hmm welcome to a scrap life a podcast solely focused on the hustlers grinders operators and business owners who live and breathe the scrap metal industry every day we are the original recyclers no suits required just guts and hard work here is your host brett eckhart all right guys i found another uh sucker to come on and uh come talk about scrap with me over here on a scrap life podcast i’m kind of excited about today um you know i’ve always i’ve kind of found different walks of of scrap whether it’s managers owners um you know we had jim keiffan from recycling today we’ve kind of had all the different walks of scrap and i kind of found another nuance the other day i was cruising around on linkedin and i’ve i’ve been seeing these uh trade fox things pop up about virtual scrap conference so i connected with chris yerby the uh owner founder of tradefox and man i couldn’t be him and i touched base we started talking i couldn’t i was like man you’re perfect for the podcast you know you live and breathe scrap so i’m pretty excited thanks chris

uh for taking the time and uh i couldn’t i couldn’t be happier to have you on the podcast man absolutely brett man it’s a pleasure to meet you now and i’ve been looking forward to it so happy happy on your show it’s friday um and uh you’re down in uh where are you at right now where are you located i’m in atlanta right now so i just flew in from amsterdam which is where i’m based uh normally so i’m coming through atlanta for a few days headed down to florida for a couple weeks and then back back home to amsterdam nice nice down visiting family right exactly uh family and friends in the southeast exactly perfect perfect so you you mentioned amsterdam so i i mean i love to get people’s history obviously how you got in the scrap business and all that um you kind of have a you know an interesting story when you started telling me the story i that was kind of one of the things that that really tipped me off and i was like man this is this guy’s perfect um so just give me give me just

a you know the you know the cliff notes version but give me your kind of history of how you got into the scrap business how you ended up in amsterdam and and kind of let everybody know you know about your history and scraps on the scrap business cool man will do um well it started out by felling out of college basically uh i went to school at the university of alabama i studied chemical engineering which is really uh i loved it but uh honestly it kicked my rear end so uh i left uh my junior year and started my first company which was a consulting business working for factories uh implementing recycling programs and this that was my introduction i had uh been reading uh you know entrepreneur magazine back in the day i was looking for something uh that i could do to start my own business uh and i really loved the whole idea of uh beginning of the you know the the uh the recycling movement in those days right it’s 1997’s when i started that company so uh i bought into a concept started my own business worked out really

well uh you know years went by uh started a a small tech company i sold it after a couple of years and then i went back into the uh recycling business ultimately got into import export and uh lost a lot of money and uh i taught i learned a lot of valuable and expensive lessons yeah and yeah that’s what led me to start this company trade fox which was essentially just a it’s a tech company to uh to solve the problems that i experienced as a trader uh so i started that company in amsterdam uh reason i was there is because my wife was dutch long story short so i moved over there 11 years ago nice so when you say you lost a lot of money you know that’s what’s going to by probably spark somebody’s ears and say okay so when you what what did what what what issues did you run into that kind of caused you to lose lose money well um you know there were there were a couple of things so the losses that so first of all we invested a ton of money in building up relationships

because we started from scratch and uh didn’t really have any contacts in import exports to begin with we paid awful lot of money that’s just normal normal uh for any type of business although it seems crazy that we spent you know tens of thousands of dollars over a few years just building up a network but the way that we lost money um typically you know just comes down to just being basically either i mean the worst case scenario fraud you know we lost 150k one year by basically being led down this road you know but increasing our order size until some point we finally got fleece for 150k but you know we’ve also made our share of uh of kind of bad decisions and um ended up being kind of dumped on by you know either our supplier or our buyers or both so uh you know all those things add up and you know we we put we basically lost about 200k over the course of six years uh in our business just purely from unfair trading practices itself and i bring that up for one reason not because i mean we all

lost money i mean if you’ve been if you’re in the scrap business and you’ve never lost money you haven’t been in it very long um that’s what i always say is is you’re gonna have your good years and you’re gonna have your years where you’re just trying to keep the lights on um whether you’re just trading or you actually have physical locations or whatever it is i don’t i haven’t ran into anybody in this industry that hasn’t had a year or two or more of uh of money losing years but where i think that the reason i want to ask that question of you specifically was because your whole business is is uh kind of you know your your trade fox is built around helping people kind of mitigate some of those risks and you know when you kind of told me you know how you got into it and and the story behind trade fox i’m like oh that’s interesting and and people need to understand like what it’s all about so can you give me kind of a deep dive into into what you guys are really doing sure absolutely uh you

