This transcript is auto-generated and may contain spelling and grammar errors.
Tyler Jorgenson (00:01.323)
Welcome out to business entrepreneur radio. I’m your host Tyler Jorgensen. And today I’m really excited about this one as a huge fan of repurposing and a slightly admitted pack rat. I love what the business that this entrepreneur has created. Damon Carson has created repurposed materials, Inc. That is
the sexiest of the three parts of the recycle, reduce, reuse triangle. And they talk about, mean, talk about some really, really cool stuff that you guys are doing over at Repurpose Materials. I’m excited to dive into it. Welcome out to the show, Damon.
Damon Carson (00:44.878)
Tyler, I’m excited. You admitted off air before we even got on that you’re a bit of a hoarder. this, like I said, this could be a great temptation for you. So we will try not to get you too excited.
Tyler Jorgenson (00:53.432)
Yes.
When I got your pitch and I was browsing your website, I was like, I need most of these things. And so, all right, let’s assume that somebody hasn’t already gone and visited repurposematerialsinc.com. What is the business?
Damon Carson (01:11.47)
So I think the easiest, most succinct way to describe it, a good word picture is just we’re an industrial thrift store, an industrial thrift store. So maybe said another way, Tyler, is we’re in the used surplus salvage business. And maybe a third way to say it is we deal in the cast offs and discards of American industry.
Tyler Jorgenson (01:34.789)
And that part, maybe not the most sex appeal in that, but man, it is cool what you guys are doing. And so, I wanna zoom way back, because this is not an easy business to just start up and decide you’re gonna do. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s space and cost and distribution and all these, and sourcing. There’s a lot. let’s go back early days, Damon. When was the moment you first realized you were an entrepreneur?
Damon Carson (02:03.074)
Well, I used to have a paper route as a elementary school student and I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t participate in the contest to double the number of subscribers. So you double the amount of money you made as a, as a youngster. So I guess I was shy, introverted. So I, there was no big light bulb as an elementary school student. You know, going into high school, I was the son of a business owner.
my father was. And so I think I always kind of had it in the back of my mind. But, you know, I don’t know. I don’t know that there was any early light bulb moments like the lemonade stand kid. That wasn’t me.
Tyler Jorgenson (02:42.767)
Sure. Okay. Well, how did you get into this?
Damon Carson (02:47.288)
So this specifically started in 2010, so 15 years ago, about 15 years ago. So I’m in my early 50s, so we have to jump back to in my mid 20s. I and a partner bought a traditional garbage company in the ski resorts, Vail Breckenridge, Colorado. So we had the big roll off trash containers that we’d put out on construction sites.
get filled full of trash, take it to the landfill, you’d slide it out, dump it, tip it back, and you’d see all this stuff come out, and there was perfectly straight two by fours. There was, there’s a window, brand new, and you’re wrapping. I just became very aware of the waste in America because we literally saw it every day. So, sold that company to Waste Management, jumped out, so got out of the waste business, bought a couple of unrelated businesses, and…
Tyler Jorgenson (03:29.977)
so much.
Damon Carson (03:42.574)
Again, that was the beginning of the 2000s when we sold the company to Waste Management. And yeah, one day I had a unrelated business and a airbrush subcontract painter was walking out one day and he just turned and looked at me and he said, hey, Damon, if you ever get a chance to buy an old advertising billboard vinyl, like you see on the sides of the hideaways, advertising Budweiser, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, you ought to get one. They make a drop cloth for painting. And that was my…
That was my eureka. That was the moment that, my gosh, my gosh, we can repurpose and give an alternate second life to these waste streams that, hence the name of the company, Repurposed Materials.
Tyler Jorgenson (04:27.525)
I think what I love most about that story is one, the seed of the idea had been planted earlier in another business, right? You’d seen it. You’d seen this waste and you didn’t do anything about it yet, but it was there and it grew. And then when you heard this other idea, it’s like, man, okay, there’s something here. But you guys have multiple locations. mean, a lot of land that you need to store, because I mean, American industrial waste is not a small…
item situation, right? You’re not talking about just ball bearings and little items, right? You’re talking, you got a lot of stuff. So how did this expand?
