all right i’m sitting here with the man of the people oh jesus shawn davidson i’m serious i don’t around i’m telling you like one thing i like about you is that you appreciate the small medium-sized like recycler well absolutely you and i have had this conversation before yeah so cheers man thank you for having me yeah we’re able to sneak you in we were supposed to do this like two hours ago yeah sorry about that it’s just been it’s we both want to walk and see the equipment we want to see the vendors like that’s an area that i really don’t know much about so you know for me you know it’s quite an education looking at the equipment seeing it in action yeah obviously i’ve seen it at so many yards but being able to ask them questions about you know certain things and how they when you can actually get up close and actually see as long as you’re being safe and you’re not like you know but also for me from my perspective also trying to understand you know where’s the innovation right like what’s the next step you know

uh and that was quite fascinating here right like i love what they’ve put together here you know such a unique expo right uh so to be able to ask an equipment guy what does innovation look like in your industry yeah right and oh so this thing is a is state of the art okay why you know like so that’s always fascinating and then obviously like the hydrogen cutting systems that’s amazing i’m super i’m super curious so like that’s what i’m going to spend my day tomorrow i’m going to sit down with powell and just kind of like pick his brand and i’m just want to see like what like hear the advantages see the advantages that he’s they’re kind of speaking of and see if there truly is something there for the rest of the industry you know i think i mean it’s it is it’s phenomenal what they’ve done and again you know for me the thing i was telling them the thing i love the most is it’s you know it’s something so unique that can be applied and employed into so many i mean applied into so many industries and it’s

come from a scrap guy yeah you know i love that like that’s the thing that makes me the happiest you know exactly uh but anyway yeah it’s one thing about our industry is that people here like they’re they’re trying they’re doing like they’re out there every day like and i think that’s you know to speak to this conference i i feel like it’s not as big as it is a big israeli you know the national show or whatever it was still fairly big you know 800 people and you know and i feel like they put on a they put on a hell of a show for the first one yeah and hats off to jim keith and the recycling today staff and i mean they just i mean so much effort goes into this and look at it it’s gone seamlessly you know it’s yeah i mean you wouldn’t you wouldn’t be able to tell that this is someone’s first time doing this yeah like and they i mean the crowd is great you know a lot of operators here a lot of people and i mean look at this flow today right like

you’re set up doing this right you know you’ve got two new software companies that are you know exhibiting you know so there’s innovation coming through the tech side obviously we’re doing what we do you know then you’ve got like people like hcs and like you know some of the guys on the on the car recycling side that are you know showing new innovations in their equipment i mean exactly when do you see i mean i can’t remember the last time i’ve seen a flow like this that had like so much you know innovation and and yet in in what we consider to be a very traditional industry you know so are you still on your guys in are you guys still focused on the small to medium sized that’s all right are you guys like still i mean last time we talked like you were like man this is what what drives me absolutely i mean like does it make price points that people can afford but also like open up the because i think the real way you get people to buy into what you’re doing is you give them more value than

you take right absolutely i think giving value yeah when you know and if you’re providing value you know i firmly believe that the business comes right and you know we’ve built davis on the on the you know on the idea that we will offer you know the best data so the most accurate data yeah with the best technology right at the best price you know so uh our you know we are absolutely like just you know we’re all about small and medium you know obviously the benefits for the larger companies anyway come right because everyone wants access to you know the good data and good information right and market analysis but you know so we’re rolling out like we we will roll out uh recycled paper you know this month and then you know plastics and you know your electronic scrap grades and you know uh we’ll do a little bit of glass and rubber you know all of the stuff that goes into a morph stream basically you know so that any kind of material that a yard handles you know we’ve got a data point that they can use right for their

