okay welcome everybody we are here with another episode of recycled Idaho I’m going to introduce Our Guest I got Graham from vgs how you doing I got Jordan right here how are you good thanks for having us yes thank you thanks for coming on we’ve been working on your company for how many years how many years has it been over two two and a half years and you guys are up out of uh Portland all right Linda is our home office yeah malicious dive in what’s vgs stand for um well it could stand for a lot of different things there’s no definite but we always introduce it as very good service okay yeah uh that’s really our goal you know TurnKey um White Glove best way to say it you all about customer service yeah uh well we’re known as movers a lot of times but you know that’s why we have a logistics as opposed to a moving moniker um and it we try to differentiate ourselves because we don’t just you know leave the product in the customer’s hands to set up um it’s all ready to use when we do when

we leave so turkey what do you guys do though what do we do um move Solutions so office moves when office mates need to go from one location to another uh oftentimes that’s prior to decommissioning which we also handle which is the removal of all FF e Furniture fixtures and equipment from an office space and then also Furniture installs and uh upgrades so office furniture let’s say if we built like a new corporate headquarters for United Metals and we are all moving there we could hire you to move all the people that need to get moved over there and you’ll take care of it all and exactly take care of all the furniture take whatever it is get out like how long would I be down on my my Workstation sometimes as little as four hours depending on the moves uh we have clients who require it to be finished within a very specific time frame and obviously that’s contingent on how close the location is yeah you know yeah um origination and destination so in the move management end which we’re developing more and more of we have trade Partners who do move

management specifically and we’re moving into more of that um as far as the the analysis of who’s going where you know uh getting our move control documents put together making sure that everybody’s aware of when they’re moving uh they have all their stuff packed up you know there’s there’s a long list of things that goes uh along with moving an employee from one location to another oh yeah especially if an employee’s been in like an office for the last 10 years or 20. 20 years they got everywhere yep so a lot of them probably that forces them to probably clean up their it does and which probably makes them feel great because that always feels good when your desk is clean and organized and then I would assume you don’t just do do you do just moves if I’m like hey I’m happy with what I got can I just move this to point A to point B or do you only do it if I like I’m buying more new new equipment like a new office desk good good question yeah um as small as you know a handful of people moving from

one location to another without decommissioning absolutely we handle those types of things um our bread and butter is typically you know moves that are more than an office manager can handle or a a manager of of the location could handle and a lot of times that ends up being 20 or 30 people you know so um that’s generally when people start to consider us although it could be as small as 10 you know uh depends on the circumstances but yeah everything from moving you know five to ten people from one location to another is being complete all the way through um you know 400 did 200 plus in about three days uh in a 200 people 200 people and about a three-day move uh Silicon Valley so um we have locations uh well satellite locations in um Phoenix Arizona uh as well as the Bay Area okay so you guys have Portland you have a location here and then you got the two others yep two other satellite locations that we have um clients that we just don’t have enough business that are yet but that’s our expansion where we’re heading so um

there’s a lot of opportunity here you know the Bay Area obviously with covet and everything shutting down it made things weird for everybody everyone had to get a good way to say it it’s a ghost town there from what we understand so um there’s a lot of furniture needs to be decommissioned down there a lot of people that are going to be downsizing so they need to be moved from one location to another um there’s lots of opportunities all over the United States when it comes to corporations making changes um needing help you know not getting lost because it’s it’s really common to get lost the pitfalls are um you know they’re big land mines too yeah you can avoid them you know I would highly suggest avoiding them I believe that and Graham are we are you guys doing the I.T are you guys bringing in I.T guys to like run you know run the new communication wire whatever Wi-Fi routers into these offices yeah so we have a guy on staff who has all the certifications for low volt and all of our guys are trained on doing computer

disconnects and reconnecting so like our standard operating procedures generally taken down their computer they will have had move instructions to pack up all other personal items and then we do the move for them and hook their computer up and all their peripherals just the way they had it before okay which sometimes can be a bit complicated because there’s got to be sometimes some snags in that right because I mean like if it where you guys have to troubleshoot if you’re like well why the hell is in the yeah every once in a while but yeah I think um the way we handle doing it right is good documentation you would probably do it better than me because like I would like when I do like that I’ll be like I’ll look at it and I might take a photo big might and I’m like I’ll remember where all this was right but when you’re doing 200 moves over three days but I won’t on one move you know so like you guys have to be documenting with photos oh yeah and everything has to go in static bags and you know kept together and

