Hello there. Welcome to Track One. Next up is Ross Dove with Heritage Global Inc.
Thank you.
Yes, welcome.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for coming to hear me. Looks like I'm getting one more. Rospina, if you'd go to the next slide. There we go. I've been coming to these things for 10 years, and I used to try to sound sophisticated and say, "We value and monetize industrial and financial assets by providing acquisition, disposition, and valuation." I firmly decided to quit trying to sound smart and make it simple. I'm Ross Dove, I'm a liquidator, and I'll make it that simple. We do two things as a liquidator. We sell machinery and equipment for two reasons.
A company no longer needs them because they did M&A and they have better equipment, or they upgraded their equipment, or they used AI to lay off people, and they have surplus equipment, or because they're in deep trouble and they had to close the factory or the plant. We've been doing that since my grandfather started it in the 1930s. We have very, very healthy, big clients like a Pfizer or like an Amgen. I could go on. We're also pretty famous in the bankruptcy world. We're the guys that did Enron. We're the guys that did Solyndra. We do good in a good time, and we do good in a bad time. All we need is activity for supply. Why is that a good business right now?
It's a good business right now because supply is increasing. Why is supply increasing? Because there's, as we say, one part is trouble in River City. There are a lot of companies that are struggling right now that are doing layoffs, and there's also a lot of companies that are doing layoffs because they've developed with AI an understanding that they have surplus equipment they don't need, and that they can change their manufacturing process. Both things give us the simple thing that decides when you want to buy our stock and when you want to sell it. The simplest question of all, will these guys at Heritage get more supply of stuff to sell or will they not get more supply of stuff to sell?
Ask yourself that question and make up your own answer if you think there's going to be more surplus equipment on one side and financial assets on the other side. Let's make this as interactive as possible because I get bored listening to myself. Anybody who wants to ask a question at any time, ask a question. If not, halfway through, I'll force you to. That's this side of the business. On that side, you've got the auction company, you've got a valuation company, and you've got ALT, a company that buys and sells used life science equipment. What's happening there is companies no longer can scrap things they used to scrap. They can no longer basically say, "We don't want this equipment anymore.
We don't want a competitor to have it." They're now valued as a good corporate citizen by putting that equipment into the circular economy. All of a sudden, they're a bad citizen if they don't put the asset back into the circular economy. Who does that better than us? Nobody, really, 'cause our motto from the very beginning is, "We sell peanuts when the circus is in town." Right now, the circus is in town, meaning the asset flow is starting to grow. As the asset flow grows, we grow. I mean, that's maybe enough for a little bit on the industrial side. Let's move to the other half of our business, the financial side. NLEX is 25 years old. Probably everybody in this room is too young to remember the S&L crisis.
There was an S&L crisis, and all the savings and loans closed, and we won all the big government contracts. We sold $ billions of real estate and $ billions of loans. Like a lot of the businesses I've been in, we were brilliant until we were stupid. What I mean by that is we woke up one day and there was no business left. There was zero business left. The government canceled all of our contracts. They, so to speak, solved the crisis. When they solved the crisis, we were left with this massive database of buyers and no sellers. We commercialized it, me and a guy named David Ludwig, and we said, "All right.
We're gonna go out to the banks, and we're gonna figure out how to tell the banks that they actually have a value in their worst loans they made a biggest mistake on, their non-performing loans that they thought were worth nothing. We were the only guys ever that went into the bank and said, "Everything you think you can't sell, that's worthless, that you place no value on, give to us." It was a sales pitch they never heard from anybody else ever. Many banks told us, "I wish, I wish you coulda came here six months ago. All that stuff's in the Brooklyn dump yard." Ultimately, over time, we built a marketplace selling charged-off credit lines. We built a marketplace selling charged-off auto loan deficiencies after you already lost your car, et cetera. We built a residual marketplace for lenders.
Why is that a good business now? All of a sudden, we have all kinds of new clients. They invented this thing called fintech. Fintech was like, if you're an old Jewish auctioneer, it's called a mitzvah. Fintech was invented for us. It was absolutely invented for us. They have these things called buy now, pay later, where people now are actually going to the grocery store and saying they'll pay later. They're actually taking a cruise, getting off the boat and saying they'll pay later. There's all these peer-to-peer loans. Literally, our business is growing because we still do all the bank work, plus we're getting all the fintech work. On top of getting a lot of fintech work, we're seeing a surge in subprime lending in the auto market, that surge will help us grow.
There's something far, far more important. When you read all the news, and all the news tells you it's a good economy because spending is up, do not get fooled that that means it's a bad economy for Ross the Liquidator because spending is up massively on credit cards. If you just take a look at the fact that spending is up massively on credit cards, there is an ultimate truth there, that a certain amount of the people that have overbilled on their credit cards are not gonna be able to pay. It might be six months from now. It might be a year from now. There will be a point in time when I will make a lot of money, or my company will, off the fact that there's been this massive increase in credit card debt. There's been this massive increase in consumer debt.
