ITAD from the DotCom Era to the Cloud: Interview with Richard Greene, Managing Partner of Liquid Technology

Steve Sidwell:

On this episode of the Tech Bench Podcast, we’ll be chatting with a managing partner of Liquid Technology, Richard Greene. Richard’s worked in the technology field for over 25 years. Today we chat with him about the.com bubble, how he started Liquid Technology, and the future of IT asset disposition. Brace yourself, you’re now entering the Tech Bench Podcast.

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Richard Greene:

Hi, I’m Richard Greene, managing partner of Liquid Technology.

Steve Sidwell:

So Rich, what did you do before founding Liquid Technology?

Richard Greene:

I primarily worked in for IT integration companies. So I was a consultant. I also did sales. I specialize around security, remote access and hardware implementation.

Steve Sidwell:

Around what time was this? What year?

Richard Greene:

From like 1996 to about 2001. In the latter part, the last company I worked for I actually ran the business side of the technology department.

ITAD Lessons from the Dotcom Era

Steve Sidwell:

Now that was the.com era, correct?

Richard Greene:

Yes, it was.

Steve Sidwell:

Yeah. What was the craziest tech company that was funded around that time? That you can remember?

Richard Greene:

I always remember pets.com because they raised so much money, and they had that sock dog and the commercial. I always thought that was pretty amusing [crosstalk 00:00:01:53]. Yeah. There was a lot, there was a lot of big companies that went out.

Steve Sidwell:

Yeah. What was the biggest lesson you learned from that time?

Richard Greene:

Maybe it’s a good idea to think about your company being profitable before you get market share.

Steve Sidwell:

So how did you make the segue of your job and kind of making the way into ITAD?

Richard Greene:

Well, I was working for a.com. At first, we were downsizing different locations. We had different locations around the world. Because I did the business side of the technology department, and I was kind of in charge of ordering everything. At that point they asked me to start downsizing everything. So I was getting rid of some of the assets, which were mostly new. Then not long into that process, probably less than a month they said, “Hey, we’re actually going to be shutting down. Do you want to stay on and liquidate all of our assets because you’ve done a good job.” So I didn’t have anything else to do at the time. I figured that sounded of interesting. I could work for myself and I basically worked as a consultant liquidating this one company.

Steve Sidwell:

So back then, what were companies doing with their end of life technology?

Richard Greene:

At that time I don’t know that a lot of people knew what to do. I would actually often be referred into companies because one of the last companies I worked for was a hosting company. So a lot of the people that I knew there had clients that were hosting that were going out of business or downsizing heavily. So I was getting referred in. But I also found that when I researched and I called companies, I was actually able to make contact pretty quickly. It wasn’t unusual, and this was actually before 911, but it wasn’t unusual that I could just find out about a company, walk into the building, and find a few workers working, never left.

The Beginning of IT Asset Disposition

Steve Sidwell:

Do you have any exciting stories or anything you remember in particular about anyone type of deal that you did? Or one of the liquidation projects you worked on?

Richard Greene:

One of my first ones that comes to mind, maybe it’s just, I was trying to figure out if this was a viable business. I was kind of trying to start methodically going through what companies are, might be good to go after because I realized too that there was known companies that were having issues, or financing problems, but there was also maybe unknown. So I started going through them alphabetically and very quickly had success. So one of the first companies I liquidate a good amount of the assets was called Abridge, AB. Because I was going through that.

I’m trying to think. I mean, there was lots of things early on where I would… I remember I went back a couple of times to knock on the door basically of this company that had heard about and there was no one there. Then I went back, I think a third time and somebody opened the door and says, “Yes, can I help you?” I told them what I did. I was like, “I help companies liquidate their excess assets.” He closed the door, said, I’ll be right back.” Then came back and he, “Come with me.” I basically was walking down aisles. A lot of it was extreme equipment so it was all purple. I was walking down what I knew to be hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. I was glad I had persisted. Because I think I spent it’s a company called the Edgeit. Because I think I spent about three or four months doing that project. I basically I just liquidated them.

Steve Sidwell:

What type of hardware were you seeing mostly, in that time?

Richard Greene:

Cisco Sun, Dell Compaq, HP. But you had a lot more brands at that time too. Brocade, Foundry, Extreme. There was a lot more too, security, there was failover appliances, Altion there was a lot more so I think in some sense’s it was interesting. It was more interesting at the time because a lot of those were kind of. com companies too, right?

Steve Sidwell:

So being new to this and having to deal with all those different types of hardware and brands, how did you sell that? How’d you learn how to sell that?

Richard Greene:

On the go. Kind of like what we know now is that people specialize in certain things. I used eBay a little bit at first. I did have a lot of sell side experience too before all my tech experience so it wasn’t that hard to figure it out.

Speaker 3:

So when did you realize this is a viable business and you wanted to start this company?

Richard Greene:

At some level right away when I was getting phone calls to help people liquidate. I thought it was somewhat viable. Also, when I would go in and maybe even work for three weeks or three months and do fairly well. I think it really took a couple of years till I had examined the viability of an actual company.

