welcome to a scrap life a podcast solely focus on the hustlers Grinders operators and business owners who live and breathe the scrap metal industry every day we are the original recyclers no suits required just guts and hard work here is your host Brett Eckhart I’m sitting here drinking Spoon Man we’ve been talking about getting this podcast done for a minute and Nick’s like hey let’s see if we can get food and I’m like let’s do it man so real man I’m stuck man I’m still gonna be sitting with you Admiral medals you got your brother here with you yes last time I saw you and your dad with you too your dad not make it he didn’t unfortunately he’s still Florida for the winter unfortunately wow okay but there is good places to be right like the floor is one of them I I guess I said unfortunately because he didn’t want to like plain hop to get here yeah I get it I get it so so just you brother you’re looking at equipment and you’re looking at the house really like anything that just looks like too good A little shiny

and bring it you know they spit shine it put on the floor you painted it together it’s like looking nice um we always like to like pretend that we were gonna maybe get a wire chop or something like that yeah one day we could pick your brain about something like that anytime man there’s so much there’s so many good buyers in our you know Midwest area that it’s it almost doesn’t make sense because it’s just so easy to not have to add that extra cost 100. well there’s no like proof there’s no like one set way to set up a scrap yard right or you know there’s I mean everybody’s processing it differently everybody has different Outlets different consumers different options with your export or your Inland or your next to Canada or you’re next to Mexico like steel mills domestic export contain like there’s just a zillion ways to skin a cat so you just gotta do what works for you that’s right so our new you know we’ve been without a non-verse bailout for 14 months yeah it’s been excruciating because ours broke and it was it wasn’t anything special it

was HRV but it was an annual time yeah so you know we knew that we always wanted to move into HRV with auto time finally when it broke we’re like all right now’s the time we’re gonna do it and unfortunately last year you know February in the April now and even past that equipment was just impossible to get yeah taking forever so we’re still awaiting and it’s coming next week and we can now I bet dude there’s something about you know the band The Other process your scrap and it kind of helps you control it it helps on the freight side for sure because you can get trucks up to weight like it’s a big middle you know yeah loose loads and I had to sell to my neighbor unfortunately yeah but it still goes back down to you can still operate your business by because you take care of your customers they’re still bringing the material you can still do look we haven’t lost them how then yes you know thank God you know we may be making a little bit less money right now which will happen if you don’t have the

proper equipment process but we’re ready to get right back to it so give me a little history on Admiral give me the because you’re what second generation or third so second generation at Admiral okay my brother actually fourth generation in the scrap metal business I love it so our great grandfather started a horse and buggy and then my grandfather joined and that my dad joined my grandfather and then me and my brother joined my dad when he opened up Admiral and 1999 with a partner so my grandfather and him were on a truck Adler’s you know just picking up from plants and dropping it off at scrap yards like ours are yours yeah and my dad was like you know why can’t I have a place yeah we could do this and my grandfather was no overhead no I don’t want anything that’s where you get your model of efficiency we were talking about earlier with your kids so so my dad’s like you know what I gotta try this and he found somebody and they started it and yeah God bless him because I think we have one of the most tremendous locations

in metro Detroit for walking what year was that do you 99 my dad opened the doors at our place and it was way smaller we’d be my brother had expanded since then yeah but you know it’s it’s been amazing to learn because when my dad and his partner started it yeah even though they had gotten off the truck for the most part yeah they still were selling to the same scrap yards for the most part so me and my brother were the ones that really learned how to take it to the next level of putting out the middle mat so your dad so he’s in Florida right now you say he’s been there for four months so is he still active and when he when he does come back when he’s not when he’s not down there summary he has a few industrial towns that he still is in charge of okay and then when he is home he had the yard unless he is laid up which is almost always he’s always there so is it when he comes back into the fold after he’s been gone for four months does it create

