while the average person may not think of darren doane as part of the scrap business you are mistaken because darren has inserted himself into our industry by being one of the scrappy individuals and one who introduced me to podcasts in the first place along with john sacco years ago a fellow idahoan who originated from california like so many idahoans nowadays darren’s assaulted earth dude with more scrappiness in him than most i hope you enjoy the podcast you made the mistakes and you kind of almost went backwards to where you just yeah more basic yeah 100 percent i think i think a lot of people like natural basic well that that kind of became the weird thesis was i started um i looked i saw something as like a corporate video i was googling something and like some 1980s corporate video came up and the guy was like you know hi and he was like you know you know look at the lighting and the way it was shot and i was like oh that’s so corporate right and what somehow in the next like 30 minutes it got me thinking in terms of like

i think what the way we look at that now is the way the generation right now and to come is going to look at really well produced and really good sounding content because unless you’re at like the level of like an apple or nike i think it’s a little different at that level personally because there’s i think there’s a line of companies sure but but that’s but but they’re going to run into the same problem which is that there’s a generation growing up on sending videos back and forth to each other and they know what authentic feels like and it doesn’t feel like being miked up so whether they like it or not like we have a generation coming up right now that they they understand authentic and natural and real to not be some sort of perfect three-point lighting and that’s why you’re mr beast of the world yeah because i’m so popular like my kids love that stuff and i’ve just sat down and i don’t like it but i like i’ll be like i don’t quite get it bro you just gave me chills i was thinking about mr beast

yeah and i think quarantine time for whatever reason we finally like got into dude perfect and mr beast and all the stuff that we’ve been hearing about and once i started watching it um our who’s the science guy uh mark rober i’m not sure yeah whole other level level um we were watching and i was and watching my kids watch it and how they were connecting with it and i was like man again this is a language that’s all my kids language i mean the language i’ve got a 15-year-old a nine-year-old and that’s all i’ll be like hey what are you guys watching you know and uh they’ll be like that i’m like well throw it up on the tv and then i’ll throw it up there and i don’t quite get it but i’m trying to understand it you know you know what the craziest thing that my kids watch they watch youtube but they watch people play video games yeah they have like yep uh twitch them filming themselves and then the video game and the running in the background and them just blabbing a bunch of at

the screen that’s right but the kids like i’ll watch my sons right they’ll watch it for hours and i’m like what what’s so funny is my my 15 year old well all she wanted for christmas is us to like do that so we got set up at home we all have mics we have a twitch account yeah and we play minecraft and i freaking hate it like i’m just so bad at him jumping in the corner right i don’t know how to do anything and i just make my teenager mad at me right i told you how to make a iron an iron sword feeding the sheep yeah yeah and then but we’ve recorded a few and yeah and we haven’t like posted it but we still play like i promise i’m like once a week i’ll play with you guys for like an hour so we’re trying to get it but see this is like these are the things that i’ve been trying to kind of i can talk about investing your new companies what you’re doing and and it’s been mind-blowing just walking around seeing those things the thing i continue

to invest in is thinking like really thinking like what the heck is going on like don’t just it’s dumb like never anymore never tick-tock right we talked about this and i love when i hear something and i go oh okay wait a minute and there’s an interesting comment that i think gary vee made which i thought was one of those most insightful comments is he was talking about snapchat and people were complaining about snapchat and how weird it is that it disappears right and this is the kind of thinking i like and i’ll try to remember how this comes back to gaming is he said well hold on snapchat’s actually more like the world than any other platform yeah yeah it’s a more of a goes away yeah we have a conversation we talk and we leave permanence is what’s weird right but everyone thinks oh snapchat’s weird it only stays for whatever length of time but who copied snapchat right everyone else right exactly yeah but i think of that oh yeah that is more like real life okay so there’s okay wait a minute so before i get too picky on

