on this episode of recycled idaho i get a chance to sit down with john schiff and hear his story of what led him from video production to owning and operating obtainium and starting a new online auction house idaho surplus auction enjoy all right i want to welcome everybody to new episode of recycled idaho i’m sitting here with john how you doing john okay thanks man so johnny here john um i’ve known you for a long time 10 years maybe yeah i think i think 10 years yeah i’ve bought a lot of scrap from you you have we’ve bought a lot of e-scrap you scrap and i never and the greatest thing about a lot of the things that i get to do is i truly turn business relationships into like friendships you know and that’s one of the great and it’s true like it’s a true like friendship not just a business thing there’s a component where it’s both yeah but one thing i don’t know about you and all the years we’ve known each other i don’t really know what got you to where you are today if you want to give

us a quick history or another history show us what half hour as long as you want it okay okay we could do a two-parter maybe yeah we can okay so um yeah so what we do our company’s name is optanium and what we do is we re-market lab scientific and industrial machinery and weirder the better and um we don’t deal much with we try to avoid doing much with consumer electronics or technology or whatnot and really go after um stuff that scientists or makers or uh other entities that are dealing in the high-tech sector would use like we sold stuff to spacex and scale spacex is one of the elon musk companies yeah yeah and um and so anyway um we buy stuff all over the country you know if i can get it from nasa awesome um and also we buy a lot from uh high-tech businesses that go go under so here’s how the business started it was 1999 and um i was working here in town doing uh video production corporate here in boise idaho boisei yeah i did that out of college did it for about

10 years oh longer than that about 15 years so in 1999 and to um i needed to go out and find a tape deck for a client at sim plot and this was a tape deck that was what was called three-quarter u-matic and it was an old technology that kind of got phased out and we didn’t have one to do our editing and so it’s like god i gotta find one of these because their whole archive at the time was they had a ton of umatic tapes and we used to do a video newsletter for them and for sim plot yeah and it was on a different format so i had to figure out how to get this tape deck and i didn’t know where it was so driving the airport one day and i’m up by the blm nifc center and there’s a uh uh at the time i think it’s still there there’s a u.s forest service warehouse just kind of right in that area yeah i think it’s still there yeah so i’m driving by and um i just see this uh you know sandwich board out front

it says auction and it’s like oh man i’ve never been to an auction before and so i’m all about you know getting out of your comfort zone trying stuff and if you fail fail spectacularly so it’s like went in there and i go yeah cool i’m gonna go see what a government auction’s like because i’ve always wanted to go to one so i walk in there and everything’s laid out in lots and i’ll be dang if one of the lots was about five pallets of old av equipment that they were getting rid of tripods cameras and one of these big boat anchor video decks it was like wow that’s serendipity did like a light come down from the heavens exactly yeah this whole warehouse yeah just like in indiana jones so i see that deck there and it’s like whoa okay i’m gonna put a bid in on this and it was sealed bit at the time and i had no experience with auctions it just wasn’t really a thing and um so a sealed bid that just you put your bid in and yeah whoever’s the highest guess yeah so you’ll have a

number of lots and then uh an item list if they’re that good or you just get to inspect it and then you yeah you write down a number fill out the paperwork you know you know put it in an envelope and and submit it and then they open them up at their leisure on a specific date okay and away you go so i just said you know what this this stuff had 16 millimeter film cameras in a really nice old gear really and i just said you know what i am not going to get this but okay i’ll write a bit down and i thought it was a good bid and put it in and there you go do you remember the number it was four hundred dollars okay and i think what did i say four or five pallets worth of yeah so your standard pallet and it was about single level and some supplies so uh you know i didn’t know i could i don’t think i even remembered when they were going to open the bid so i forgot about it and it must have been three weeks later or something

like that i get a letter you know with their return address they’re from i think it was gsa or something like that and open it up i won i won it and that was awesome so i go down the bank you know get some money go out there and i had an old isuzu trooper at the time and i did a couple uh loads back to my garage my wife’s at work at the time and i just threw it is that the same as zuzu that you had when i first met you yeah like a like a tan one oh no no i had it was gray it was oh okay i’m thinking of a different one yeah it was awesome we go help man i can tell you some stories with that that built the business that was a great old truck so anyway i go back and forth and i basically we had you know as many people’s garages are you’ve got your own crap in one bay so you only have space in one side to park your car and that was where my wife parked and so i just filled

it because i had to get it out of there and my wife comes home and uh i tell her i tell her the project i can just imagine yeah the garage opens it is full of all this ephemera you know it’s like and um so i thought god how am i going to get rid of this and i the light came on it’s like you know i’ve been playing around with this website called ebay and it was brand new you know it only been around ebay been around since i think 95 and i think i discovered it in 97 and and anyway so i got the deck anyway sold it back to simplot for 400. and did the work and so you sold the deck yeah for the 400. for the 400. so the rest is going to be you’re going to be in the green already yeah yeah and at the time 400 that was a paltry sum for this whole antiquated deck yeah if you had to go get one from b h or any of these places yeah you’re four figures so anyway um yeah so i made my money back

and then i got this whole thing and it’s like i gotta sell this sell this and um so i put it up on ebay and man it was just like in those days it was just like throwing uh something in the water with piranhas in it it would just get gobbled up and it was one of those things that everything i listed it was auction format would just sell sell sell sell so it’s kind of like what do you sell it like at the number you’re hoping for would it go like a lot higher or is it kind of a mix god it was crazy well and i was part of that madness because i would buy stuff it’s like here’s an old lunch box that i had as a kid and you know i paid 30 bucks for it you know so you know there was some just irrational exuberance i remember you said it came out in 95 yeah that sounds about right because i remember my dad always had a pretty good computer i would play i don’t even need old computer games on it you know and that’s what i

would use but he would always kick me off there’s an auctioneer he was so addicted to ebay oh man it was he had auctions every day he had like a schedule yeah and he had this big clock like this big like a real accurate one that had like a countdown yeah and he would like you know try to snipe it in there like this like boom like you add it down to like a science yeah and it got to like my dad’s a little obsessive uh-huh things like that that became his obsession and that’s kind of shifted where he just buys stuff on it seems like he gets an amazon delivery every single day he finds deals on amazon now yeah you know yeah oh yeah well a lot of good deals on amazon that’s one of our sales channels but so i i digress anyway so i start selling this stuff in the garage to get rid of it and appease my wife but what was really interesting as i sold stuff on ebay you know i get this little kick in the back of your head this little reward you know