The guy that makes a market in consumer debt will win. We figured that out, but we also, at least we think we did, and that's why, one of the reasons we plan on growing. Over here, I just bought a company called DebtX. Why did I buy that company? Because the guys that win in consumer debt were not able to be the guys that win in commercial real estate debt. Partially an image issue, where the banks were not quite tony enough as the liquidator of charged-off auto loans. It's going to be the biggest addressable market of all, and there's gonna be no market bigger for guys that sell tough loans. Why? $1 trillion of commercial real estate mortgages are coming due, the most amount ever are coming due. The regional banks, you know, are not gonna be able to securitize everything.
A lot of those loans are gonna fall out for securitization. A lot of those loans are gonna transfer from banks to specialty banks, and some people will win. We will now, at the bottom of the financial asset market, cover both spaces. Once again, I say the same thing to you. If you believe there's gonna be more supply, then you believe in us. What are we doing to ensure that we win with more supply? We're not just doing M&A, although we did the M&A. We're putting our money where our mouth is, and we're hiring. We're hiring business development people across all that area. We're adding business development people because in the business I'm in, it's not all internet-based. It's not all them calling you. It's feet on the street.
The more people we talk to, the more supply we get. You know, that's the whole idea, that in each one of those areas, we win with feet on the street. We win with hiring business development people. We win with creating the M&A strategy that works. All right, how long do I have to talk before someone asks a question? Don't make me talk forever. Somebody come on. Not one question? I'm just gonna keep rattling off the same crap if you don't ask a question. Giving you fair warning. All right. Very shy audience. What's gonna happen over the next three years? Over the next three years, we're going to basically take each one of those things with the very simple goal. We got stuck.
We didn't get stuck in a place where a lot of the pre-NASDAQ companies here got stuck. We got stuck as a NASDAQ company. We got stuck making $6 - 8 million a year. Yeah, it's very annoying that we got stuck. My entire goal as the old guy CEO is to get us unstuck. I wake up every day and I say, "How do I get us unstuck?" Because if you're just making the same every year, you're not exciting. You're not exciting as a growth company to anybody that comes here.
If you're growing the company, maybe not as a software company quarter after quarter, if you're growing the company year after year, and you have a goal of getting a company from making $6 million or $7 million to making $14 million or $15 million, for the people that are not looking for a miracle, 10 times their money. For people who are looking for a solid way to triple, quadruple their money, hopefully, where the risk is pretty much taken out of the company at a $45 million market cap and a $1.30 stock price. We've pretty much de-risked the company and left it at a really good entry plan. With that entry plan, we think it's all now 100% about value.
When it's 100% about value, we are very, very easy for you guys to measure. We've made our company very, very simple and very easy to measure. Just come look at us next quarter, come look at us the quarter after, come pay attention to whether or not we're growing it. We basically are doing it in such a way, we're gonna show you how we're growing it as long as we are growing it dime by dime and line by line. We're gonna show you how we're growing it at each place. You're gonna see what we made at HGP. You're gonna see what we made at NLEX, what we made at DebtX. Each quarter, we will show you line by line, dime by dime, how we're working, if the plan is executing, and why we believe the plan is the right plan.
There are places where we have holes in the company still, and a big part of my job is to fill them. I believe I filled the commercial real estate hole with DebtX. Over here on the industrial asset side, there's a hole. We do way too much business in North America and not enough business in Europe. It's kind of a tough time to fill that hole right now with a lot of international questions, but that hole needs to be filled. We do way too much inside the building manufacturing assets and not enough outside the building construction assets. Yeah, there's a $20 billion Ritchie Brothers, but there's a lot of smaller assets underneath them we can attack. We have to fill the sectors over there, we have to fill the geographies over there, and we have to talk to more people.
There are more corporations that don't know they have surplus until AI is helping them find it. There are more corporations that never worried about selling surplus that now are planning to sell surplus. We need to get in front of all those companies because they don't over-focus on the back end of the supply chain. They focus on the front end of the supply chain, and we need to get them to focus on the back end, on the far side. Hey, you have surplus. Stop paying rent on it. Stop paying tax on it. Stop moving it around from plant to plant. Let's get real and sell it, and there is a global market for it. That is a big part of the plan. All right, I'll try again. Hey, I'm winning now. I got four hands. You first.
What's your thoughts about initiating a cash dividend? My thoughts on initiating a cash dividend is we have these capital allocation meetings with the board all the time, and they're, for lack of a better word, very healthy debate meetings. There are people that like the idea. There are people that think I really am not being strong enough in a cash buyback of the stocks and like that better. There are people who are thinking, "You got a $45 million market cap company. You shouldn't be doing either one. You should be putting all of your energy into growth. You know, save your money for M&A. Save your money to hire people." All that said, that's not what you asked me. You asked me what was my thought on a dividend.