Damon Carson (05:05.848)
So I want to step back and answer one of the questions. So I grew up in rural America, central Kansas. And so I grew up in and around farming and ranching. Actually, agriculture is the one industry that’s never lost sight of this repurposing. Taking something met in life number one for one thing, repurpose it for life number two. Railroad ties become fence posts. Old oil field pipe becomes corral fencing.
Tyler Jorgenson (05:08.207)
Please.
Tyler Jorgenson (05:24.356)
Mm-hmm.
Damon Carson (05:34.732)
So when you see all this waste in my garbage days, I mean, it just took me back to my agricultural rural roots. it’s just like farmers and ranchers could figure out what to do with this stuff. So I just wanted to jump back to that for a moment. But yes, in answer to your most recent question, I mean, this stuff is big and heavy, semi-loads, truckloads, multiple truckloads. So it takes acreage. takes under roof warehousing. So…
Tyler Jorgenson (05:46.165)
yeah.
Damon Carson (06:00.97)
Our average warehouse is about two acres of lay down outside yard and about 30 to 40,000 square feet under roof. So one of the, I don’t know if it’s a surprise, it’s just a fact. When you get a truckload in, you just don’t immediately find that alternate second life for it. It takes weeks and months to make that happen, to make those connections. Well, in the interim, it has to sit somewhere. The corporation that’s getting rid of it, they want it gone.
They don’t want to store it until you make those connections, connect those dots. So yeah, it’s a very logistically intensive business. Logistics as we know is trucking. Logistics is warehousing and storage. It all fits under that, big L word and it’s takes a lot of space and time.
Tyler Jorgenson (06:46.01)
Yep.
So you had this idea based on the painting drop cloth from an old billboard, right? But when did it first seem like it’s actually gonna be a business that works?
Damon Carson (07:00.866)
So just a little timeline, a little six month timeline. So September of 2010 is when that airbrush painter gave me the idea. I made a couple of phone calls and found 20 billboards for sale from an outdoor advertising company here in the Denver area. That’s where we live and it’s where it started. Went down to South Denver and my, you know, half ton pickup, put them in my truck and posted them on Craigslist and you know, they started to sell.
Tyler Jorgenson (07:18.788)
Uh-huh.
Damon Carson (07:30.38)
and it was 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 75 bucks. was just the technical MBA term at that point was entrepreneurial screwing around. I mean, it was just, hey, can I buy them for X and sell them for two X?
About six weeks later, one of our customers came in talking about billboards and we got to talking about rubber products. And for some reason in the next day or two or three, I was online Googling and conveyor belt from the mining industry. Life number one conveys rock sand aggregate. What happens when that stuff, it’s a wear part when it gets too thin? So made a couple of phone calls, found a magical two roles. I mean, I was taking a big risk. Two roles of used conveyor belting and
Likewise, posted them on Craigslist and within a week or two, those two rolls had sold. That was October, November. What’s the holiday in November? Thanksgiving. We’re just about there. Driving back home to see my folks in central Kansas, I-70 from Denver to central Kansas. And that’s where my farming ranch knowledge and background. And it became a hypothesis. Are there enough byproducts, wastes, cast offs and discards?
that can get a very different second life that I could make a business out of it. So that was the little three months from, know, hey, they make a great drop cloth for painting to, hey, here’s a hypothesis for a whole business model.
Tyler Jorgenson (08:53.901)
Yeah. Give us, know, for maybe the people who are struggling to really visualize the opportunity and what’s going on, give us some of the fun stuff, some of the best, you know, case studies of what type of things you guys have done repurposing on.
