, and say we made some good decisions around people, processes and systems that I think teed us up for where we are today and even where we want to continue to grow to,” she says.
Indeed, over the past four years, Harleaux has grown the business by 200% and shifted the company’s primary customer base from the public to businesses and government entities nationwide, which now account for 70% of SPORC’s revenue.
In addition, Harleaux has led efforts to increase the company’s employee base by 50%. That base now comprises five family members—Harleaux, her mother, her sister, her uncle and a cousin — and 23 non-family employees.
Looking ahead, Harleaux envisions continued growth, including potentially expanding the company’s footprint to source recyclable materials globally and adding new revenue streams.
Just as crucial, Harleaux says, is continuing the company’s legacy of taking care of its employees, serving its community and educating the public on the importance of recycling.
And while she’s invested in developing the next generation of leadership within her family, she also knows the importance of finding and fostering outside talent, particularly women.
“I think the way that we’ll scale is to have more people who align with our vision, who believe in the ‘why,’ who believe that this is a place where they can contribute and grow,” Harleaux says. “And I think the more we get that, the more we can scale with everyone on the same page, family or not.”