foreign we have a special Metal Monday we got Phil Phil Madison yes sir Phil Madison from Modern Recycling out of Victor Montana thanks for joining us today man thank you for having me and Brett always a pleasure always I feel like we’ve done this once or twice before dude but I’m always I always loved it you know we’ve done them a lot I don’t remember the number but we’ve done a lot of them the only thing I do I enjoy like I mean I know you were we weren’t talking about like putting you on here but I’m like hey you’re here like let’s go let’s just figure it out but I think that’s like the joy of doing business the way that we do it is you just get to do it the way you want right so real quick give everybody like a quick like Cliff Notes version of uh of your company so Modern Recycling we’re based out of Victor Montana which is about uh 40 miles south of Missoula we started in 2014. uh We’ve now grown and are working on our second yard in Missoula Montana doing dirt work right

now it’s me and my partner Justin quiser the owners it was more his brainchild but we’ve been growing and loving the scrap industry it’s a lot of fun and and we’re looking to to make moves and do new things dude I’ve been seeing you that scraper you’ve been posted on LinkedIn is um and just for everybody’s like how do we get connected like LinkedIn right I mean so the power of social media um and I’ve been seeing that scraper making passes right like a moan a big lawn like just yeah creating space Creighton uh for your guys’s newest yard right which is going to be in Missoula which is in Missoula yeah we got to move 60 000 yards of material we’re up on a Hillside and uh we’re kind of flattening yeah we’ve got about 15 feet off the top nice so Wednesday when’s the open date we’re open for end of summer you know I mean okay because we’re just I’ll be here soon yeah ever took anything right like you just you get as much done as you can get done and you have a kind of an idea when you’d

like to open but sometimes the weather Gods mess with you on the dirt work and sometimes it’s just you know it just is what it is you’re just you know try and get it done as you can get it done sometimes you got to open it before it’s perfect if you’d wait for perfect it just ain’t never gonna happen just run with it I just read this this book where it was talking about the new first iPhone they pushed that thing out with half the that they wanted it to have in it just didn’t have it and the you know Steve Jobs is like such a perfectionist they still pushed it out even though he’s like I just have to push it out and we’ll fix it as we as it goes so and I think that’s true not just in the scrap industry but so and I mean we talked to I mean we one of our good friends um his name is Jake bronstein and he built a basically Greenfield and a whole a brand new yard in Merrillville Indiana and he opened in March of coping like he had like been

building for two years finally he was new he was going to open it in his March of 2020 and he and he’s like what do I do I’m like open like that’s all you can do like what are you gonna do just wait until yeah like you just gotta go now he’s got two yards now he has two yeah to do it right and we met him on LinkedIn yeah 100 which is why like we do this right like dude I I don’t know everything about scrap I probably know like half the I should know and uh but I do know the power of like getting people together like with that that are that that have a love for a certain thing and whether it’s business or scrap or both or whatever and trying to like pick each other’s brains and say how do we make each other better how can you help me how can I help you and you know what you’re doing in Victor or Missoula isn’t going to take away from what I’m doing here if actually if I can teach you something then maybe someday you’ll teach me something

and we’ll all be better for it yeah I really appreciate the openness that you both have and and you’ve shared I found you in 2020 I have just bought a brand new truck in 2019 semi yeah had a great driver and he got hurt and so what do you do well you get in the seat and you drive truck yeah so I was sitting there driving truck you know hey you know six months for this I managed the Western U.S for Halliburton and I’m sitting in this seat where I go what am I doing but I got I got your podcast so I just sit there and just devoured the whole thing right because yeah nothing but time’s sitting that seat and drive trucks you know it was a good education and it just taught me a lot of things so I’m no I mean I appreciate you guys I love it so tell us about the describe what’s what’s going on with scrap Market in Montana you don’t have to give us hard numbers well and also whatever you want go ahead Nick I got a question your yard and yourself how

