welcome to the ic disc show interviews with business owners industry leaders and tax experts sharing how the ic disc can benefit your bottom line profits check out the show notes at icdiskshow.com this show is brought to you by the ic disc alliance discover how the premiere ic disc consulting firm support you at icdisc.com and by your podcast team where having your own podcast is as easy as being a guest on ours find out more at your podcast dot team now here’s your host dave spray hi this is david spray and welcome to another episode of the podcast my guest today is bret eckert the ceo of united metals recycling in idaho brent has a really interesting perspective on what is seemingly a commodity business the scrap metal business rather he views himself as being in the customer service business because of that underlying philosophy he’s innovated and created some new products and services that i’m not familiar with in the scrap metal business that i found to be very interesting brett has also had a podcast for a number of years where he interviews people in the scrap metal business and

it really is a great insight and perspective not only on having a podcast but also in the scrap metal industry so whether you’re interested in having your own podcast or you’re in the scrap metal business there’s a lot of good information to be had now let’s get to the episode hi brett welcome to the podcast how you doing today i’m doing great are you calling in uh from idaho are you in idaho today yes sir yes sir in idaho and then i think the travel whirlwind starts here soon yeah yeah thank you it sounds like we’ll both be in las vegas uh in a couple weeks for the israeli conference correct yes for the institute of scrap recycling industries uh annual convention i think that’s the official name of it yeah yeah first one they’ve had in person for a couple years now they took two years off because they killed it and now i think everybody’s pretty excited to get back together yeah i i agree i was at the consumer’s night in st louis last month and that was just i think a record turnout there was a lot of pent-up

demand so so i want to talk about two two primary categories one i want to kind of get your story here a bit about your background a bit about your company and then the second part i want to talk about your podcast and uh kind of lessons learned while you started it things like that does that sound like a good plan sounds good to me all right well let’s start at the beginning are you a native of idaho born and raised my parents were both born and raised from idaho grandparents you know for the most part are all from idaho so yeah i don’t know any i don’t know any different i grew up in idaho around the boise area in a town called caldwell and i went to school got my undergraduate um in oregon and then came back and went to work and somewhere along the way you picked up your mba at the university of phoenix right yes sir at night i basically came back to work started working full-time i graduated on saturday my parents came up to uh watch the graduation nobody in my family had ever graduated

nobody in my family cousins aunts uncles grandparents nobody ever even went to college so so i was the first person in my family to even go to college let alone graduate so it’s a pretty big deal for my family they came up watched the ceremony and that was on a saturday and i was kind of half asked joking to my dad hey when you’re ready for me to start and he goes monday would be fine and he wasn’t joking so that is monday monday it was we went to work so i didn’t realize this but you and i have something in common so two things one is i’m from one of those other states that starts with an eye called iowa and i’m sure for folks that you know like from the east you know they seem to get those states confused right you know it’s like they think of them as both kind of back backwards you know rural unsophisticated and they both start with an eye and with a vowel so they seem to get them confused but the other thing i have in common like you i also was the first

person in my family immediate family extended family to go to college as well and like you i have a a bachelor’s degree and i have an mba awesome yeah congratulations and congratulations to you it’s being a trailblazer is not always the easiest role is it no no but you know what like i’m happy i did it and people used to ask me all the time well why are you going back to school you already know what you’re going to do and yeah and i’m just kind of i don’t know i guess this maybe has been born into me i just part of my dna that i just do i have a hard time half asking stuff so it’s like i if i somebody tells me i can’t do something like i’m gonna try and prove them wrong or b if someone says oh that’s good enough i’m like well what’s good enough you know like i’m like the one that i want to go extra you know a little bit more than that you know what’s good enough so i think that’s the reason why i don’t think i necessarily need an nba to

do what i do but you know it was part of my process understood so talk to me a bit about the company you know i came back i graduated school in 2004. my grandpa a little i’ll kind of rewind a little bit my grandfather started our business in 72 with a partner just to kind of a little hole in the wall scrap recycling company scrap metal recycling very family-owned operated business throughout you know my dad’s younger years high school years you know my dad lucky to even graduate high school he worked the business pretty much his whole life with my grandfather and about 1997 my dad was my grandfather was ready to retire or my dad was ready to retire my grandfather they had enough i think of each other yeah and you know david had been working you know together as a family aunts uncles cousins anybody that would want to come to work because it’s hard you know it’s a hard job it was maybe 20 employees a couple trucks just a very you know labor intense uh gritty gig you know one location and my dad being an entrepreneur that

he was able to find a way to get my grandfather bought out of the business by partnering with a uh company you know a publicly traded company now that’s pretty large in the recycling business called center steel okay so yep i know them he partnered with schnitzer in 97 they bought 50 of our company and i bought my grandfather out of the business so my dad owned 50 percent since your own 50 and that kind of started the relationship with those guys which would be like when i was my early high school years and so when i came back in 2004 after i went to college it was you know we had around that same 20ish employees my dad had expanded a little bit we had we had a little pipe company we had two locations at that point you know a little feeder yard and a yard in caldwell idaho our main our first yard and then my dad had kind of got really heavily into more heavily into the trucking business so he had started brokerage and we had a handful of trucks at that point to kind of move our scrap