like an interesting Dynamic does it like change the hill he’ll find does it change the flow of how these are getting together no rip the mechanic off of Pixie the machine and say hey I need this light bulb change yeah he’s we can probably fix this yeah like let’s let’s just hang on right here and then we can figure it out you know like he’ll take the scale man away and be like hey let’s fix this over here I’m like Dad the scale man has customers that he needs the service he can pull away from the scale okay so the business is like you know way different than when he was a child yeah well so in the in the day-to-day is like how do you and your brother divide up duties like what’s like what’s what are you doing what does he do so my brother is in charge of sales all the non-ferrous and he’s also helping the quality control to make sure all the the Bales and boxes and everything are proper so that we don’t get rejections yeah very low rejection rate which is amazing I can’t

even remember the last time we’ve had a rejection um and then he helps with operations of the yard to make sure guys are you know processing the right things in order of what we need yeah um and then I am in charge of light bulbs um I’m in charge of Steel sales I’m in charge of pretty much all of the plants that we are uh servicing yeah um so plastic or service you call that and then I’m also in charge of equipment and trucking so even though we have a mechanic I’m still in charge of you know like are we gonna buy uh refurbished pump or are we gonna buy a brand new one yeah it’s quicker with more stuff like that I feel like that’s the only way you can make it work right like if you’re gonna have two brothers or family like everybody has to be a lane like a very defined Lane like that’s your lane this is my Lane we’re going down we’re going the same direction but absolutely people have always asked me that and like well how do I work with my friends right and you guys

that we do and I was like because we all know like here’s what we do right like here’s what you do here’s what you do here’s what you do if you don’t step out of your lane and I won’t step out of mine and we’ll all still be able to get there and we’ll all still be able to like enjoy in the you know exactly it’s just it’s too big for you or I to do all the pieces ourselves yeah and that’s how you scale too is how you grow your business is if you can get good people in certain positions that are really good at stuff you’re like okay you take care of that because you’re really that’s like kind of the sweet spot for you and I can like there’s just certain things that I’m just incapable of not good not good at doing right like that’s why we have you know people that do the account you’d say that’s why yeah see let’s do like roll-off boxes and bins like what so you guys so you guys like full on you guys yeah so we have three full-time drivers

okay uh we have roll-off trucks and lugger trucks um the service I don’t know I’ve lost track 100 something plants that we pick up from nice um some of them come back to our yard some of them resell to other scrap yards that are bigger and have better you know drainage returning to stuff like that yeah um and then some of the plants that we deal from generate volume where we take it plant direct to uh smelton okay nice so it’s pretty you know it’s pretty diverse when we’re handling you know I never really consider us a broker I guess you know the plants that I pick up from and go directly to the smell or smelter I’m a broker with an asset I guess well it’s like the difference is yeah Trucking brokerage and like an asset based brokerage right so like if I can’t get to it then I I get with my own truck then I can get someone there to this the same same concept this every year actually bringing the boxes and handling I think his dad that’s kind of what they did right for years and years

I mean they ran the raw trucks they had the Box they had everything else and they actually came in I want to say in 2000 and don’t call me Mike I’ll probably this up but somewhere like in in the in the 2000 2006 seven eight somewhere in there and actually put a actual facility in and so which was a big move at the time and I think if you talk to him now he’d say that’s one of the best moves that they ever made right it was going from just Trucking it and handling it and kind of being that broker type and then also now they can bring certain things back process reprocess it package it repackage it and yeah I think that’s key if you want to grow in our industry is to have your own yard Warehouse whatever you want to call it yeah because then you can power more value for your material than just having the one truckload however many pounds or tons that would be in time yeah you can say all right I’m gonna pull up this up a little bit and and demand a better price I

want to find further out where you can sell it yeah well and then it gives you a little more reach but it also allows you to take care of the local Market a little bit better so like what is your like sweet spot like what do you guys kind of hang your hat on as far as like what differentiate I mean you guys are a competitive spot so how do you how do you compete like so I think uh the difference is that Kelly and I are not just owners following the operators so we’re there six days a week you know we’re putting our eyes and hands on a lot of good material that’s flowing in so like you know if our guy downgrades and a little you know we receive a little returnings yeah our yard size it’s ironing okay well I’ll talk to the owner and say look the slope is irony there’s no way we clean out our machines perfectly and I’m like well here’s pictures then you know are you physically watching this is machines yes we deal with a hundred of you guys and this happens all the time