it like gaming bro when i grew up i sat there with my quarters laid out on asteroids in line and i watched dudes play yeah i stood there yeah waiting to get the asteroid so you were watching you’re mr beast was watching asteroids right yeah yeah i’m what right that’s what i’m we’re not mister well mr beast has a video game channel as well so to me it’s like wait a minute we haven’t really changed it’s just the it’s the i keep thinking it’s the platforms and the delivery that has changed there’s that human behavior hasn’t changed there’s that picture of people like you get a lot of people bitching about people on their phones all the time yeah and then there’s it’s most people have seen it that are on social media but then you look at a picture like today in a picture in the 20s everyone was in a newspaper you know so has it changed that much we’re just getting our information you just get your information differently yeah because i mean that’s what i’m doing on my phone when i’m looking my phone i’m reading the news for the

day and i’m trying to get my mind wrapped around what’s going to happen for tomorrow yeah so i can either make a sale not make a sale what’s going to happen with china what’s going to happen over here what do i think the commodities are going like i’m just not reading the local newsprint right in a paper form i’m reading you know bloomberg fox right zero hedge like i’m reading different articles and trying to decipher and make my own opinion on which way we should go with our business a lot of not like and including podcasts including youtube including you know your friends feed linkedin facebook yep and so i’m just taking in all the information it’s just a different way of taking in the information well we’ve got some clients and some friends i’ve got some clients and friends over in the finance i’ve been hitting them up on you and tagging them and it’s been fun to kind of get people on sort of big finance side of things to kind of look over here you know and so because to me the things you’re saying you know when you’re in your

car and you’re rolling and you’re talking about the market you know every time i’ll hear something and go well and i’ll send that over to my guys over who are in investment banking and and it’s fun to see them go oh that’s okay that’s interesting because there’s another here’s another source of information in news that you’re actually providing where is a dude on wall street going to get intel on commodities of this level well you’re communicating in such a way where i can share that now they’re seeing that and i know people are making moves based on that and ours is like a regional level i mean we’re where we’re seeing in our area but we’re also you know when you talk about price commodities and why do i think they’re getting pushed around and it’s it’s definitely you know there’s a lot of china there’s a lot of different factors but that’s what i’m consuming at night right why are these things getting pushed one way or the other and also the other thing just from like an entrepreneurial mindset like i’m trying to think what’s the next way to grow the business

right what’s the next like when nick said earlier trying to put yourself out of business like we’re over here every day trying to put ourselves out of business but explain that i mean i’m i know you’re listeners but i’m going to be sharing this with a lot of my listeners as well what do you mean by that i i i love that expression that one hit me like all i listen to so much gary vee yeah everything he’s ever said that one like struck a chord with me and brett had seen it too but i i you know i had to be like brett have you heard that i’m like dude like that makes perfect sense like it’s great having a team right sometimes things we’re already doing that to a certain extent and i think businesses that end up failing is when they dive there like dig their heels in and like no that’s how we do it that’s how we run our business if you have the train of thought and gary vee was talking about it with like airbnb like hilton should have invented airbnb right and like you know the

big taxi new york taxi or whatever it’s called should have made uber so you know what are we going to do we’re going to try to do more mobile buying and i try to reinvent the game we’re still going to run our current businesses but they’re going to feed those in and then you’ll be kind of ahead of the change or maybe you will help make the change which is why i think commercial airliners are in trouble because they’re not working to put themselves out of business there there should be a mid-level jet service is whoever figures that out first this is going to kill again 100 because look there’s there’s a price point to jump on a private plane you know to go anywhere um in some sort of comfort tour it’s it’s worth doing that that’s a that’s a ten thousand dollar trip to go somewhere short distance maybe one or two people yeah short distance yeah it’s it’s 10 to 15 grand once someone gets that two to three grand hits that price point yeah i think it’s over i’m more than two to three hundred dollar guy by the

way and and i think it’s exo jets are flyo or i just i just saw them private jet company they’re only kind of working this triangle from like san francisco san diego i think vegas and kind of everything in there but one ways on a jet 500 bucks a ticket yeah that’s like i mean there’s plenty of people people could afford that plenty of people with that with that kind of cash so tell me how i love i love telling this but like you’re the guy that got me to do my first podcast okay you and john basically called me up and said hey we need to do a podcast and i was like yeah i’m good i’m pretty happy just doing what i’m doing yeah and but i was like you know obviously there i need to push myself and out of my comfort zone so i did it and i’m like hey this is legit like this this is a i enjoy it because i like talking to different people but b from a marketing standpoint it’s really helped our business um but how has your business changed since we met in

