EYE ON THE ENTREPRENEUR

City Entrepreneurs Create Market For Wide Range Of Goods

BY NEIL YOUNG

Dan Shuman and Brad Bondroff love the movies.  They’ve seen some really great ones and some that weren’t so great.  Some, they’ll admit, were pretty bad.  However, there was one movie they saw several years ago they can’t even remember…but they’ll never forget.

 

“Dan and I were watching this movie with a buddy of ours who owns a construction company,” recalls Bondroff.  “It must have been a pretty bad movie because we were talking and nobody was complaining.  Our friend was bemoaning the fact that he was renovating some movie theaters and he had to pay the dump $5 per movie seat just to take them.”

 

Bondroff and Shuman looked at each other.  They’ll tell you they forgot about the movie and both had the same idea at the same time. 

 

“My mind was racing,” recalls Bondroff. “I can’t even remember what the movie was about.”

 

“It seemed ridiculous that these movie theater seats would go to the dump while other movie theaters might be willing to pay for them,” they thought.

 

Shuman and Bondroff got on the Internet and started looking up movie theater owners. When they had the contact information, they hit the phones. 

 

“We spent ten days hammering the phones, asking theater owners around the country when they planned to renovate their theaters,” Bondroff remembers. 

 

They found lots of theater owners who would love to get rid of their seats.  Now that they had a supply, the two of them had to find a market. 

 

“We went to the Internet again,” explains Shuman.

 

Within a few weeks, they’d sold over a thousand movie theater seats at an average price of $25 per seat.

 

One person’s junk was obviously someone else's treasure.  Shuman and Bondroff realized they had a viable business, and so The Asset Store (www.theassetstore.com) was born.

 

Shuman and Bondroff figured that if theater owners were happy to get old theater seats taken off their hands and other theater owners were happy to buy them, there had to be a market for other kinds of stuff.  They talked to John Ferber, the marketing genius who founded Advertising.com (www.advertising.com).  Ferber was so impressed he agreed to serve on their Board of Directors.

 

"The Asset Store had a strong approach to a unique market,” explains Ferber.

 

Today, Shuman and Bondroff consider themselves asset brokers.  They have divided their company up into five divisions: Hotel, heavy equipment, office, restaurant and medical.

 

“We don't even see a lot of the stuff we sell,” says Shuman. “We don't even pay for it until it’s sold."

 

To accommodate their customers, the pair has opened a fifteen thousand square-foot retail store on Sisson Street in Baltimore city, Overstock Outlet (www.ooutlet.com).  The store sells used hotel and office furniture. Their web site has hotel items such as “57 Rooms of New Kimball Custom Lyonnesque Hotel Furniture - $500/room.”   Anyone interested in sleep sofas? Shuman and Bondroff currently have forty of them ready to go for $3,200. Need a mobile MRI?  They can get you one in excellent condition for $85,000.  Some doctor group paid $800,000 for it ten years ago.

 

A lot of the stuff the Asset Store has to sell moves very quickly. Shuman and Bondroff have a large supply of generators, and after Hurricane Katrina, there was a huge demand.

 

"We were getting generators in our doors in the morning, selling them and shipping them in the same day,” explained Shuman.

 

Shuman and Bondroff realize their customers not only want quality at a fair price, they want quick shipping.  To handle the demand, The Asset Store has a fleet of four tractor-trailers and two more owner-operators.

 

Since much of what they sell in bulk goes sight unseen, Shuman and Bondroff allow for 5% fudge factor.  If a customer needs a thousand movie theater seats, they will send a thousand fifty to make up for any that are damaged.

 

Not everything goes out the door quickly.

 

"A while back we had one hundred cubicles from an office park,” Shuman recalls, smiling.  "They were not only old, they were really ugly.  We didn't think anyone in their right minds would want to buy them, but eventually we found a company in the Caribbean that was happy to have them.  I guess there are not too many office furniture companies in Caribbean.”

 

Shuman and Bondroff are excited and happy with their success.

 

"When you have an idea and you're ready to deliver service and quality," says Bondroff, "it's amazing how fast your network grows.  We began to realize this one right after we sold the theater seats; someone called us and asked if we wouldn't be interested in hotel furniture!”

 

In a few weeks, they’re going to clean out five hundred rooms of furniture at a major hotel that’s renovating. They will then sell on the open market to smaller hotels and motels around the country.

 

And so it goes.

 

When Shuman and Bondroff started selling theater seats, they never realized the opportunities that lay before them.

 

“When we started our liquidation business, Brad and I were eager to show people that we could create a marketplace for any liquidated goods and serve clients as a true asset brokerage firm,” Shuman explains.  “People who have been in our warehouse have had some very confused and amused looks on their faces when they saw some of the crazy items stacked in our warehouse.” 

 

Some of the more unusual goods that they have successfully liquidated include a half-million pieces of make up, lipstick, eye shadows, nail polish, press on finger nails;

one hundred thousand square feet of wood flooring; fifty Refrigerators for dead bodies;

sixty Milk Shake Machines from a restaurant chain and four hundred and fifty Church Pews.

 

Life is a real adventure for these two.

 

“We look forward to seeing what items we will liquidate in the future that will confuse and amuse people,” says Shuman.

 

Anybody need women’s panties? They have two hundred a fifty thousand pairs they can sell you.  The price is great, but you’ll have to buy in bulk!