Taking ITAD and Mobility to the Next Level with Darrell Fleming-Kendall of the Global ITAD Alliance

John Shegerian: Get the latest Impact Podcast right into your inbox each week. Subscribe by entering your email address at impactpodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. This is a special edition because it’s my great friend coming back on the show, Darrell Fleming Kendall. He’s the Executive Director of the Global ITAD Alliance, also the Events Manager for ITAD Summit, Mobile Disrupt, and ITAD Europe. Welcome back, Darrell.

Darrell Fleming Kendall: Thank you, sir. So glad to be back. It’s a privilege to enjoy every time. It’s a privilege. It’ll never get old.

John: It’s a privilege for both of us, and it’s also fun, which makes it even better.

Darrell: Exactly.

John: Coming off of the high of being in Nice, France together, I don’t know. First of all, I’m almost 64 years old. I’ve never wore on stage sunglasses. And at that event, the sun was so bright, and the ocean was so blue, and the sky was, the sun was just shining on all of us, and it was such a huge crowd. It was just the funnest[?] way to kick off any event I’ve ever been involved with in my entire life. Talk a little bit about the success that you had with the ITAD Europe event in Nice, France, and what you’re planning on next year.

Darrell: Yeah. So, I mean, you talked about the- I think the gem of the entire experience was that opening session. Rob and I hatched that plan, and I came to you, and I said, “We’ve got a wild idea. What do you think of it?”

John: It literally happened the way you predicted. The way you planned it a year before was literally exactly how it happened.

Darrell: And the weather was, as you said, the weather was perfect. The conditions were great. The wind even died down long enough for us to really make full advantage of it from a sound perspective.

John: The crowd was as big as, I mean, it was a standing room[?] only out on that deck.

Darrell: Yeah. It was truly remarkable to watch. And, you and the pictures of you and Fred in your sunglasses, and Jen, and then Tsuyoshi as well, and having the privilege to moderate that panel in any setting is something that I don’t take lightly. But to do it in front of that backdrop, as the folks, the citizens of Nice were riding their bikes past and kind of looking over and see what was going on. I think we ended up having about 350 people in the crowd for an opening session, which is absolutely amazing, right? Particularly at nine o’clock in the morning in a beautiful European party city like Nice. To get everybody out there was pretty remarkable. And the content, like we can talk about the setting and all that stuff, but the content, the wisdom that you guys shared from the stage was, I think we haven’t stopped hearing about that as well. But, to your point about the event, we had big plans, big vision, we knew Nice was going to be a great city to host us. But we had no idea just how the way the industry was going to wrap its arms around that event. And you and I talked briefly before we started recording about the social media. After every event, we hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. And in this case, the bad was little tiny stuff, right? It went really well. Overall, we were very excited. But the social media activity after the event was like nothing I’d ever seen. And that’s something like we can’t- there’s no way we can kind of prepare for that or navigate that in advance. But I had never seen somebody respond to an event and say, “I promise this is my last post about ITAD Europe.” And we had that. There were probably five or six people that posted that over the weeks after the show. And then we had several people reach out to us immediately after and either closed business or found a partner or whatever. And sponsorships are already rolling in for next year. We’re super excited. The week of April 20, we’re going to be back there at that venue. And our hope is really for that to be a landing spot for the entire international ITAD community. And really learn from what we did last year. Maybe ratchet it up just a little bit as we like to do and see if we can’t take over the Riviera again.

John: We’ve already signed up. ERI has already signed up as one of your top lead sponsors. So we’re back in one of the dates of next year, and we’ll put a link to ITAD Europe, ITAD Summit, Mobile Disrupt, all the show notes for our listeners and viewers. They don’t have to go online and struggle and find it. I’ll be writing our show notes for this show. What are the dates for next year?

Darrell: I’m pulling this from memory. It’s the 22nd and 23rd, I believe, are the official dates. It’s the week of April 20. So I believe the 21st, we’ll have some activities, right, some day zero kind of activities, master classes and things like that. And then the 21st and 22nd, or the 22nd, 23rd.

John: Yeah. But what we did- we got there early, and we stayed late, because there’s so much to get done. With all the people from around the world that come, we just arrived a couple days early. We’re going to leave a couple days late. So we’re just going to block off that whole week. That’s the value of what you put together.

