How Crazy Ideas Fuel Your Business--EP 223

Often the best deals and business decisions happen when you’re doing something that seems crazy to other people and even a little bit crazy to yourself. As used machinery dealers, putting our money down to stock old, dirty machines that we’re only interested in for resale, we have to have chutzpa. To some people, the business model seems a bit ridiculous, but it’s how we eat.

These days I often question if it even makes sense stocking machines. Often we make a good profit brokering machines we’ve spent no money on, selling them right off the owner’s floor. 

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Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion!

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Interview Highlights

Stocking machines requires risking your cash, so you have to have some big self-confidence. It requires you to believe that you’re smarter than other people, which is an important trait to make clever business moves. But as you can imagine, it could also lead to doing some very stupid stuff.

Seeing other used machinery dealers out there rolling the dice on old equipment makes me feel a little more secure specking on machines. If we were the only ones buying other people’s discarded treasures, I’d be more nervous doing it. But still, most of our dealer contemporaries don’t buy the same junk we buy—Legacy Hydromats, Davenports, Acme-Gridleys—some as old as American presidents. Obviously it’s not really junk. Otherwise we wouldn’t buy it. I’m just trying to sound dramatic.

Anyway, even when a deal seems REALLY interesting, it’s easy to question yourself. Why hasn’t anybody else bought it? Are we really smarter than other people out there who aren’t specking on screw machines built in the ‘50s by companies that don’t even exist now?

And why is someone selling these machines? Do they know something we don’t? Or do they just have other things they want to focus on besides worrying about maximizing the value their old iron that they’ve already written off?

In any case, our biggest deals these last few months have been selling a bunch of Davenports, New Britains, and Acme-Gridley multi-spindle screw machines. I’m not going to lie, I was not enthusiastic about Graff-Pinkert’s recent purchase of a group of these machines out of a shop in the middle of nowhere.

As Rex and my Dad, Lloyd, plotted their bid on the machines, I thought back to the last New Britain Model 52 we owned. It was actually a really nice machine that came with a lot of spare parts. We ended up selling it very cheap after it sat in our warehouse for four years. I also thought about the New Britains in an auction we had