know the mission of so so we started the company now nine years ago first of all so we’ve been at this almost a decade uh we changed our business model entirely about three years ago first six years we were a marketplace last three years now we’re a trade reputation management system um you know but uh but basically it’s uh the mission is still remain the same always we’ve been trying to create a system uh you know community online just leveraging existing technologies that you know they’re out there already uh and uh and just trying to create a safe place for companies to trade so you know the first model was hey let’s build a little marketplace just put a wall around it let’s check everybody that comes in let’s make sure everybody’s vetted uh and then we’ll you know keep the we’ll keep the bad guys out you know and if they’re bad you know if they’re bad well if they get in somehow we kick them out right so that was kind of the first model uh and in the last three years we’ve become this um you know reputation management system basically

for for trading where we decided instead of trying to create our own little boxing and invite people in and let’s just start ranking and rating companies around the world you know putting all the information that we can uh find on those companies in one place where it’s accessible by our users whether they trade through our platform or through their own means uh and so now that’s really the you know that’s the way we’re solving the problem of just trying to clean up the you know trying to get out the the the troublemakers in our industry basically trying to again create a safe way of trading but we’re trying to kind of help a much larger scale instead of trying to force the trade through our system which is kind of our previous model so what caused the pivot on your end what what kind of what what did what made you guys pivot from you know building a wall and and deciding being the gatekeeper of of your of your business and other people’s business to just basically trying to be the gatekeeper of the industry as a whole from the from the trading

side well you know we learned uh just through trial and error um a lot of course about you know we’re trying to apply technology solutions to an industry our industry right so every industry has gotten some nuances and so uh one thing that you know we kind of did an error was you know we were setting up a marketplace but you know it’s when we went in with you know setting up a marketplace we were already kind of you know basically starting something on the wrong foot basically we we were fighting uphill battle just trying to convince people that our marketplace is not like all those other marketplaces where you’ve either lost money or you know people that have yeah so that was us trying to you know we in this in this way we’re basically saying hey we’ve got a safe way change the way you do your business and come through our conduit trade through our platform you know and it’s a marketplace and uh and things will be better and safe and that was a hard sell you know and it makes a lot of sense why people were not so

excited about that idea um and then we had this epiphany at one point you know about say four years ago or so where i said okay we’ve learned a lot in the first five years just put everything let’s let’s take everything off the table and let’s start from scratch you know what is it that we know what can we do here how do we make the solution now that we have five years experience uh you know in four or five years and that that’s when we realized okay well you know essentially what we need to be doing is just looking at all these uh companies around the world finding out all the information and basically just you know rating those companies from our system that way people can do business the way they want to do this instead of trying to get them to change the way they do business i think that was a huge uh kind of breakthrough for us as well because when you try to get people to change the way they do business it’s a it’s a tough battle basically you know so yeah well it’s hard i mean

it’s hard because people then at some point might think you’re playing favorites right they might say okay well you know you know if you just want to be let in by the gatekeeper so that you can do business with a certain person or whatever the case may be versus i like your approach i think the pivot is smart because it now opens you up to everybody um as long as they want if they want to take more risk if you know you rate a company um as maybe a little bit more risky to deal with but they feel like that pricing that they’re being offered is is worth their worth at risk then it gives them the opportunity to uh to take that if they only looking for aaa rated you know like a bond then they’re gonna look for those people and and and know that it might not they might not get that extra penny or two you know um i i like that pivot because it kind of puts you as a neutral observer and really just reporting the facts exactly yeah i appreciate that and and indeed that is the

case and we learned that you know over time we we assumed that you know people were only uh going to strive for the you know for finding companies with the best ratings for the co you know of course i know this is a trader there’s a lot of competition when you’re trying to deal with the best of the best and as a trader you know we’re trying to mitigate risk in ways that we can we can manage that risk but but other companies are not able to manage that risk and uh you know we didn’t even really think about our own business model as a trader when we were building the first version to be honest with you then as we started looking back on it made a lot of sense because people like you said they go where they go for the companies that don’t have the triple a rating so to speak because they can handle the risk and that so that does has to open this up and given us a lot more uh that value to more people i should say more people more companies so you having been you

