all right welcome everybody got a exciting episode recycled Idaho with Kyle Nelson from Gem State medals so I’ve been wanting to do this with you for a while because you we buy a lot of iron we buy a lot of recycled steel yeah that market es and flows pretty dramatically in our world you know on a monthly scale but you’re on the other end which is really cool cuz I like to see how it’s all connected yeah just let our audience know like what where’s Gem State medals what do you guys do yeah thanks for having me on we uh we kind of connected I actually found you guys on Spotify and I I gave it a listen and then realized hey that’s Nick yeah that’s awesome so that was really cool yeah um uh but yeah we’re on 52nd at Sawyer in Garden City um we are the only cut to inch place in town um and then we have a bunch of other services we have so what did the other places do like cut you cut to the inch yeah we sell everything by the inch or square inch okay

um a lot of places are selling by the stick or by the pound maybe even um just kind of depends um I don’t pay attention what they’re doing really I’m just trying to focus on what we do but yeah we sell to the inch square inch so right when you walk in the door on the left hand side you’ve got our our drop shelf so once it gets down under 48 in um we throw it on that shelf and it’s basically like a picker dream right there you have um Square tubes round tubes Doom uh cold roll Hot Roll um we even have stainless section in there you know solids flat squares uh aluminum anything you can you can think of that’s in the in the metal Market really we have in there we have brass copper um yeah so in that first that’s right when you walk in the door you have that that scrap kind of people love picking through that and going oh this will work for me yeah well we probably get oh varies week to week but two to five people that walk in here yeah they want to

walk the yard and and we’re just not set up to do that we got a lot of metal going in and going out we don’t have a just a good spot to do like a resell yeah and I don’t that’s a whole other headache I don’t want so I just send them your way cuz you also and correct me if I’m wrong you don’t have a minimum right uh we have like a $5 minimum but it’s on it’s on credit cards because of the processing fees and stuff like that but if you bring cash yeah you can get whatever you need you can get whatever piece you want most likely it’s in that that spot if it’s a $5 you know whatever it’s it’s in that drop section right when you walk in the door so you can grab it say I need six Ines off this cut it for you uh no problem um yeah and that’s kind of what we do um so you don’t have like a lot of these other bigger shops they have a pretty high minimum though and that’s where I like yeah guys will find me because

they don’t want to spend 200 bucks when they need a piece this big yeah you know what I mean and I have it here I just don’t have like a good way to find it you know yeah I’m like man we can’t find that like you got to talk to Kyle down at Gem State yeah inventory is uh is tough especially when we have so many different items we have a ton of items down there like I said we have stainless steel we have copper we have brass so a lot of times um you can come in and say hey I’m looking for this and then you know one of the guys will know exactly where it’s at but it’s it’s it’s a very hard problem the inventory problem especially a small business like us where it’s just me and Jeremy and John and Brian you know it’s just there’s four of you running that business okay that’s pretty cool so just the one location yep now y we’re uh hope hoping to expand okay how long have you guys been there um so been there the previous owner had it for uh a

lot of years it’s been open for a lot of years and some of your listeners that have been there probably know Tom and and his legacy and I took it over I never met Tom but I’d heard of him yeah yeah interesting character okay obiously and he sold the business to you guys okay cool yep yeah I was uh doing aircraft sheet metal at the guard out here just down the road and um wanted to do something entrepreneurial and the uh business broker said hey we got this metal thing let’s go take a look okay went down there when was that that was uh two and a half years ago now okay so been doing it since then are you happy you did it uh some days yes some days maybe not it’s kind of a loaded question uh totally yeah being a being a business owner is is intense man it’s like drinking from a fire hose most of the time your days never go as planned no for sure um you know everything from internal stuff to customers to um and we uh we really strive to have a good customer service

you you know so I think that’s something that’s kind of lacking in our industry um you know you go on to the metal shop and it’s a bunch of rough and tough dud a little r neck yeah so we we actually get um most of our positive reviews I found on Google are are women because they’ll come in and okay like super surprised that we were like really nice to them and helped them well that’s important I mean and that’s becoming more and more important you know every day we really we really try to hit that home home at all our yards with all our customers if it’s a customer that comes in yeah or it’s a customer that we have bins at like you you know we just want to we don’t want you to even like really have to think about it you know what I mean like you think about running your business we’ll handle the extra like wa whatever you deem like waste metal to be recycled you know and that’s how we met you know so and it’s been I’ve always wanted to have bins down your place cuz