feeling it’s like wow this is really cool there’s people out there that want what i have and you know being self-employed as in your audience probably knows when people want to hire you or they want to buy from you that’s a really good feeling when you’re waiting around for that phone to ring like we i used to do in my previous career in video production uh man you know half the time you’re waiting you know hurry up and wait or you’re doing other type of work to get people to see you and hire you and it’s very competitive and a lot of times the work that you did was not that you’d uh wasn’t fulfilling internally you know when you’re doing like film production yeah yeah where were you doing that at i was doing that here in town oh and uh are you born from here um grew up here yeah yeah and uh yeah so you know you do you know do some fun projects but they be commercials or you know or a news firm i get hired by a news firm do an interview for like you know let’s

say like for the nba or um cnn or something like that where they just want a body to go ask some questions you know and it’s kind of like okay it wasn’t like your passion then you weren’t like real passionate about it i loved the business yeah i wanted to be in film and i just never seemed to know how to put it all together to do it that’s such a competitive field yeah such a yeah and that’s a whole nother podcast yeah they’re sure the stuff in the production community here in boise and that you know yeah my good friend anthony anthony sanchez um he still does some commercials for idaho lottery okay yeah creative guy yeah i did a few of those for drake years ago yeah okay and he’s still and he’s kind of filled me and he does plays and he’s just in that kind of community yeah he’s kind of gotten in and i think that’s some of the times the hard part especially if you want to get to like the top level yeah how do you get in to the industry like is it a lot of

i would imagine a lot of politics well it can be yeah yeah and it’s um it’s a social game like any you know like any business it’s um it’s built on friendships you know like like ours yeah you know you just you like there’s nothing wrong with it you like to do business with people you know because you have you know you have money you have time you have a number of things that you’re responsible for so you want to deal with known quantities and you have friends and friends and trusts you know for it’s all kind of connected like yeah um i love doing business with people i like number one i guess my favorite the end of the day you know but i think that also circles around the truss so it’s like for instance if i bought a load of boards from you and weighed it and i’m like oh okay i paid you you know four bucks a pound for these but then i get to the bottom it’s full of like transformers i’m not saying that happened i know it feels good i know if it did i can’t

oh yeah i could be like john you know i believe this is a mistake can we fix it you know and there’s some guys you can do that with and there’s some guys you can’t that some guys are like no a deal’s a deal you know no and you know and i think most people got the sense like i’ll say i’ve said this 100 times i’ll say 100 more i want to do business with like you yeah for 30 years not three months so i’m not in the game to you know make a bunch of money in three months i want to man they get it a little bit you know you man you nailed it i don’t know i don’t know if i get it but that’s that’s the truth that’s how i that’s how i really feel about like everyone i deal with like i don’t want i’m not here for six months three years i want to be yeah you know i want to be sitting here do a follow-up in 30 years with you see how things are going you know well we’ll be going i don’t make enough

to retire yet and i don’t plan on doing it yeah but yeah you get it um that’s always what’s been a good relationship between us and united metals i worked with uh greg before greg brown yeah i learned a lot from greg brown yeah i too love greg and uh it was always um it was always a win-win and you know a lot of times you know i gotta ask gabe what’s it you know gotta help me out here because i you know i don’t know what this is worth can you help me out and i always felt like you guys came back with an honest answer and you know you got to make a profit i know that but i always felt like you know you kind of laid it out on you know where you need to be where you know i need to be and it’s it’s been equitable and really fair and profitable so been happy very happy with it so going back to ebay that’s kind of where you okay you like the so we liked ebay yeah so we were i basically sold it pretty much everything

i had and um i remember staying around in my office one day waiting for the phone to ring and i hadn’t you know i had one room you’re completely on your own at this point i had to feel like are you working at a another job and doing this is no i had been doing this no this was my total gig so you’re just a gear just working you’re your own boss you’re you’re you’re your own yeah do you have any employees yet just you no no as my mentor said it was all circus and you’re just out of uh out of your garage uh so the video business wasn’t it was um i had an office in belgravia i shared it with uh and on even on the video side you were that was just all you that was all me okay yeah awesome yeah so you know i used to edit i wouldn’t shoot uh the guy shared office space with he was a shooter he was he was older than i by about 16 years and so he was well established as a videographer here in town but i would started

gripping with him and then i would develop kind of support services and then what one of them was editing so i did a lot of editing and so yeah i was basically on my own so yeah getting back to the ebay thing i’m waiting around for the phone to call and this is around 99 and uh you know boise wasn’t as prosperous it is as it is now and i’ve been noticing that my corporate work was kind of getting shaky and the phone wasn’t rigging as much and this was you know right before the bubble burst and um so uh you know when silicon valley gets cold boise cotta or he gets a sniffle boise caught a cold well before the bubble burst and my business just dried up but the thing with the ebay is ebay just kept going and i kept sold everything i had in that lot and i remember looking around in my office going what else can i sell what else could i say i was hooked how much is this worth yeah exactly i’m looking up at the wall i don’t need this extra microphone there you go

yeah and uh this is serious and so i do that and it’s almost like a rush like like kind of like a gambler’s rush you know with something like that bingo yeah thank you i didn’t yeah didn’t the other one you hit it yeah so i you know we’ve talked about this um sage and marissa know this as well like we talk about garyvee a ton and heath always on ebay yeah selling stuff and yard selling uh-huh and he does it he doesn’t need that money you know he doesn’t he doesn’t he does it because he likes it like yeah and he’s way into uh trading cards like football yeah he’s in the yard selling and he likes it because he just is a he just has that spirit about him he’s got that hustle and he and he’ll say he’s like i’d much rather like do this than buy stocks because i don’t get any enjoyment like buying and trading stocks like i don’t like that like i would rather go buy you know like a lebron james rookie card yeah and sit on it for two years and gamble that way

um and so when you bring up your ebay and stuff it’s it’s reminds me of when i listen to gary v talk about yard selling selling sports cards yeah and at that hole i hadn’t been on ebay for years but my my neighbor russell shoemaker he helps manage a hops farm out in perma okay really good dude but he is you know neck deep in the football trading card world wow and wow i went over there to give him some money for some scrap uh-huh and he’s like dude you gotta come look at my football cards i was there for like an hour looking at football cards okay and he was showing me ebay and how much they were selling for it it blew my mind yeah like that um and kind of the where ebay’s gone too ebay is like shifting you know mm-hmm because i’m sure are you still selling on ebay sure yeah yeah so we sell on ebay we have a couple uh websites for our different sales channel we sell on amazon and uh know we’ve really um you know what you need to do as a