yeah I hear the same story every time you know our machines are clean there’s no way and I know you’re switching between steel iron and aluminum yeah because I have a doctor in your Bland for steel and a dumpster girl yeah no it just it happens or the guys 18 20 an hour guys are talking dump hopper in the wrong bin well it just happened and you know it’s not my fault it’s not your fault but the material is no longer the same value anymore when that happens so the difference is is like we can back it up a little bit better because we’re physically there and seeing it and I can provide some good proof to them and I think that they like the handheld touch which is very tough to scale and that’s what keeps me up at night is how how can I scale that but I think that’s what differentiates us is that me and my brother are physically handling a lot of stuff and and in contact with the people that are in charge customer service man like just relationships and keeping the relationships and not getting short-sighted

right I mean you guys been doing it long enough you guys have been in the game you understand like the tricks of the trade like you’re not gonna does anyone over on you right and it’s it’s very simple and I say it to almost every sort of new plant I try to get I’m like there’s no way I’m going to be the highest price yeah you can call three guys after me and each one are going to be offering you more money the question is is the service going to be there are they going to answer the right questions you know are they going to pay you quickly and are you going to have any issues or what are the weights going to be right like I could pay you 500 bucks a ton but I’ve only paid for half the weight you’re not getting 500 bucks a ton you know so many guys with assets in Detroit that pass that this dump off and on the scrap yards and they’re like well well he’s paying me you know 20 bucks more a ton than you’re offering me I’m like well he can’t but

that’s like a tough conversation to have yeah it’s like well I’m not going to call anybody I’m not here to call anybody a thief at all all I’m saying is is like the proof is in the pudding it’s in the customer service it’s in like there’s a weights match up does everything match up does the reporting make sense am I downgrading am I not like there’s I mean the proof is like is the opportunity to service the customer absolutely so your brother where’s he at is he out there he’s in there looking like right now like you guys he just not man enough to keep us together Harris before I think Sarah was making the they’re not Affairs bigger so um they’re both a good neighbors like from my standpoint like did Bulls make good balers now to each its own like there’s always uh you said you bought the badger which is what um it’s still Auto Ty Baylor auto tie closed door yeah it’s got an 11 inch cylinder so typically they come with a 75 horsepower motor but I want the 50 horsepower motor because it’s a power restraints yeah I

didn’t really want to upgrade um the difference with that is that the speed of the ram going back and forth increases from 17 seconds to I believe 25 seconds or something like that so you know if I was getting you know poor scrap Non-Stop and you know having like you know yeah it would I’m not doing that so it’s not going to be that big of a deal what’s like the traditional mix of scrap in your area like I mean it seals it feels very industrial right it feels very like machine shopy like so like we are buying several grades of steel and iron okay machine shop turning Steel turnings Cast iron borings and they’re short shuttle turnings which is you know like really fine steel turnings okay so there’s three different types of attorney yes then there’s bush like uh you know typical Stampy yeah then there’s number one bailing which is you know larger pieces that need to be cubed yeah then there’s number two bailing which is thin clean post consumer um which can either be cubed or shredded If you shred it it’s uh you know very clean where

there’s no um so they pay a premium for that then there’s regular shred feed yeah there’s heavy metal number one heavy metal number twos pns um some people do pns two foot yeah how big of an operating footprint are you on so ours is pretty small uh I think we’re on about three acres total with about 10 000 square feet okay um we pop out pretty good volume for a little tiny that’s like we say you say listen off all those grades of Ferris right like yeah you can you can start putting some real you know yeah I mean we can’t handle all of those exactly because like returning to the borings we don’t have the proper training facility yeah so like you know those go to a place that really focuses on those items yeah um and then we don’t have a steel Baler so we’re not bailing number one we send you a place that will Cube it to The Foundry bottle or whatever yeah um well you know mostly pns heavy metal shred number two bailing number one bailing Auto cast you know all those items are spread around our yard

and you know there’s gonna be bad to having a small footprint the good thing is you know we can’t get crushed terribly by fluctuations yeah so we keep it moving pretty regularly so it has I mean you don’t get that you don’t get the upside but you also don’t get to have to take the downside when it goes the other way right which is kind of feels like I don’t know when this podcast will come out uh that’s up to Nick let’s let him figure that out but you know we’re in the middle of April it’s like April 19th I think so those feels like this Market starting to soften up going into may as we were here people dropped from some of the big players in town saying we’re decreasing our spreadsheet iron and uh car body price by 20 bucks but they’re anticipating yeah and I’ve heard that like you start to hear things in this in this convention how you start hearing like as the word gets out and usually I’m in past experiences people get a little more bullish around like an isary event they’re like you know people get