I’ve loed really been referring people down there even when we didn’t do business just because I I want to give people a good option yeah you know and me walking the yard with them isn’t the option yeah you know yeah well I appreciate that because uh there’s not a lot of room in the budget for advertising a small business so the word of mouth stuff is is key um so yeah we really rely on on good reviews you know and people telling other people word of mouth is still very important obviously your reputation in the market reputation reviews are very important you know we do a fair amount of advertising ourselves but you know if you can get a good word of mouth and that traction does grow yeah for sure you know especially if you’re the only shop offering what you Doh which as far as I know it is so I believe so yeah there’s there’s some that do similar um but not to the extent that we do like there’s we’re probably one of the only copper retail places in town that I know of um along with some of the

stainless Steels and stuff like that okay so you’ll do like different Alloys brasses coppers do aluminum we have some in stock um some of the common sizes so many that we can’t carry them all in our you have to special order some but a lot of times we special order yeah um like especially if it’s you know something random like 316 stainless round bar yeah some high temp nickel things like that got some 13-8 1 in thick by 6 in by 72 for uh an entity the other day so um we use you know our buying power to and our we have forklift and everything so that kind of makes our cost a little bit cheaper on the shipping and things like that um another thing that we’ve been doing recently is getting into knife steals okay 1095 1084 um some of the cool stainless is S35 cuz there’s quite a knife shops in there is there’s there’s a really big um community of knife makers in those knives are so expensive some of them are yeah you get a guy put their heart and soul into making a cool Damascus knife you

know it starts costing money they’re awesome like I’m I have just a cheap Gerber yeah but I don’t yeah for every day I rock the buck yeah I don’t take good care of a pry bar a little bit as everything but you know I’ve always always like when I go to a nice knife shop I always like look behind the glass and like someday I’ll get one of those yeah shout out to the Idaho knife Association they’re putting on a show um okay and we’ll be at that just talking to people where’s that at that’s at the courtyard of Marriott right off the eagle exit Okay eagle and uh eagle and was that Overland I guess yeah um yeah it’s a August 9th oh just in a a week or so yep just in the conference room there uh you can come and see uh awesome knives uh Chris Reeves knives will be there you know they’re the big sponsor um but then some of the makers that have been on like forging fire and um some of the really cool yeah I would like to I to go check that out yeah she

come check it out is that a like a weekend what is that yeah the I believe the the 9th is a Saturday oh double check M okay but yeah just Google the Idaho knife Association and you’ll find it um but yeah that’s a really good time so three years ago you didn’t own a business uh I did actually I have I have three now well let’s hear that I didn’t even know that the first one I started as a side gig while I was in the guard and it’s a service business um it’s pretty silly we uh we actually Chase geese and I’ve been doing that since 2012 you chase them like off properties things like that yeah we uh we mitigate their effects on certain areas okay they they drop a lot of poop and oh they’re their menaces yeah so we have few goes to BSU and she’s always talking about all the geese in the park now they’re kind of scary we actually uh bid Boise State at one point but somebody higher up in the food chain decided that they didn’t want to chase the Gees there’s still a lot

of geese there oh yeah yeah NOP they didn’t hire us so but that’s that’s kind of just been a side gig for my wife and I for so you got you’re very entrepreneurial uh I would like to think so yeah so you got the geese what’s the geese business called uh it’s I just call it Tree City management what’s it what is it Tree City management Tree City management it’s not really um customer facing I just work for a few clients okay well that’s cool and then you got Gem State medals what’s the third one um and then I uh started an LLC with machine shop um and we’re trying to develop a piece of land to move Gem State and the Machine Shop into um and hopefully have a like small business community of like metal oh nice Supply type businesses so it would be you know me supplying metal have the Machine Shop there where we can do stuff you know above and beyond kind of what I so you could like buy it from you and then go next door to the Machine Shop have holes have some custom stuff done

yeah exactly and then that would be really cool I would love to yeah because then you know it’s like a small small business Community yeah so there’s on the piece of land we acquired it’s it’s got enough room for about six units okay 80 by 40 um and we’ we’d love to to develop it but money is uh interesting right now interest rates are higher interest rate is high so we were looking private Equity we’re still kind of got our our feelers out for investors and so if anybody’s interested okay okay hit me up we’ll get your contact info those on this podcast so people could reach out to you reach out to you for your shop reach out to you for any future business Endeavors for sure and things like that but I want to go a little further back now oh so you’re you’re in the guard you’re still in the guard yeah right yeah that’s awesome thank you for your service yeah thanks and so when did you join the guard 2009 is when I joined um so it’s been 15 years ago yeah I actually just signed a six-year