small business is you know uh don’t make the mistake that i did in my previous business and have like one or two major clients you gotta spread it out so you’ve got all these yeah revenue streams going because they will stop and um you will get interruptions in in revenue in one of these streams so you’ve got to build out and so nothing’s forever like you got to be able to adapt like in in this industry in the scrap industry no doubt like it’s different every day yeah um and anything like that’s one thing i’ve learned like even just the positions within a certain company those people got to be willing to adapt to change to the current market yeah yeah you know yeah there’s two directions forward and back and there’s no you know there’s no crews you can for a while catch your breath and cruise but you got to be focused on if i’m not moving forward i’m moving back there’s a good analogy that someone told me it’s like when you’re on the freeway everyone that passes you that zooms by you as an everyone that’s going slower than you

is an idiot you know i was like that’s a good way to thought about that that’s like that’s a good way to look at it everyone’s always kind of comfortable on their spot yeah and earlier you said you got to be able to fail big yeah and i i love that like i love when you can learn to fail yeah and not let it destroy you yeah and you grow from it that’s when the true success begins i think and it took i’ll be the first mate it took me a long time to figure that out because i yeah i’m competitive and i don’t like failing and it would bother me like when i would like not get a customer or or anything like even my other other careers yeah other jobs i had like not get a um a placement or sell a cell phone package like anything like it used to kind of like weigh on me and recently the last few years i’ve learned to really embrace it and one way i do it yeah is i go macro macro i go like if we lose an account and it was

because maybe say like nothing that we could have controlled i’d be like you know that sucks i hate losing an account i hate that you know but i’ll go there shake their hand thank him for the business and i’ll learn from it yeah and i will think you know i got a beautiful family at home my kids are healthy my wife’s healthy yeah i’ll go macro yeah i go macro and that helps center me um so i’m sure you’ve had some pitfalls and things yeah how do you guys handle that when you lose you said when you are relying on one or two customers and you lose one yeah i could really screw things up right it could and so yeah so when i’m doing corporate communication you know i i would work with you know a few of the businesses and ad agencies in town but they were um you know they keep one would keep you busy for a while and so you got that revenue stream you’d have to say no to others but and then when that dries up you have to jump over to another project revenue stream and

and so when you don’t get any of those you know streams to fish in you’re kind of really waiting and so one thing that i’ve always done in every business that i’ve started is when i started it i look at the one that has that i did before and look at what’s going what didn’t i like about it and i’m not gonna i’m not gonna carry that into my new business yeah so one thing one thing i did with the ebay business that i really liked what did you call that business um well obtainium oh that was so you that’s where it started it’s been obtaining this whole time that’s awesome yeah that’s awesome yeah and uh yeah and so one thing i really made sure with the ebay business was get your money first you know you know that was a cool thing people wanted what you sold usually got your money up first or it came in the mail and then i didn’t ship until it was paid for okay okay so let’s say i go and do a job for well let’s say a big corporation here in town it wasn’t

simple she’ll remain nameless so you do a project and work a month for him you get it done it gets reviewed so after that month you have a stack of paperwork you have to fill out on this project and submit it and once that goes through 45 days to get paid and you know you’re you’re a small fry sounds like you’re in the strap this crap industry yeah cash flow is king man and especially when you’re you know especially when you’re you know one man shop and you’re trying to make it cash flow is king and um one thing i like about united metals is uh we’ll pay you the same day yeah yeah yeah cash flows king is wonderful it’s like oh get a little bit of a little bit of juice or what you talked about you know that vegas thing tripping your head anyway so yeah so ebay evolved and so um when the internet.com bubble burst there was just a flood of stuff that came on the market because there was all that dumb money investing in startups that just shouldn’t have even been there a lot of people

lost a lot of money a lot of people lost a lot of money and then uh manufacturing in silicon valley and all over the place started to kind of condense and go overseas over the years and this was kind of the start of that so my video business kind of dried up but now there’s all this stuff out there to sell on ebay and you could probably buy it right if you knew where to buy it yeah and uh wasn’t a lot of competition there and so i would like hop in a rider or penske truck later and go down to california fill up fill it up bring it back and my wife so i started this business in the garage and my you know my wife was on board because i made her a deal it’s like one year we’ll do this for one year did she did you take her side of the garage yeah you took the whole garage okay so she had to park outside for a year park outside yeah and so the agreement was i’ll scrape her windows okay make sure the car is warm and everything else

but one year and she said okay i’m good with that so you know that’s what you got to do with goals is you got to define you got to define when it’s going to happen so what is it they say dreams or goals without a timeline or something yeah yeah yeah so so one year really helped and uh it was about what was your goal for the year like what was it going for the end the end of the year to grow be able to go get a show up go get more stuff grow yeah yeah and so about 10 months in uh i just outgrew it because you know we could process orders and we would pack and we had tabletop photography we would pack in the garage and then my office in the house we you know would take the orders and then and process them there but we stored everything off site and in up the hill in self storage okay and so these were just filling up so i think i had five of them self storages at one time so about 10 months in he said hey you know

we got we got to go big go home and so we rented some incubator office space down in garden city and you know those are the places where it’s just a box with a roll-up door a little sheet rocked area for an office yeah so got one of those about 1500 square feet is it just you still um well from the from the time i had two other people that helped me part time and they were also in the film and video business and you know at that time since we had that you know kind of contraction in the market there’s just no work for anybody especially in boise idaho so my friends were unemployed too so so you they came and helped yeah so one of them uh she was great with graphics and uh she did the table top photography and of course could build some of the listings and whatnot and then my other friend he would do a lot of the packaging and then um when we go like on road trips to go pick stuff up uh like hill air force base was one place that we’d go

and pick up old computers down in uh near layton utah okay yeah yeah and uh yeah that was that was an interesting one that was yeah pre-911 and that’s when computers this government still sold computers with hard drives in them and uh we can we can they won’t let anything off the base nowadays without it like getting i’ve seen it here they send officials here and they’ll watch you yeah they’ll watch it until it’s demilled yeah i can and it’s like and we’re like all right we’re gonna you know it’s stuff that has no intellectual value really but it’s still like i and i get the protocol yeah so i could only imagine you know post 9 11 that the changes on like selling computers yeah yeah so you know the rules never changed with the military you know you had to keep a paper trail digress a little bit you had to keep paper trail but the sensitive materials they they weren’t really up on the technology so some of the some stuff would escape you know and get out but it was your responsibility not to let it proliferate you know