Damon Carson (09:07.416)
So we look for things that are generic, versatile and adaptable. you know, the chair you’re sitting in, Tyler, you know, it’s specialized. you’re done with it and you put it on Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, the guy, person that buys it from you is probably going to use it as a chair. By contrast, the door that’s shutting you into the room, your recording studio, you take the hinges off, you take the doorknob off and you go horizontal with it, it becomes a shelf. So chairs specialize, the door is…
are three words, generic, versatile, adaptable. So those are the things we go out in the industry and look for. One of the things that’s fun about it, so there’s a lot of gambling in this business. So I joke that I’m sitting here in my office. I don’t have to get on an airplane and fly to Las Vegas to gamble. I just get to sit in the office and try to pick and choose which of these waste streams, which of these cast offs we think we can rehome. But we take a big risk. So we bring them in.
Tyler Jorgenson (09:47.001)
Hmm.
Tyler Jorgenson (10:03.236)
Right.
Damon Carson (10:06.082)
We don’t know if it’s going to be the cranberry farmer in Wisconsin, the copper miner in Arizona, or the golf course superintendent in Florida that’s going to raise their hand and say, hey, I can repurpose that. I can reuse that. So a lot of mystery, but a lot of fun in solving that. It’s one of my analogies is, you know, in crime, crime novels, crime TV shows, it’s a whodunit. You know, there’s a bank robbery whodunit. Well, in our business, it’s a who has it and who wants it.
Tyler Jorgenson (10:17.891)
Yep.
Damon Carson (10:36.066)
So a lot of detective work.
Tyler Jorgenson (10:38.489)
Yeah, absolutely. And so some examples of things that I’ve seen you guys do, I I think some things are people understand a little bit quicker and you’ve got the military parachutes that people will use as a wedding canopy or things like that. But then that’s kind of being repurposed into maybe more commercial or more end user type stuff. But a lot of it’s going from one commercial type of use to another commercial type use.
Has there been any repurpose or reuse that’s really like, was a big surprise to you?
Damon Carson (11:13.07)
yeah, on and on and on. So I remember it was about six months after I started, a lady calls me and she says, Damon, do you ever get old street sweeper brushes? And I was like, like from the street departments, like the, the, the big brushes with plastic bristles. That’s yeah, those I said, well, I don’t have any, I didn’t even know about them, but let me ask you a question, ma’am. What would you do with those in life? Number two. And she says, they make a great.
back scratcher for livestock. And so here you’re listening to customer feedback. I had no idea. Totally over my head. And now 15 years later, we sell used street sweeper brushes to zoos, to dairies. So it’s just crazy. All these little niche industries have figured out some of these repurposes and we just try to pay attention and listen. And we get surprised all the time by the brilliance, ingenuity, resourcefulness of our customers.
often affectionately call them. don’t know Tyler, if you’re old enough, but if you remember the late 80s, early 90s show MacGyver. Yeah, this is our customer base, our modern day MacGyver’s.
Tyler Jorgenson (12:19.64)
yes.
Tyler Jorgenson (12:25.635)
Yeah. And I mean, what an amazing thing, even just from a, you know, ecological perspective to save this much from the going into the, straight to the landfill and the waste that that creates just the idea of life. Number two, it’s such a neat concept. so, you know, not that you did this to be a charity or a, or a nonprofit, but, but neat that it has that side benefit for real.
Damon Carson (12:51.34)
Yeah, so very gratifying. mean, we save literally millions of pounds, you know, in the teens, you know, we’re looking to someday will be 25 million, then 35 million pounds that would otherwise go to the landfill. Some of it’s recyclable, so it could get melted down. But again, as you referenced at the very beginning, the famous reduce, reuse, recycle triangle, the highest and best use of waste is reuse. Let’s not melt it down. Let’s not grind it up.
Tyler Jorgenson (13:15.001)
Yep.
Damon Carson (13:21.758)
If you can think outside the box, find a second alternate use for it. Let’s just keep it as it is instead of melting it, grinding it up. So yeah, a lot of gratification from an ecological sustainability standpoint for sure.
Tyler Jorgenson (13:33.461)
Yeah, absolutely. So you, mean, it sounds like in six months it really went from your entrepreneurial screwing around into like this, let’s see if we can actually turn this into a business. But when was the moment where you really realized, hey, this is actually gonna, this is gonna be something like we can grow this.