you know possibly bubble wrapping monitors and and then hooking it all back up the same way with their docking station the way it was the monitors hooked up to different things oftentimes people have multiple monitors setups or photos of their families back up where they are personal items they get to handle themselves okay I was just curious like how deep does this go because I was like I get a little weirder you know um so for both of you what’s the the biggest and or craziest job you guys have done oh probably uh four floors 320 340 000 square feet of decommissioning uh and the request was as fast as humanly possible was that the one I’m thinking of that was here yeah yeah we have a client who’s uh um they make uh computer chips I can’t say their name semiconductor manufacturer um and they they contracted us to go ahead and decommission to move all of their people out of the building and decommissioned four floors of um offices and cubicles and uh conference rooms oh goodness what did we end up with like 1200 people moving in preparation for that I

believe I want to say it was about 1200 moving uh just for that one I could be mistaken there I mean to have all the numbers if we were looking a button yeah yeah it was a ballpark that’s a big huge big number huge numbers and there were 25 uh the numbers escaped me um you know what let me let me just grab go for it go for it well you should almost know him Nick we were calling trucks to you every day for three months it’s the number is a ton that’s the number tons and tons of tons yeah okay here it is um workstations was 1770 workstations that we uh decommissioned um I’m sorry those were cubicles only and then offices were a couple hundred 120 conference rooms so 1700 employees moved in preparation for and out of that building um a portion of those had already been moved or were working from home so it was more than a thousand that we moved in preparation for this 3 400 bulbs each workstation had um uh what are they called the two fluorescent bulbs yes fluorescent bulbs in them and those have

to be collected the Hazmat you know with one of them with a lot of people around you you don’t want to breed that stuff so I will look up the real number of how much we’ve recycled here I think at United Metals probably hundreds of tons oh it’s insane probably it’s insane I’ll look it up I’ll put it on this podcast sure for everybody to see because and this is where I met um Scott and Dan 2019 they got a hold of us and I really like them I like to you guys culture and they just came it’s like hey can you recycle any of this and these are the cubicles mainly the main things that we were talking about cubicles and like old like filing cabinets and things of that nature desks old dads like that metal chairs in your yeah in the metal chairs and you know that scrap we we were able to they gave me a sample of the the filing cabinets and all that stuff that’s 10 you know that’s all metal almost all metal it’s the things that are like the desk with the wood tops we learned

like no we got to take the wood tops off it’s not good enough you know it’s just too much waste and then I took three different sizes of those cubicles here and we broke them down and it was I don’t have the exact number on me but it was around 80 percent of it was metal which people won’t really think that when you look at a cubicle you know because a lot of things the thing was cool about it is the middle section was all metal too you know and I think that those were nicer probably so people could use magnets on them yeah so that because I’ve seen them so those are better because I’ve seen some that have that particle board Center or cardboard or cardboard yep I’ve seen those and that’s where us as a company rather than saying no like we don’t we don’t all garbage right we said well let’s look at it and see and then we’re like okay yeah we’ll do it so we provided a trailer and we would swap them a lot and insanely like sometimes two or three times two or three times there

was some on that first run it was like two to three times a day there were some because yeah there were some we ended up running um and you guys were running as well you know three or four lines or four loads a day sometimes it was insane it really was and it was really cool though and it was cool to to help keep that out of the landfills I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if if we threw all that away and even the landfills like a lot of those landfill operators they’re separating they’re they’re segregating their metal yeah and they recycle it so a lot of people don’t really think about that when they think of landfill like if they think it goes to the landfill it’s lost forever but you never know like with those they might be like oh this isn’t yeah this is garbage yeah you just never know like maybe just might not realize like oh this actually is the most the weights still iron metal in um so we got it here like we had a made it all work um so I recycled the metal

did you throw the rest away what do you guys do we try to reduce that yeah on that project we wasted maybe a little more than than we have subsequently we’re um so you were talking about taking the wood tops off the wood desk yep we’re basically doing that with everything as long as our customer allows it you know they don’t have time constraints because it does take extra time to pre-process some of the customers want it recycled and some probably don’t I think everybody wants it recycled but they just might not it’s like anything in this Society everybody wants it recycled but they don’t maybe don’t want to pay for it exactly or put the time into it or anything so because because once you really dial into like recycling certain things like fibers and Plastics and things of that nature it costs more than it’s worth to really recycle it you got there’s got to be a cost associated with it so unfortunately you were able to find homes with for the wood yeah so we found another Uh Wood recycler here in Boise and we’ve been working with them for

