on this boots on the ground i get a chance to walk the warehouses of obtainium and idaho surplus auction with john schiff it’s interesting to see the infrastructure that goes into making these businesses work check it out all right we’re here for our boots on the ground portion got flick here trusty companion and this is where this is where the magic happens huh yeah magic that’s right yeah uh well that’s worse this is where stuff gets done if you want to call it that okay and uh yeah so we moved in here uh 2003 i believe okay and um located in beautiful garden city and it’s been a it’s been a great setup for us and our business is such that we we’re always getting different odd items odd sizes different uh things that uh having a lot of just space to spread out and triage stuff and to uh uh throw stuff into scrap bins yeah and give them to you is awesome so we try to yeah so when you’re doing big big cleanups we’ll bring the bigger container out for you yeah yeah well we’re and ideally though you the little

or the less scrap that goes in there the better for you yeah yeah but we’re uh we’re gonna do another we like to do a big uh clean out a few times a year and uh keep us efficient and yeah we just got a semi load in here uh last week week before and we’ll probably have a couple more semi loads here in a few weeks so this is a perfect example like this is something a lot 14. got your name on it you obviously won it uh-huh you bought this on auction i assume uh yeah yeah well is this that uh and what’s in it this is helix that’s what it looked like um which is using waveguide antennas yeah which is use a lot of the cell phone tower guys who use this stuff right yeah but we see a lot of this in scrap okay scrap level now yeah yeah so we got a bunch of it but it looks i mean it looks brand new brand new never been deployed um so walk me through like how this like lot would go like how would you move this so

this one will be offered on our local auction okay and uh so the you know there’s a couple options depending on how much it will sell for somebody will redeploy it or deploy it okay or uh scrap it out because yeah there’s a fair amount of copper if you want to put some grease yeah if it’s the copper copper one it’s got a good yeah it’s got a good recovery like you don’t even have to strip it oh really you you would get a decent return on it well you have that foam core in there is that it’s still 55 to 60 percent copper oh okay yeah so we’ve done the breakdown we’ve done our research and save you time we’ll pay off the percentage of it and that’s just how we do it on our copper site well man good to know because uh yeah i i was but hopefully you get to sell it for a lot more than scrap value here you go so this telephone booth right here i’ve seen that oh yeah well yeah one of my projects is i’m going to put a solar panel in it and

make it basically oversized night light and put it to where somebody you know people people can see it that’d be cool yeah yeah so that’s your product i’ve seen it for a long time well that’s my last one oh you’ve had more in one got like four of them at one time from the nevada test site oh okay and you can still see the caked on dirt and everything from uh from that and uh yeah yeah we sold one to uh somebody doing an off-broadway show who had a superman theme to it so oh okay yeah so our places go our equipment goes everywhere we uh the technology um you know gets used but uh some of the really old stuff gets um used in like film and television production and corp big corporate shows so we’ve supplied old printers to um for the film wolf of wall street oh okay breaking bad they needed something in their laboratory some you know background menu so some of your stuff went to breaking bad yeah so the set design i never knew that because that is my all-time favorite show so so that’s

awesome so uh yeah so being you know i was in the biz at one time somehow my name gets knocked around and i get a call and it’s like you know it’s usually somebody doing set dressier design they say hey i need this and it’s like oh cool let me go see that’s awesome so yeah yeah so that’s that’s the sexy part of it um so this is uh inventory that has sold or is being offered on our uh auction site and uh we get it all staged here and just all sorts of different stuff and so this is the spot where like i these towers right here i noticed these yeah we got those those are up there right now uh-huh so yeah so this is where it’s ready if someone wins it then you’ll you’ll ship it to them uh yeah if they want shipped but uh most of our customers so far just come up and pick it up locally so most of your customers are local still yeah yeah we have a few that drive in from out of town um and even from like utah and oregon so

but uh the majority of them are here in uh you’re in local cool yeah yeah so yeah let’s go over to the the other warehouse here so okay this is kind of the the auction part of it and i’ll give you a quick watch whoa good one didn’t hit the celebrity foot catcher there yeah so that copper is probably a good item to move right now oh yeah yeah we’ve been meaning to bring that in yeah flack come on buddy uh neighbors got feral cats so he likes to he likes to patrol um so this is kind of a little bit backwards this is where once something you know our main business is sales via the internet and so we ship worldwide both uh freight and non-freight items and this is basically where things come in and get staged prepped for uh freight or um we there’s a packing table we box things up and out they go you know yeah i see you got all your boxes your different sizes here yeah yeah we do a fair amount of volume so you use ups you said we use ups yeah yeah it’s

kind of kind of uh disheartening because we started when we started the business we started working with fedex ground because they gave us killer rates and they were new brand new that’s how long i’ve been doing this yeah and they wanted customers and so we went with them we’re loyal and everything else like that but they just kept jacking up the rates and then i got to this one point to where um ups was cheaper which was just kind of a you know a head scratcher and uh so we had to we had to jump yeah you had to make the so this is where you ship uh those products from where’s kind of your intake area is that kind of here too yeah okay yeah you roll that door up yeah yeah the um yeah you know so that’s when you occupy space that’s usually uh you know the the whole uh one of the pitfalls of it is you uh kind of take what you want you know a perfect world you’d come in one one bay and work your way through and go out the back and or the front or