so you’ve got to de-mill it or destroy it and uh you know hard drives hard drives that’s another podcast you want to get into that kind of stuff you know some of the interesting technology that we run across when we were buying and selling this stuff oh my god um so there are a lot of smart people out there anyway so uh we’re in this incubator space and it’s growing and buying stuff and you know you’re fine-tuning the whole process and figuring out who you are and what you do well and with this business it was just a blessing because i never imagined myself doing it and it wasn’t glamorous and uh definitely didn’t go to school for it but there were so many components in there that worked and it was you know and it’s kind of like one of those things it’s when you have an opportunity and it feels right try it take it you know it might not be glamorous and might not be what you really think you want long term but you know you know if you almost take it like um take that opportunity and

see where it leads you did you almost get like a moment of clarity where you’re like this is it like this is what like this is what i’m gonna do you know because that’s i’ve had that yeah myself in this industry like it kind of i kind of remember when around the time it happened i’m like you know what like i like scrapping like i’m gonna just i’m gonna give it my all yeah i’m gonna i like this i never you know you know when i growing up i didn’t think i’d go this path but that’s how life life throws you a curveball and you deal with it you know yeah yeah and yeah exactly and you can apply a lot of these skills that you’ve had in other areas if you can apply those into a new field that’s innovation and a lot of people will see that and think you’re a genius and it’s like no no no no these were just a skill set that i had here now we’re applying it here and it looks cool because it’s never been there before so one thing that we did was this

was no brainer it’s like in the beginning days of ebay you’d be lucky to get one fuzzy crappy looking photo in your listing if at all and so from out of the gate since you know used to do video production and in still photography everything we would just cram pictures into our listings and that’s a game changer right there and this was you know this is a no-brainer this is late 90s you know early 2000s it was like what and uh yeah so we’d have a we’d have a server off-site and host our own pictures but and then we would also composite them because ebay would only give you like six slots or something so we’d stick like you know one photo that was a composite number so we could just just stuff our listings with photos because a lot of times when you get high-tech items you don’t know what you have yeah so you have to make empirical observations saying okay what is this oh it’s made out of paper it’s got a it’s got a top on it the dimensions are such yeah it’s uh it’s warm it

looks like it holds liquid so you have to explain these things yeah and then put a model number part number but you don’t know what it is and pictures help with that process when you put it out there say you have something very high-tech you’re putting out there that you might not even really know what you have did that ebay platform help find the right buyer for it or sometimes yes yes it did and uh they did it right back then um i worked uh yeah back then yeah it did they had um they had incredible market share and um they were doing something very unique and uh i hate to say they pretty much threw it away um in the uh early 2000s to chase the amazon model and they were just they were monsters they were so much bigger than amazon at the time they just like had this unique sales model and threw it away to chase this other one that was gonna eclipse them they knew that but it’s like why would you do this why would you yeah i mean that’s a good point maybe i think you’re

not gonna maybe you’re not gonna be as big as this company but don’t throw away you don’t throw away your your value your problems yeah and what to chase that and what’s needed like even you you um what kind of led you in your path is you saw a potential for that type of business and a need yeah and really a need like you know any like really good business that’s really unique finds a need that isn’t being met yeah they figure out how to do it and make profit off of it i mean yeah um and i think that’s awesome that’s always like the best story it’s like no one was doing this and if they were they weren’t doing it well yeah you know and i can do it better and i can do it and i can pass that value i can find this really cool stuff like a tape deck that sim plot needs and get it to them and also make another profit or i can find this high-tech device and find this guy you know across the country right and then i’m sure you kind of held

on once that person found you they probably follow your ebay you know ebay channels i don’t know how they call it but uh some would yeah but then you get reoccurring customers and then i would imagine you built some relationships through that built a lot of good relationships uh after the fact um the one thing it’s was a challenge and still is is the nature of our business as such that we won’t have a sometimes the majority of our inventory is always churning and unique it’s not like we have a thousand widgets and our whole warehouse you know has a product line you know like maybe like an office supply or something like that that you can count on and sell it’s always changing so you have to be flexible so the downside of this business is um you’re constantly attracting customers you know there’s not a lot of repeat business so you still have to be professional and encourage it and whatnot because maybe out of those hundreds you get one good relationship or have a thousand or whatnot but you still have to treat you know it’s all about it’s all about

the customer it’s never about you you focus on the benefits that and the service you’re providing and um yeah so when you get a good relationship like ours you just you know you make them family because uh you know they’re few and far between all right and keeping a customer is a lot cheaper than going out and finding a new one i’ll tell you that oh my gosh yeah yeah i don’t even know how to put a price on that you know like i don’t even know how to measure yeah measure that because we talk about that you know yeah retaining yeah retaining customers and employees yeah is so much cheaper than getting new ones and you learn yeah and then when you get a friend you can learn about from your customer you get to know them and talk with them you find out what they do what their needs are you can say oh yeah you know what oh we can help you here yeah or i know somebody that i i can hook you up with so again like you’re talking about in the in the film business or whatnot you

know it’s again it’s your friends and who you know and who you can set up and trust and uh well it’s like um um one of my scrap friends his name is andy he lives in kentucky he owns a scrap yard over there okay we’ve been texting back and forth about brass and i met a guy um on linkedin named eddie who flew out here from ohio to kind of show us some stuff about brass oh cool yeah and just because i hit him up on linkedin i’m like hey you know i love that video because anyway you could teach me more he’s like yeah i’ll fly out there and i’m like i’m like you don’t have to and it’s hard for us to ship all the way to ohio where it makes sense since we’re so close to portland right so we haven’t put any uh loads together but um this i’ve shared eddie’s contact with two people that are right by him i’m like man if i lived where you did i would sell every piece of brass i had to eddie so even there like it’s an investment for him man

