PowerOn

you have?And here’s what I have.’I could buyand sell anything.That’s reallyhowI started.” In the beginning,Kelleywas buying and selling used equipment,and then,employing his intimate knowledge of industryand product hardware, he began buying excess,newequipment that themanufacturers had and didn’t knowwhat to dowith.He,however,was able to find buyers by repositioning components in themarketplace and finding their appropriate niches. “Each of the companies had their own little nuances,”he recounts.“Acompany likeHPhad all these excessmonitors–literally tens of thousands of them that were all RGB (Red,Green,Blue).The problemwas-their normal market didn’t use RGB; it usedVGA(Video GraphicsArray).And so, theywere just stuckwith them.Wewere able to convert things fromonemarket to another and drive value,wheremaybe before,theywere going to scrap them.Since that time,our focus has been to find the value in the outside channels,or find something that’s going to be scrapped and find amarket for it.That’s what we’ve been incredibly good at.” As PowerONevolved,it began to dive deeper down into its value proposition.“Companies have needs for trade-in value; everybody’s buying and selling,”says NellyRamirez,Vice President of New Business.“But there’smore to that trade-in value if you can find away tomake something out of POWERON SERVICES, INC. AT A GLANCE: POWERON WHAT: A reuser and recycler of consumer electronic products WHERE: Roseville, California WEBSITE: www.poweron.com it beyond its immediate economic return.If you can’t sell a device again–whole–then you have to lookat the next layer.Then you have to lookat the next layer from that component level.Then there’s another layer after that,and that would be the baremetal extraction. Then,you’re really looking at howto economize from the left-over scrapwithout pulverizing and incinerating it–because that has no value.” PowerON’s various value propositions aremade manifest in the company’s four core services: Trade-in &Take Back; Buyback–Buy/Sell Excess; Processing, Refurbish&Repair; and 360° Recycling.Trade-in provides the company’s Fortune 500 customers an easilybranded“white label”trade-in solution for their consumer direct accounts,educational accounts,small business accounts,and enterprise accounts.Buy/Sell specializes in excess inventory,end of life,returned, service parts,and“as is”consumer electronics.The Pro- cessing,Refurbishing&Repair facility is R2,ISO9001, ISO14001 andOHSAS (Occupational Health and Safe- tyAssessment Series) certified,and includes logistics, repair,customer service,resale,and data destruction services.“We can get down to pulling a singleNAND chip off of a phone and performdata destruct on just the chip,”says Kelley. Kelleyelaborates on howPowerON’s diverse capa- bilities help separate it from its competitors: “We have a reuse part of our companyandwe have the recycling part,”he explains.“Most companies that do recycling are not verygood at reusing product; it’s a lot easier for them to scrap it.And a lot of the companies that are into the retail or reuse space are actuallyverypoor at compliance and destructing product that peoplewant destroyed,and they’re verypoor at reclaiming parts and pieces.So,we do both sides of that market in order tomaximize the value for our customers.”In the past three years,PowerONhas diverted nearly5million electronicdevices from thewaste stream.These devic- es were either properly recycled,or reused and sold at a substantially reduced rate to thosewho needmore