and backhaul lumber products off of the west coast in idaho so that’s kind of uh that’s how it started and so does schnitzer still uh have ownership in the company no they do not in 2014 and 15 the market the scrap market commodities markets in general got hammered it was pretty tough year 15 14 was tough 15 was really tough schnitzer was basically came to us and we’ve been partners you know going on close to 20 years at that point and they basically just said hey you know we’ve kind of reached a point we had grown we’d added some locations through the throughout the partnership and they kind of basically were like hey you guys are losing money and we’re ready to and in in their defense you know they were kind of they also looked at me and i was kind of trying to grow and i was kind of had a kind of a ceiling on me because i couldn’t really do a lot you know being only a 50 owner and my dad was burned out of being partners the big trump totally traded company and so it was basically like

you know you buy us out or we buy you out type of deal and my dad kind of my dad kind of looked at me and he goes you’ll never get them bought out because you’ll never get through the process and i think oh just the wrong thing to tell brett right yeah exactly yeah i mean so he he kind of i think my dad’s kind of smart that way you know he’s not a college educated man but he’s a street educated man he’s a people guy and so he i think he knew what to tell me to say hey if you want it you know if you want it here’s your chance you know and so it kind of motivated me to kind of figure out a way it took me about a year of myself and my cfo brian ferguson we started we said all right we went through the math and we said we think we can make this pencil and we went through the process of trying to buy out a publicly traded company out of our you know little mom-and-pop scrap company and wow that’s we got

it done story i’ve i don’t think i’ve ever i’m sure you’re not the first one but i just hadn’t met somebody who’s been through that so did it start with like did they just give a number and say here’s the number we’ll either buy you at that price or you can buy us or how did yeah it was go ahead yeah no go ahead it was it was kind of in 1997 when my dad partnered with him it was a it was not a publicly traded company in 97 they became public trade i think 99 or 2000 or something like that they were still pretty good size companies but they weren’t quite publicly traded so the operating agreement at that time was like a simple you know five-page document you know compared to if you did business with a public trade company today and took like they should ownership and you’re looking at a you know a book right right right so but in the operating agreement basically the way it was set up was you know if at some point if we agree that we don’t want to be partners anymore it’s

kind of uh whoever you put a number on the table and if we don’t like if we don’t like that number then basically you’re telling us what you’re willing to sell your 50 for kind of like a russian roulette style yeah i think the technical term is i think it’s called a shotgun clause is what i think it might be yeah it was like some sort of smart person and and uh so they put the number they put the number on the table first no they did it okay they did it which is you know we they have the president of the metals recycling side is named mike anderson and him and i have developed a relationship over the years along with a guy by name mike kirshman and you know they knew that was kind of a rough way to negotiate an exit because they still wanted to do business with us we still wanted to do business with them and so it was like hey we don’t have to do it this way right like it’s in the contract that way but we can both agree as partners that we would prefer

to try and negotiate something that we can both live with that’s you know fair for both sides and keep the relationship and i knew it was important for me to keep the relationship because just like anything you know relationships are important so you know we kind of we put some numbers together they put some numbers together and we just kind of found a middle ground that we could both live with and you know where nobody was really getting the lion’s share of the deal and it was you know the market was still tough at that point and so it was like all right we can live with that they were you know like they were ready to get out of the relationship we were ready to move on and it was a mutual agreement where both sides kind of felt it was going to work and that’s the way it was negotiated we they’re still one of our main consumers with one of our largest consumers so we were able to successfully you know maintain that relationship and you know it’s for me it was a you know it was a pretty monumental deal

because the same year i bought my parents out or retired my parents and was able to let them go live their lives and wow that’s a that’s a great story i imagine that was kind of a harrowing time because i’m guessing you didn’t just have uh some money stuck away in a bank account that you could write a check to schnitzer and write a check to your parents i’m i’m i imagine no and the way though i especially my parents are different than i structured it was schnitzer essentially was schnitzer we had do we had accumulated enough assets over the years i’m not a big spender on i guess um you’ve always reinvested you know like my parents taught me well i believe but you know you’re whatever you can reinvest it and so we we had enough assets that we were able to go to the bank and we you know even though the the market was tough and you know the p l wasn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination our balance sheet was exceptionally strong so the banks were willing to loan off you know assets just because we had

accumulated enough assets over the years high quality assets that were bankable okay so it wasn’t necessarily oh you guys are projected for a lot of growth it was kind of a deal with the bank that they’re like well if you guys do go under you got enough to cover your bills you know okay no oh well that worked well and then with your parents you did i guess some kind of uh my parents buy out over time yeah we kind of developed a family trust and kind of have moved some stuff around and basically to give them the latitude they need to to go live their life and need a latitude i need to to run the business and continue to grow up that was that 2016 you said 2016. so let’s fast forward six years it sounds like the company has grown some i don’t need to know like your you know exact revenue growth or income growth but could we use like another proxy i think you’ve added some locations maybe employees so what how might you characterize like your growth percentage since you bought it have you guys doubled is it