do you guys keep track of where the markets are going how do you do it I’m just curious on how other yards do you just open your phone check the apps check the apps call the you know call The Mills see what they’re saying Get the air pulse you know um you know we’ve got a few different buyers out there that we watch and then just watch the price the ticker each day okay but at the end of the day there’s only so much prediction you’re going to be able to do anyway yeah we when we started we said we made an agreement we said look we’re not going to try to gamble the market just scrap yeah just move it take your margin and go yeah right we live and you know we try to keep our prices you know our Buy price is safe enough to where if it has some minor fluctuations we’re okay yeah but just move the scrap at the beginning I always like there’s I look at it two ways is if you could predict the market you wouldn’t own a scrap yard you’d be sitting somewhere on

a couch and like just betting Futures because you’d already know where it was going to go so but I I do think that so I have like I agree with you when you’re trying to build a business and especially in the Commodities business which can be volatile is you have to move the scrap at the beginning because cash flow is so important like every I mean when it all comes back down to like like people asking what’s one of the most important things about um building the building a scrap business Recycling business is managing your cash flow because you have a big cash outlet for material you have big cash outlays for equipment buying equipment equipment and you’ve got big cash outlay for your labor and everything that just keeps the lights on so excuse me so if you’ve got a crazy amount of inventory just sitting around as well especially at today’s interest rates then all of a sudden like you you’re in a quandary like you have to do you’ve got to manage the material right now you build your business instead of you know I would say once you have a

certain amount of money and you can park some scrap on the sideline and wait for a better price because you feel like you’re going to get more interest on that scrap yeah in a down market then you’re in a position to do that great do it run it the way you want to run it right but in the build phase you have to turn that like you have to make it go away whatever that price is make your margin and move and sometimes lose your margin like sometimes you buy scrap and you’re like I’m gonna make some money on this the market takes a you’re gonna lose five percent ten percent you’re still better to lose five percent ten percent get their money back because then that’s what’s gonna allow you to make the next deal to maybe get that 5 10 20 back yeah it’s still flying out the door every day yeah you know I mean you’re paying it out every day you better go get some of that back so you can keep buying 100 money to buy yeah you have to have money to buy scrap you have to have

money to you know pay your people and kind of keep the uh the wheels on the bus so I don’t know I I firmly believe that turning your scrap especially in the beginning now we’ve told this story before like at this yard we put this yard in 2011. I’ve always thought we could carry a decent amount of non-ferrous until we had a 40 000 square foot building and six acres all of a sudden I’m like we could carry a lot I’m not but I’m like we’re we’re choking on just trying to get enough inventory and keep it and make full loads I’m like our freaking you know cash outlay to keep scrap around and build full of those was just like took some Growing Pains oh it took two years like I literally took years to get to the point where you could actually stomach the market I mean I’m gonna say like four to five years to where you could actually carry enough inventory and feel good about it to build bulldogs and our flow just wasn’t big enough I mean it took a long time for people to realize we were

here get new customers get new big customers and then we finally get that flow where we can build full loads and then you know we try to pay the competitive as we can we’re being safe too to not jeopardize our business because one thing that’s comforting to me I’ve made my fair share of bad buys and Brett someone told me like you know what like move on because you get a chance tomorrow to make a good buy you know so that is like comforting because that sucks when you buy like a load or like you commit to it and then it comes in the market dropped 20 cents yeah what are you gonna do go back on your word or you’re gonna eat it and move on to the next one and sit around cry about it yeah go get it back somehow right so question for both of you guys where’s Ferris going what’s Your Gut say well I I feel pretty good it’s going down I mean I don’t know how much but I don’t feel like it’s we’re not going like June isn’t going to be a strong Market Ferris wise

would be off 20 30. maybe I mean it may be in the cards you know I don’t know what’s your what’s your opinion Phil I might maybe made me guess a number I’d say we’re going to go down 20 but I don’t know that either you know it’s hard to say but it’s hard to tell and things can change on a dime that’s like what you said it’s it’s hard to get too invested in looking forward when it doesn’t matter too much it’s nice to be prepared and give and give your customers like a warning because that’s what I’ll do is like hey I think it’s going off so then you communicate that and they know and then and then if you’re like hey man like some you know this changed and we’re sideways debt ceiling yeah and all of a sudden they made a one trillion dollar Bitcoin out of thin air you know that makes a lot of sense yeah I don’t know I feel like that’s like that’s a uh one by the rumor sell the news type deal I feel like it’s if they do solve that it’s just going