all the wood surface so that was a shout out if you want uh Treetop yep Treetop recycling up on Diamond Street Okay um yeah so they’re taking a lot of our wood now and that allowed this last project we kept all but less than five percent it’s probably going to be around three percent that actually went into a dumpster I think we only ran one one dumpster on the last week 250 000 square feet of decommissioning everything else this one was about 70. sorry that one was the right we’ve done a we’ve done two large decommissionings and one medium decommissioning at this point out there um uh 750 000 square feet or something crazy um but the the numbers have been reduced drastically because of the um inclusion of recycling the uh the wood tops um we don’t know the final numbers yet we’ll get those and be nice to post those we’ll post those we’ll put them in the comments so we can overlay it we’ll get it on here um the white boards you guys gave them did they get new white boards what do they get did you guys sell them

new white boards or did they get those glass ones right I’m not sure we’ll see what they put in that’s uh the next contractor’s job but uh so you’re just doing the move and decommission right you’re not putting putting up whiteboards from not in this instance not in this one but you do so but before we try to recycle anything to keep it if if there’s any usable life left in a product it’s better to you know donate it to somebody you know well it’ll get recycled someday probably but um you know at least you get some use of life out of it before you have to crush it up and bail it and send it to well I’ve got one of those white boards in my office rather than throwing it because I think probably what I that would have gone to the landfill there’s a little bit of aluminum on it but it was and they probably had a still sheet in the center because it’s magnetic you know um and we’re able to donate a few to a place my wife volunteers at Breaking Chains Academy in Nampa they got two

of the bigger ones cool I just met with them they’re gonna figure out how to use them they haven’t got them up yet those things are monsters they’re heavy eight and ten feet I think yeah they’re they’re big so and I still have more that were were donating out we’re trying to I think I got the Mountain Home School District’s gonna take some cool yeah and it’s cool like so we’re gonna see it all that go out no we thank you because we’re using them internally too yeah we gave about 120 from this last job to Sage International School um they’re building a new campus and they were so grateful I mean there’s nothing better oh yeah they’re not cheap though they’re not cheap those those are quality ones too those quality industrial sized ones yeah and I mean even just Freight and delivery on them is really expensive yeah so Sage International Greenleaf Academy oh okay his kids go to Sage mine go to Greenleaf and then uh Boise State as well Sage is out here yeah down on Park Center they have a campus and they’re building a new one got it

out that way always so let’s go back a little bit did Scott and Dan start this company I meant that good question originally uh Scott did kind of his um I believe father-in-law is the the one who founded the the company about 20 years ago um under a different name about five years ago um what was the name okay are you allowed to say it oh goodness yes and I don’t recall off the top of my head um it may come to me um it wasn’t it wasn’t it yes oh okay I thought it was that name uh okay got it um right about five years ago uh it was rebranded uh was going to go into some government services which is uh originally what the logo and everything was going to entail but then a few things changed and some transitions to um office moves uh we have a lot of clients over there did you just find opportunity there versus where the the path of the company was originally going you’ve had more opportunity and those types of moves there’s band Services yeah um and the big changeover was Tech

so um not all not all movers can don’t want to be nice to everybody not all movers have the capability with their staff to be able to be accountable on a short-term constraint time constraint okay so when we started to get into uh high-level moves of employees who were you know 150 250 000 a year you know um you have some challenges when they take uh weeks to get moved internally or by a company who just doesn’t have the so high level companies um you know Fortune 500s don’t deal with that that’s you know minor league stuff yeah uh so when we started to get into those for the city of Portland for the Community College over there the hospital um many clients over in the Portland area um we started to see that there was a a niche or niche in uh constraint time constraint moves where employees needed to be down and up very specifically I think as people get maybe move up in their career or a company gets trying to scale they realize how valuable the time is the most valuable commodity all of us have I’m always

looking for time hacks my own personal life and my work life I’m just like I need like more time I need another hour of my kids or I need another hour at the office like kind of wake up earlier you know what can I do like so being down that’s a real problem especially if you have a thousand people down for you know then you’ve got a major problem like that like that cost I would be hard to even measure yeah like if you ever have you guys attempted to measure that cost um you know you know when we’re when we’re actually doing the moves what are you doing a bid after the day I mean like if you’re busy no we don’t we don’t take that into account too much on the front end as a company but you know our guys I’d be like I’m Gonna Save you this much money that’s responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars you know I would think Millions for uh or you know um salary employees for the computer chip guys that would have been millions of dollars if they were down