reenlistment will take me to my 20 okay so um yeah I’ve been doing it a long that’s awesome so are you from here in Idaho yeah I grew up here um born and raised right here in Boise yeah nice my dad likes to tell the story that I was almost born on Bogus Basin Road okay cuz uh we actually lived up there at the time okay so yeah lot of skiing or no yeah when I was a kid yeah not anymore uh then when I was a teenager I did snowboarding but now my knees are uh they’re shot they’re shot yeah do a lot of dirt biking and stuff so you still get to enjoy Idaho what Idaho is great for you know the outdoors yeah I do dual sport riding and I do dirt bike riding so get out as much as I can and so how did he get into the metal work um so the guard really trained me up on on sheet metal okay um I try to move away from boisey and do a school uh to be a pilot and then uh didn’t work out for a couple

reasons Financial Plus I kind of realized that I didn’t want to be away from family you know as a pilot yeah that schedule kind of sucks I love flying but um I just kind of made it to private uh so then I moved back home after that that was in Spokane okay and uh realized how crappy it can be outside of boisey I got my car stolen like two times and Spokan you know there’s a bunch of homeless I’ve heard it’s kind of on the up now but back then it was rough yeah and I go oh Boise is a pretty nice place to live I think if you’re from here we take it for granted yeah you know yeah I think it’s still such a great town yeah I’ve traveled a lot and and I’m I’m born and raised in Caldwell so the same area yeah you know and I’ve traveled a lot I think when you’re Younger You Think You Know The Grass Is Always Greener exactly you know until you start traveling I’m like I don’t know if I’d want to live any anywhere else you know I don’t minda visiting

I really enjoy it traveling but but I love it here yeah I definitely had that grasses Greener thing and then went out there and got my car stolen and you’re like I might come I’m going back to boisey uh so I came back and um my dad gave me a tour out there when I was younger and I just went and talk to a recruiter I was like yeah get me in um then joined uh my recruiter was Milo Davis he’s awesome MH um um and you know you take the test to see what your aptitude is and everything and I just crushed the mechanical stuff okay so um uh I was going to go um do like TP and then I was like and then TP is like tactical control air party you’re a guy on the ground and Dr bombs for the oh wow um but so are you the guy like marking the targets okay and then they dropped the bombs so you were going to go so I joined into that yeah CU I thought that was super cool yeah um but being at college for a couple years and

only eating ramen noodles yeah you know um I couldn’t pass like their minimum standards and stuff to even go to school like push-ups and sit-ups and stuff and uh so I ended up having to switch careers what’s so were you at like Boise State or where do they put no been in Spokane oh that’s right you were in Spokane for school yes and my wife and I were just scraping by you know eating noodles and yeah um but then uh yeah my my recruiter shout out Milo Davis he’s awesome he uh got me into sheet metal and uh and realized I loved it it’s awesome so how does that work when you join the guard do they have their own like training all on base it’s kind of like a V school or how how do you learn it it’s actually so you go active duty to learn your trade okay so um after I join you know I go to active duty tech school just like a regular active duty okay um recruit and then um you know you go through that tech school that tech school was like four or

five months something like that where was that at that was in pens Co Florida I looked out super hard with that a lot of tech schools are in like Texas or just in the middle of nowhere but mine was on Pensacola okay um and they do that because the Navy kind of has a sheet metal schore there too so they kind of combined forces and um anyways yeah it had a a beach on base and oh wow so you could fish from the shore and that was super so you got to live in Florida for a little while lived in Florida for a little bit yep uh and uh does the wife you were married yeah is your wife stay here H she probably could have come with me but it was such a it was like four months she stayed here stay here yeah I stayed in the dorms and stuff so it would have been really hard to kind of get a place off base yeah um yeah then came back and then there’s some on the job training that we do you know you have to sign off tasks um the