know a trader yourself previously um does that i mean i would assume that that gives you kind of an inherent advantage when you’re sitting there trying to determine you know whether it’s a consumer you know on the other side of the world or i mean when you look for a criteria of a triple a rated or a you know a a you know a great consumer i mean what it what are you looking for in that consumer or trader or broker what are the big the big outlying factors that you’re looking for to give them a you know an exemplary rating well the the way that we modeled our scoring system so we basically said okay let’s set up like a system of consisting of three buckets of information and um and in in as long as we have information in any of these three buckets we can start to score the company so sometimes you have more information like the first bucket is is information that we get from credit processing companies i’ve done in brass street equifax you know this is the credit safe and we look at that information differently we’re

not looking for signs of payment you know capability to pay we’re looking for signs of trustworthiness reliability uh so that’s one bucket and then we have this import export bucket which now has almost i think about i think it’s 1.7 million trades and then growing pretty fast and we can look in that bucket and we we look for signs again trustworthiness reliability we look like for volumes we look at signs of we look we can look in to see do they change trading partners way too often you know that’s that’s one thing that we can see that signifies in our mind a lot of risk and if the answer is yes then we maybe get involved and have our people contact some of their their customers and get more information from them and then the third bucket is is to us the most important and uh and that’s the feedback uh ratings that we get from our members so this is specifically uh buyer seller feedback so we have all the trade data so then we say okay you know um let’s take a look at these you know 27 or 50 different

trading partners of theirs to see how many guys how many companies we can get to rate this company because you know if you can tell me what you know 15 or 20 you know buyers have to say about a seller or vice versa that’s probably the best information i can have at my fingertips and uh we look at these three buckets and basically have an algorithm that favors the third bucket more than the second second one in the first and uh and yeah we just just it just goes to that and continually updates so you know we again it’s like everything is every uh analysis is done on this on this bubble’s information all like developed by us you know looking at all the data that we have and you know trying to figure out like what can we infer from this data that says that god i think the company itself is reliable and trustworthy so that’s how basically the nuts and bolts how it works so reversing back a little bit when you were when you were actually trading yourself before you had set this before you set trade fox up when

you actually were just doing the trading what what services what was out there what helped you determine who to do business with i mean was it just a meeting you know trying to go to these uh the israelis or the birs of the world and try and just kind of go with your gut i mean what existed before this if anything that kind of helped you determine who would be a good potential uh business partner with you someone you could do business with you know i found it you know keep in mind that i came into this this import export business as an industry person but as an outsider to trade to global trade right so um you know so essentially i was coming in fresh and like and you know i couldn’t believe how difficult it was and how expensive it was to learn lessons and create a valuable trading um it has a lot to do with process of elimination uh you know sure you can get out and meet all kinds of people you go to conferences you can pick up you know back in those days uh you know uh

you know yellow pages or whatever you can go from scrapyard scrapyard and meet people and try to create those relationships but you know what i learned over time is that really the most vital information comes from the friends that i make along the way the other traders and brokers and people that work at yards that know something about what’s going on in that area people that i develop a relationship with um their opinions was what mattered the most and then also then secondly and most expensively it was the process of elimination of basically getting you know just have getting in a deal realize that you’re you’re you know you’re not going to make a profit on this trade because this person’s taking advantage of the situation you know and you just mark those guys off your list and keep going and man that’s a super inefficient extremely expensive way to build up a network but i didn’t know of another way of doing it because you know even if you go to your israeli i mean you still you still can meet people that uh you know that uh well there’s two sides of

every story right but you know when markets fall and suddenly you know orders getting cancelled or market market prices are changing and suddenly there’s issues with uh you know with quality etc you know you can kind of read between the lines you know that people are trying to kind of make up for mistakes that they made to your expense and that comes from every sector i mean every every it happens you know i’ve had problems with people in different trade associations there’s no safe way to do it there’s just process of elimination so that’s basically it you know so you’re i mean so it’s it’s actually when i sit there and think about it i mean you talk about like the better business bureau or like dun and brad street right i mean that’s essentially what you you’re trying to establish and establishing more and more every day for this scrap industry as a whole right right and who do you feel is like your biggest um you know because i i think about you and i had this conversation previously over the phone you’re like so um how do you you know decide

who you do business with and and you know from a brokerage standpoint or whatever and i said you know i’m i’m i have some good friends that are brokers and that’s what they are um and we have these conversations a lot and i just say you know i i have no desire to go find consumers in uh other countries my my personal preference is to find a broker based here in the united states or north america and just someone i can trust i got a relationship with i know who’s a good consumer for certain items and then just let them go to work on on their consumers right right and and they and they talk about some of the pitfalls and kind of you know of of who deciding who to to buy from and who to trade with and whatnot and what’s the what is the best i guess what’s the best way to get to get those guys to uh to value what you’re offering more i mean how do you how do you get those guys convinced that that what you bring to the table at trade fox is you know