2000 and was it 18 19 yeah 19 13 19. yeah um what what part of it i mean what are the highlights maybe the cliff notes like how because at that point you were just kind of digging your heels in yeah you’re doing what you’re doing today yeah my business stalled my business stalled like it just stalled and like so like summer 2018 it just stalled and i’ve never had to go out and get work as much as i like to grind and do it just it’s it in in a weird way i’ve never had to grind to go get work it kind of came to you it always came word of mouth built a reputation uh and then one day just stopped and i was i mean i was tripping and then i had to kind of get on the phone and do like weird fake phone calls hey just checking in what’s going on you know what just you know like i was actually i was actually cold calling yeah i was trying to put feelers out there and i was like you know what i’m not good at this yeah like

this is not my thing and i can’t even i kind of hated myself too i was like i don’t even like myself making that phone call but the phone was not ringing so i i knew something had to change i was like this this this isn’t working and i knew it was all about content but i was just not what what what what had not really sunk in was we were all on our phones and so summer 2018 i’m looking at my phone and i’m going you know what everybody’s here how am i going to get here i’ve never told the story even on all my podcasts i’ve never told this story i was literally because like i was looking at the mortgage i was looking i mean i got four kids i was like i mean there was no work i’m not a guy with a 401k we don’t have save we always dump back into the company and it was gone and i was looking at my phone going and i was just praying and i was like lord i i don’t know what to do and i get a text from

from the lord kind of from a buddy of mine that became like a priest years ago used to work with me years ago i hadn’t heard them in years i just see what do you think of this would love your thoughts and it was a video i hid it it’s gary vee standing on a stage holding the phone he says if you’re not here you don’t exist that was the clip i was yeah what i was like if what is that clip right so then i who is this guy turned out i knew who he was because i was a big wine guy back in the day and he had a wine pass so that was some weird things we’re connecting i found that keynote that he gave and i when i heard it the thing that got what what i realized was wait a minute the idea of daily content being on this on this device communicating every day it’s one thing to know something makes sense i was like i realized yes wait that’s it but there’s also something different when you realize that you are actually wired for that thing yeah

like it’s like it’s one thing to go okay you know what like you’re a psycho but now you got to go be like a navy seal psycho like some dudes are made for that and that’s why we have the seals yeah right but if we had to go to war we would know we’d have to put that work in and we’re not a bunch of psychos maybe on that level but the psychos love it i was like wait a minute create stuff every single day multiple times a day like don’t even worry about what people do i was made for that yeah that’s when i was like okay that’s what i’m doing this january 2019 so i’m gonna post once a day and literally within a week business changed posting once a day i almost didn’t post on my instagram because i was going to change it from like doane family something i had on my instagram to doane creative agency i i almost didn’t do it because i thought about this might confuse my mom i almost didn’t make a business decision because of my mom she’s gonna get confused where’s all the

pictures of the kids yeah but i had like 500 people there i figured start with those 500 right like let and i was like am i really gonna wait i’m out of money am i really not gonna do something because of my mom and so i was like don’t create an agency i started posting daily within a week work work was coming in so they started hitting you up like through instagram oh yeah and it was just the weirdest thing because i had to rethink now what the heck is this i wanted to become one of the most thoughtful people on the planet that was i’ve never had like a psycho psycho what could i actually get psycho at and outwork everybody at it’s like i think i can think about this issue and and i wanted to become thoughtful on what is this not just the mechanism that’s post everyday but what are we doing and the first thing that hit me was i think like a week or like a weekend i started realizing how i need to show my music videos but ah but if i show a music video from