whatever and we don’t have that luxury here so everything comes in gets dealt with triage listed auctioned whatever and then goes back out okay cool let’s yeah okay come on in here and uh this is real messy so please shoot around yeah so see you got a few workstations yeah throughout here what are you what are your people doing on here so this is kind of our bullpen to where um our people come in and um we basically take product and evaluate it and uh kind of part of the triage process is determine if it has value how much what you want to invest in as far as refurbishment and cleaning and evaluation and then building listings for it to go up on the internet and uh you know we got a little work uh bench there and eclectic uh tools and parts and stuff and they’ll go post it are you doing the posting to like ebay and amazon or is you got your team helping with that so the team does mainly does most of that and yes so we sell one we still sell a lot on ebay we have um

two different websites uh e-commerce websites that are ours and then we have a whole complete product line of some specialized lab uh consumables that we sell on amazon okay that is kind of outside of this and it was a business i kind of developed when amazon was really starting to get into the business industrial laboratory okay fields they they chased me for a long time and what we found was um this consumable we had sold okay but what we found with amazon is they want new product and they want consistency and they want um certain you know they have certain levels of service that you can that you need to uh provide product for and uh what we found was we were shipping faster than them our product was getting out and um so you were beating amazon yeah and we were getting that’s impressive we were getting frustrated because we you know we try to get everything out the door the same day and so when we would do their fba that’s fine for the small step but our big uh what’s fba uh sorry fulfillment by amazon so there’s two ways

you can sell on amazon you can ship it they sell it you can ship it out of your warehouse and do the fulfillment or you can use fba which basically you send the product to their warehouse they warehouse it charge you a little fee and then when it sells it they ship it that’s probably what most people do oh yeah yeah it’s a really good opportunity for somebody to test the waters with their products so that fba then that new warehouse that’s in nampa would that warehouse do something like that i believe so so yeah so if you wanted to you could ship all your stuff fba to there well and then they’ll ship it out for you in theory yes but um basically what it works to is they they have some kind of algorithm based on your sales and they’ll say send some here send some to kentucky oh okay so they’ll hit their hubs that way they can fulfill their quick shipping perfect yeah so yeah so what we did is when we refined the process down we found that they’re very very attractive when you use the fba program and

so we just kind of just scrapped our own shipping here because we this business is really high touch to where you know you send something to a client you want to make sure that they’re taken care of it’s a business yeah sometimes the machine is down we have to fedex something over to them overnight and since a lot of our equipment or a lot of our inventory products are older so it’s kind of legacy it’s really important to get it to the customer and um unfortunately ebay and amazon will get in the way of that you know you need to communicate with the customer you need to take care of them you need to do that and sometimes you know you just there’s too many filters in those organizations to allow us to do what we do do you think amazon has helped your business or hurt your business um it has helped our business in the fact that we’ve been able to develop another uh income stream or sales channel through it um but we aren’t due to the nature of our product and our model we aren’t susceptible to the you know

how they just kind of swallow moms and pop stores up and yeah and that’s where i was going with that because um like for instance sunday i was setting up a home office so i needed a monitor i needed like a laptop stand i ordered like all this stuff for under 200 yeah and it showed up within 12 hours yeah and that’s like it showed up the next morning like and that’s like mind-boggling to me that that’s even possible yeah yeah it is it’s it’s kind of crazy how uh how they got it all figured out you know um they’re really good at what they do yeah and being rewarded for it that’s why you know bezos is so rich but um we use them for like replacement parts like batteries lead acid batteries and stuff that’s heavy and uh the prices are such that unfortunately it’s cheaper than me running down or sending a guy down to go pick it up locally and so that’s our same here little secret yeah same here like what do i i’ve even bought we have a really old rv that has outdated tires yeah i

can buy the tires for cheap on amazon but if i bought it around here yeah i’d be spending triple yeah like it’s like some things like are awesome on there but i i suspect that it does hurt some of those mom-and-pop shops you know it hurts some of the mom-and-pop shops plus um you get what you pay for too so there’s anytime we have something where we require any type of support or uh there might be an issue with a warranty um we’ll try to buy it local or or or costco i love costco i love going to costco liberal return policy yeah and uh so sometimes we’ll have something to say well you know costco’s return policy is insane yeah yeah return stuff a year later yeah yeah crazy yeah well i haven’t quite did done that i did take a camera back after about six months you know it just stopped working it was nice expensive so my wife worked there for 13 years and one of my favorite stories when she was working on the return desk and someone bought a raft to float the river in