a is a worthy you know investment whether it’s a is it a subscription based model is it a uh yeah we have annual and monthly subscriptions so yeah i mean i mean basically um the way we do it is just simply by showing them you know giving them access to the product and showing showing them that it works you know we’re just guaranteeing a good experience based on you know uh you know you know a money back guarantee essentially so uh you know we don’t want to take anybody’s money you know unless we’ve earned it honestly you know we’ve got a lot of growing ahead of us and we want to build up our allies and we want to make friends with everybody we can the business because also we depend on the information that they give us ultimately what we’re trying to do is capture that information that’s you know in the heads of you know thousands of people around the world and create a usable and sensible a system that people can you know benefit from so they can make the right decisions but of course it depends on their involvement as

well so uh so yeah we just you know simply long story short i mean we we just built up the value we’ve got a lot of we’ve got now about 300 and it’s more that used to be 350 uh data contributors so these are companies that receive a discount for using the services because they’re they’re flooding in lots of trade feedback reviews um you know so that like seeds the system you know we got over it like uh we’re going in that pretty quickly like over i won’t say about a year ago we had only about 60 trade reviews in our system we have almost 20 000 now oh wow so yeah so we’re good yeah that’s a that’s a huge milestone we’re i’m waiting on that 20 000 number to hit so we can just have a little celebration so that’s going to be a milestone for us so heck yeah heck yeah yeah but that’s what it’s all about you know and the thing is we wouldn’t we wouldn’t get there without people buying into what we do so we just have to explain here’s what we’re doing here’s the vision here’s

what we want to be for for you know for for everybody and some people don’t want it you know other people some people think it’s a great idea but would not like to support it but be honest with you nowadays we’re getting a lot more support than we had in the first couple years we just we’ve kind of reached a critical mass now where it’s the point of no return you know it’s basically just going forward now there’s not any you know it’s just a matter of time before we have you know 100 000 trade reviews half a million trade reviews are you getting any love from like from banks or like credit rating agencies basically people are securing the debt of these of these brokers traders i mean are they saying hey we’d like to see you know a trade box review on these consumers before we basically are willing to uh to take on you know these receivables or whatever have you have you gone down that road at all or a little bit yeah so we we are very much uh you know targeting that for the long term um and

what the most interest we’ve gotten so far is from insurance agencies because they’re they’re hungry for as many you know just different data sources as they can get their hands on to rank companies and you know when you when you talk about you know extending credit terms to a company you know there’s enough information out there nowadays to credit you know credit processing or sorry uh credit uh bureaus and other systems uh to get a good gauge on whether or not a company is going to pay their bills or not so that’s that’s been you know it’s been done and it’s pretty well mastered now we’re not going to try to compete with that space yeah but you know there is something to be said about how a company uh treats their trading partners out you know after those i know they they may pay all their bills on time but you know how do they make that money to pay the bills are they treating people right and this is becoming some it’s because it’s interesting to a number of insurance companies uh especially um we are also in discussions now for over

a year um with uh you know potentially creating a new insurance product around our data actually which which is ensuring not the payment potential of a company uh but whether or not you know things happen such as like basically insurance against fraud insurance against a cancelled agreement assurance against um uncollected quality claims these types of things there’s no there’s no insurance for that right now and that creates a lot of problems for traders and you know and companies importers experts as well and that’s really where we have our minds you know kind of focused on we’re trying to get down that track because if we can offer that insurance policy for the industry that’s a huge win so we go that way yeah banks we don’t have a wait to be honest with you we’ve not really pushed down that track i don’t really uh i’m sure there is definitely some value in the long term but it’s not really something we’ve looked into hardcore yet that makes sense and i and i just i can’t i can’t um express even our own team our each one of our facilities and our businesses how

important reviews are right i mean we push reviews because a it’s good honest feedback but b i mean how many how often do you go onto amazon or whatever and you look you’re looking for a certain product and you then that’s a product review right and it’s no different when you’re trading with somebody i mean they have genuine feedback from other businesses other companies there’s the same size as you larger or smaller but they’re actually doing business with that individual i can’t help but think that that’s a you know a pretty big get if you can if you’re a trader and you want and you want people to to give you a shot if you can get legitimate feedback from a from a basically a neutral source like tradefox you know i can’t help but think that that’s gonna at least give people that warm cozy feeling like i’m going to give that i’m going to give that individual a shot at a couple containers just to see if the reviews are true right so it feels like the review part of what you’re doing is has got to be just the uh i

