Women Leaders in Waste: Cheryl Waite of Perkins Manufacturing Company
Perkins Manufacturing’s president and CEO shares how she has grown the company while carrying on her late father’s legacy and passion for the business.
Cheryl Waite has been the president and CEO of Illinois-based Perkins Manufacturing Company for about seven years now, but her roots in the industry run much deeper. And through her position at Perkins, she has been able to carry on her late father’s legacy and passion for the business.
Waite’s father, Robert “Bob” Hoppe, started out in the industry back in the 1960s as a distributor for Leach garbage trucks and Elgin Sweepers. As a child, Waite recalls chasing garbage trucks with her siblings and going to visit dumpers in the back of restaurants with her father. She also remembers her father always having customers and people from the industry visiting the family home.
In 1973, her father bought a small machine shop from a man named George Perkins and started making large steel containers. Then, in the ’80s, when poly carts came out, Hoppe was on a mission to develop a lifter that could not only pick up the residential and commercial containers that he made but also the newer poly carts. And that’s how Perkins Manufacturing, now known as an industry pioneer in the design and manufacturing of cart and container lifters, got into the lifter business.