and even yeah eddie paid for the plane ticket that’s going to pay off like because just because like all the contacts i have and like yeah and when they’re like hey you know i got who do you sell your breath to them like man i sell it to these guys in portland usually but you know if i lived back over there i would hit up eddie yeah and that just kind of boils down to taking the time and talking to people and then and then and then taking the small risk on putting a little money to fly it somewhere you know because you might not everything’s gonna pay off but no but you are gonna have ones that do and then if you can get some enjoyment out of it you get some knowledge out of it like there’s just it’s impossible to measure some things like that like you know yeah it’s like you got it doing the marketing like i helped with a lot of it but with the help of a lot of really smart people in that room right there but they measuring a return on investment even in the

marketing spectrum is difficult because it’s really hard to actually put a number on it and i think i think that’s true on any aspect of business yeah yeah well if you work with uh you know this is just my view but if you work with a marketing agency and they you know they anybody promises you returns on your investment i’d say go find somebody else you know it’s it’s always hey you know it’s always a crap shoot and you you um you bet your judgment as j.r simplout used to say and you make these decisions on what you think are the right areas that you’ll get influence or you’ll get a return on and um it great you know if it fails it’s not a failure and so my you know my mantra my cut line that i always come back with it’s not failure it’s tuition and i and when you buy when i buy stuff just like it’s like movie producing you’re going to have so many flops but you’re going to have a you’re going to have blockbuster that pays for everything well in the beginning i had some just

major flops but so you had some expensive classes oh yeah expensive classes yeah well here’s the thing is those expensive classes you had to take a big old truck you know across a few states and load them up yourself and drive back and eat sandwiches and stuff so you know your nose was just ground in it you know and like your san diego guy i was that guy once yeah oh yeah more than once where it’s like oh what did i just do and uh yeah so it’s yeah it’s just tuition and you learn and grow from it and move forward and that’s all you can do that’s all you can do so how did obtainium lead you into some of your other businesses so um you’ve got at least three more that i know of yeah so we just diversified the revenue stream so we would get uh truckloads of stuff and that’s kind of how our business model works is um we’ve had it to where like a manufacturing business will shut down and it’s not so much of them to sell you all this stuff but to maybe reclaim lost space

or just to get out of a space and so what your value proposition at that point is you solve a problem for somebody and a lot of times that problem isn’t monetary it’s giving them more bandwidth so it’s like okay i’ll come in and i’ll say okay you got to get this place cleaned out we’ll take care of it you’re done and it’s a trust it’s a trust and it’s a known quantity and the person knows it’s like oh yeah john his crew they’ll they’ll clean this out and it’s worked great you know sweep it and everything so we’ll do work like that but so we bring a truckload of stuff home and there might be some what we call pieces of gold in it that you know is the technology we like to deal with we’re good at representing and selling online and we’ll sell it but then you know i said earlier in uh before i went into the incubator space i had all these self storage units yeah well that’s what would get filled up with what we call chaff not not the gold yeah so when you’re hungry you start

going through and saying okay well this is you know you’re so you’re you know you’re offering 100 bills there you know on product and then now you’re just like oh i’m hungry i got to make rent yeah i need a five can i get i need one of them yeah i need some five dollar bills yeah asap you know exactly so you’d you’d keep the chaff you know because yeah it’s like value we call mining or yeah yeah and all that and so um and that’s a lot of it the name optaneum came from because it’s like wow what’s this it looks cool it looks like it might be valuable what is it and uh you know that’s kind of the definition if you look online what okay defines obtainium and uh so that’s where the name came from so anyway uh yeah so we’d have all this other stuff and i i was trying to figure out where where it goes because it didn’t fit this internet sales model that we developed that we’re really good at so we mined off all the good stuff throwing it that way and then i have

all this chaff well so uh starting in 2006 i rented a space off of shinden thinking i’m going to have a surplus store because this stuff is cool i you know i tried i gave stuff away to schools and like bsu engineering students but you know there’s just that was limited so so i just had all this other stuff and i hated throwing it away and sorry hated to scrap it you know and yes it wasn’t that part of the food chain yet i will always say this to everyone if you can sell that item yeah as what the item was originally intended for do it 100 of the time because you’re going to make double triple you know 10 times yeah on the scrap band if if it’s at the end of life where no one wants it anymore of life yeah send it this way that’s that’s our niche like that’s our niche on not just what you do like with manufacturers or um you know just households you know okay they’re cleaning out their garage and they this stuff didn’t sell in the yard cell and they’re ready to get rid

of all these lamps you know yep bring it here you know so that’s that’s our niche i’ve i never ever try to persuade someone to scrap something that isn’t scrap yet because i like seeing people i i love seeing old stuff get reused i love the true nature of like recycling yeah yes yeah i love it i’ve got i got this thing it’s called the 4rs and it’s called the first one is reuse uh the second one is um resell and the third one is refurbished and then the fourth one is your end of life recycle okay and so that’s just always going through my head is how how how can we do this we’ll always just take what we can get we’re kind of the bottom feeders but uh you know you make people like us successful and uh there’s a lot you know there’s a lot of scrap that you know comes that way so anyway let me go through the surplus store so i started surplus store and um i filled it up and it took about two years before i had enough people that i could or somebody i could

get to run it and so in 2008 i started a store called the reuseum mm-hmm and that was on shinden for a little while and it’s still there right well that um no no it was on 45th street oh it’s kind of a strip mall next to a uh mexican uh grocery store and um so then we moved off of uh what was it 33rd street i think in 2000 to a much bigger place and uh man i just filled it up with all sorts of really cool stuff and the the brothers who owned the building kept renting me bigger chunks and finally one chunk had this office area that we could kind of use for a classroom one thing uh that was cool about three museum is one of the um initial guys that was running it and really gave it a good uh physical kind of permea kind of given a good identification was a fellow by the name dave holtes and uh one thing he did is he encouraged a lot of workshops and so um we got this other space that had offices in it and started doing workshops

in it and uh reusing a lot of uh stuff and then uh he had like uh deconstruction labs to where uh you know we get stuff in like old vcrs and stuff and show kids how to take them apart and but before you did that you’d show them how the tape you know fit into the machine and stuff show you how it works yeah and that stuff is cool i mean yeah goes back to like that that tv show my kids love is like how thing how it’s made yeah i love that you know i love it too like it’s just so fun to watch because you’re like oh i just never thought about how they made you know a tape deck you know you know and that’s how they make it and i think people have a real thirst for that knowledge so i think that’s a need that you helped provide to yeah was it adults and kids or anyone who wanted to well it was anybody anyone yeah it was anybody that he had on that but he had other ones where he would make uh bristlebot little robots and and