Darrell: Well, and beyond that, I mean, John, you and I had the opportunity to sit down at an amazing tiny, when I say tiny…

John: Oh man[?].

Darrell: …off the beaten path, little Italian restaurant. And the food was phenomenal. And of course, whether it was that restaurant or anywhere else in Nice, it was unbeatable. So it’s a city worth spending some time in. And especially if you can connect with the industry for an extra day or two. That’s all ROI.

John: Yeah, smart use of time. It’s a smart time. Talk a little bit about what’s coming up. We have two other big events coming up this year. You got the Mobile Disrupt coming up, and then the ITAD Summit. Why don’t we start in order of chronology, Mobile Disrupt. Talk a little bit about Mobile Disrupt coming up on July 7th and 8th in Miami, Florida.

Darrell: Yeah. So as you said, the week after Fourth of July. And hey, coming in early, looking forward to the festivities, we’ll be there starting Saturday, make sure to get the show ready and stuff like that. So the pregame festivities will be great. And then starting Monday, again, sort of day zero activities, we’ll have stuff going on. Going back to the Fountain Blue. Just absolutely, just a classy place. Just to spend time at that facility is just a great place and phenomenal for facilitating networking, right? It’s just set up to do business, right? Whether it’s in the exhibit hall and the sort of the conference side of it, or whether it’s in the lobby bar area. It’s just a really great place to meet people and connect. And I think among the best venues we have for that because it centralizes everything. So good opportunity to network with people. Our exhibit hall is already larger than last year’s Mobile Disrupt. That’s only going to continue. It will be, I think we’re going to be digging out every 10 by 10 space we can in that hall here in a minute. So tickets are selling quickly, and we’re going to have just tons of education again around the mobility side. And I think if you touch mobile devices in any capacity, I think this is a show. It’s the full ecosystem, right? There’s not really another show where the full ecosystem on the mobility side is on full display. Everything from logistics to carriers. And this year, some of the remarketing platforms are coming out in a big way that we’ve never had before. So really cool opportunity to see what TikTok, Whatnot, stuff like that are doing, and how they’re changing their platforms or how they’re using their platforms to help our industry do what we do best. So I think it’s going to be a really, really cool event. And, again, the venues we choose are all about having a good time by design. It’s by design for sure. We want, when you tell your friends you’re coming to one of our shows, and they ask where it is, we want them to get a little jealous. We’re not going to lie about that.

John: And then less than a month later, we go back to the Bellagio for the fourth and fifth of August in Las Vegas for ITAD Summit.

Darrell: Yeah. And, John, the great thing about ITAD Europe is that the first thing everybody said at the close of ITAD Europe was, “You got some work to do on ITAD Summit to raise the bar again.” So we’re working on it. We’ve got some fun ideas planned. And the exhibit, I think we have 10 spaces left in the exhibit hall or something like that. We’re like two months out. And so it will be sold out completely probably here within the next couple weeks. And then probably by the time this podcast is published, even the ticket sales are on pace to be another record-breaking year. I think this is the year we break 2000 pretty easily. So, when we look back, it was three years ago, we were at 1200, and 2000 seemed like a pipe dream. And it’s a credit to the growth and maturation of the industry. It’s a credit to the fact that we’ve got really great exhibitors and sponsors that help us put on a great show. But most importantly, I think the people that come to the show really have found value in the networking opportunities. And so when you have fun and close business, it’s easy to go home. And, as you said, I’ve already booked my stuff for next year. So we don’t want it to be a decision. We want it to be a mandate, right?

John: Have fun and close business is a winning combination.

Darrell: Right.

John: Talk a little bit about the success, the huge success you’ve had with the Global ITAD Alliance, even though it’s still in its beginning stages, it’s grown massively and with really outside success. Talk a little bit about that.