mean heads and shoulders above the rest of it i mean just because it’s other people in the industry validating your you know your worthiness totally i mean you know and and you know and i think there’s two two comments to that one you know um when you think about rating systems that exist for like you know items that you’re buying on amazon um you know uh i can lose a thousand dollars you know to a store that maybe didn’t behave themselves or should be some poor quality product you know but yeah i can’t take a 200 000 loss you know right so so like you know it’s so much more important to make sure that we that you have that kind of information before you enter a transaction of that size right because you you people are continuously taking risk in this business and lots and lots of money is being lost and so certainly we provide that value on the front end so knowing that you know it makes it we can at least say hey over the last you know x number of transactions uh this is what their their buyers say

about this company uh but the other side of that coin is also the accountability side as well right so we we not only give information about the reliability and trustworthiness of companies but also we have a system in place so that if if any of these companies in our system uh trade unfairly with your company um we even have uh we have a panel in the system for reporting unfair trades on on trade fox okay so yeah so basically if the deal goes you know that’s not some good examples we’ve got a few of these you know that we have on our list now but you know where you know money’s transferred for example to a supply clear records of it we see all the evidence we know what’s going on we have to they have to convince our panel basically that this is a genuine problem we’re not getting into a little you know petty disputes we can’t really you know substantiate we see these really there’s enough of these problems where people are trading uh really unfairly and they need to do the right thing and so those those guys when our

panel agrees to go on our list and get flagged it’s on their profile so that’s the other side of it as well right you can you can they can leverage our network in order to make sure that people are trading fairly with them and so that’s the other side of the coin is have you ever thought about i mean have you ever thought about going into the uh the mediation business i mean as far as like uh you know between between you know two companies because there’s always that old two sides to every story right and then there’s usually you know it could be one person being treated unfairly or it could just be a two-sided airborne story trying to find that sweet spot that everybody can live with right in an uncomfortable situation that’s right i mean we’ve certainly considered it and decided that we don’t want to get into that business ourselves but you know what i what i’m what we have on the drawing board is essentially a model for mediation that’s for the scrap industry which which other companies mediation firms could uh you know institute the the you

know the procedures and policies that we’re putting together they could follow that in in a process for collecting in our industry or getting an agreement between two parties um we’ve not fleshed that out all the way it’s a high level yeah you know ultimately you know there’s so many in so many different parts that we you know that well there’s like i guess about 10 or 12 different problems you know that we that we’ve identified in global trade which need to be sorted out one way or the other and we’re trying to think of how can we add value without trying to start you know 10 foot 10 different businesses right so ultimately we want to have other companies on board that are working with us using our platform like shipping companies insurance companies banking uh you know mediation services inspection uh there’s a lot of different um you know separate business entities that we would love to have as partners just utilizing our service allowing us to orchestrate the you know trade because there’s just so many nuances to it so i remember and i’ll kind of tell a little story real quick

but i remember probably a year and a half ago i really started to you know post more on linkedin and i started posting who i was selling scrap to and people were hitting me up all the time and saying why are you why are you saying who you’re selling your scrap to right and i was like because i’m like at the end of the day i want the good players out there i want them to be recognized right so if i’m being very vocal about what our company does how we go about our business i want people to know that that i’m i’m basically saying that if i’m willing to sell to this individual or this company then i’m kind of putting my stamp of approval on it right in my own in my own way and and so it wasn’t very hard for me because you know scrap was a super relationship driven business right i mean you have relationships and it’s hard to you know work into some of those relationships it takes time it takes effort it takes energy to actually get to a point where you have that that trust

and then once you have it i’ve always said i mean the reason i never have minded posting who i’m selling stuff to is because i i’m proud of you know the business partners i’ve been able to kind of you know accumulate over the years right but i think there’s still a lot of people that don’t understand that concept because they feel like there’s a lot of trade um secrets a lot of a lot of people that hey i got a good in you know this guy going to this country with this product yada yada i don’t want anybody else to know or else they’re going to blow up my market right so how do you navigate those waters um they’re a trade fox yeah i mean you know what you’re describing is uh is is the new mindset that’s as i’ve noticed uh in my career you know so um you know silos of information that you know protected contacts right they are actually um they they may be the assets of a lot of companies but that that siloing of information is actually creating the problems that we suffer from in global trade