all sorts of different workshops but anyway so that was you know that was something you know i basically was funded out of my pocket and it was growing and growing and so finally we would have businesses approach us and want to give us stuff and they’d ask you it’s like are you guys a non-profit because we’re doing all these workshops and everything else like that i’m going oh man i wish because you know it’s just not making any money with this re-museum it’s like huge and it’s cool and it’s popular and everything and it’s just like you know i’m just writing a check constantly constantly constantly yeah and but there’s a real demand for it so uh we in was it 2012 we turned it into a non-profit okay and then the tide kind of turned with that and so businesses could donate to it and it was a very unique model that pretty much it’s a unique model period and at the time and basically that model was basically built on three legs and one of them was the surplus store recycling and we used to take stuff apart donations

what not give it to and greg helped us with that and then education so you had three legs that were also three income streams and it nurtured a sense of community and provided a very essential and needed service in the community for not only for kids education the monetization of scrap and surplus and discarded technology you know you somebody could bring in a drawer for like power cords they didn’t have and and donate it to a non-profit and they would monetize it and then you’d see a workshop over here that you know yeah as a result of that it’s like how cool is that and then it was so instrumental having you know a good scrap dealer yeah to help monetize and fund it on the very end of life oh man yeah yeah so that worked out real well and then i um it was a non-profit and then i kind of set that off and and got out of that around 2015 because uh a good friend of mine became the executive director there and they god they were doing some great stuff with education and and um the direction

it was going they got some heavy hitters on their board and it’s like it’s one of those things it’s sometimes you just got to stand out of the way and it can hurt but yeah it was just kind of like it can be hard i’m holding this thing back and so i just you know and that’s hard stepped out and and it took off and it’s doing great today and it’s back on shin so it’s across the scratch coach restaurant yeah that’s where i thought it was yeah um yeah no a great shop and but you hit it on the head it’s it can be painful to especially something that you’ve created oh yeah to step back and then like be out out of it but it opens up a new possibilities and you got more time yeah it opens like so what what’s your new what’s your big big project now so oh so okay so we’re talking about revenue streams so uh our big project which again trying to make it work and i think it is we’re fine-tuning the model is we’re doing local auctions and um we basically are

taking a unique stance on auctions our value proposition is such that it’s not like anything else locally and a when we decided to do local auctions a year ago or about a year and a half ago we kind of looked at what everybody else was doing and tried to imitate that because that’s that’s really good sometimes is to see what what other people are doing and what works don’t reinvent the wheel go ahead and yeah absolutely it’s not copying or anything because you’ll add your flare to it and everything else but you know people have broken trail before you why not take advantage of that trail yeah so we started doing local auctions and the problem with them is is these really good auction houses here in town will do an auction like with hundreds of lots and um we tried doing that and i just like uh like musics yeah you know awesome ones like that yeah they’re great then they have the new one over here in meridian yeah cool auction houses but just a different format than yours then yeah so we tried to do that format to where we would

you know try to get 150 lots up there of you know individual items my warehouse is stuffed you know and i’m trying to get rid of stuff and so again we kind of failed miserably at that yeah and uh covid hit and it was kind of like okay let’s stop and and so i wanted to still do local auctions but it didn’t know how and so uh with the coved we stopped and then i just said you know i got to give it some time here i’ll figure out this problem you know i will figure it out you know it’s kind of like einstein said you know one of einstein’s stories nothing i’m comparing myself to him was yeah uh somebody would come to him with a a problem and he’d say oh yeah i know the answer to that give me some time and i’ll tell you what it is i’ll get to it yeah and that’s just kind of how it works is you have to empower yourself to to know that you’re going to come up with that answer so i knew that this this felt right this had to work

so anyway in december i got my answer and so the and this is what we do today and it’s called idahosurplusauctions.com and what we do is we do maybe a dozen lots and that’s it because we’re a small shop we don’t you know that’s not our main business but we want to sign another revenue stream it’s another revenue stream so what we do there is we offer pallets a product that people can bid on and use it you know you get a whole pile of stuff that you can use in your business or maybe scrap out or resell on ebay but we try to provide enough value there that whoever buys it can benefit so it’s a win-win yeah we want to you know we want people to come back so it’s not like we’re trying to get rid of crap you can’t you want returning users you know to keep coming yeah yeah and where that’s unique in this market is pretty much all these auctions are onesie twosies that the other auction houses do and stuff goes for pretty much retail but some of it goes for wholesale prices but

we try to just go after a bit of people in the market that are entrepreneurs okay people say hey oh yeah i i see those 450 plush dolls on a pallet i can make some money doing that yeah so i’ll sell them one at a time yeah however yeah and it’s like hey we’re happy we got we’ve got the warehouse space reclaimed because we’ve got a lot of a lot of stuff to sell so we do that so but and also another part of the value proposition is i kind of modeled it the way i would like to have it you know you always say if wow in a perfect world i would do it this way yeah so another thing that makes us unique you got to stand out is we don’t have a buyer’s premium okay because buyer’s premium is what they can always run from like 10 to 18 there’s one in california i deal with it’s 25 yeah yeah buyer’s premium it’s crazy ah you know when you’re trying to do math in an auction and playing with that oh my god well and then it’s tough if you’re first

like a first time person on that site i’ve seen it that’s what we talked about a guy from san diego yeah this guy got on a government auction bought a bunch of aluminum shells that needed to be demilled he then he didn’t know scrap so he didn’t know the scrap value he just googled aluminum value and then he found the lme which that’s not the actual scrap value you know so he finds the lme he does the math he’s like oh i can make some money on this but then he didn’t realize the the premium i think it was 18 okay you add 18 to your final whatever number it is and you have to have it d milled by a scrap yard usually i mean there’s no way you gotta we run we run those particular shells through the baler and they deem that d milled enough and then then we box it okay um because we’ve done it before we’ve won those bids and then only done the math and and the the beauty on for the auction side is like you get people nationwide and you might catch someone that doesn’t

know what they’re doing mm-hmm and they made a lot of money on that guy lost like in three four grand he had a brand new baby at home he had to fly up here and he lost i think three or four grand and we paid him the best we could yeah the best we could yeah and i felt i felt for him but that guy you think he’ll ever buy something from that auction again no yeah hell no like that’s where like that was an mba that he that was his tuition he learned and maybe he will maybe maybe he learned like you know okay sure you know i but i gotta watch this and i’ll watch this and i gotta watch this um but that’s one thing i hate about all those online auctions the buyer’s premium the other this i mean what other fees are there yeah so the other one is um credit card fees okay and uh because a lot of times your your business buying and selling is cash flow based yeah and if you can have that 30 days to you know run it on your credit