Damon Carson (13:50.094)
Absolutely. Two seminal things happened in the summer of 2011. So, you know, nine months later, one is the New Jersey Recycle Association got word of what we were doing. So again, we’re in Denver, Colorado. The New Jersey Recycle Association caught word of what I was doing and asked me to come and keynote their conference about this new frontier that I was nine months into.
That was one. The second one was somebody else in, it’s funny, I already referenced copper miners, but the copper mine in Arizona called me and said, Hey, would you come out and visit some of our mammothly large copper mines because we want to do better with waste. We hear you’re pretty pioneering in your efforts. Come and see some of our waste. So the summer of 2011, those two events were like, okay, I think we’re, I think we’re onto something here.
Tyler Jorgenson (14:47.949)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s funny how exciting it is to be called to go and look at somebody’s waste, but it’s because a lot of times, especially like you said, in industry, the waste is significant and it’s items that took a massive amount of engineering and development to create. I mean, they should have longer lifespans than they do.
Damon Carson (14:54.158)
You
Tyler Jorgenson (15:13.049)
but oftentimes they no longer are safe to use in that industry or in that specific use. I’m looking through some of your social media posts. I’m seeing some really cool things like bowling, old bowling alley would being turned into workshop desks. Conveyor belts used as backstops for shooting ranges, things like this. I mean, just how cool, like the number of things that I’m seeing that just really, really fascinating.
Damon Carson (15:35.278)
sure.
Tyler Jorgenson (15:42.002)
And so how did you start expanding this from an idea in Colorado to multiple locations?
Damon Carson (15:51.544)
So it became quickly apparent as I just referenced the two events, one was New Jersey, one was Arizona. my gosh, this is a national problem, not that that’s a surprise to anybody. So then it’s, as we talked about, very logistically intensive. So our first warehouse was Chicago, then Atlanta. So a triangle, we have now, we moved from Chicago to Iowa, we moved from Atlanta to rural South Carolina. But if you put pins on a map, we’re about a day’s truck.
drive from the majority of the United States. So there’s what appears to be random pins on a map. It’s very strategic. If you draw 400 mile circles around each one of those, you know, you’re about eight, nine hours from most of the United States. So if a call comes from Boston, it would go to Ohio. If a call comes from San Diego, it’d go to Arizona. And so, yeah, that’s the strategy. I mean, as far as making it happen, you know, we’ve hired really good people and they just have to go find a building.
some of the buildings we own, some of the properties we lease. So it’s a combination. And then you get, got to go find a branch manager and I mean hiring people is an inexact science. Fortunately, right now we have a phenomenal team, but you you don’t always get it right the first time. Just ask the NFL coaches and general managers, their first round draft picks, how those have all turned out or not turned out.
Tyler Jorgenson (17:00.271)
Yep.
Tyler Jorgenson (17:07.737)
No.
Tyler Jorgenson (17:15.533)
Yeah, that’s fair. That’s a good analogy. Hiring is sometimes kind of like drafting. So you guys, you obviously aren’t new to business, but you’ve been doing this one for a while now. What was one of the first really big challenges that you faced in repurposed materials and how did you overcome it?
Damon Carson (17:34.264)
So I always use an ice cream store analogy. So if I wanted to start an ice cream store here in Denver and I would just find an ice cream producer, I would find a piece of real estate. I would go to several dairies, ice cream manufacturers and I would taste their strawberry, their chocolate and their vanilla and pick one of the ice cream stores. And then I would have a source of ice cream. Then all I’d have to do is go find customers. That’s really the only hard part. It is a hard part, but the only hard part.
In the repurposing business, in the used surplus salvage business, it’s really hard to find procurement opportunities, source materials to get your inventory. Sometimes I feel like we work just as hard or harder on the procurement side versus the selling side. Whereas again, an ice cream store sources relatively easy. You just got to go find customers here. It’s hard on both sides.
huge challenge. Well, it was a huge challenge at the start. And it’s if we want to continue to grow and get to 25 million pounds, 35 million pounds, we got to source more materials. We got to get the word out. We got to let you know, wave our hands. Hey, don’t throw that away. Don’t throw that away. Hey, call us instead of just mindlessly throwing it in the scrap metal bin to go be melted.