contracting and you know with price benchmarking whatever right and it’s at no additional cost yeah you know so so we’re making the investments to do that right because you know we’re playing a long term vision you know we want to go for scale and you know uh we’re happy to support it and i feel like when a solution like that’s available to the industry and it can help the industry make better decisions you know they’re you know it’s a better industry if that makes sense right i don’t want to sound like very like oh you know um too philosophical with it but it’s true right like if if our industry has yards that are doing well right yeah and robust that just encourages if their margins are improving guess what they’re going to keep reinvesting in the industry right so our recycling rates go up and the industry is just more robust you know i mean like so it’s like making you know we not our industry but you know people outside industry love using the you know those boss words esg and all that yeah i hate that it’s not it’s not none

of our decks because we’re already in that industry you know that’s we are the especially the industry people right like you know but that’s exactly the point so it just it drives me crazy but you know the point is like so if we can contribute to that engine and make that engine sustainable yeah right like then we’re doing our our part in you know in this industry right that i love so much so you know that’s so tell me like so it’s like when you talk about innovation i know you’re a pretty entrepreneurial guy like do you have stuff that you’re like that’s that’s coming down the line that you’re super excited about yeah that you like we have a lot we have a lot going on so yeah i’m more on the tech side is it more i mean i mean that’s kind of your wheelhouse right yeah so and data so like uh so the data side is obviously davis index right so you know market analysis news data uh and tech and so on the on the on the davis next side we’re rolling out a platform called trade hooks and

trade works will allow it’s only for our subscribers obviously but it’ll allow our subscribers to tell each other hey i have this material that i want to buy i have this material i want to sell yeah you know and it’s free like you don’t transact on the platform but like so if you like what someone’s telling you then you can like you know chat with them on the platform itself or you can pick up the phone and call them on a number they’ve given you right yeah so we’re facilitating that communication you know as opposed to for example someone reaching out to you on linkedin or me and then say hey by the way i’ve got this material and i’m a spot you know you know i can go to yeah i’m like hey listen the community’s already built why don’t you all interact with each other right so we’ve got that it’s actually in testing right now uh we’re we’re also rolling out a massive data analytics uh piece so we’ve spent two years uh cleaning and structuring data that comes out like import export data but also like you know for example

the weekly steel output data comes out in a press release you know aluminum data a lot of it comes on press leads so we’ve actually structured it and we’ve written technology around it and uh we’ve organized it in a way that now you can bring it into dashboards and you can take like a price series and chart it with like export volumes or import volumes and create your own dashboards it’s built we’ve um we’ve licensed some technology from a you know from a californian tech company and you will be able to use that data or put your own data in to build your own price forecasting if you wanted to do that yeah we’re not going to do forecasting for you but you know so that’s that’s rolling out in like at the end of this month and again it’s all included in that thousand dollars you pay for davis right so there’s no additional charge for it right that’s the main thing right so you’re building on your existing because we want to keep adding value like hey listen you know what yes this data is important to you right in your decision

making and yeah we’ll structure it for you and we’ll you know we’re happy for you to uh we want to provide you with the tools to help you you know make better decisions basically right so you can use our data but also all the outside and the there’s 250 data regions that we’ve seen and structured and now we’ve built the tech tool like so every time they update it we can bring it in and you know yeah uh so is that a way just to get us all like sucked in and then you’re going to jack the price on us never mind like i think look i mean at the end of the day look i mean you know see to be perfectly honest right at the end of the day if it’s a viable business it’s good right so 100 you know we know what yeah right we know what our marks are so we know like hey listen you know if we’re an x number of users i’m happy right so let’s say that we never hit that number for example hypothetically right like you go into worst-case scenarios and you

go oh you know what we’ve put in all this investment we’ve built this amazing platform and we can’t for whatever reason get to that number right maybe there’s a problem on our sales side you know without a product whatever you keep you know you keep working on on those solutions but let’s assume that everything is equal and you go okay fine look uh we’ve tapped out and we go okay what can we do so maybe at that point you go okay fine look the data side right like uh you know not a lot of people are using it only a few people are using it so let’s do one thing let’s you know let’s charge them a little bit for it you know if you i don’t think we’ll come to that to be very honest but the in an ideal world if i could make price data available for free yeah right uh and and build revenue models around uh supply demand for example data i would love to do that you know so we’ll see where it goes right like but our we’re definitely not on the journey of like hey you