r d you know yeah production all all kinds so obviously like a smaller outfit like ourselves like if we were an extra couple hours it’s not as dire you know even small businesses like payroll is usually their biggest expense so it is yeah I mean if you come to them and say you guys are only going to be down half a day that’s a big difference then two days like this is going to be a two-week move yeah and that’s a that it’s a big deal it is because operations must continue or else Revenue stops and I mean that’s a no-brainer you know Revenue stops you have bigger problems than employees not working so that’s it yeah it’s not an easy thing to plan for so that’s why the the preparation is so crucial in all of these projects so where what was vgs what did it stand for very good service oh before veteran government services and I think I think when I met Scott even though it was maybe already changed that’s how he introduced bgs sure well that that shifted when we started moving into moving computers because okay

when that was really the you know the transition because before that we just moved people which was or things and when we don’t have higher level constraints on what we’re doing that we’re responsible for you know large dollar amounts of production it’s pretty basic but you know when you start to have to move 30 people in a four hour window with six guys A to Z you know and you get there at 7 30 and they’re hooked up by 12 30 and back working that’s probably it’s TurnKey you know and that’s that’s awesome the definition in our book you know and then we have Day One support this is this is the best part about what we do in my opinion is we’re not willing to leave something halfway done typically after our moves like our our move down in the Bay Area here we just completed yesterday we had Day One support a full day where we’ll have uh our low volt Tech and a couple of other installers generally are Movers Tech guys who are there to make sure that monitors are working um so if there’s something that wasn’t right you

got some people on the with their boots on the ground like they’re there to help absolutely okay yeah I would imagine a lot of those come other companies like yours don’t do that I could be wrong it’s not standard I wouldn’t think that would be because that’s an extra expense for you but it is um business long enough realize how important the service is and people if they liked your service they’ll go back to you maybe costs a little more you know that’s one of the reasons we called you after the first one you know because our first one here in Boise was I think about 240 000 square feet and that was done in a very similar fashion uh how fast can you get it out of the building and we had some restrictions just because of people or exits in the facility or transport of the materials there were some things that had to get creative and pretty fast we have other customers and other material we got to move so we had to work we had to both work with each other and that was difficult you know because they’d be

like hey I’d be in a chair or something like dude that my guy’s in La Grande Oregon until Tuesday and it’s Friday and we’re going well this one’s full and we have another one ready to go Monday and I think we did we did always do our best to get it yeah and we get try to get a guy we usually could get a guy dedicated to that on that first one the other one wasn’t as like every day quite as demanding but um there were some other reasons was that different because like still them still going through covet and all that was there a lot of restrictions on your end with all that or were you able to just get like foreign tests every day twice a week sometimes twice a week okay yep um I get it yeah but it slowed me down you know it did a little bit uh we did a we did a pretty good job with all of these mitigating those risks and you know we had to bring in 10 to 20 percent more labor to begin with okay because we know well I think we

hired I think 25 people here in Boise in our our initial um decommissioning um and then we brought over I think another six or eight from Portland so we had about 25 working on the project initially uh with our first one here in town uh this latest one um we had about 15 I think throughout pretty pretty standard so that one was a little longer project about three plus months versus the first one being to say 40 days or so 30 days pretty pretty quick projects oh yeah I was able to walk through a few times during the projects before the project and then during and I could not believe how much you guys were getting done I’m like holy crap and I call Sal who controls our trucks I’m like hey we need a guy like dedicated these guys are moving fast like we gotta be ready and he did an awesome job like we would get it swapped out um it’s more fun to work hard oh absolutely man um the crazier the better you know you just gotta not lose your mind yeah organize chaos man you kind of hit it

on it but when they ask you first what is your favorite part of what you do with vgs my favorite part is working hard out with the full team just pushing you know sweating like the craziness there’s like oh you gotta yeah get it done tearing it down you know getting physical that that’s that’s uh my favorite part do you like to see the final product is it kind of nice a big empty room or a room of blank cubicles no I I it is it is fun yeah it’s it’s cool to see all the work that’s done because the thing with what we do you the guys never get to see an empty pile because it keeps coming in we always know if that pile like goes away with it we’re in trouble you know so I think um I came from like a construction and a cell’s background me personally I would really like look at a roof that we did or paint a house like oh that looks awesome I’m really proud of that yeah finished product the recycling World they don’t really get that you get the finished bells and