guys in the shop teach you how to do you know aircraft specific stuff and out here we is that what you’re working on as aircraft yep okay yep yeah the the A10 warhog is what we have right now is that a lot of like aluminum what’s on the I figured it’s mostly aluminum right the A10 is is uh a lot of aluminum yeah it’s it’s also super famous for having the titanium bathtub okay protects the pilot from Small Arms fire from below so they they’re sitting in a titanium like cockpit kind of De right yeah underneath them is all titanium it’s really cool okay and uh I think are we going to go out there and do a tour I would love to Sweet yeah yeah uh in the Faso uh they pull the gun out so you can see underneath and everything it’s really cool so I’ll take you through there yeah I would love to check that out I think that be cool to kind of put all that together for our audience to see yeah it’s super cool the guard loves it when we bring people out and kind of show

them around and show them what we do because public Outreach for them too is kind of hard too you know yeah I think it’s good to just get it out there I think a lot of people and the reason we started this podcast is there’s so much cool things so many cool businesses so many cool stories right here in Idaho yeah for right on her people’s noses realize I didn’t realize it until I became a business owner myself you know and then people come in you know like a cabinet shop owner comes in and hey I need you know this or whatever and you get to know that guy yeah it’s pretty cool it’s really cool it’s a cool Community there’s a lot of great manufacturing going on here some a lot of big manufacturing going on right here so we like to highlight you know all sides of it like and I we never done like a metal supplier yeah so I’m excited to go check out your shop yeah we’ll film a little there to share with everyone I’m excited to check out up on base yeah will they let us film

up there I think they will I think great I’ll get it we might have to share it with them to get approval oh yeah yeah we’ll have to we’ll have to get some approvals most likely but yeah they’re more than happy to have great people come out and and film and do stuff so we had the we got to go on the boss LIF oh with a guy that uh that worked one of your guys is in the garden yep yeah that’s a pretty cool program that do they do uh did you actually get to fly on the the black the Blackhawk yeah that’s on the Army side that’s really cool program uh the A10 is a single cater didn’t get to go on A10 I never get to take rides or anything hopefully we’re transitioning to the F16 I think there’s some two-seaters out there so maybe before I get out I’ll get that’ be cool that’d probably be pretty wild yeah I’ve ridden on you know the cargo aircraft C130 C7 um they suck from my perspective anyways you know they put us on a big pallet of seats okay you

treated as cargo so comfy no okay flying over to like Kuwait and stuff that’s a long F yeah it was a cool experience they let us like do the simulation like do some of the trainings we got a they got some cool toys out there we were there for two days it was it was really really cool it was a really cool experience so I can’t wait to go back on with the yeah it’ll be cool because that was mainly Army side that you did with the boss lift most of that stuff is on the Army side um the air side there’s a lot of stuff that people don’t even know you know people think of the Army National Guard a lot of times out there just cuz they do the cool Outreach stuff like that but um yeah we can definitely go down to the hanger look at you know my shop show you kind of all the breaks and shears and stuff that we have and yeah I would love to see it we we’ll do that we’ll get this out to everyone do you so you plan to hopefully move gem

St metals to its own kind of business complex I’m hoping I don’t want to put too much out there cuz you know then it’s not going to come true but like I speak it into existence I’m going to try and speak it into existence i’ I’ve worked really hard to get this land and uh and now we just we got to find the right investor team to get the building to develop it yeah and I know it’s going to make money you know it all napkin Mass out it’s just right now the rates are high so it’s like hard to do it all through the bank and justify it you know because that’s so much money it we estimated during construction if we were to go all bank it’s like 100k P just in interest before we even get the building oh yeah it’s crazy so you know that your mind is just kind of blown as a small business owner you know once you start stepping up the money it just gets crazy so any other big plans like 5 year 10 year 15E plans or G State medals the biggest one is

trying to get into our own house and get some other business um small business people next to us you know that we can kind of provide some really cool services for people you know give make it a destination um we are kind of that right now um but if people know us they know back and down our drive to get to us kind of sucks yeah fun if you’re a contractor with you know an 18t trailer and you got to come pick something up from us it sucks I’ve heard it from our drivers yeah our drivers sometimes they bring the forklift all the way down they’ll Park on their main road and drive down that’s what I told him like just park down there put your flashers on so I wouldn’t do it yeah just get in there man where small business so you got to got to deal with some things sometimes but well I’m excited to do these next two pieces with you I’m excited to share this with our audience and I thank you for taking the time to meet with us yeah I’m glad you uh mentioned it yeah thank

you all right