a 50 growth is it more than doubling i think it’s you know from a revenue side from uh you know profitability side you know from employee side it’s you know we’re close to double for sure you know we’ve added you know some other revenue streams that have really helped our helped our business you know sometimes i don’t i would never sit here and tell you i’m some great business guy um sometimes just timing works in your favor as well you know there’s a fair amount of luck i think in business it’s not all skill and i think you know you put yourself in a position to be successful and are you a position to be lucky you know quote-unquote you know by putting yourself out there and and then sometimes the stars align sometimes they don’t and in our situation you know 2016 came along you know trump got elected the markets turned and it actually worked out very positively for us right financially that the money turned i mean nobody knew going into that election that i mean i was i would have bet my house that hillary clinton was gonna get

elected and we were going to you know you know suffer through some pretty tough years on the on the show recycling in the you know scrap end and you know he’s never you know whatever the history is what it is things change that you know trump won the market took off you know the the commodities businesses performed pretty well you know for a couple years fairly strongly and enabled us to you know look like we were really smart i guess sure and then and then even in the last year and a half you look even smarter right i mean if your business is like that of our other scrap clients 2021 was likely a very good year for sure for sure if you’re able to kind of you know keep the wheels on the bus through covid and keep employees and keep your things keep things moving then you definitely i don’t think you know if you didn’t make money in the scrap industry last year then you need to go find something different to do sure you’re not cut you’re not gonna you’re gonna have a hard time when this thing actually turns

rough sure now you know what’s interesting about half my clients are not in the scrap business they’re in other manufacturing businesses and the last few months one of the big issues they’ve had is raising prices right because of inflation and they really have struggled with how you present that to your customer do you just blame it on inflation do you try to you know point out another value proposition and it seems like that’s one of the benefits that the our scrap clients have is that you’re in the you know pricing fluctuates every day automatically right on the buy side and the sell side so your customer and i do you have you buy over the scale also do you have so those folks are using yeah so they’re used to the price changing regularly right and so it seems like one of the nice thing about things about the scrap business during an inflationary time is one the your pricing adjustments just happen automatically and two you’re dealing with hard assets so it seems like those are a couple things that in a inflationary environment it would seem like it would benefit the scrap

business over a kind of a traditional manufactured business but that’s just my thoughts what do you think of that do you think that’s accurate or am i missing something you know i’ve had a lot of success and for on and living off of this kind of a little piece of advice my dad gave me he said brett if you’re buying all the scrap you’re paying too much right so and so i i’ve and which is just a scrap term but you can really i’ve always kind of put it to all of our businesses right like we have a corrugated steel pipe business and i said if you never miss a bid then your price is too low oh sure see because i mean ultimately i don’t want to buy it all because that means i’m paying too much if i don’t want to sell it all because that means i’m not charging enough and so i think a person needs to figure out that sweet spot for their business and decide do you want to be walmart low price high volume do you want to be you know target maybe higher margins less volume

but once you pick a lane you kind of have to go and stay in that lane you can’t be high volume and high margin right because it’s not going to work and for business owners i think they get caught in that trap of well i don’t want to lose business well sometimes if you lose that low margin business you’re better off because it frees up time and opportunity if you’re a high margin you know company that you know you want you know less business but high margin well then get rid of that shed that low margin business and go look for the high margin business but you got to have time to be able to do that right you don’t have that time if you’re over here focused on i’m scared to raise my price well at some point you know you have to just take the pick your price say this is what i need this is where i need to be and if it doesn’t work for you mr customer i 100 understand and leave the the situation on the best terms is absolute possible and go looking for someone that it

does sometimes less is more and it doesn’t feel like it initially but it can be more you know if you just focus on that piece of it no i that’s that’s great advice and thank you for that clarification i really hadn’t thought about that nuance of if you’re buying all this that there’s still pricing decisions to be made but it’s not necessarily inflationary driven it’s just part of the inherent part of the business that if you’re buying all the scrap you’re you’re paying too much and if you’re selling everything that means you’re charging too low so thank you for that for that clarification so this reminds me of a story so you know our clients you know we help you know companies who export and you know about half of run the scrap metal business and through that relationship there’s a program called the ic disc that we help them with and we help them year after year it’s very specialized their cpa doesn’t usually know much about it they don’t want to know much about it and so we end up having dealings like oftentimes with their other advisors their attorney their cpa

firm their bank and this reminds me of what i thought was a hilarious story this one scrap client we have on the east coast in like 2015-16 when business was kind of tough their cpa came in and said you know your margins are just terrible you’re not making much money i think i can help you just if you just listen to me and do what i say i think i can help you he goes hey that’s great what’s your advice you said it’s pretty it seems pretty simple but you should pay less for your scrap and charge more for it when you sell it that’ll help your margins i’m surprised he didn’t fire the cpa on the spot i think he would have his partner i mean i like i’m a great advice yeah you know it’s uh you wish you thought of it wish you thought of it right just think of all the how much more money you could have made yeah uh-huh so so i’d like to talk just a bit more about the different businesses you have because you know on the surface you know i i think