for sure um the you know the other thing that um is is important is you know people for example would you know gladly come to trade fox and you know report a company that has wronged them but not as many people are willing to come and report companies that have done great by then right because yeah keep that good buyer that good so that’s the old school mentality i mean it it is let’s just say there’s old school there’s new school i’m a good old school i’m a big new school right i think we’re all more so but that’s that’s the old old-school method and the new musical method says that look you know if we get up there and we’re vocal about it and we if we patent you know these guys in the back that trade well with us we’re going to not only encourage that behavior again on future business but we’re going to reward them with better you know with other companies they’re going to supply them as well now what does that mean that means that buyer for example is going to going to have a better margin

that trader is going to have a better margin on the deal but it takes a better margin to do business the right way especially if you’re a producer uh for sure so i think these things i i believe that more transparency and more openness it’s the new way of doing business it’s fun to watch it changing and people are trying to grapple with how does this make sense but this is how it makes sense you know you you got to reward the people that that treat you right because they’re in business make money too yeah exactly it’s a matter and that’s what i always said i’m here to support the good players out there and kind of give them props where props are due and i believe that’s how you that’s how you as your company can grow too like we’ve grown because people like oh you deal with these guys or these guys then and here’s the product we sell and we stand behind our product and we’re willing to kind of put that out there right and i i think that that that mentality is people are a little more willing to

share nowadays you know than previous i feel like what is how do you convince um someone to go on and share those positive reviews what is that what does that process look like to get somebody to come on and say hey i’ve done business with these guys and they’re legit it it yeah we’ve been working we’ve been trying to work out the answer to that question for several years now and i’ll tell you where we kind of have progressed to um it’s simply it’s a minds a kind of a shift in the way people do business basically and um and i think that of course we can talk forever about these great you know possibilities if we do business in this new way but you know um i mean in the end we just need to just give them examples you know and show them like or ask questions like have you considered this outcome you know if you were to go this route give examples of how other people are doing business you know um you know it’s people you when you’re when you’re successful in business you’ve learned how to make money

and that’s like that in our in case of our business in an in transparent market you know you’ve learned to make money in a system that is in transparent with solid information and suddenly the game has changed right and in the beginning there’s a lot of resistance and we’re just trying to kind of convince people that they should open up more but as people start to open up more and you can see it in the numbers you see the trades the trade feedbacks being shared now what we’ve noticed in the last year is more people you know look at that are looking to us and saying hey how can we get on board with this you know this way or how is this working for other companies and then when they’re receptive or asking that you know the how and why we could just tell them what we’ve learned over time and how this can work for their business i think ultimately it comes down to maybe like some little you know kind of small videos that would help educate and give examples of how it’s working for other people’s businesses so they can

apply that into their own kind of make sense of all these changes that come about yeah my big my biggest thing in life and in business i think it reverberates into our business is you know is the positivity it will win out and the positivity isn’t just walking around a smile on your face all the time like hey life is great you know the positivity is in giving positive feedback about people and about individuals that are doing a great job but other companies are doing a great job and kind of knowing that the world is abundant everybody can still be successful by helping other people grow their business as well right and i think that that that abundant mentality is where if we can get people to understand that then it’s not going to take it doesn’t take away from your success it’s just helping other people that are doing a good job you know it’s just helping promote them so that they can they can they make money but grow their business and and support their employees and their families and everything else as well right absolutely i mean it’s it’s a yeah

it’s interesting to see this change because like i’m literally this is one of the biggest struggles that we’ve had like trying to get this whole business model to work is we needed to wait we’re kind of ahead of our time a little bit or you know kind of behind behind the wave a bit you know so but like we needed this kind of shift of mindset to come on and we generation third generation uh you know uh scrappers or you know consumers people that work working for their parents and the younger generations are seeing this the world differently and they’ve they’ve understand and embraced the technology that we have social media and they want to find new ways of doing business and doing you know doing business online is just the future right so that’s just kind of one thing that nobody would do before they won’t do any business online now we even you know now people are trying to figure out how can we do this so yeah it’s fun to watch that and i’m just glad that we were you know able to kind of wait it out long enough to