Steve Sidwell:

And now ITAD’s a whole actual industry. When did you see that change from just a liquidation process to actually having standards and certifications and things like that? How has the industry changed over the years?

Richard Greene:

I think, I would say, especially in the past maybe seven, eight years. I’ve seen people who are much more aware that there are standards that people just don’t ask us for a certificate of destruction that they want to see what we’re actually doing, what processes, what certifications we have. But for a while it was just like just give me a certificate and that was fine. Or no awareness at all of proper recycling. I mean, it took quite a while. I would say it took quite a while because I kind of started about 2000, 2001, I would say maybe even 2010. There was always awareness, maybe Fortune 500. But below that, and there’s a lot of business below that I saw very little awareness until now. Until I mean the past five years, maybe.

Liquid Technology’s ITAD Expertise

Steve Sidwell:

So how does Liquid Technology stay competitive as technology continues to change and more companies move into our space?

Richard Greene:

I think we try to differentiate ourselves always with service. I think since anybody can do any business or whatever, we try to differentiate ourselves by the quality of service we provide our clients. Because I do think there are other company and ITAD, I think by description you’re doing proper recycling. If you’re doing it right, you’re doing proper recycling, you’re doing data destruction. You’re hopefully getting people money back for their assets. So the service is fairly simple to understand. I think the way that we’ve decided to differentiate ourselves is a high quality of service, in terms of processing and getting things done. A lot of times people don’t want to deal with this so they want us to, to kind of run with the ball and we do.

Steve Sidwell:

Now as the business has grown, what has been the largest challenge that you’ve had with Liquid Technology and continuing to kind of grow the business?

Richard Greene:

Well, we always had the challenge of warehouse space. If we’re doing well by default, we’re going to get more stuff and just trying to process it quicker. So we have addressed it with just constantly hiring more staff. I would say just kind of the overall management to of a company. Trying to keep everybody happy and the quality on track.

Steve Sidwell:

How many employees are there currently?

Richard Greene:

I believe we have about 75, actually. I should probably just say 75.

Steve Sidwell:

In terms of the ITAD industry, what do you see in terms of changes or what’s the next frontier for it?

Richard Greene:

For us, I see it improving our systems, providing more visibility to our clients, in terms of where we are at the process. Just improving things like lowering logistics costs, turning things around, even faster. That’s kind of where I see us. I do see it as a fairly straightforward business and I think we continue to acquire clients because we have a high quality of service. I think competitively that’s number one for us.

ITAD and Cloud Migration

Steve Sidwell:

So we’ve seen over the years, people go from PC workstations, to mobile devices like laptops, and then people working on their phones, cloud is the new big thing. What’s next? What do you see in the future for technology?

Richard Greene:

I’ve been in the tech business a long time. For a long time there was going to be all the dumb terminals and no one was going to have anything that’s sophisticated. The reality of it is everybody in terms of big [inaudible 00:11:33] we still see, are probably PCs, laptops, and servers. I think switching and routing volume has gone down a bed because also, you have combined routing into switching somewhat. So I don’t know that, that’s going to change that much. I do see, I think tablets have taken more of a share. But I would say maybe more functionality in Smartphones but I haven’t seen anything that’s really intrigued me as far as technology goes.

Obviously, cloud migration is the biggest thing that’s happened in the past. I would sit down major momentum in the past five years. We have been doing as a company, we do a lot of cloud migration. So I guess basically liquidating or handling assets when companies are moving over to the cloud. But still a lot of companies retain a server presence. So I always see that as a viable opportunity.

Steve Sidwell:

So going back to the days of the.com era, we’re seeing now many, many companies raising a lot of money and it just feels like we’re going back to that. Do you see a tech bubble coming down anytime soon? I mean, how could you not.

Richard Greene:

There’s a lot of similarities. I think it’s more efficient this time around, but the economy has always had boom and bust. I think this is a big driver of the economy. So it’s obviously going to have the boom and the bust it’s just a matter of when and exactly how it happens. But I will say we kind of saw in 2008, 2009, but it didn’t… It actually hurt our business where I thought it was going to maybe be good for our business. It just that would actually happen was that a lot of our clients kind of retreated and held onto their equipment. So we didn’t see the benefits.

So we try to structure our business as a focusing on companies that are ongoing concerns, that need a reliable partner worldwide to handle this excess product. I think companies are always going to have technology, whatever it might be. We’ll always be helping them with it. So I think that will continue.

Steve Sidwell:

Where do you see Liquid Technology five years from now?

Richard Greene:

I think we’ll have more warehouses and we’ll be a larger company. We’ll continue to do higher volume. I’m very happy with the pace of client acquisition. I think now that as time gone on we really developed a very good model. We’ll just continue to build on that model.

Steve Sidwell:

Well Rich, thanks a lot for taking some time to talk to Tech Bench Podcast. Appreciate your time. Thank you.

Richard Greene:

Hey, thank you.

Steve Sidwell:

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