know uh we’re a thousand dollars today and we’re gonna be at three thousand dollars at the end of you know three years that will just never happen are you enjoying what you’re doing i love what i’m doing so you know and the other thing is over the last year i’ve made some investments on the technology side so i’ve put together a fund and i bought a company in france last year uh which is an erp for trading businesses okay uh because there’s no real modern technology platform for trading so it goes and sits on top of any yard software you know and we’ve implemented it at multiple like i mean i think right now jules is already in like maybe 400 locations you know so it’s you know we’re still in stealth mode yeah uh but it’s it’s that’s really going well uh we’ve also invested i bought a company in england which is a crm technology company and the idea is that you know so all these solutions are basically for for recycling industry right so where i’m buying them or and now you know we also built our own call linker which

is an internal communications app for people that buy and sell a lot of material uh so it just organizes threaded conversations you know i have it on my phone we’re testing it right now uh and the idea is like you know whenever there are gaps in our industry where there is no proper solution we’re either building it or we’re acquiring companies that have built technology very close to it and then we’re helping them build the right solutions so they go into yards that we have relationships with go and see what they’re using you know that’s how they’ve been killing it out right uh we’re we’re going to be doing something very soon with carbon emissions uh this is all through night echo uh so you know so it’s it’s been great and we’re also doing something with freight we’re trying to create a uh you know a singular freight platform for freight management and booking for your containers or your trucks so we’re you know so there’s a lot going on man there’s a lot going on that’s why i appreciate you man because you are like me like if you’re not doing something

you’re like oh yeah i feel like you got it in you you know one of the times we spoke a long time ago remember i was telling you like you know our industry has been neglected for too long by good solutions and you know especially on the technology side uh you know because you know if someone wants to go and make quickbooks right i want to go make a a software that is an accounting software that you know hundreds uh thousands of companies can use and i’m a billion dollar company right yeah and you know and uh you know that’s their model right so they look at our industry and they go it’s too small right so if you look at some of the existing solutions in irondaster in the tech side they’re prohibitively expensive right um you know because they they kind of like figure oh we still want to be that big but it’s within a smaller base so like how do i get there right yeah but to a point where today you know a lot of this stuff so a lot of the good solutions don’t exist and some of

the you know the band-aid solutions kind of you know are just like i can’t understand that and you know they’re not even on cloud servers and like there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s happening there that you know that we want to we want to go on and solve and we’re also i’m like actively investing uh and looking at investing in companies that are bringing this kind of innovation right so people that are working with soaring systems and you know bringing some machine learning ai there we’re evaluating you know we’re we’re constantly evaluating other people are bringing new ideas into the industry right yeah that help our people you know our yards small and medium you know um that’s that’s where i want to live and breathe you know and yeah i’ll keep doing it till i go broke or will one of them yeah i don’t know you know like i know i know so and honestly like you know even and with knight echo look i mean you know with these acquisitions that i’ve made and some of the investments like you know more like 90 90 6.5 is all

my capital yeah you know it’s so there’s very little money there’s actually been raised from you know like yeah you’re putting your money back in and trying to make yeah so it’s not even like you know so basically what i did is i exited by investments in in in in startups that were in other industries last year and i said now i’m just going to put everything in our industry right yeah so you know i do i had done a piece of that for you know to fund davis uh and then last year i just made the call like no let’s just put it all into recycling and genuinely you know like the the the goal here is to is to solve problems and you know if i make a little bit of money you know to to pay my bills and live in my little two-bedroom apartment in toronto i’m more than happy and you’re happy i’m not chasing some big goal i don’t really care about that stuff you know so i love it man that’s why you’re a man that’s why when i introduced you as a man of people