kid rock someone’s gonna say well that was like four or five years ago has kid rock hired you since i wasn’t going to post that because in my mind i’m thinking and by who’s this person yeah that’s going to call me yeah hey i saw that postdone what was the last time kid rock called like we do that right like we do that we all do that and so i posted that and the next day someone called one of my clients and was like i had no idea you work with kid rock man and and all of a sudden i was creating categories remind people remind people remind people every day remind people so literally every six months i do another post of all my top music videos top bands i’ve worked with those are cool because i don’t think a lot of people knew no right and i think and i think well but everyone knows that dude no one knows yeah no it’s all the way back to like short-term memory like people like they might know or they but they don’t they’ve been told once or they’ve been told it’s

like they forgot and some of your best like motivational speakers some of your best speakers in general they pretty much go up on stage and beat the same drum right the same pace right about the same because people need to be reminded or they need to hear a similar message and i think that that’s part of why multiple you know i i’ve been talking lately about this again trying to really think about this stuff because i remember it was like a you know and you remember this this is a big moment when i shared it with you like about a month or so in like people were hitting up you know me and my wife and being like is darren okay yeah i remember you and i had that conversation in my pickup outside the airplane and that that was heavy because that point i don’t even really shared that story with with with anyone really and someone had called and said you know your husband’s looking a little desperate you know and and it was like my response was when i saw that person hey i am yeah you told me like i

am i remember you i remember in the car they taught in and i remember something like i remember you kind of like i remember you kind of did that like brett like that like when the dog hears that dog whistle type thing oh yeah i don’t know what it was but something clicked yeah well because i i was telling you earlier like i’m kind of patient right my patient when it comes to selling scrap if i don’t feel like the market is the right price right but i’m impatient as when it comes to like business and making decisions and moving forward and going right like i think nick’s been around me enough to know like when i’m on something i’m like go go go go go next next next and he’s like i’ll have to get clarity it’s like oh is this just a thought or is this like a go yeah because sometimes i’ll be i’ll be brainstorming here are we going build this tomorrow so when i’m ready to go like i’m ready to go and like we had that meeting you were ready to go like you could see in your

eyes like you it was go time like there was and sometimes you go because there’s no other option or at least you don’t feel like it or sometimes you just go because you know it’s the right time and i think that that decision once that decision gets made in your brain yeah it’s go time and then it’s all just it all becomes you know gray outside and you’re just going and we went again and we went i was already we were out of money found way found some ways to put a couple hundred grand into this restart 2019 get to 2020 january february and we’re crushing it i’m looking at the numbers we’re two three months away from that the debt we put into it being gone and then we’re gonna be and we’re we’re off to the races right you know and uh covent hits within a week we lose 85 percent of our business and i was for the first time though i wasn’t that bummed because i didn’t feel like it was my fault i didn’t do something stupid yeah well i don’t know i can’t even pull the rug out

from us like oh well you know everybody else yeah right you know so i i didn’t have that guilt when i usually had like an idea to run the business in the ground you know um and so what what i really learned though was now all of a sudden all that talking all that communicating all those podcasts within three months we probably three x the company and then by the end of 2020 you know i don’t know eight x and i mean i said i i it was just during one of the hardest years in the recent research but i saw i saw it’s weird when you can make direct usually in business it’s tough to make direct correlations but i was seeing all these things come from that one little silly thing i said that one thing i almost didn’t post that one picture that one little you know it was all so i learned that what we’re also doing here and this comes to the patients is you get to have your cake and eat it too you get to be aggressive on the content side make things make things communicate non-stop

