Trash-to-Treasure Supply Sourcing

“The real lesson was that, throughout my whole career, I have made a business out of taking other people’s trash and making it into something of value.”

“Desperate to earn enough to support my young family, I jumped right in at Jet-Line and went about the task of understanding the oil clean-up business, literally from the bottom up. I learned about cleaning oil tanks, I experienced the emergency response business, and I got lessons on how to turn dirty oil into recycled oil that could be resold for a profit. With me being a welder and mechanic, one of my early jobs involved constructing an oil storage facility called a tank farm. A tank farm is where dirty oil and wastewater are taken to be filtered, separated, and recycled after an oil spill.”

“Our most popular frame style is the rustic, unfinished wood we call “barnwood.” People have a soft spot for the past, it seems—for simpler days, for their rural roots. So they put country scenes in these frames . . . paintings of old-time kitchens, for example. The barnwood line is perfect for this. I’ll let you in on a little secret: The wood in these frames doesn’t come from barns. It comes from old picket fences that are being replaced! The fence companies are more than happy to give us the old, weathered, paint-peeling wood that they otherwise would have to haul to the city dump and pay a fee to get rid of it. We take it off their hands, put it through our specially calibrated router machines, and glue it into frames for people to buy.”

“One of our most enduring categories is the product line that started it all for Barbara and me: frames. The small picture frames we made in the beginning were strictly a craft item. Customers would use them to hold small paintings for a grouping on the wall. Then a wholesale company (the same one that sold us that first frame-chopper machine) wanted to get out of the ready-made frame business. The owner sold us a forty-foot truckload of inventory for $2,000. We had no way to store this much in our small facility, so we parked the trailer out front and began running newspaper ads for a big sale. We spread some frames out on the lawn, while the rest could be seen by climbing up a ladder into the back of the trailer. (Fortunately, nobody slipped and fell and sued us!) It turned out to be a tremendous success; we netted five or six times our investment. So we bought another truckload for $4,000, and a third for $8,000, still managing to be profitable. This showed us the potential of large, ready-made frames. It’s still one of our mainstays. Today we stock every size from 2 x 3 inches to 24 x 36 inches. Granted, frames consume a lot of floor space, and they come in lots of different styles. But people will always want to hang a picture of their child or their mother on the wall, and Hobby Lobby will always be there to help them.”