catch up with yeah kind of you know general you know mindsets on how business should be done and i feel like i mean it’s a it’s a review game like i mean i mean not to not to kind of minimize or like get like you know neck your business all the way into just one thing but i mean when i want to go to a restaurant and i’m and i’m traveling to nashville or wherever i’ll get on yelp simply say i’ve never been or i don’t have any locals there i’ll get on yelp but i’ll figure out okay who’s got the best restaurant views and whatever else right i mean i think yelp is kind of turned into that restaurants and bars and you know they used to be reviewing a lot of stuff and i feel like they just started narrowing you know tripadvisor we want to go somewhere i want to go to a certain country you know true advisor and see what’s out there and i could really see this being just you know a monster review game if just you know guy okay i want to sell aluminum and i

and i and i feel like i need to figure out who’s a good consumer of 381 you know figure it figure that out and i’m gonna go on i’m gonna see who’s a buyer of it what does their review look like what’s their profile look like who’s doing business with them and um you know that person might be worth giving a shot to right it’s but it’s got to be the the shippers the uh the scrap recycling companies willing to put their name on who they’re doing business with yeah you know and that’s just a matter of confidence in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and saying you know if you’re better than me come get it you know yeah compared to me at what i’m doing then come take my business you know but i’m pretty confident that i’m i can i’m good at what i do where i’m doing it so i’m willing to put it out there but it’s a mindset game but in your business it feels it’s a lot it’s a lot of rev it’s a review game and getting the players kind of the cream rises

to the top absolutely that’s what it’s all about you know it’s it’s uh as some people say that you know they’re they’re concerned that it lowers the bar and it makes it easy for you know for somebody that’s coming into the industry to come in the top of the market and you know and and make you know business opportunities you know out of it but you know the thing is and we also provide transparency into the fact that that person or that company is new as well right so you know that visibility into that company’s reputation as well and you know people that are new in the business we’ve all you know i came in as an outsider so i wasn’t you know really born into this industry basically directly so you know i was always you know kind of fighting to get my way in that’s just normal business you know so yeah sure we make it easier and less expensive for people to enter into the business but that also should bring in some really great people with high integrity that that everybody’s going to give a chance to uh you know

and and you know it i think in the end it basically uh makes it easier for everybody you know makes it easier for everybody to do the business and if we can cut away like you know a good portion of the 200 million plus uh that’s lost every year because of unfair trading practices we can put a huge debt in that that’s that can’t be that’s just going to be good for everybody yeah yeah it’s good on so many levels yeah so for a guy that didn’t start in the scrap business and just kind of found your way into it after uh after college um what’s kept you in it so long what’s kept you in here doing what you’re doing and still kind of beating your head against the scrap wall with the rest of us for as long as you have you know there’s this irrational aspect of you know in some ways you just get of the fact that a scrap just gets in your blood based at some point you know so i started to sing out with these you know you know i started out the import export business

thinking hey it’s gonna be you know pretty cool to travel around the world i get to meet people from different countries i love travel you know i can pay for my business that sounds real glamorous and and of course that is the glamorous side of being a traitor you know that is a very nice thing you know and i enjoyed that but it comes at a very serious cost you know so a lot of frustration a lot of problems you know you’re constantly as a traitor you’re constantly you know stuck in the middle and and getting you know getting hit from both sides you know so that was a tough business but you know that that new the you know the kind of feel the kind of you know glamorous aspect wears off pretty quick after after it gets real and then hopefully what keeps you in the business is just the fact that just somehow becomes a part of who you are you know it’s just uh it’s just you know yeah you when you’re breaking your neck looking at the scrap yard every time you’re going down the interstate or you know

you’re flying and you’re flying into airport you’re checking out what kind of stocks another company has i mean you know you know that it’s kind of just uh it’s just who you are then that never going to change so i mean i got to a point we lost all that money that year um you know i was about to say you know what take your business and shove it i’m out of here you can yeah you can have this crap i’m done i’m going to find something else to do and you know literally that was the place i ever came but literally just saying i’m going to turn my back on all this but that was the moment when i where i decided i was gonna start this company so i either said i’m either gonna i’m either gonna take these lessons that i’ve learned and my knowledge and all the learnings in my life for that matter and put it into something that’s gonna solve these problems or i’m just gonna leave and uh well ten years later now let’s go here so he’s still here i love it before we go man