right and there is an instant gratification you get something every day but you are planting seeds yeah you’re planting seeds oh yeah 100 you’re always planting seeds but here’s the deal and i i feel you know people ask me it’s like oh you guys do work with doan and and you know he does your stuff and and i’m like no but i do talk to him like him and i collaborate because we kind of both started it really was down a similar path at a similar time and you know you do it you know you have a business around it and i mean i feel like we have a business around what we do but no but you’re running the same business i am we’re running the same business you are in a roundabout way but this is the same you weren’t doing that because you weren’t doing that when i was here no this is a new it’s all of a sudden you were rearranging skills and people and all of that and and i tell people if when when people call i always say you probably can’t afford me but if you

listen to me i’ll talk to you for an hour if you just write down what i say to do you’ll be just fine and then they say well what’s it look like i go go look at united metals go look at united metals if you want to see what i would recommend people doing it’s what united metals does because it’s it’s you’re you’re doing everything i tell people to do which is one this multiple podcasts um look we’re all just stealing from gary vee but but what gary has filtered is what we’ve actually all it’s what we’ve always done we just didn’t know what it looked like on these devices right you communicate with people you touch base with people you hang out at the bar with people you have drinks with people you go to games with people you do all these things we do but now you can do that a hundred times a day through these platforms right but you guys are an example i think of all the different things all the onesies and twosies when it comes to content that you can be doing i tell people go look

at united metals go look at it because i remember pretty early after that conversation you had a whole team yeah all of a sudden like you shift you’re like oh well i’m going to hire people to do just this and i i think like when you’re not afraid to tell your story like there’s in our industry it’s always been like this big secret of how you do and how does it work and what’s the material who you selling to right and no we’ve had this conversation before yeah i always feel like there’s when you’re just genuine about your story right yeah like if i tell a story like go go look it up right yeah i’m not bullshitting you right you know and i’ll tell you my wins and i’ll tell you my losses you know and i think that people appreciate genuineness like if you want to go all the way full circle about like you know mr beast or whatever like people appreciate genuine sound genuine video yep genuine pictures that you took with your kids on vacation like having a coors light on a saturday morning yeah walking around the trucks

yeah right like you can’t do that right you don’t even know that that’s what i want to tell you yeah no no no wait you you in the morning and walk around because hr yeah the lawyers here united medals would be like you can’t do that yeah right you know i mean like but if you can hang out like that’s who you what do you mean like that’s who you are but i wanted to be genuine that’s what i mean like that’s like i was watching that and i mean i was losing my mind but but i was losing my mind because you don’t have to be fake anymore to get business like that’s because we’ve always known so you can’t be fake you can’t thank you yeah yeah you can’t yeah it used to be the bar we were all fed until we got to the bar yeah yeah everything’s flipped now if anything you’re at the bar non-stop and you put the suit on and put the deal together yeah right and then you put the suit onto the real deal yeah the deals get done right by just being genuine

dealing with people that you want to do business with and i hope like you know i hope you’re in a position and it sounds like you are that you now get to you know do business with the people you want to do business with right oh yeah and that’s when you feel like your career is kind of moving in the right direction is that now you’re going to do business with the people you want to do business with if you cultivate enough business that the peop the right people that don’t match up ethically or that don’t match up morally or whatever you can say that’s not really good for me or my long-term brand or my long-term reputation like i’m going to try and do business with people that genuinely yeah you know are our ethos match up yes yeah yeah and that and so all this content now becomes a filter for all of that you know what i mean like that’s that’s what it becomes and it turns out there’s more than enough people to go around right there’s there’s no such thing as isolating yourself out of business anymore

i just don’t believe that’s the case no there’s always been enough people when there were gatekeepers yet it was hard when it was gatekeepers and you didn’t even want to offend the person at the magazine to run your ad let alone before you got into an audience with some vanilla ad campaign you couldn’t be you because the it it always comes back the best operators win yeah the best business i don’t if you’re in the table business the scrap business the marketing business if you’re the best yeah or you’re damn good at what you do you’ll win you’ll win business right and there might be enough business to go around and when is it when it’s an abundant amount of business then the falls through the cracks and and some people is going to be are going to be able to eat on the bottom yep but the reality is like we’re confident enough like in our abilities and our genuineness or we’ll put it on tv we’ll put it on the podcast and say it here we are right come get us yep and people will inevitably want to you know or or