the definition of a commodity is something like you know it’s fungible there are no differentiation and thus a company has little ability to impact pricing because you know it is a commodity it’s hard to demonstrate additional value add but i think based on your prior comment that it sounds like you are able to differentiate what you do to some degree so why don’t you first just tell me about all the different businesses that now uh make up the empire if you will you know ultimately like we’re in the we’ve preached it to our guys like we’re in the customer service business right so like i’m not in the scrap business i’m not in the pipe business like i’m like we win only if we take care of our customer um and and essentially that starts with basically starts with our employees then it moves to the customer and then out from there because if you don’t have anybody to take care of your customer then it doesn’t really matter to begin with so i mean ultimately we’ve everything that we’ve built and branched off doing is just one more exercise or effort to take

care of our customers just just as an example say we started here this year a company called tire reclaim so okay we there’s no and real big inherent value in recycling tires today you know there’s some different uses for them whether it’s for fuel at cement kilns or for aggregate you know on some certain projects once you’ve shredded them but it’s really still a waste stream we inherently because we have seven seven scrap yards some auto salvages we are a generator of tires so we basically heard about solving our own problem of tires and said okay well if we’re facing this problem we’ve got a slew of customers that are facing a similar problem right because we’ve built a lot of manufacturing companies a lot of farmers ag guys that are you know they’re getting rid of old combines or whatever and they’ve got these tires and so these guys piles of tires and so we just said okay well we have a problem which means other people probably have a problem so let’s figure out how to solve it right and so it was it was a way that we could give our

customers some value that maybe very limited people could so we went about starting tire reclaim so ty reclaims one of them copper reclaim we have them what we do you know mobile copper pickups for electricians contractors demolition sites we do favorite converter reclaim which is a business that we buy catalytic converters all over the country canada and mexico but our core of our business really is our scrap metal recycling company we have a wholesale corrugated steel pipe company and then we have a trucking company our kind of the core you know i say the meats and the meat and potatoes of what puts food on everybody is on our table everything else is for now as these other entities become more core to what we do every day um you know for now they’re the desert they’re the appetizer you know they’re the the rolls on the table they’re part of it you know but we still you know i feel like you have still have to have your kind of meat potatoes of what you do sure and i so i think to summarize it i think maybe a way to say it

is that over time because of your customer service focus as you saw you know pain points for customer customers you develop solutions for that and so like one example you gave was like for electricians every electrician i’ve ever met their process for recycling wire is they just you know throw in the back of their their truck until it gets full and then they drive it to a scrap yard and but it sounds like you’ve tried to make that a little bit easier for them by putting a bin at their location saving the trip to the scrap yard is that right 100 or even one step more we actually have a mobile truck that has a scale on the back of a van really we’ll go to the job site we’ll put the material on the scale right there right of a and pay them right there so at the end of the day or the end of a job or whatever you know whatever you know depends on every customer is different right but we’ve just scaled our business trying to make it as easy on the customer as 100 possible so like whatever

whatever creates an opportunity that we see out there like okay we don’t want you to have to make a decision what scrapyard to haul that coffee yeah just call us and we’ll come pick it up right we’ll pick it up right from the job site and it’s those decisions that you know we’ve really kind of had these internal discussions is what opportunities lie out there that are going to make it easier for your customer and more conducive to business because it’s not about price at some point people value time more than they value price right it’s strictly become a time and a convenience game and if you can provide a good price but you win on convenience and the time and customer service then i feel like you’ve got a much larger shot at the business then you do just throwing a big number and hoping that they well and when you think about it i mean i find it so interesting these different things you’re doing because i mean we don’t work with every scrapyard in the country but you know we work with a decent number and some of the things you’re

talking about i mean are really now some of them may be doing it i just don’t know it but my sense is the way you approach it is uh somewhat unique or cutting edge in the industry and what you’ve also done in business i think you could say you’ve de-commoditized the product because right for that electrician example you know they just throw in the back of their truck they drive around then eventually they go take it someplace and they get you know x amount per pound but there’s risk to that right i mean they run the risk that in the meantime somebody steals it out of their truck and they have the hassle factor and they have to remember to do it where i mean obviously you all are paying them less per pound i shouldn’t say obviously i’m guessing you pay them less per pound when you come pick it up for them but at the end of the day the money they make selling their their wire is really just kind of gravy for them right it buys them you know some lunches and you know some beer after work and

so the fact that you’re paying them you know some you know lower amount i would argue that’s insignificant to them in the grand scheme of things like if you were selling them brand new wire they might be more price sensitive on it but uh but that’s just that’s really really interesting and you now become like their solution right they don’t think of it as they have this commodity that they need to maximize their revenue on they think of it as we have this hassle of this extra wire that we know has value and what we really want is just we want to not think about it and just periodically have somebody show up and and give us some money is that about right i think 100 it goes back to the original question you asked me is you know you have clients that are wondering how do they bring it up to their customers that they need to raise pricing right i mean and it becomes like there’s always going to be consumers or customers that are price sensitive like there’s a reason why walmart exists right i mean they are low price high