Tyler Jorgenson (18:54.561)
Yeah. And, you know, procurement being such a large part of what you do, because it’s not necessarily a consistent feed, right? It’s like every purchase could potentially be one off. I’m sure you have many repeat sources, but you, what percentage of product is given to you in the exchange for the cost of just hauling it away versus purchase?
Damon Carson (19:17.998)
now you’re getting into the dollars in a sense. mean, yeah, I mean, it’s a real percentage. mean, products that, hey, if you haul it away, you can have it. Because again, they’re facing disposal costs. So there’s a real cost for them to, you know, to land fill it. Certainly, especially the bigger companies, the CEOs out talking, putting in the annual points, hey, we have sustainability goals. So we did a deal with Apple in San Francisco.
Tyler Jorgenson (19:22.693)
Ha
Tyler Jorgenson (19:36.375)
yeah.
Tyler Jorgenson (19:44.997)
Right.
Damon Carson (19:48.05)
And they were taking out a bunch of huge seven foot by 30 foot skylights out of one of their retail stores in Palo Alto. And it’s Apple. Billions of dollars. We talk green, we talk sustainability. You know, my offer to them was, yeah, we can help you keep that glass out of the landfill. We won’t pay for it and you have to deliver it to us. And they were happy to do it because they could go back to shareholders, to customers and say, hey, we didn’t just mindlessly
wastefully crush that glass and put it in a landfill.
Tyler Jorgenson (20:22.669)
Yeah. And I just think that’s really, really cool. That so many businesses, do want to be, they want to be more conscious. The challenge oftentimes is it’s not a big part of the business where they have, they may not have a team that’s, you know, or person assigned to it. So the fact that you guys can kind of step in and help and facilitate and in potentially pulling that, I mean, these guys delivered in that example is a big deal. What,
You know, you’ve shared about the brushes, you know, and the animal back scratchers and things like that, right? Are there any things that you still just kind of scratch your head like, holy cow, this is hilarious that this happened or any fun stories that have happened in the business?
Damon Carson (21:08.12)
Yeah, one of them that I always, you know, not an uncommon question. One of them that’s kind of a favorite is this was back a few years ago, Comcast cable. know, a lot of people are familiar with Comcast cable around the country. They reached out and they had two semi loads of concrete pads. So imagine four foot by four foot, four inch thick concrete precast. So it stays together and they had holes in it. And what this was in life, number one, it would be placed out.
in a subdivision, they would set their telecommunications, fiber optic stuff on top of it. And then they would, the holes were to run the conduit to each house to provide, you know, Fox News, CNN, ESPN, et cetera. For whatever reason, these didn’t get used or they were used, brought back to the warehouse. We don’t want these. Can you help us? So again, back to three words I used earlier, generic, versatile, adaptable. thought.
Yeah, we’ll take a risk on these. We’ll gamble on these. Somebody, some industry, I bet can figure out what to do with these. So we brought them in and it was, that one didn’t take very long. Within probably a month, we had a motor freight company, a trucking company call us and said, we’ll buy them all. Two semi loads of these concrete pads. Great. You you sign the dotted line on the invoice. Sir, what in the world is a trucking company buying?
these concrete blocks for basically. said, well, Damon, you have to understand we’re in Denver. That’s when we were very small and Denver based. He said, a lot of times we, our trucks are only half full of freight. It’s not always, you know, full of freight. And sometimes what the freight is light. Well, some days we go to Wyoming. If anybody’s driven through Wyoming, my wife and I joke, we’ve never seen a limp flag in Wyoming because the wind is
just blows and blows and blows. So their problem is if they have light loads going to Wyoming on windy days, trucks can literally blow over. It’s a big risk. It’s a big cost in the industry. Comcast cable has these no longer good concrete blocks. The motor freight company said this is a solution. It’s just weight or ballast and they fill their trucks half full of concrete when they’re half full and it’s a windy day in Wyoming. So again,
Tyler Jorgenson (23:31.365)
Yeah
Damon Carson (23:31.534)
Problem, problem, waste to concast cable, the telecommunications industry becomes solution to a trucking company.