and they just obviously bought it just for one day and planned on returning it they dragged it in and it had a bunch of coors light cans in it everywhere and they just dragged him and she’s like we had to return it you know but that’s like the rules you know and um yeah so i do think some people abuse that but at the end of the day like just as a company as a whole if you’re willing to eat a little like you can be really really successful too well you know yeah and it’s uh you know they’re not doing anything new that’s basically you know nordstrom and um was it land’s end but nordstrom is the famous one for that okay where they had uh they have stories where they’ve taken in product that’s not even theirs i think it’s like tires or something but the whole thing is here we are talking about nordstroms yeah you get them in the door and get them in it’s it’s such brain dead simple marketing to do that yeah absolutely so another thing what we do and amazon is just now starting to do

this in ebay a little bit but we’ve done this for quite a while is if there’s a customer service issue with one of our products uh a lot of times at a certain threshold we’ll just say sorry about that we you know we dropped the ball we you know got off on the wrong foot or something and here’s your money back and you know keep the part because and it’s just you know what you do yeah that goes take care of the customer it goes a long way move forward yeah everybody wins because you know and then they’ll tell everybody yeah you know and you know that’s you know when the right situation comes up for us we always do that too yeah when we drop the ball or when we realized we made an error on a ticket where the customer should got paid more we’ll always call them yeah and that’s been it’s a it’s the right thing to do but b they’re always so shocked yeah like we’ll be like hey we forgot you had two old car batteries we forgot you had them so i only had 20 bucks yeah

uh-huh you know exactly yeah i can ship it you would check or if you want come down anytime i got 20 bucks waiting for you yeah and like that that’s awesome it just it’s like you said it’s simple but there’s a lot of companies that don’t do it you know and you know people in businesses take that stuff personally and you’re gonna have a certain amount of people who game that get over it just just factor that in but the the other thing is uh you know culture wise you gotta rep you gotta think that okay so you have a customer service issue now the the meter drops and you’re spending money i.e you know company resources to deal with the issue and so what are you going to do you’re going to spend more money to to make a point on a two dollar or twenty dollar item or whatever it is no no we’re just going to like cut them loose yeah and uh there you go yeah pick your battles you know you gotta pick yeah can we go in there yeah let’s go over here yeah so we

this is our table top yeah and um so uh yeah nothing nothing sexy just real neutral uh diamond plate there and um a background that i painted years ago and basically yeah oh i take a product and you’re ready to go gotcha got kind of a three-point lighting system going there lack of space well you helped me with uh some photos for that shirt yeah so and that turned out really good yeah yeah and it’s just we found like this whole system is very neutral and and works uh works period and if you need to cut it out and throw it against white you know you can you can do that but it it’s just kind of geared so we can you know get really high quality photos and a lot of them and then move on so you see how easy it is and this is just an old drafting table and the reason why i think it’s really cool is got a foot pedal yeah you can raise and lower it yeah i love it yeah yeah i’ve had that for ever since day one this is this has been with

us ever since day one where do you put your camera so um camera just hand hold it you hand it it can yeah yeah so basically all we use now are iphones yeah iphones ipods that’s so that’s where everything’s going i mean like the cameras on some of them are amazing yeah um it’s amazing plus you think about how the lensing system set up it’s for like selfies and people shots and stuff yeah works really well so here you are boom yep so we’ve used older cameras guys i don’t even have one out anymore so we had some really nice canons and sonys and fuji’s that we’ve used over the years and we’ve spent a lot of money upfront on on photography but we just found at the end of the day you need you need something that you can shoot fast and a lot of pictures and um you know get details such as data plates and if they’re blemishes or whatnot you’ve got to be able to show warts and all so i just found that the phones do it really well and if you’ve got like a so i have a

12 that i shoot with um you got great software you got lightroom uh you can use you know so i use lightroom to you know crop batch and upload to our server is that an adobe yeah item yeah yeah i think it’s free i think the uh one version free camera is free and it’s just dead simple fast we used to write photoshop actions to process and stuff in the olden days and um the um you know since we’ve gone you know this uh apple system just has gotten so good that it’s hard to beat it it’s really hard to beat it and you shouldn’t try you know pick your battles as you said earlier yeah and that’s just one that we don’t you know that i don’t really wanna you mess with anymore after doing it so many years because we’ll shoot you know uh our old digital cameras we would wear them out we would shoot tens of thousands if not more of images and we’d wear the cameras out you know little viewfinders and the focusing motors would go out on them and uh so yeah that’s how we just take

a lot of pictures so cool yeah it works really well all that stuff being solid state so yeah so that’s uh that’s about all we have well i love it thanks for showing us yeah today and and yeah i’m excited to share this with everybody okay great yeah well if you can uh you know hide the uh the mess no i love the mess some of that oh man yeah yeah some of it’s some of it’s uh been there a while yeah it’s real i like it ah it is real and a lot of it’s uh found and uh you know discovered and we try to keep as much of it um going as possible this is our little scrap bin here that will get triaged out to the bigger ones but yeah and yeah so yeah basically what we got um see what else i think that’s it man it’s pretty simple well i’ll shake your hand sure yeah