volume like costco right costco doesn’t make their money on selling you food i mean anybody that’s ever done that study costco i mean they make their money on the memberships and driving the the volume uh driving volume on those food items and a lot of them they’re not they’re losing money on certain items and making it back on other items which isn’t very which is similar to the scrap game but the reality is they’re making most of their money the lion’s share of their money on their membership yeah and their kirkland signature brand which the only reason they they were able to develop a kirkland signature brand is by years and years of collecting data to figure out which product they can make or have a manufacturer make and rebrand it as kirkland and set it right beside their own product and just get sell through volume well it’s still the it’s the customer service it’s them taking care of their customers and providing them the price but i say that you know for everybody that’s a member of costco or sam’s club or whatever there’s still a lot of people that shop at

you know over here they’re fred meyers or you know a target you know more a more expensive place that’s convenient because close to their house it’s easy to get in and out of it’s not parking a mile away from the store to walk in with a huge grocery cart and buy you know 100 pairs of socks right you know i mean it’s there’s a many different ways to skin the cat and i’m not saying that ours is right i’m just saying that’s what works for us and what we’ve found you know to be good for our businesses you can’t be everything to everybody you can be really good at a few things and just be really good at a few things and one of ours is just service and service isn’t cheap it’s not free and we you know our customers know that but we basically just say if you can out service us and out pay us good luck you have to be in your own game you know right but you better be damn good at service if you’re not going to pay the highest price because if you’re shitty at both

you’re going to go out of business yeah no that’s uh that is really cool so the last thing i want to talk about with your business i can’t believe how the time has flown before i get to the podcast is i believe you have another service that you’re close to launching using some of using some maybe excess capacity in real estate is that something that’s public you know knowledge enough that you want to talk about it or is it premature to talk about that no you can probably argue about the storage side yeah absolutely yeah yeah 100 so so tell me about that and how it ended up coming to be because i think it’s a great example of really thinking outside the box yeah i think we have because of what we do there’s facilities we bought property we bought over the years whether it was an investment opportunity or you know excess property we needed a certain location for one of our businesses we just had property that was available in good decent traffic locations and we were either going to offload it you know sell it and do something different or

we were kind of trying to figure out you know what would be a good opportunity for us so basically what we’ve done is we created a you know we went through we said the storage market is pretty strong it’s more of a long-term play so storage meaning for us covered rv boat storage and also larger scale storage units so okay goes back to basically differentiation we are not interested in being the mini storage company we are you know we basically are big units you know covered rv sp large drive aisles you know larger units and basically going like that’s how we are have differentiated our storage company is you know our prices are going to be a little bit higher but our buildings are going to be nicer and our space you know we’re not here trying to you know maximize to say per square foot on the build out because dirt that would land that we already own so we’re able to you know build bigger units we’re able to provide you know just a different product you know than necessarily what’s out there you know where many storage companies are you

know driving you know cost per unit cost per square foot and trying to you know make that deal pencil with you know with increased property prices increased steel prices and yeah and they think they once again they think they have to capture every rental unit customer as opposed to your concept if you’re not trying to do it so i’m curious did you do any formal market research do you have an rv that you need to place the store did you have some friends that had rvs did you read an article at a magazine or did you just wake up one day and just say you know i have this gut feeling let’s go yeah well i’m not i’m not i’m just like i’m an entrepreneur at heart right like i just look i’m just always curious what people are doing whether it’s a restaurant business like what how are they making money what are they doing like what’s their strategy or uh you know a mechanic shop or whatever i’m just i’m super interested in business like what makes their world go round and why are they doing what they’re doing and so i

was kind of paying attention to the storage side and what really came up to be 100 honest is we had a guy that was our banker and a younger guy you know 30 early 30s smart guy just a super good guy and we were trying to we wanted to hire him and he was more interested on the property development side and okay and so i was talking to my cfo one day and and he was my cfo was smart guy and he’s like man we need to hire this guy and i’m like i know i want to hire him but we got to find something for him to do like i mean sure you do so much you know there’s only so much accounting yeah you don’t want him yeah you don’t planning and you’re not going to hire him to operate a grappler right that’s probably not yeah that’s good for his skill set and so we were kind of you know i was chewing on this whole storage like i wonder how we could do this what makes sense and then i i said i showed up one day and i’m like

all right i got it and and he so him brian ferguson our cfo him and i were talking and i’m like let’s hire casey and let’s have him build storage units and so we met with them we’re like hey this is our you know we got all these you know different properties you know we have the ability to buy the steel right and for the buildings we already own the dirt and and we basically pitched him on like hey what do you if you’re interested in property development then you know obviously he helps us on the financial arm as far as from the banking side because that’s kind of his background his wheelhouse he’s also a cpa and we said you’re in a prime position to be able to get these projects funded and depending on how much funding we need plus it’s an interest you have and we like you as a human you’re just a good person and he was like let’s do it and so it was more of like we found a good guy and we’re like what can that guy do to come what a great what a great