like you want to buy they want to like do some business so you kind of but it feels like this one do you think we’re at the top of the market for the year you know what do you think how do you think this year plays out I’m wondering if it’s going to be similar to last year we’re gonna now have down months until November again yeah depends on like the consumers I mean you slow down from the plants I’ll tell you that right now I always say like scrap guys will tell you more about the economy and where it’s going then uh than anybody else will write because because we we’re dealing with the manufacturers we’re dealing with the people on the front lines that are building manufacturing and creating and when we see a Slowdown we are I mean I can already tell you the economy’s sold now there’s less consumerism going on right whether it’s consumerism on the like on the you know manufacturing front where they actually buying some things being made lawn mowers whatever else or just you know Trinkets and stuff like we we feel that I think

ahead of time but totally so I think we’re usually a pretty good engage on on that right I think you you’ve said a couple times you’re bracing yourself now for the next for the rest of the year yeah well I just it feels squishy right like it doesn’t feel like a rocket ship it feels like it’s coming off two incredible years I’m sure you are as well yeah and I I’ve got I think you know enough to withstand what I feel could be coming yeah so you’re not married yourself you don’t spend too much so that you can continue through the bad time yeah and it is it’s going to be interesting to see though I mean I think this the there’s still a lot of money out there like this it’s still kind of like there’s not like I wouldn’t necessarily there’s just like all these good deals in the market either because there’s still people with cash out there that are still buying still doing still you know so it’s kind of like but the economy in general feels soft but but you know like I’ve been thinking that the economy was

going to fall on the clinic for the last two years now we had the most incredible two years I know it doesn’t make any sense I was telling somebody this earlier I said don’t ask don’t ask me where you think this thing’s going I go because as soon as I predict it I’ll probably be right wrong you know that calls me the reverse mush all the time all right man family owned fourth generation like you’re like you these are like my favorite conversations one thing I’ve been kind of pushing on lately is how do we get the younger generation you know my my business partner Jake over here he’s got a son he’s about to graduate college and like I love seeing like that young like 20 year old 21 year old blood 22 like coming up because he realized okay like there’s there is a chance right yes but how do we get more people that want to want to do it diamonds are in the rough but they’re like deep because there’s so many privileged kids and people out there like they don’t want to get dirty yeah you want to go

to a desk job let alone do what we do I know and it takes a long time to not be that guy that gets dirty yeah you need to work yeah before you know in it to understand there’s so many facets of what we do and nobody has the patience these days it is it’s a bit I think it’s a patient’s thing is what it is I think of course again to tell the any and whether it’s orange or anything else like that patience component is is so big because people want it’s like they want they want to live their life you know the cell phone technology yeah Amazon delivers in 45 minutes after you order I mean I know the problem is we’ve all been spoiled it is yeah self-included I know gratification yeah so it’s almost we’re created almost impossible well and maybe that’s maybe that’s where though like a little bit of a downturn economy or recession or whatever you kind of reset It’ll like reset it a little bit and say okay like maybe maybe let’s maybe act and have a little more patience let’s kind of get back

to doing some of the Dirty Work people somebody asked me before like so how why’d you get in the tires I go because it’s dirty and hard to do which means not many people want to do it right which means a little bit of less competition you know like everybody I always say everybody wants to be a non-ferrous broker in an office building you know buy And subscribe so you know letting somebody else it was that easy right wouldn’t that be fun I know I know well let’s get to deal with a million Tire problems and whatever every day 100 yeah find the dirty find the that people don’t want to do and there is money to be made yeah money in the dirt exactly manager says and he’s a guy that I would never believe would be interested getting dirty every day yeah I love the guy to death and he’s like there is money in the dirt just like you just said um that’s in right there I love it there’s money in the dirt thank you for sitting down man appreciate you I’m glad we finally got it done so

good to see you man thank you