Episode 11: After the Startup

all right welcome everybody to the barrel Solomon's Show today we have an excellent very special guest my father Jeff Solomon the legend himself I I wanted to bring my dad on the show today because we talk a lot about startups but here's men who built a business that has been in existence for 40 years and I surmise if it's gonna be a business for another 40 years God willing I hope so right you hope so what happened was when I was 16 years old my father died in a plane crash and he left us he left us penniless I had a next-door neighbor who is in the same business that I am in in the metal recycling business and the guy took me on as a helper so it became a part-time summer job I contributed to the house household expenses gave the money to my mother helped her pay the rent and everything and slowly but surely I started to get an education in that business and the fall I went back to school and that was in 1974 when Nixon normalized relationships with the Chinese and the Chinese came looking for scrap metal and they drove the price of scrap through the roof now I was only 18 years old and I didn't have much experience I didn't understand anything about business and I in those years we had very very high inflation bank rates your mortgage rate on your house was 18% if you put money in the bank they paid you 14 or 15 percent and an inflation was running at fifteen sixteen percent a year and I thought this was the natural trend of events I mean things are people do things in a different in a different fashion today in those days you know today if you go to a bank and you put together a program and you and and you make it look like you're something else people are willing to work with you in those days I mean when I started to get into that business all the guys in the local industry they did their best to shut me out because they were afraid of a competitor if I would try and sell something that then they would tell me we're not interested if I go and try and buy something from a guy well we're not interested in doing business with you and it's it everybody today seems to work together if you know how to use the tools yeah it seems to me it's all young people they just do things differently and I see when you start to use the tools that are available today if you use your head you can get a lot further today with nothing then you could back then there there's there's several things that you have to take into account to make your business last that long the most important thing is you got to love what you do when you walk in the door every day you've got to enjoy what you're doing because if you don't enjoy what you're doing and it becomes a Drudge how you gonna keep doing it and doing it and doing it you got to love what you're doing that's number one you gotta get the best education possible in your business you have to know exactly what it is that you're doing all the time you want to have we want your business to last you got to be learning all the time and that's what the guy told me said if you really like what you do and the last thing is you have to be organized you have to have data in front of you you got to know what your costs are you have to know what your expenses are you you have to know how your customers are perceiving what your services are and just you got to stick with it you can't allow yourself to get discouraged no matter how many times you get kicked in the teeth you got to pick yourself up you got to dust yourself off and you just got to start all over again and if you just keep doing that all of a sudden you make a deal here you make a deal there all of a sudden you have three four people they're your regular customers and then a year later you have seven or eight people and before you know it you have 50 60 100 regular customers that are calling you for your services all the time how to compete with the big boys this is something that I appreciated my father's company we were a I'd say we're probably one of the smaller guys out there when when I first started with you I'd say you guys are one of the small to medium guys because there's some mammoth is mammoths in your business you have some billion-dollar players but nonetheless you push and shove around the big guys every day so how do you how do you how do you compete with the big boys well if you want to compete with the big boys it's very very important that you establish niche markets because if you want to try and tackle the big boys I'll give you an example in our business today in in the regular scrap metal of the steel and the aluminum and the copper and the brass the margins have shrunk to nothing and the capital investment that's required to be in those businesses is huge in your in your business yeah okay you you developed a couple of niches that you were explaining to me today yeah that set you apart from the other guys your presentation with your pad that you send out to the guys that they open it up and your video is there it's it's it's a well presented item nobody does that so what happened with us is there were there were there were certain products that I never really knew existed I was the only salesman in the company at the time and and I decided that we were gonna hire another guy and I was gonna train that guide to look for these various products it's always niche and that's really that's you want to compete with the big boys you can't compete with them you can grow alongside them but you can never compete with the big boys because they have too many resources so what you have to do is you have to look for products that are not dependent on those resources where the profit margins are better there's less competition people are looking for service you know you can go out and you can buy all the t-shirts that you want at Walmart for two dollars and fifty cents to me you have to do what your competitors are not doing and that's the secret to success that's the secret to competing with those guys when I first started hiring people I just I took somebody who I liked their personality and then I started training them and then really I just dropped them in the spot and I said call this guy called this guy called this guy if you get stuck come and see me and I'll tell you what to do come and see me I'll tell you what to do 14 months ago I did something that I never did before I ran an ad in LinkedIn and I found a guy I I wasn't looking for that position I was looking for a marketing guy and and this guy contacted me and I took a look at his credentials and he had experience working at three major metal producers and of two of those metal producers were guys that I was trying to sell metal to we could never get in the door I went and I met the guy and I couldn't believe how much money the guy was asking for salary for a starting salary and I said you know what I'm gonna take a shot and I learned something very very important from that you get what you pay for so okay so how would you have done it differently building a sales force I would have stolen people that could hit the ground running that had relationships with customers that could start building right away and and start generating revenue right away well if you're if you're not in that position where you can afford to carry people you want to have people that can hit the ground running you're better off to pay a little bit more salary and a little bit more commission and this way here when those guys they start hustling for you you have something left man right it's not only their there their 40 $50,000 salary base that you're paying but it's all the resources that you're putting into them is well I made a mistake now that you're saying this I had a kid who came to me flew out from New York to come meet with me and I made a mistake he wanted a hundred grand a year and I didn't give it to him it was us it's a lot of money hundred grand for me it's a lot of money but I made a mistake because I know this guy day one he would've brought me a contract I made a mistake I'm gonna reach out to you Azra I love you buddy I'm gonna hit you up again it's not it's never too late never too late it's never too late okay cool thank you for that so your advice is find people have experience in the industry so what about my industry which is a relatively new industry too I hire somebody from a video production company or hire somebody from a social media I guess yeah from a social media company first of all the other problem is when you're training them is that you're taking the time to train them and and that's detracting from the other things that you have to do that gotta get done to keep the show running I freaked out when I'm starting to pay this guy and I'm writing paychecks on a weekly basis and like nothing's happening but then all of a sudden like five six weeks later and I have to tell you something the first couple of deals that he brought me I didn't want to discourage the guy by not supporting what he was doing between you and me those two deals turned out so bad but the guy learned something from that he had no experience in our business before right don't take the tools that you haven't just throw them away every salesman I ever had I let them make all kinds of deals not not because they were profitable or not but so that the guy at the end of the day could have the sensation of knowing that he could make the deal he had to cover it to know that he could put the whole thing together initiative is probably the most important thing I mean you know right away when somebody has initiative you just you just know you give somebody you give somebody a project or you make a comment you're in a sales meeting and you make a comment about something in that sales meeting and before you know it you have an employee that comes to you and says you know you mentioned that thing in the meeting look I got this thing here here you got to encourage the people when they come to you with stuff you got to encourage them to go ahead and do that stuff because if you have a guy that keeps coming to you with ideas even if the idea is stupid and you're constantly shooting that idea down well eventually what's gonna happen is the guy's not gonna come to you with ideas anymore you're gonna be paying a guy to do a job and the dog don't be mediocre you want to be you want to be a top employee you want to be an asset to your company take some initiative don't be mediocre and respect the people that you work around and and I and I promise you one thing if you are that person working within an organization the sky is the limit for you Jeff Salomon the legend himself this is how he did it dad thank you for being on the show thank you for having me hope to have you again God everybody god bless and let's make North America great again