Nidal Allis CEO Techno Rescue, Reuse, Recover and Recycle

Nidal Allis CEO of Techno Rescue, which is a veteran-owned, full life-cycle green IT company based in Colorado, specializing in computer electronics, recycling, data destruction, e-waste disposal, computer service and repair, IT support, and consulting.

Not just computers-

• Medical equipment, have them refurbished, recertified, and remarketed to other medical facilities, whether they’re in this country or aboard, that cannot afford brand new medical equipment.

Earth Month

• We brought in probably somewhere in between 400,000 and 500,000 pounds. And most of that was in the last two and a half weeks of the month during Earth Week.

Guinness Book of World Records

• We do an event with 9News, and this year we’re doing it on September 9th at Coors Field. Last year in a five-hour period we picked up 378,000 pounds in five hours. So much so that this year the Guinness Book of World Records is going to come out because that is a world record for the most amount of recyclable material of electronics in a one-day period.

Vision and round the clock

• I can envision us in a year, year and a half from now being a 24-hour operation just to keep up with the growing volume
• I was in the shower and I had the vision. I jumped out of the shower before the soap got out of my head, I called my soon-to-be partner, and within two hours we met for lunch. I went to the Secretary of State, I got licensed, two weeks later found a warehouse and got busy

Success and control-

• The first year we profited and that was against all odds, as you know as a businessman. The second year at Techno Rescue we profited, and again that was against all odds. And then, being the young entrepreneur, I think I got a little ahead of myself, started expanding, had multiple locations, and I decided I’m going to go after some of the big million-dollar contracts and accounts. And I’ll accept my accountability, I lost control of it a bit

Embezzlement and Cancer

• The third year I experienced an embezzlement. So the second embezzlement of my life, the first one in D.C., then this one with my own company. Had a lot of problems with employees. At that same exact time my mom got diagnosed with cancer.
• So I decided to fight. Shut all the different locations down, got reorganized, I terminated both partner relationships. It was a very expensive experience.
• I have a Ph.D. in the hard-knock class of business learning.

Rebuilding-

• Difficult because I had zero dollars and massive debt that I took on by myself, especially when I kicked out my cofounder. He wanted to sue me, but luckily, even though we had a high school relationship, I was smart enough to have an operating agreement an attorney drafted at the beginning.

Advice

• You had two opportunities to look at embezzlement, if you were going to take and start another business today and you were going to have partners, what procedures or policies would you put in place where everybody would know that there’s accountability and oversight? What would you do?
• I’d do is I’d make sure that my partner had a vested interest and not going to walk in with just sweat equity. They need something to lose,
• Part of the operating agreement was that I’d be the primary to manage all the books. But he wanted to run it because I was a better business development person than he was. So I should have kept my hands on it.

Present

• I have 27 really excellent employees right now that I’m very proud of and we’re just rocking. Are we where I want to be? Not even close. At the same time I’ll probably never be satisfied, I’m probably always going to want more.
• When you’re thinking about doing another location, what are the two or three things that you’re thinking about that you need to keep in mind when you’re going to take and expand to another location?
• I’m taking a different approach initially before I do another expansion. Now I have clients in different states outside of Colorado. So the approach I’m taking now is something that I learned from my government days. I have set up, through some serious due diligence and vetting with really credible companies who have my same certifications who have even deeper history
• I haven’t figured it out 100%, but it could be a franchise approach, it could be a licensing approach. Or it could be, if I’m going to have a facility somewhere else, that I have somebody come in to be a partner of that specific facility who’s going to have a vested interest and buy into that.

Policies and procedures in place.

• As a certified company, we have documentation. I totally went back to my military roots, I have standard operating procedures, I have policies. There’s a system for everything, how to answer the phone, how to clean the bathroom, how to break equipment down. We have a system and policies and procedures and everything that’s not only compliant with the regulations to be this environmental business, but for how to run the business more efficiently and appropriately and just the best practices. I call it my Techno Rescue Bible, if you will.

Data Destruction and forensics

• At Techno Rescue I guarantee 100% data destruction, and I issue you a certificate of destruction. And I can guarantee that because I use the DoD, the Department of Defense, approved methods of data destruction. And I have gone as far as, and I do this now every year, and in fact I’m doing it next week, I hired a forensic company who does global services, forensic work for technology, I hire them every year, where they come in, they evaluate my process, they take any random hard drives or storage media, and they’re not able to retrieve a single bit of data.

Books

• Good to Great
• Tipping Point

Mentors,

• Retired Air Force Colonel Dave Gruber
• Talal Hafiz, an incredibly successful gentleman
• Mike Walker from Washington, D.C.

New initiatives-

Rebate asset management program, it falls onto our IT asset disposition program.

• We will first, of course, do all the data destruction, but we will salvage, refurbish, and remarket the equipment. Then we’ll take a proceed of the revenue we generate from that equipment and send it back to that company. Now they got a return on their investment of what they probably would have never seen and they can take that money for the next equipment that they’re going to replace it with or do whatever they want with it, it’s their money

Data center decommissioning.

• We’re going to get involved to include the life cycle portion. There’s going to be organizations like the Air Force Academy, Buckley, Lockheed Martin who are looking at GPU technologies, and they need a solution to dispose of their other equipment.

website- technorescue.com

e-mail- nidal@technorescue.com

office number- (303) 482-2207

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