story so it’s so it’s kind of reverse engineered it like yeah having a business we found a good person and we said why don’t you just go build this yeah so in essence do you think of him as sort of like if you think of that storage as like another division that he’s sort of like the division manager for that so is he yeah in essence does he does he have like a pnl does he have like a p l for that division and we let him buy into the we let him you know is we basically said hey we can’t pay you what the bank’s gonna pay you but we’ll give you equity into the facilities oh wow and basically just said you make this thing pencil you make it actually generate a buck that’s money in your pocket it’s money in our pocket and it basically it gives us another goes back to you know making and building yourself a strong balance sheet right because that’s kind of your war chest in the commodities business it’s a it’s an inherently tough business or a great business right there’s really is there’s no

really middle ground it’s either you’re killing it or you’re getting killed and so you have to build a war chest of assets and not just you know some equipment but like really truly bankable assets that if you ever get into a sticky spot or if you ever you know the market takes a crap and you’ve got really good assets now you can leverage those assets and take advantage of somebody that maybe hadn’t financially planned as well right with their facility or their company we’ve made our best deals when the market is not when the market is good right so it’s been important for us to say okay go build the asset war chest so that when the opportunity arises like we’re in a position to strike and so that’s kind of the prob you know the one of the main reasons of doing it we had the property it made sense we’ve had the right guy now it’s like okay it’s a long term play but if we build these we if we build these facilities you know we generate it’s a revenue generator once you get them um and then you actually now

have a rarely bankable asset that you can use to leverage into other you know opportunities yeah so so just one follow-up question there to to be clear so you’re saying that his equity participation is just in the self-storage division correct right yeah so what a wonderful opportunity for uh a banker who has some entrepreneurial desires i mean what a great opportunity right i mean he gets basically to have all the upside of being an entrepreneur in control and that where you guys have have created the platform that doesn’t take much you know he doesn’t have to take a big leap of faith to go from being an employee to just an all-in entrepreneur and you guys have the win if you have a motivated guy who you probably don’t have to spend much time overseeing him right because he’s got all the motivation for the thing to be profitable so i i love that it was good yeah and it was and you know the other thing about casey two is because we you know it takes a while to get these things through planning zoning and get everything you know

the box is checked and then you know covid hit and he ordered steel and everything’s delayed and contractors and whatnot but you know the last probably you being on the financial side you understand this as well as anybody the last year we basically any sort of debt we had we refinanced right and sure we went out and basically you know took advantage of dirt cheap interest rates on anything i said i don’t care what it is like look at the note make sure it’s you know we’re getting the best you know we combined some stuff and just cleaned everything up and and casey was a big part of that because of his banking experience right so just taking a guy like that with it with experience that we didn’t necessarily have in-house at the time you know while we were working through the storage projects he was able to kind of help us get a lot of our financial stuff in order and get us really positioned well for you know rising interest rates or you know other opportunities arbitrage opportunities that are going to you know present themselves so yeah you know

we’re very happy to have him on the team that’s a great story you know the other story i wanted to share remember that cpa that had the brilliant advice for my client about how to increase his margins he had some other brilliant advice so this particular client was very dead averse he had no debt and he kept literally like eight million dollars of cash available i mean not you know physical currency but in the bank basically just in a checky account and once again the cpa explained to him how stupid that was because he wasn’t earning anything on it and that you know if you put that in a you know diversified you know you know stock portfolio he could earn you know five six seven eight you know whatever assumption you want to use and that was a much smarter decision and he was an idiot for just leaving his money like that and once again i think he would have fired him except his partner really liked the cpa and his partner wouldn’t let him fire it but so if you just had to guess why would a scrap guy keep eight

million dollars you know laying around as dry powder if i had to guess yeah oh because i mean the same reason i mean most guys do is you know that eight that eight million might make you negative one or two percent today but if the commodities fall off the side of the hill you’re gonna be able to buy cheap and a lot and so you’re gonna you know you might make negative one percent this year but you’re gonna make a hundred percent year two or three and average those out and you’re gonna be a lot better very yep you nailed it what he his strategy was you know he in his circles it was known that he had large amounts of capital and you know we’re talking like a 30 million dollar a year scrap yard okay to give you some context and so you know the the word was out that he had large amounts of of liquid capital that he could deploy on a moment’s notice on a phone call or a handshake so as he described it he said dave he goes yeah so for 11 months out of the year

i have a negative you know negative real interest rate he said but because of that i get opportunities not just when the markets are bad but just when somebody calls me because they have an opportunity and they don’t have the cash for it or they’ve gotten trouble and they need to dump something and he said when those opportunities come up they don’t say hey can you go to your bank borrow some money and come back in a week and buy this from me their conversation is usually at 10 in the morning they say hey i’m in a bad i’m in a bad spot i’ll cut you a great deal if you can pay me in two hours and so and then he has the patience to be able to then you know process sit on that do whatever but but anyway that was the other brilliant advice by the by the cpa so well the subscribe guys are like you know business guys in general right i think that they have a mind for that and it’s the same reason i’m not a big stock investor is i i try and operate in areas