Darrell: Yeah, so the Global ITAD Alliance is, it really, it’s grown out of the ITAT Summit and the success that that event has had and the environment that we’ve created, the collaboration we’ve created, the ecosystem of vendors from literally across the entire ITAT spectrum, operators, the equipment service providers, brokers, the entire ecosystems that makes ITAD as great as it is as an industry. And last year we walked away and it was like, “It’s really a shame the energy has to die on Thursday, right?” And that was, somebody said that to me, and that was the catalyst, right? We got everybody together. We got a team together in Scottsdale in September, launched it on December 3rd publicly and kind of understanding that maybe we’ll get a member or two on this end of the calendar year if somebody has a little bit of extra budget to spend, but really just kind of putting it on people’s radar. And never in a million years did I imagine that before we got to Mobile Disrupt would be close to a hundred members and that’s what we’re on pace for. So, and what’s most exciting about that is the membership represents the entire scope of the industry. It’s the biggest in what I think objectively people look at as the most successful ITADs are all, if you draw a circle, those are all members of ours at this point, many of whom are on the board and kind of leading the charge. ERI included in that, of course, but there’s the small ITADs and medium ITADs. There’s the service providers, everybody from the data, the data software providers.

John: Give me the why. Why should someone belong to that alliance?

Darrell: So, first of all, our goal is to really raise the profile of the ITAD industry. I think we’ve all gotten really good at the elevator pitch that explains what ITAD is. We all recognize it within the industry. We all recognize that every adult that’s ever made an electronic transaction is protected day in and day out by an ITAD somewhere. And they just have no idea even what an ITAD is. So one of the things we’re looking to do is change that, really give people an understanding of what goes into managing their assets on the back end, getting some credibility around what we do as an industry outside of the friendly confines of our events and things like that. But also to extend the education. We spent two days putting on all of these sessions and jamming as much information as we can into two days of the ITAD Summit, which is absolutely crazy because by the time you walk away, you’re taking a little bit, you get on a plane, you get into your office on Monday morning, first fire hits and you’ve forgotten everything you learned at the ITAD Summit never happens again. So if we can turn that into bite-sized consumable material that we’re doing virtually and providing, that’s a great opportunity for us. I mean, really, it’s all about, you used the analogy last year at the ITAD Summit on the session that we were on together of ITAD being in the second inning of its proverbial baseball game. I perhaps selfishly want to believe that inning three is the GIA era or the GIA inning. It’s an opportunity for us to bring the voices together. I view my role as the executive director as the conductor of the orchestra. And we’ve got, among our membership, we’ve got all of the different instruments, all of the different voices, all doing different things in some capacity. You all specialize very differently. And so the way you tell the story, the way you project the music is all different. My job is to provide a harmonious orchestration that can bring everybody together. So when we’re all talking about what ITAD is, why ITAD is important and why ITAD is going to drive the circular economy forward into 2030 and beyond, we’re doing it in a way that the audience can understand and it comes together in a way that ultimately ends up being beautiful music instead of discord. And talk all the time about rising tide raises all ships. And I’m very proud of the fact that the ITAD industry tends to lean that direction on its own very naturally. But the fact that we’re seeing as much collaboration as we are in the launch of the GIA, it really speaks to the fact that everybody recognizes we’re only cutting into a small piece of this pie and we have a huge opportunity as an industry for everybody to get better without cannibalizing everybody else’s piece. And that’s the part that is so inspiring to me is like, hey, man, let’s take this ball and run with it. Let’s make it happen.

John: Like you’ve done a great job and the alliance is helping with this as well to make everyone inside of our industry and outside of our industry as well that this is not a zero sum game. There’s so much to go around. It’s a world of abundance. And if we even collaborate more, there’s even more to get together. And I think the alliance has proven that already and it’s going to continue to prove that in the months and years ahead.

Darrell: John, we’ve had actually just this afternoon had our last of the nine committee meetings, our sort of launch meeting for the nine committees. And what I have found so interesting in all of these meetings is the amount of excitement and enthusiasm around building more framework around the industry, getting to a point where we’re understanding better who is doing what, how it’s being done and creating a level of understanding across the board of what is expected from ITAD services when we’re buying secondary devices and then how we should operate within the standards that already exist and what can we do to ensure that those standards that are governing the growth of the ITAD industry are being reviewed and checked and the revision process is being effectively overseen, we’ll call it overseen by representatives from the ITAD industry who understand what we need in order for the entire industry to get better. Not because they’re trying to get out of work. I want to be very clear. Not because they’re trying to get out of work. And everybody recognizes this is the part that’s really interesting to me. They’re not trying to get out of having extra hurdles to climb or whatever. But I think everybody recognizes it’s important that as we build those requirements within certification standards or regulation or whatever, that it makes sense and it’s moving things forward and it’s not just arbitrary, right? And I think the Alliance is a really interesting place for a clearinghouse for those folks to share their input on things as they happen. So I think it’ll be interesting.