card you know don’t you know debt is bad in this business you got to get the money in the bank cash flow is king and you don’t want to cut that cash flow by having a lot of debt so when i say credit card you’re just leveraging that 30-day you know grace that grace period whatever it is when you buy it yeah so i was thinking wow no let’s not charge a fee because fees can be anywhere from three to five percent on credit cards and the way that a lot of firms do it is they give you a discount for cash if you if you um uh don’t use a credit card but usually that just means oh you give me cash there’s no credit card fee i don’t know how that’s a discount so when i did our business i actually give a discount for cash and it’s currently five percent oh wow so if you pay with cash there’s the incentive because cash flow is king we’ll give you five percent and so um those three things i thought were really fun and uh would um if when i was

buying buy when i buy stuff at auction and stuff like that those are things that really influence my bidding and um and you know they’re just numbers that you have to keep in your head and keep adding up with your bit and so it’s really hard to participate and have fun at an auction if you’re doing the math all the time yeah and you know of course you can do a spreadsheet or whatnot but so i just want to make it as simple as possible to say you know what i i see about 500 off that lot you know i’ll make my level i’ll make my level 200 and um and then you know what’s your you know it’s like ebay you know how much you’re really going to pay and it’s like oh okay let’s do that and it’s worked out real well good good people like it we’ve gotten feedback from people say i really like that and then of course um we take we don’t have any on-site preview because we’re a small shop and then also with a covet where we uh we’re kind of not uh into doing

that but one thing that we make up is we shoot a ton of pictures yeah i looked at them you have a lot of a lot of good details a lot of good pictures on there again that’s a no-brainer yeah that’s just left over from our what we do with our internet business is um if you don’t know what it is just take a lot of pictures somebody else knows and we’ve gotten feedback from um customers from that too they say wow i really like the pictures because like i can see data plates on a piece of equipment or i can see condition or you know or what so i feel confident when i bid and it’s like that’s something i really like too because a lot of times um i bid on stuff to where i can’t see it there’s no physical there’s no picture there’s no way to physically go out and inspect it so then you’re kind of at the mercy of this agency you know government agency or business or whatnot to take them on their word and it’s vegas baby you know sometimes you’ve been burnt probably yeah

yeah so and you can’t let your imagination get away from you because a lot of times you’ll paint a picture in your head yeah of what you want to encounter and it’s like no no no no the gambler takes over sometimes yeah we’re like oh like it could be this yeah my bid a little more so yeah and know where your margins are what your costs are and all that stuff and um and just stick to it and it’s real hard because when you do auctions and purchases or competition and buying a big lot and you know that somebody else is interested in it too and they’ve approached the business and you know so what’s the biggest check i’m gonna write based of this guy sometimes you can’t make the numbers work and if you can’t make them work don’t try to make them work exactly you gotta know uh no one will walk away yeah and that’s the hardest thing to do because you think that’s failure and it’s kind of like no that’s a win yeah being able to walk away from something or change your mind on a stance you had

on something or a philosophy that’s his strength like a lot of people look at that as a weakness holy which is weird it is right it’s weird that it’s perceived as a weakness yeah when you maybe go back on something you had said previously as long as you’re open like i know i said it this but now i think like this you know because yeah because my you know i learned from failing you know yeah exactly yeah so you know and i think what plays into that is another thing to try to do too and you know i’m obviously i’m not perfect at it but i try to do it is you know if you’re faced with some a challenge and you say okay well how am i gonna how am i gonna package this or present it to this person well i try to get in the mindset of saying if i ever get in that situation i just stop and get out in front of it because okay then you don’t have the bandwidth to hold it on and uh if you approach a lot of things in life that way in

general ah you you just imagine you know it goes what you’re saying getting out in front of it means you’re admitting you’re wrong sometimes absolutely or you didn’t do it right or you screwed up yeah it’s not a weakness or like this person’s better at it like let’s just take over and that could be like the hardest lesson to learn yeah yeah you find somebody yeah if somebody’s like some of my best friends now i met because i lost bids to them and they were competitors yeah and this is what’s crazy about this business and um that’s just a testament to the kind of guy you are then like if you’re able to be friends with like your competitors like that kind of can show you yeah yeah yeah and i know that you know one competitor that i have all the time that’s uh you know we just love spending time together and talking and uh just kind of like this you know just spitballing but then you know sometimes and then we’ll go and go bid against each other yeah and it’s kind of like it’s fun you know it’s like what’s

in your head um i guess ron ronyanki and uh jr used to do that too they would go and fly okay and go they both wanted uh antique uh agricultural machines and stuff like that they both collected them so they would fly on jr’s plane together go to go together you know play some yeah play some cards you wouldn’t leave them there and uh no i never went but these were the stories i heard um so they go to this auction and you know bid against each other for antique farm implements and uh had a great time and so when i remember hearing that story and running against my friend is like yeah okay we make this work and uh yeah and it’s just amazing how many good friends that i’ve had that are and were are competitors and i just kind of like okay that’s life yeah and get out in front of it you know there’s if you lose to them it’s like you know a lot of times people who are successful will share that philosophy of how they got a lot of success right a lot of people successful people

aren’t afraid to share share it because yeah they’re yeah they have a level of confidence that they can still be successful bingo yeah yeah and yeah so you know i’ve done that and you know my friends and competitors is like hey i just obviously just flubbed up on this one yeah what were you thinking over on this lot because you know what you bid i just didn’t see it yeah and a lot of times you know your competitors say well you know here here here or this is what it says or they might be like you’re right i lost my ass you know either way yeah and a lot of and it’s good to engage and become friends because a lot of your competitors are good at something else that you aren’t and that you will probably never be a focus of your business so like one really good friend of mine he does computers and um i.t equipment and he’s good at it and i just don’t do it i just don’t see it i don’t swim in those waters but we there are lots to where we butt heads and go