that i’m that i feel like i have a strategic advantage right is strategic advantage i mean i have to be able to provide some advantage that says whoever i’m going to compete against does not have right and i think and if it’s cash then it’s cash if it’s you know i i own some property so it’s easier for me to put up a you know storage facility than the next guy is gotta go get a loan for the dirt and the steel and the you know like i try and find an inherent advantage that we have that maybe the next guy is you know he’s going to have to kind of come to the table with a lot more than what i already have in house and so that makes 100 sense why that why your uh client is doing what he’s doing sure so no well hey i could just talk to you all day about your business philosophies because i really find it just very intriguing and impressive just how many opportunities you’ve capitalized on but we probably should talk a little bit about the podcast so talk to me about the

podcast what’s the name of it why did you start it do you enjoy doing it so let’s start with the name what’s the name of it so we like i’ll get i’ll just check it i’ll try and give you the cliff notes version my very first podcast was a podcast called reline unknown and i was very against putting myself out there i was just kind of operating in the shadows just doing what i was doing and i had a guy john sacco from sierra come hit me up and say hey i want to push you on my podcast and i was like no i’m good because you like to just to be clear you flying below the radar screen yeah i just was kind of in my little world over here in idaho just doing my thing and i didn’t want to bring it and you didn’t want to bring a lot of attention to yourself right because you don’t want somebody to go oh my god it sounds like idaho’s a great market you know we need to go open a location there right was that yeah well yeah at that point i

was playing i was i caught myself playing defense instead of offense and i’m like why am i playing defense like i’m we’re damn good at what we do you know i’m like you got to beat us at our own game if you’re going to beat us and so i’m like i’m going to go play offense so essentially that’s why i started the podcast john talked me into doing his podcast so i did it and i was like oh this isn’t bad and so then i had just bought a company in outside of indianapolis indiana um and it was it was a company that we relined on existing corrugated steel pipe under the freeways under under railroad you name it like people that didn’t want to tear out an existing culvert and they want to reline it and you know make it cost effective so i was like it was it’s a very relatively new market and within the last say 20 years we had a new product we had one competitor and i was like let’s just start let’s just start a podcast where we go around and interview people that are either relining

or that are engineers and because we had basically bought a company that closed up shop had to get the manufacturing fired back up and go find dealers for this pipe that we were manufacturing in indiana and so in order to bring awareness i’m like let’s start a podcast and just start talking to people and start there’s nobody doing it at the time and so we did and we just we traveled around we started talking engineers started talking to you know people that were installing it we started talking to you know anybody that would talk to us about anything to do with re-line and so that was my first podcast and as i you know we built that business up our we only had one competitor at the time they’re a pretty large outfit they approached us and said hey what do you guys think about getting bought out you know selling this business to us and my wife was getting tired of me traveling as much as i was you know the midwest and east coast and south and she’s like really do you need another business and i’m like no i don’t

need it but it was so anyways i sold the business and in that i had a gal that was working with us at the time i pretty much turned the podcast over to her and said run with it and then i started a scrap life podcast which is more in my wheelhouse and it basically revolves around people in the scrap metal recycling industry i i love it and i really enjoyed the first episode where you interviewed your parents and kind of get the back story i mean that was really cool just to to hear that because you could tell that some of those conversations you maybe never had like specifically right you just had tangential conversations around the history and different things so that was pretty cool so but what’s the motivation like is your goal to be like a top 10 podcast and make a million dollars a year selling advertising revenue is it just kind of something you like doing for fun what’s is there a strategic purpose for it or is it just something for fun you know it’s i i look at it as i mean i love what i

do right i get to talk to people like the reason i do the podcast is probably twofold is a i’m super proud of what my team and people that we’ve put together over the years has built so i’m i’m very like i become more of like an offensive player versus defense right like i’m like hey look at us look what we’re doing like these guys are doing it and gals are doing it every day like they’re killing it you know but on the flip side of that is i enjoy talking to other people that are out there doing the same thing like and not by the same thing like that we’re doing every day but just that are out there killing it in their perspective whether they’re the owner the operator the buyer the you know whatever they’re doing that really have an appreciation for our industry which is you know the scrap metal recycling industry and that are just interested in kind of helping themselves create a network and i heard somebody say it one time i really taken it to heart and they you know like the world is abundant right so

if you’re successful that’s not taking food off my plate like that’s actually that’s actually you know good i mean it’s good for energy that you are successful so i want to a surround myself by other successful people and be i want to celebrate your success because that’s not taking away from my success so the podcast gives me the opportunity to do that it gives me an opportunity to you know talk to them about what made them successful maybe i’ll glean a couple you know lessons or tips or whatever from it and kind of go from there i love it that’s that is great what i think you kind of touched on it if you could just summarize it like to one thing or two things like what’s the best thing about having a podcast like what comes to mind is just like if you just had to summarize it like what’s the best thing about it i love hearing people’s stories and talking to them i love you know like talking to people other people in our industry and just hearing how they what i’m a big documentary i used to love reading uh