i wasn’t bullshitting i don’t know but how are you doing my tell me what i’m doing good man i’m doing good business what are you excited about in your world you know we are right now working on um really going hard at the tire recycling side of our business so we’re super excited about that we’re putting together this uh recycled media um we’ve had we’ve we’re going to stand up our own our own media company because it’s just tailored for recycling companies okay because we understand the message that we’re trying to promote and you don’t have to go and basically find a you know media company explain to them what you do every day you already know right right oh so you’re going to build the material that they can go and use we have we have the people in-house like we have skye and marissa and nick and these people have been in our industry and been around us for long enough and they’ve stood up with a scrap life they’ve helped us stand up you know recycled idaho these other podcasts and these other brands and so we’re basically like hey

we’ve got you know some answers for you some solutions for you and so we’re excited about that i’m just excited about the industry as a whole and being able to see these small medium-sized businesses connect well when you do almost each other when you do things like this when you say okay fine look you know we’re going to build like a media asset right for so like mass media communication tools right like do you build that from the notion that hey listen you know what i see this as a gap or do you look at it as like oh we can also monetize it right i look at it as i look at it as both i look at it as if you can’t monetize it then you can’t pay the bills so you have to monetize it to a certain extent but i’m also such a long-term horizon thinker yeah that i don’t have to monetize it today right i just have to at some point yeah i mean with a lot of ventures you’re burning you know for a while yeah you have to be able to but what i

also see is a gap in the recycling industry where you know there’s there’s great companies like say gei gie media right like the people have recycling today and these other brands and but what they don’t do is they don’t focus on you know enabling somebody to take the social media platforms that are available to them and help promote their business right like they do it their own way and it’s been good and it’s worked for a lot of years but like what you’ve done what i’ve done like ultimately my goal is to help these small medium-sized businesses stand up against these larger corporations and be like hey we exist not only do we exist but we’re damn good at what we do like we can handle your material we can we here’s our location here’s our people you can and basically allow them the opportunity to get more swings of the bat right very cool whether it’s bids quotes so you go in and you say bases hey experienced this is what success looks like when you’re contacting x y and z and based on my experience right you’re as as as a

medium company somebody can come to you and say hey i want to go and try and bid for this project or whatever is that what you’re saying like you can help what i’m saying is based on our experience is as being a company based out of out of idaho yeah when you think of recycling in idaho i want you to think of us right so i want to find that company in every single state yeah and then these 47 countries we have that we’ve kind of dialed in and say when people think these are several states or countries 47 countries that we have 47 countries we’ve done 47 countries and 50 states that’s amazing so our goal is to say hey i’m the premier recycler in texas all right whether you you have to communicate with the state of texas yeah you probably have multiple in there yeah but i’m i only want one i want somebody to stand up and say and i want it to be a small or medium-sized business that says i want to be recycled texas when you think of recycling in texas yeah i want you to

think of me i’m willing to put myself out there and be and do the podcast and do all that like as this company owner right and and build it out right so okay so you would help them i would i’m gonna help brandon right marketing assets for the like a mass communication just like we’ve done with idaho right okay i want to help people do that for their state or their country and say cool man be the be the guy be the gal own your state wow 47 countries yeah we got them right over there behind you oh belgium austria so there’s a company in belgium that has like that is using that and we’re we’re gonna we’re we’re gonna basically like take our platform that we’ve built and basically give them the tools give them the podcast tools give them the marketing tools that we already we’ve already made all the mistakes right right we’ve already like just like how you built davis right right you already knew having come from an industry that did a similar type platform right you knew all the pitfalls yeah and all like where you could like

basically say hey improve let me show you a better way to do it like that’s the same thing that we’re going to do with recycled media say hey you in austria you have a recycling company let’s make you recycled austria and you put yourself out there you’re going to have to do the work i can’t do i can’t do the podcast before you like the thing i can’t do all the bs for you you’re gonna have to do that right we’ll give you all the tools to do it congrats i like that so that’s the goal so man of the people we’re gonna we’re we’re chasing you i mean you’re a 47 country so i don’t know what man of the people anymore that’s probably you yeah so that’s what i’m excited about man we have our converter recycling business i mean what about like your yard right like at your different you have the seven yards right do your to your people at the yard right your ops people and your sales people right and your commercial teams do they come to you and say listen all these other things that you’re doing