My thought on a dividend, and I don't know how to say this, I'm the largest shareholder. I sure as hell wouldn't mind paying myself one, and I also wouldn't mind paying the people that have been very loyal to me and stuck with the stock one either. I'm not opposed to them, and it's something we'll talk about again. You know, nobody has told me we'll never pay one. Nobody has told me we need to pay one. My brother is retired. He owns 1.5 million shares. He tells me every time we go to a board meeting, "Figure out how to pay a dividend." My thoughts are mixed. Right. My thoughts are mixed. It doesn't have to be huge. Just small and then begin a trend.
There is also some people who have told me, "I can't buy your stock until you pay a dividend." There are some people who said, "Just the way my fund works, just the way my internal system works, I like the fact you're making money. You know, we're compromised in buying your stock because I've been told by my boss or even the boss tells me it's just not our policy, that we just, you know if you were paying a really small dividend, you pass the test." All I can say to you is I sure as heck can promise you that if that were the decision, I can afford it. I mean, you know, maybe we're not gonna make $10 million this year, but we're gonna make $5, 6, 7 million this year, and I can afford a small dividend. Next question, sir.
I'm new to the name. I don't understand what's happened. The stock price has declined considerably over the last few years. I understand that the environment for your business is not incredible yet, but it's not been poor either, right? What is the sweet missing piece?
Two things happened. I made less money than the last few years than I made before. Nobody loves the stock from a guy who made $9 million and went down to $7 million, okay? Nobody loves that. I also, in my lending business here, I made a bad loan. It's not gonna turn out to be terrible over the long run, but it put us into a loan loss reserve where I don't get the credit. I was able to do two things not right, and it drove the stock down. What's gonna drive it back up? Every analyst I talk to, every investor I talk to tells me, "Make more money," tells me, "Earnings will fix everything, and earnings will cure all." What can I tell you? It went down. I'm not mad it went down.
My job is to get it back up. The best plan I have to get it back up is to grow the company. Next question. Yes, sir.
On the industrial asset side, you were talking about how AI is revolutionizing and creating so much more room for assets to be able to be sold. Also, as AI revolutionizes technology and there's such a competitive market now in those advanced technology changes so much, how does the long-term success look like for companies wanting to buy these refurbished older technologies when they need to compete with the newer products?
Because I'm 100 years old and I've been doing this for 50 years, I have some perspective. I watched every textile plant in North America close up and move offshore, and I did 50 auctions. You know, people are still wearing jeans. People are still wearing T-shirts, and the technology advanced a little bit, but mostly it moved offshore. I've watched that happen in many industries. Everyone cannot convert to robotics on the same day. Everyone cannot convert to a lot of advanced manufacturing processes on the same day at the same time. Assets have two things that happen to them. Either they have no secondary life, and that's primarily they have no secondary life because of functional obsolescence. If they have technological obsolescence, they can live again somewhere else, at least for some time period.
You know, there was a time they used to call it cash for trash. We don't say that anymore because we're gentlemen now. Everything sells if you're able to find the right buyer. The right buyer is oftentimes a dislocation where you have to understand how to do business cross-border. Next question. We're running out of questions, so I'll ask a question. If I turn this thing around, and instead of making $6 million or $7 million, I make $10 million, raise your hand if you think that's gonna drive the stock up. Mostly yes, right? Mostly you think that the answer is to make more money. I guess I got my job cut out for me. All I can ask you guys, pay attention. You know, keep an eye on it. You know, watch it.
If I'm proving that's true and you raised your hand, hopefully you'll believe it's true later on when I do it. We all leave here with good intentions. There's Yes, in the very back. What do you view as better long-term than the revenue for the company? Like with the lending or Can somebody repeat that? It's not loud enough. Say it a little louder. What do you view as better long-term than the revenue for the company? The biggest addressable market is over here at DebtX because in the end of the day, I mean, it's billions of dollars of commercial loans are gonna get sold. That's just a fact. It has nothing to do with me.
If I can go from selling this many to this many, it could be a $4 million, $5 million, $6 million difference in the business. I also think that as a principal, buying machinery and equipment has been our most profitable business by far. We're seeing some really decent opportunities out there where we don't have to do a big deal to make a lot of money. If I buy something for a million and a half, it doesn't move the needle in any macro sense of the economy. We're so small, if I buy something for a million and a half and sell it for $2 million or $2.2 million, every half a million dollars is a massive move for us. When you're trying to go and make $12 million instead of $7 million, you don't make it $5 million at a time.
You make it a half a million at a time, a quarter million at a time. I think moving them all up a little bit, I think I can grow DebtX. I think NLEX is gonna be very, very good just because of the amount of consumer debt. I think that if we execute and we can't get more supply, then I'm the wrong guy because I believe if we execute, I can get more supply. Last question because they're gonna fire me here, kick me out of here.
Well, the really good news about being as young as me is you have a really long timeline when you're only 73. You know, I have a very liberal timeline based upon my youth, if that's a fair answer. Thank you all very.