after other stuff and so we’re really it’s really easy for us to say you know this is what i thought was valuable here do you guys ever do some trading after we do some trading after yeah perfect and uh you know and it’s um yeah but you know and he’s long distance so a lot of times uh what’s like with this other guy i bought some stuff from him uh i bought some stuff from him first time i met him uh we bought some stuff down in nevada it was an auction uh-huh and uh uh it was on uh it was online so we do this auction together and um it was for a whole bunch of computers like semi-loaded computers and i figured i can make i can make that work and so we started bidding bidding bidding and finally it was just the two of us and uh went for this price and i lost i had to walk away because i’m going i can’t make the numbers work and what was really cool was the guy who was running the auction uh called me up and said hey um

you two are the only bidders on this and uh you know steve only wants this palette and we still have you know almost a semi load of stuff would you be interested in it and it’s like okay and okay well i’m gonna i’m gonna give steve your number and it’s like okay cool so steve calls me and competitor and first of all i apologize because i said hey sorry for running and the guy ran it up and he just slapped it off because that happens i’ve done that so many times and steve said yeah you know i just had these network switches that i wanted because i got a customer and uh but you know i’m over i’m over here i’m 80 miles away from where i have to pick it up i really don’t want to go back and clean out this warehouse and yeah get all these computers would you be interested in this like yeah so he sold them to me for a fraction of what a you know where i got out on the bid and um it was really cool we and i think i met another friend he

was really nice and i learned a little bit about what he did and he learned a little about me and uh yeah and so he sold me all those computers and uh sent a guy down to he was in nevada send a guy down and he loaded the truck and we brought him back and it just win-win for both of us and uh that’s you know just kind of the way you got to be in business is sometimes you’re a competitor and sometimes you lose but hey be gracious because don’t burn any bridges don’t bernie bridges you might not get like yeah you yeah in hindsight it was good that you lost that auction because you got it for cheaper you got it for cheaper yeah literally no but if you would have been a prick about it you know you could have been burnt that bridge yeah and then you’d be like oh john no yeah i think i’ll work with him yeah that’s where like take your ego just being a good person goes a long way take your ego out of it because you know that’s another thing you know

i got a colleague and it’s like we’re always shaking our head it’s like in business it’s amazing how many people don’t say please and thank you or identify a gatekeeper in the organization and find out what’s important to that gatekeeper so the gatekeeper is somebody you go through to actually deal with who you need to deal with okay that’s your gatekeeper oh yeah well you got to acknowledge their importance too absolutely in the whole process because they have the power to lock you out yeah exactly so everybody in the chain you you say please and thank you to you like you say you’re not pricked them because a lot of people say well that’s not who i want to do business with in this organization so i i don’t need to spend any time with them no you do you need to it’s the whole you know packaged deal so to speak and so you please and thank you and you’re courteous to everybody you acknowledge people when they help you you find out if somebody else in the organization might need something you can provide you just never know i have a real

issue with people that are that treat the ceo or the owner or the president whatever title it might be they kiss their ass but then they’ll treat the janitor the guy that is pushing the broom like a yeah idiot like i i will no thank you no i won’t i don’t even want you to i don’t even want to hang out with you no i don’t want that like i don’t want that energy around me man because that’s not how i was raised and that’s just not how my mind works and i mean it’d be fun um sometimes the guy that you might think isn’t important is important yeah that guy might be the the owner that guy might be the president oh the guy you know yeah and and you’re treating him like that like and you know yeah and it’s hard to fix a reputation like that once you go down that path right it’s hard to fix hard to fix that train of thought i think in people when they when they think that way like so yeah a lot of that i definitely i have a yeah i have an

issue with that yeah well you know and just think about it you know this way too is the guy pushing the broom might be the one that can unlock the warehouse half an hour early for you you know save you a ton of money because you can you know get it all done in one day instead of having to come back yep save you a couple thousand dollars because you you were nice yeah you know yeah you got some yeah you got an extra water you don’t throw up to somebody yeah just it was kind of cool when i worked on in film it was very communal you worked with all sorts of people and and all sorts of strata if you will in the production process and you know you have that stereotypical image of the director being an and yeah you know not acknowledging and i’m sure that happens but i ran into that very rarely and because everybody knew that you’re there to do the work and the work isn’t done until the work’s done it’s not like punch in punch out so everybody there they’ve agreed to you know do

this job and you get this money and once you agree on that you’re there to get that job done and you know whoever is in charge team i would imagine you’re a real team and you have to if you’re you know lowly pa which you know i’ve done plenty of that you need to know how to address all the gatekeepers you know to get what you need you know or stinger cord or an apple box or something like that and so you gotta be nice you gotta play nice and the ones that don’t don’t get called back and that’s just it yeah and you gotta show up and that was another thing with the business too is i got so much business when i was doing uh video production because i had a radio telephone before there was a cell phone and i paid like 1500 bucks for this thing and it was like you know in a year that i made five thousand dollars out of college and my mentor said this will print you money and the whole reason was he instilled in the fact that when the phone rings pick it

up absolutely and take the work absolutely and uh he was right and it worked it was like okay that was a lot of money out but it yeah it paid it returned yeah it was you guys you got your return on investment on that one i got my return on investment but what was more important was it’s like hey i’m calling john because he’ll show up yep he’ll answer the phone he’ll show up and if he doesn’t answer the phone he’ll call me back yeah i love it yeah can’t say that i’m really good at that today but you know try to have people in place that do that a lot better yeah he still boils down to a team you know you know i’ve considered each yard and everyone as a whole like we’re a team united medals and i like and that’s why i have to explain to everyone like on a football team um the receiver might not be best friends with the linemen but they respect each other okay you know and that has to happen on any team you have to respect each other you don’t have to be

best friends but you have to have a mutual respect for each other to make a team work yeah you know yeah if you are friends bonus you know but you don’t have to be well with you it’s easy to be a friend so yeah it’s great and i get that perception when we you know bring stuff up to recycle that glad to hear that you guys are very cool we drive yeah we try um yeah well thank you for sharing um i’m excited to see how your auction does i’m excited to come do our boots on the ground portion with you okay we’re gonna come tomorrow okay if you’re open to it still we’ll come check out your warehouse right warts included it’s not sexy but oh no no we sound sexy here okay yeah i talked up a big uh yeah i talked to talked it up pretty big so hopefully when you see it it’s kind of like huh no i think it’s more retail it’s real yeah it’s real yeah i like it yeah that’s it you know it’s it’s real and uh yeah we’re real we’re honest and what you

see is what you get awesome thank you sir glad to be here thank you thanks