right are distractions and they’re taking you away from us you know it’s like instead of having three children you have seven children and all of them want equal attention and one child feels like they’re not getting enough are you facing that no because we too and i can’t say for a fact but ultimately the way i’ve done it is by us like doing a scrap life and building our branding like media company is we’re we’re helping build our business at the same time right we so we hire great people we allow them to lead from the front like we allow them to run their business run their yard run their facility and i just say hey i work for you like i’m out here doing this every day because i’m trying to feed you business right okay right like that’s great driving like i’m trying to drive converters because if we if we if we we make money buying and selling converters and we make money buying and selling and processing tires and that allows us money to buy equipment and allows us money and i think ultimately you have to lead by example

so like if i was living in some zillion dollar house and i drove a ferrari to work and i showed up three days a week and i didn’t do and i never put my boots on and went out and did it then yeah i would be probably people would be like this is right i’ll also tell you one thing if you ever do that i’ll stop talking to you but ultimately because i love what i do and i love like all the people i do it like i can show up and like be like hey what can we do to build a build it better what can we do to make a better business and there’s so much to be done right there’s so much to be done right and i think like you know um you know it’s interesting because like most yard operators right like there’s so much going on just at that yard level right like if i’ve got a single yard i’ve got multiple yards and you know the the daily uh challenges that you face right like you don’t really get enough time to take a step back and

say okay fine look uh what can i you know what can i build for our industry for the future like innovation you know whether it’s you know whatever an operational level systems processes whatever right a lot of companies don’t intend to improve process but you know i mean like yeah you create like you know the stream i guess you know and um when when our industry has more people and there has been a lot of innovation obviously especially on the equipment side but you know what i mean is like when more people from our industry take a step back and start innovating yeah that’s when you see some really good solutions come out right and and a lot of solutions that can be applied to other industries too right so you know and uh it’s quite exciting to see more you know of that now than there has ever been you know so i i’m rooting for you guys to succeed you know and likewise and that’s why and that’s why we’re both here right yeah well you know we’re trying right cheers everyone’s going to work and i like it i like that’s

a good end spot like we’re both here to just try and be successful and cheer other people on to be successful and and support our friends and say hey like we want you to be successful it’s abundant and if you can contribute right you know a lot of times like you know you’ll see a lot of people um and you know for a long time people have done it this way are like oh i think i can help you you know you got this thing to move and you know i know this person might be interested in it and then you know i try to take a cut right yeah and i you know and uh when i say i’m like that’s generally how a person has thought about it like oh this is an opportunity you know i can connect these two people and i’m gonna now if that’s that person’s business that’s fine that’s different right but like uh you know i look at it completely different i’ve done this my entire life right like you know if i know that you you have something that this person wants to vice versa

i’ll connect you all and i want you all to succeed and i’ll never ask for anything in the middle right i don’t want i don’t want it because i want you all to succeed because my philosophy is look as long as you’re doing well at some point i want one of my companies to be able to hit you with a product that you’re going to look at and go i like this it solves a problem for me it’s adding value it’s helping me with my margin right and you know and uh and you go oh yeah also by the way you know this is one of sean’s companies he’s helped others on the part he’s helped us out in the past you know you build some goodwill and you know i want to grow it that way and that’s what i’ve invested in you know for the last 14 years and you know uh and i think that you know when you’re when you’re trying to help people and you actually help them without a um you know a transactional interest in everything you do yeah you build uh you’re actually helping build a

better industry basically you know that’s the moral of the story what goes around comes around yeah i’m still waiting all right sir thank you for coming i appreciate you cheers yep cheers you’re done with that i’m almost on mine yeah i’m good