i i wanna i do wanna i wanna kind of give you the opportunity i mean you to me it’s a genius idea but it’s a it’s a good way to help promote what you’re doing it’s a good way to help promote the industry but can you touch on your virtual conference that you have coming up you know the days give everybody information but sure and we can go we’ll post that on on the uh on the site but just talk about you know why you’re doing it what you’re doing and kind of the premise behind it because i really love the idea cool thank you yeah i’ve definitely been happy to um you know when we started this as you as i’ve already you know said i mean we were looking at creating the safe assistance people trained uh you know and then trying to solve a lot of problems with scrap industry in general and um you know as things went forward we started seeing more problems and started coming up with ways that we’re going to try to help these problems uh you know help solve these problems well the latest problems

was this corona this pandemic situation right you know basically you know back then went into 2019 early 2020 everything shut down um you know lit you know people were just struggling to figure what to do to save their businesses you know containers are stuck everywhere and it looked like they’re going to be locked down for a long time and we were and so you know conference after conference was cancelled and and you know we were thinking okay what can we do you know to help you know what what’s our role going to be and you know it just came you know came to me that we need to have a you know we have all the capability you know we’re a tech company you know we even had a a company that’s across the hall in the building that we work at that builds a virtual conference product you know so i’m like yeah i went to talk to the guy and i was like man you know we could we plug your system into our system and help our industry out because this is how we meet each other you know this is

how trade is done you know we need to the old shape the old handshake may be gone but we still need to create these relationships to make sure trades moving and so he said yes and took an interest in it we said okay so we’re not in the conference business we don’t know anything about conferences we didn’t know anything about it we still don’t know much but uh but we knew we could help you know this is our way of helping and giving back so we you know we set it up we do it we have our first conference uh you know back in 2020 uh in nepal and uh it was uh it was it was well appreciated a huge success and a lot of business relationships were made and you know so we decided this is going to be a part of our product going forward because the mission is the same you know we’re trying to connect the people of integrity together to trade we’re trying to help the industry that’s what we do and this is a great way of doing it so we’ve now decided that we’re switching over

to uh you know to a quarterly conference so our goal now is to create a networking conference that we can that we can run every three three four months yeah and uh with the real kpi of like of connections made like we’re all you know focused on bringing people together and and we do vet them we don’t let everybody have networking access to the site so we can we have our own data so we know which companies are you know that we can say these are the good ones and we we allow certain people to upgrade and get full access tickets yeah the rest of them can participate he knows so that’s yeah that’s what we uh that’s what we’re doing now it’s a conference.tradefox.com is the website where in case anybody wants to check this in the future see what’s coming up awesome awesome what’s the dates the dates of the next one’s coming up is uh october 12th 13th and 14th okay so people can just log in and just kind of peruse and kind of either listen to he had some roundtable discussions you got a couple of uh

guest speakers i saw um sean davidson or dave’s yeah so i i shot and so i i mentioned him to you yesterday i mean a great guy he understands he’s got a real passion for the uh for the scrap industry i think he’s trying to do it you know there’s people out there that are doing it because they want to make money and i’m okay with that i mean everybody’s got to make a living but there’s people out there that are doing it to make a living but also are trying to create and make it better and you know i get that vibe from you and you and i originally talked and sean’s definitely one of those people i mean he wants you know he wants he’s trying to build a business there is no doubt but he’s also trying to build a business for all the right reasons and to make the industry better and so i saw him come up popped up on my screen the other day as a speaker and i was like oh that’s great man yeah so i think it’s going to be a good event you know

i i i look forward to uh checking it out and being a part of it if the opportunity rises more than anything just uh i like seeing good people succeed man so thanks for putting it together and any parting shots if people want to get a hold of you or how do they how do they get ahold of you yeah i mean so yeah i mean you know i can be reached quite quite easily through our uh get through our website we have a we have a support section there to click on it and normally i’m one of the people that gets referred to um you can drop an email to me also chris at tradefox.co that’s another way to get in touch with me directly and uh yeah hey brad man i really appreciate the opportunity to jump on here and talk a little bit about what we do i appreciate your interest in what we’re doing it’s it is a labor of love man and we’re indeed i appreciate your coughing that saying that we you know we’re in the group sean davis and i i agree we’re trying to make

a difference and uh of course we’re building a business but so we’re in it to make change so yeah i mean that’s that those are the best businesses man when you get it change your industry up a little bit and and and make it better and and you and make some money at the same time i mean it’s capitalism at its finest but uh right with the labor of love and mixed in all right man i appreciate you taking the time and uh you have a great rest of your weekend thank you very much bro appreciate it all right take care chris