biographies that was kind of yeah me too my style of books growing up so the podcast is just another form of reading a biography or watching a documentary right it’s just a hey you joe blow tell me your story and tell me how you got here and tell me you know what you do or how you did it like that to me is cool you don’t have to be some famous person i don’t really care like just be have been successful at whatever it was that you’ve done and i want to hear the story because it’s interesting to me yeah you know it’s so funny i just i i feel like you’re like a younger brother i never had i’m the same way i love biographies because it’s like i mean you know when you read a biography of benjamin franklin it’s like you’re sitting down and he’s distilled to you like his life you know lessons across his life and that insight just is amazing and i also like you know documentaries for that uh same reason and i and your answer on the podcast is similar to mine i say that i

like to give i like to provide a gift to a successful entrepreneur by giving them a platform to tell their story and that’s really how i think of it and that’s how i think of it and it’s great because you do learn stuff and um like we have a client who sold a business not in the scrap business he saw it about five years ago you know really great exit and in his late 60s and i really told his whole story he’s got two kids some grandkids and they were saying when they listened to that podcast they learned stuff about their dad they didn’t even know about from his story because it’s just a unique platform you know when you sit down and have a bear with somebody it’s not really appropriate to to talk about yourself the whole hour but it is okay when you’re a guest on a podcast and and i just and that client and good friend he just died a couple weeks ago and one of his grandchildren was like two three years old and and his other son doesn’t have any kids yet and so i was thinking

how cool is that going to be that 10 years from now 20 years from now when they say hey what was grandpa like and they’re like hey i’ll tell you what he’s like you know here’s the podcast you know let’s fire it up while we drive to your baseball game like isn’t it 100 i love it and that’s the same reason why i want to interview my parents right for my episode number one um i had done a few podcasts obviously for the reline side so i felt a little more comfortable in the interview process so i’m like okay i said you guys are going to be my first podcast for this first scrap life and i said and i’m just going to ask you a question i said you know we actually what we did is we got a couple bottles of wine and we just sat at the table and we poured wine and we just we i did the podcast we drank a few glasses of wine and i just asked him questions and told the story right so and i did that for myself but i did that for my

my my kids to know you know here’s how it happened and i don’t have any preconceived notions about what whether my kids are going to be in the business or not like i don’t really care honestly like i ain’t gonna give it to them so they don’t really matter like they’re gonna have to either they’re gonna have to go work for it like i did or go do something different and i’m i’m i would just assume them go do something different has come to work for me you know unless they just love it you know if they love it like i did then by all means let’s go but if you don’t go find something you love because i’m not gonna give you and good for you and i and just because i’m not i don’t i’m not going to ruin you like life is too good if you earn it and that good feeling you have down in your stomach that you earn something like it just takes the food takes better when you bought it the car drives smoother when you’re the one making the payment the house feels more more homey

when you’re the one that bought it you know and i don’t care what anybody says like i 1000 believe that and if my kids aren’t going to get a free ride i’m sorry yeah no i’m i’m with you well that is that’s awesome so as we’re kind of wrapping up what what do you wish you knew when you started podcasting and what might you’ve done any differently if you knew then what you know now equipment like like basic stuff what would make the best microphone what’s the best you know because podcasting is so audio driven obviously right you know it if you have a good audio and you can and do it then it’s a little clearer on the other end and then basically find something that you’re don’t just do a podcast because that’s the thing to do like find something you’re super passionate about and then find other people that are passionate about that topic and they’re because they’re going to give you the best interview because they’re interested you know they’re not it’s not you’re not forcing them to do it now i haven’t listened to to to very many of

your episodes here i listened to your parents episode and they kind of dabbled in a couple others i’m just curious are your guests all folks who are involved in the processing of scrap or do you ever have guests that do things that are kind of tangential to the business like you know a company that sells equipment or that provides you know specializes in insurance for the scrap business i’m just curious i’ve had like uh the guy that is the president of the you know recycling today magazine yeah so i’ve had him on there and asked him because he has a different viewpoint of the recycling industry than say an operator or an owner i’ve had i’ve had the gal that runs our two eastern idaho locations her name is amy and just to give a woman’s women and scraps point of view please kind of came up through the ranks and and you know what’s her day today like what was her story how did she go from just you know living in bernie idaho to becoming you know the manager of two facilities and what’s her perspective so yeah i kind of i

try and vary it enough to just you know keep it interesting does that make sense no that does that does make sense well i cannot believe we’re already over an hour so why don’t we wrap up is there anything we didn’t talk about that you think we should have no i think we covered the bases and i just want to tell you thank you for giving me an opportunity and hopefully it went as expected it absolutely did i i really appreciate your time i really enjoy the story and i look forward to having a chance to meet you in person in in vegas in a couple weeks i’ll follow up separately and to get something on the calendar so thanks again for taking the time really uh love the story love the insights a lot of lessons to learn not only for people in the scrap business but even people not in the scrap business i just really like what you’ve done so i’m so thankful to talk to you likewise have a great day brad there we have it another great episode thanks for listening in if you want to continue the conversation

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