Some companies start with a business plan. Richards & Richards started with a commute.

Nearly four decades later, the Nashville-based secure destruction company is still family-owned — but the family has changed the business as much as the business has shaped the family. Here’s how a father’s leap of faith in 1987 became the specialized, NAID AAA-certified shredding company Middle Tennessee businesses rely on today.

The Founding: Steve’s Leap of Faith (1987)

In the mid-1980s, Steve Richards was living in Atlanta, working as a partner alongside his brother at Armstrong Relocation, a Nashville-based moving company. The work was steady, but Steve never took to Atlanta — and he missed Nashville. One day, on his way to work, he passed a records management company that was hiring. He stopped in, and a single conversation with the owner changed the direction of his career.

Steve secured financing from family, leased warehouse space in downtown Nashville, and founded Richards & Richards in 1987 as a traditional records management company — physical box storage, document scanning, data protection, and secure shredding all under one roof.

He ran it like someone who’d actually done the work himself. When the industry standard for tracking stored records was index cards — a system prone to losing boxes and files — Steve implemented barcode tracking instead. When two of the company’s larger clients needed roughly 70,000 boxes of old records destroyed, the fees from that single job funded the purchase of the company’s first shredder, planting the seed for what would eventually become the company’s entire focus.

Steve built Richards & Richards into a multi-million dollar business known as much for how it treated people as what it did for them — including fully paid health insurance premiums for staff, a benefit that made local headlines in its own right.

Bowman’s Journey: From the Warehouse Floor to the Front Office (2008–2018)

As the eldest son, Bowman Richards didn’t start at the top. He grew up in the business quite literally — sweeping floors, riding along with drivers, and pulling boxes for destruction during summers as a teenager, back when he’d rather have been outside like his friends.

Bowman joined the company full-time in 2008, graduating into the middle of the Great Recession. He expected to land in operations. His father had other plans and pointed him toward sales instead — a decision Bowman later credited with teaching him the business from the customer’s side first. Over the next decade, he earned his way up from a sales role into management, working alongside his father and absorbing both the advantages and the very real friction of building a career inside a family business.

The Refocus and Handover (2018)

2018 was the hinge point. Bowman officially took over ownership of Richards & Richards from his father — and rather than simply inheriting the business as it was, the family made a deliberate strategic call: sell off the legacy records management lines (physical box storage, scanning, and data protection) and refocus entirely on the company’s strongest division.

That refocus is the company you see today. Under Bowman’s leadership as president and owner, Richards & Richards became a dedicated secure shredding and destruction company — the specialization that now defines everything from paper shredding to hard drive and media destruction.

The Modern Era

Since taking over, Bowman has built on his father’s foundation rather than just maintaining it. The company grew through acquisition — including Ladd & Childers Document Solutions in 2021 — extending its reach into new markets. Bowman also took his experience into the wider industry, serving on the international board of i-SIGMA, the trade association that sets the standards behind NAID AAA Certification, including a term as its board president.

Nearly forty years after Steve Richards stopped in to ask a records management company why they were hiring, the family name is still on the door — now representing a company that’s narrower in focus than the one Steve started, but sharper for it.

Want to work with the team behind that history? Request a Business Quote and see what secure, certified destruction looks like when it’s still run like a family business.