ATR COO Ken Ehresman shares valuable growth insights with industry leaders at the 2019 e-Scrap conference in Orlando.
What do tradewars, bankruptcies and Millions of dollars in fines have in common? They all mean opportunity is knocking for tech savvy IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) companies like ATR who specializes in risk mitigation and sustainable life cycle asset management.
ATR’s very own Chief Operations officer Ken Ehresman was recently invited to speak to an eager crowd of industry leaders who wanted to know how ATR has continued to grow during such turbulent times. We’ll get to that in a minute but first let’s hear what Ken had to say about what “not” to do.
“Don’t solve your short term cash flow or growth challenges with long term investors who don’t understand your business” said Ehresman
As was the case with ECS Refining, a company who recently went bankrupt after a failed hostile take attempt from an investment company who had acquired controlling interest went south. ATR was only 1 of 6 authorized bidders that day so we had a front row seat to the proceedings and we learned very quickly growing organically is a better strategy. Incidentally one of the other bidders turned out to be MeTech who suffered a similar fate.
In an unusual twist of fate Ingram Micro ITAD which was one of the other two companies represented in the “Growth in Turbulent Times ” session also went up for sale by the investment company who recently acquired majority shares. It’s unclear if the sale will go through but recent news articles indicate Ingram Micro has begun shutting down facilities in South Africa.
“Picking up where others have failed has become increasingly common” continues Ehresman
Another key strategy that has lead to our continued success is to avoid channel partners who aren’t able to deliver the same level of service our customers have grown to expect. Sure there are advantages to expanding your footprint virtually overnight but as we have learned there are serious risk factors that accompany that convenience, especially for the customers. ATR has organically grown our fleet and our nationwide infrastructure allows us to utilize our own staff, vehicles and facilities to perform the specified work in a uniformed and secure way.
So how did ATR do it?
ATR listens to our customers and we align our growth strategies with their needs not our own. We never sacrifice availability for reliability, so when a customer needs us somewhere new, we find a way to get there, and we don’t rely on channel partners to solve our problems. We provide transparent solutions that make dollars and sense. If you would like to read the full Resource Recycling article you can find it here