go attack your area the way we attack ours yeah you know like that’s more my mentality is i think the best operators win but i’m trying to encourage people to go attack their geographic area the way we attack ours yeah and finally find your people if you’re if you’re coming out of college and you’re absolute complete marxist leftist whatever you want to fight go find your people yeah have at it you know what i mean and if you’re not cool check out black rifle coffee you know come like you might want to work for them everyone’s out there now and you know what and everyone’s filtering to find their people so that their company culture can run the way they want to run that to me is like as divided as people say we are and i think we are to some extent but that’s cool i mean it just find where you fit exactly and pick a lane yeah i don’t care i mean there’s there’s a hundred lanes yes exactly thousands now and that’s what’s great about just all these different platforms and connecting with all these different like for us it’s

in the scrap realm you know so we get people commenting on there and getting real feedback like you you know foon you know so we went over we didn’t go over there but i talked to him all the time and he told me you want me to be honest with you i don’t like your stuff that’s really edited and clean looking i like the dirty just the picture with the logo right like that’s the stuff i like right so i went back and looked at some of our likes and like a lot of times just the picture of a pile of scrap right and a logo in the corner yeah sometimes wins rather than the stuff that we’ve like maybe thought over thought you know right and uh so it kind of i was like oh i got it like i’ll put both out there right i’m not always sure after the scrap guys marketing campaigns we’re also after the manufacturers we’re not you know there’s other we’re after the you know the people at home with the pile they want to haul it in so it’s not that we’re always just catering towards

the scrap the guy that works at a scrapyard but i found that interesting and he liked those pictures better and and here’s what i like about that scenario is it’s i guess we can say anything on this podcast but it’s sort of like if you got a boy if you got a boy and you got to always pull him back i think it’s awesome yeah right trying to push a boy harder way harder right yeah so so to kind of draw on that metaphor when you start with a little bit fancy i like that because you you can pull back and get real but if you’re super basic it won’t catch their eye in the first place well and here’s the thing everyone is going to be here eventually and when everyone shows up here being just real the differential is going to be creative mm-hmm yeah and so i love when i hear that’s why i love watching what you got i still don’t know how you got look i do this for a living i still don’t know how you make those cool pictures with those backgrounds and stuff moving and

all that cool i’ll show you you know i mean yeah you know i don’t want to know i don’t want to know but my point is like i love that stuff like i look at that i actually think that that is look you you did find something of a creative differential and that’s so i love that if it turns out the world really does want just hey run and gun boom cool i like it both you know so i’m like now absolutely now that being said i’ll try to like be like some of the pictures that our team sends in like i’ll just put a little logo on it maybe run it through and like kind of crisp it up a little you know make it look a little cleaner well i mean i won’t put a bunch of other stuff in look we don’t want the reality of go find 10 people with their phones and look at the brightness level on their phone yeah because it could be because it’s at five percent yeah my wife we were golfing i mean like oh she took a picture she goes i want to

take a picture and i was like okay and she did a selfie and i looked at her phone and i go what the like what is that i go i know it looks like i have makeup on i go change that to like a regular picture and she’s like what do you mean i go don’t do that to me i was like i won’t ever look so silky there’s something there i want to see all my flaws you know what’s it if you ever come in where your face pulled back off and want to talk brett knock it off no botox you’ll know the deal you can’t top that story yeah i i think we just found the end of the pause exactly yeah that’s just good that’s it i’m going back on the road hey man hey real quick yeah intro like we’ll do the intro on the outro all right but you called me up today said you’re driving back with a family trip yep and uh we’ve been talking about doing a podcast for a while now and that tells you how much i was on vacation because i thought it’d

just be fun to stop by yeah and then you completely done it on me yeah and i’m like dude you’re here like let’s do a podcast we can talk about whatever we want that’s right and i’m so stoked you did it no man