to create a bunch of other headaches it might be a temporary fix you know but going back to what you just said if you just move the scrap it is what it is like which then goes back into what we were just talking about like how do you move the scrap right so like let’s say you have a decent month where you can buy a decent Jack of scrap regardless of the price right like in in our area I’m assuming yours is similar is we’re probably as much weather driven as anything like we people are just digging out a winter yeah and it’s been a kind of rough long winter this year this nasty so you’re getting more flow regardless of the price just generally it just picks up because it’s clean I’m able to do yeah yeah and the fields aren’t muddy and whatever else the case may be and we’re still getting a lot of build buildings going up here so I mean I just got a call this morning from a guy out of Back East somewhere and he needs a container because they’re building they’re taking out an old building

and putting a new one up nice you know and you know he didn’t really he didn’t care about the number he needs it moved and I’m still gonna give him a good number yeah but the capability I mean of course he wanted the container you know today and I was like I’ll get it there tomorrow you know if you could give me a day I’ll make it happen so like if you can get your service done and then you give them a fair price where you he gets his job done and we make a little money and I think your ability to control your delivery of your scrap right is what kind of what I was like alluding to like so that if the market does come and you do get an abundance amount of material your ability to deliver to that same Market is how you can really keep your margins in place the best you can is figuring that component out you know controlling your transportation do you guys I mean you talk about you had a truck you’re driving truck so I’d assume Trucking is a pretty big part of what

you guys do right it’s it’s been a big part I think last year uh we were in the year before we were really blessed to have some trucks because there was it was really hard to move this year you know we we’ve been brokering a lot of trucks too um it’s been a little easier to get outside Trucking right now but I never want to let go of having the ability to move my own material I don’t mind having the flex and running other trucks I think that’s yeah we do the same thing we’ll run some like Lanes we don’t run yeah we’ll run some guys out but you know we try and control as much of it as we can internally I think you’re smart in that regard is that you understand yeah you understand the value of saying okay I need to kind of control at least a certain amount of it like on a larger percentage basis if possible yeah I got another truck coming and my gosh the mount trucks have gone up in the last three years we’re kind of Trust You by 389. I like your unhooded trucks

I got a my best friend growing up they all ran hooded trucks and I just got into that so so you guys got the big four axle like you guys go heavy yeah Max yeah yeah eight axles all around yep and uh you know try to run as much weight as we can we don’t we don’t run that lift axle quite as far forward as you guys do we kind of run more of a stock man yeah uh I’ve looked at those and thought that’s pretty interesting you guys get a few more thousand pounds that way yeah I know you can that’s kudos to Barry Prescott on our end like he’s a truck guy like I always call him like a truck Guru all we’ll walk we’ll meet him today hopefully if he’s around there I think he is but uh you know he’s the one that kind of designed where to put that lift axle to get as much weight as possible and like kind of get it all figured out and he’s that dude’s smart guy he knows his and that’s why Barry’s hands on like give I’ll like go try to

find Barry in his office and he’s never in there he’s got you know a coveralls on and he’s covered in Greece because he’s just what this guy’s working on yeah which you know kudos to him yeah all right Metal Monday it’s a wrap um Ferris markets not looking as pretty as we would like to think not Ferris recovered on Friday on Friday recovered a little today we’re off again kind of where we started and you know that coppers you know that 370 range I don’t know if we’re gonna get to four you know this month you know we’ll lose another bet yeah anymore as much my wife always asks you because I’ve watched all the basketball games God did you bet on this one I didn’t on this round sweetheart I promise you you’re a Celtics fan right hell no a LeBron fan we’re back I’ve got two guys here like Buxton and Tom they’re both Celtics fans and you just watching old Jimmy buckets get after it I love it yeah if LeBron can’t pull off a miracle which I doubt he does I’m going Jimmy buckets all the way yeah all right