Tyler Jorgenson (23:40.261)
Yeah, and they were probably already on palettes and things or, know, they just, all right, here’s the number. Throw six ballasts on there. Pretty smart.
Damon Carson (23:43.224)
No!
Damon Carson (23:47.116)
Yeah, you know, 2000 pounds of pallet, we need six pallets on that truck or whatever the math is.
Tyler Jorgenson (23:50.883)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love this kind of stuff. I love the ingenuity that goes into every one of your customers acquisitions, right? They have to have that vision for how else it can be utilized and how neat that you built that up and done and have done that. I you guys have, like I said, multiple locations and you’re keeping, think the last, the email I got from you said over 15 million pounds out of the landfill this year. And that’s just,
really, really cool to think about how much is being saved from that. a personal level, what’s one item on your personal bucket list you’re gonna accomplish in the next 12 months?
Damon Carson (24:32.834)
Business or non-business?
Tyler Jorgenson (24:33.931)
No, man, no, this is Damon, you know.
Damon Carson (24:37.718)
Well, I don’t… You said 12 months? It has to be 12 months?
Tyler Jorgenson (24:41.284)
We give or take a little. I’ll give you a small buffer there.
Damon Carson (24:43.214)
Okay, so my wife and I love to travel, so we’ve been married almost 28 years. Our goal before our 30th year of marriage, which is coming up soon, is we want to make it to our seventh and last continent, which is Antarctica, traveling. So that’s what comes to mind when you ask the question. It’s a little outside 12 months, but maybe 24 months. Maybe 24 months.
Tyler Jorgenson (25:05.423)
That’s a good one.
Tyler Jorgenson (25:10.043)
well, yeah, it could be, yeah. I’ll take it. That is a perfect one. I think that’s fantastic. I think how cool to make it and make it to that seventh one. So few people do. That’ll be a really cool thing. You know, as we wrap up and get towards the end of the show here, again, I just think what you’ve built with Repurpose Materials is really, really cool. Any advice that you would give to entrepreneurs who are earlier in their business? I mean, you’ve done, this isn’t your first business.
You’ve been around for a bit. I know it’s kind of a blanket question, kind of broad, but what advice would you give to someone who’s just getting started?
Damon Carson (25:44.908)
It’s funny tomorrow I’m getting asked to speak at an entrepreneurial competition for a bunch of high schoolers here in Colorado. So I’m speaking to them and they’re, you know, they’re budding, burgeoning entrepreneurs. You know, what am I going to say? I’ve got several things I’m going to say, but, I think baby steps, little bets. you know, if you could just manage risk, I think the
biggest thing as I’ve observed many people who are just as smart or smarter than me, and there’s a lot of them, but they’re still working for somebody. It’s, it’s risk. think that’s the one thing that differentiates the entrepreneur from, you know, the people that aren’t. If you had to name one thing, I mean, there’s many, but, and I think you have to practice, you have to get used to handing over a dollar or a hundred dollars.
And you know, I might only get $70 back because I made a mistake. But some days you hand over that $100 and you get $200 back. I think, and you don’t have to do it with $200,000 on your first move or a million dollars, you know, baby step it if you can, little steps.
Tyler Jorgenson (26:57.443)
Yeah, I think that’s really, really smart. I think so many people think that they’ve got to go raise a ton of money, build the next app that’s going to be huge, but really the principle of just taking those little efforts and learning the process and learning to see and understand risk. think that’s fantastic. Damon, I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing with us how you created Repurpose Materials, Inc. I think what you guys are doing is just awesome. I browse your site just saying, hey,
Maybe I need a palette of whatever that random thing is. So I love checking it out. If you guys are on social and stuff as well, all has repurposed materials. So everyone go check them out, give them a follow and maybe buy a used basketball courts worth of wood, because you probably need that. Yes, exactly. And to all my business, wherever you’re listening, tuning or watching, it’s your turn to go out and do something.
Damon Carson (27:43.912)
It’s absolutely what everybody listening to this needs, absolutely.