you ship the loads oh we get to see it a little bit though because we we get to sort the piles so seeing all of that in the recycling pile and hardly any in the landfilled piles feeling good that feels good yeah I’m sure I love it when we put the numbers in um I think it was like 3.5 2 or 3.8 tons total to trash and it popped up as about eight percent and we don’t have our final numbers yet from September and a couple other things yeah our goals were trying to get that under five I think we have that yeah we’re we’re guessing ballpark around the two to three percent range as far as a waste of waste of the entire project that doesn’t count as by weight and that doesn’t count some of the waste that goes to recycling so you know there’s a little buffer in there um because there is some waste that comes to you or whatever yeah for sure like that stuff’s gonna get shredded right separated out that’s going to get blown off and wet yeah I thought that’s the shredder guys like

what they can recycle on their end like they might be that might be a product they are recycling though there’s a good possibility it is I guarantee if they could they would no so but inevitably there is some waste that comes off those shredding lines you know that’s just the nature of the business you know but we do our best to keep it all in the you know in the recycle stream so I gotta say my favorite is going from the percentage 30 plus percent into the the trash to you know the three percent it’s like I like to find like a new way like you know that’s a huge move that’s a huge change yeah it’s crazy I mean that’s major leverage points when you told me those numbers when we you guys did that luncheon like I I was kind of shocked like wow that’s all the waste that came out of here you know yeah it’s it’s crazy to see those reductions you know and just going that this product was going to be under a golf course somewhere voting eventually now it’s being shredded in now made into uh cow

beds you know things like that that are betting yep yeah why wouldn’t we do that as a society right it makes sense a lot more than throwing away what um one more question for both you what where do you see the future of vgs any like big Innovations any big Innovations in the industry you’re in any big changes or goals keeping it out of the landfill is a pretty big innovation um there’s got to be fairly one other company in the country that kind of has a program that’ll do that but because they probably more maybe are Turn and Burn like right oh totally yeah yeah it takes a lot like we have to train all our guys before we start saying here’s the two dozen categories of items that we’re going to be touching so every time you touch a wood top desk take the top off separate the wood from the metal every time you touch uh pedestal put it in the metal pile every time you touch a file cabinet goes here when you touch 24 inch monitors put it in the redeploy pile when you put it touches 17 inch

monitor put it in the uh donate pile you know so we have to go through and train all our guys for every single thing we touch before we even get in there but that’s the only way to do it because after it’s taken out of the building nobody can I mean unless you’re just shredding it and doing your kind of best to separate like you could never get donate items back out again of something that went in a dumpster so only the first guys that can touch it which is what we’re there to do is are the ones who can sort it and actually try to keep it out of a landfill awesome um zero zero landfill um the industry is moving toward uh refurbishing so I don’t know how much refurbishing is going to be done out of the older stuff that’s coming out because some of it can be refurbished some can’t like Sally like the old desk well no you get cubicles so let’s see okay you have um we’re going to be working on an install here uh next week in a week on some reused furniture out of California

for a client new office getting open here in Boise and they need you know a 10 station set up or something for 14 stations and so they’ll pull furniture from a used uh a decommissioning and take it and try to redistribute it but if it’s old enough or um not in good enough shape they’ve got to refurbish it which means they’ve got a dry clean sometimes all the Fabrics other times they’ll strip them and reattach so this is a lot of times the manufacturers who are doing this so closed-looped systems um Apple him and I talk about this all the time about closed loop systems in the the manufacturing world and apple uh is one of the few that does that in the world trust you tries to right there’s it’s extremely difficult to track everything so they’re trying to get all their computers back put a product out and make it available for their customers to bring it back to them and recycle reuse redeploy whatever same thing in the furniture world the problem is that the money isn’t there you know and the installs I mean the the pulling it out

is more expensive than what it’s worth got it right I would think like those cubicles that makes a lot of sense if you found the person that manufactured them and ship them back to them and they can they’re already set up I would think it’s got to be cheaper to re-skin them than rebuild the whole thing I don’t know though I don’t know I have no idea yeah that is interesting depends on how far are you traveling yeah the location is huge yeah you know that’s interesting see I that’s what that’s what I love about my job is I get to see all these different industries that also recycle yeah and kind of learn a little bit about it like and it opens my eyes to I’m like oh I never thought of that you know and it’s cool well I really appreciate it guys yeah thank you uh thank you very much and I will get those numbers we’ll put it on here and I’m hoping it was two percent waste yeah so me too awesome thanks guys thank you everybody thank you appreciate it thanks