John: You have something else cooking to launch next year. You have, well, you tell us. Tell us what you have cooking to launch next year. So it’s a whole new subset, but a very important adjacent subsector to our industry. Talk a little bit about that, Darrell.

Darrell: Yeah. So, ITAD is a part of it, is a big part of it, right? It’s a very unique niche within that. So ITAD will remain very independent. GIA will remain independent of it. But we recognize the Venn has a pretty significant overlap, which made this the opportunity very interesting. So many of your listeners probably know that the Reverse Logistics Association was acquired by NRF two years ago. NRF kind of closed down the RLA show, turned it into NRF Rev, and then probably got rid of basically everybody that was involved with RLA and left a pretty massive gap in the reverse logistics side. And so we initially decided that there was an opportunity there because of our relationship with the Bellagio and the fact that we had just spun up a show in seven months for ITAD Europe to kind of fill in that gap. And so we decided to launch the RLA Expo, Reverse Logistics Expo, which will be at the end of March at the Bellagio. And that will be a much larger web of industries and groups. That’s everything from basically any returns, any repair, refurbish, and everything that goes along with liquidation, 3PLs, all of that. And ITAD is going to be a huge part of that. ITAD is a niche within. And so we’re really excited about that. And really, as soon as we launched that, the next question was, “What about an association? Are you doing an association?” And as we looked at it, it really made a lot of sense to represent the secondary marketplace and secondary goods. So we now have sister organizations, the Global Reverse Logistics Alliance and the Global ITAD Alliance. And our goal, and I recognize that NRF is not probably, it may be a little persona non grata on the reverse logistics side to make a comparison to at the moment, but our goal is to become the voice of the secondary market, secondary product lifecycle, and really, through GIA, focus on electronics, and through GRLA, focus on the importance of the rest of it. Because I think everybody understands we’re very quickly approaching a material shortage cliff, both domestically and internationally. And we need to do a better job as a society and as a pair of industries in ensuring that we’re introducing material back into the stream and really facilitating a truly circular economy. Not because it’s fancy or fun or because it’s a buzzword, but because we owe it. I mean, John, you’ve got generations ahead of you. I’ve got generations ahead of me. And we owe it to them to make sure that they’re not scrounging through landfills, looking for materials to rebuild their economy, right? So it’s a very interesting place to be. And I know both Rob and I feel very privileged that we get the opportunity to be a big part of that.

John: Well, we’re going to put all the links to each one of these organizations and events, ITAD Summit, Mobile Disrupt, ITAD Europe. Also, when you have the link ready, the Reverse Logistics, your new GRLA, all will be in the show notes. Darrell, it’s always wonderful to have you on the show. It’s always wonderful to hear updates in the industry and updates on your events that bring us all together so we can collaborate more and we can take this industry to the next level. It’s because of you and Rob and all your great work that you’ve offered us platforms to just get together, have fun, but also get deals done. And that magical intersection that you’ve created has really propelled the business and the industry to a whole new level. I appreciate you. I know all the other leading firms appreciate you as well. And we’re going to continue to support for many, many years to come. And we can’t wait to just keep watching each one of these great organizations grow. And we’re going to be a part of it. ERI is going to be a big part of that. And I just want to say thank you for everything you do.

Darrell: Well, John, I appreciate it. I feel like there’s probably a disproportionate amount of credit being given to Rob and I. I think we’re sort of scrappers behind the scenes putting this together and trying to make it work for everybody’s benefit. And obviously, we enjoy doing it, love doing it. And the more we hear your successes that come out of it, the more motivated we are.

John: All great innovators and entrepreneurs are scrappers. So that’s what you and Rob are. And I appreciate it. Again, for all listeners and viewers, to find Darrell, you’re going to be able to go to ITADsummit.com, MobileDisrupt.com. We’ll have all the links to all these great organizations in the show notes. You don’t have to go searching for them. Darrell, both to you and Rob, thank you for not only spending time over and over again here on the Impact Podcast, but more importantly, thank you for making the world a more sustainable and better place.

Darrell: Appreciate it, John. And appreciate what you do on the same front. So thank you.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit LetsEngage.com. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.