(lighthearted music) - PNC is proud to support Business Forward, where community leaders discuss the issues confronting business in central Illinois.

(lighthearted music) - Welcome to Business Forward.

I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Bill Sullivan and Becky Hutton.

Both are the co-owners of Whiskey City Architectural Salvage.

I had to say it slow cause I knew I was going to mess it up.

(Bill laughing) Thank you guys.

(laughs) Thank you both for coming in.

- Thank you.

It's good to be here.

- Well, we've got a lot to talk about.

You're in a fun business, so let's get right down to it.

Explain what your business is, Bill.

- Yeah, so our business started in 2015.

Really like most businesses it was designed to fill a need.

The need was that Peoria and the surrounding area, demolishes hundreds of houses every year, and all of that goes to the landfill.

So in 2015, I had some building materials that I was looking to donate.

I reached out to the city of Peoria and said, "Hey, is there anybody doing salvage in the city of Peoria?

"Is there anybody who wants these doors and windows?"

They said, no, but they're looking for somebody to start a business in the Peoria area.

With that being said, the city of Peoria was really our first client.

We obtain the contract with the city of Peoria to provide salvage services to any structure that the city of Peoria demolished.

- Oh, wow.

- And at that time, yeah, at that time it was 50 to 75 properties a year.

That's really kind of how the business got started, was just kind of filling the need here locally.

And then over the last six years, we've branched out and really provided that services for big corporations like, OSF, Bradley, other municipalities throughout the state.

- Okay.

So been in business since 2015, have you been along for the ride the whole time?

- A little over four years.

- Four years.

- Yep.

- And so is this your passion or is it just something that you just fell into and said, "You know what, this might be an opportunity?"

- Probably both.

- Okay.

- I've collected antiques since I was little, enjoyed flea markets and estate sales.

I came to Bill probably five years ago and I fell in love with the business.

And I was like, "Oh, please let there a job opening."

And he's like, "Ah, not yet."

(Bill chuckles) And then they were looking for somebody to do online sales, so I moved into that position, and then online sales to manager.

- Okay.

And so the word, whiskey is in there.

Where did that come from?

- So in 2015, when the concept was thought about, of an architectural salvage store, I really wanted to do my homework on Peoria and Peoria's history.

And everybody seems to remember Peoria as the whiskey capital.

Peoria in that time had the nickname, The Whiskey Capital, a vast majority of the alcohol revenue came from Peoria, Illinois.

So I started digging into a little bit more research and some of the nicknames Peoria had at that time, Whiskey Town, Whiskey City, or ones that really stuck out to me because it plays on kind of the era that we're salvaging, in the city that we're salvaging in.

So that's kind of how Whiskey City was born.

- So I went to the grand opening of your new building and a lot of people, I was talking to somebody and they said, "Yeah, they just opened and it's a new business."

But it's really not a new business, it's just a new, maybe, storefront business.

- [Becky] Mm-hmm.

- Right.

- But you could have gone online.

I mean, you're talking about having online sales and... Are your sales mostly just private collectors when you're talking about online that they know about you and...

I mean, how does that even go about?

what do you do?

- Since our last storefront closed, our online sales have kind of gone by the wayside.

We hope to eventually pick that up with a new website, but eventually have e-commerce, website, Etsy, eBay.

It was private collectors, but sometimes it's just... - [Matt] One-offs.

- Yeah.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- Meemaw is looking for that one plate to finish her collection or... Yeah.

- Yeah.

So I'm a collector, I collect all kinds of things.

And so I love and appreciate your business, so I reached out to you Bill.

I came to the opening and talked to you then.

And when I walked into the store, there's so many things that catches your eye, but it's almost like when you go into a store like that, it changes hourly because you miss so many things because you're constantly just looking around and there's not the same thing all the time, right?

- Yeah, I think in today's world where you can pretty well get anything online, salvage is a little bit different and you have to give people an experience to want to come to your store, and not just once but multiple times.

The beauty of ours is, our business is nothing's ever the same, that's a beauty and somewhat of a curse when it comes to shipping.

But ultimately-- - [Matt] That's true.

- Yeah.

- [Matt] Never thought of that.

- The beauty of it is our inventory is ever evolving, one week it might be, we salvage an airplane from Minnesota or next week it's a hundred doors from a house or a warehouse, so it's ever changing there.

That does lend itself to some hurdles that we've come across when it comes to doing online sales and how do you effectively ship large odd items all over the United States.

It has some tasks, some hurdles that we've come across.

- And it can be very costly.

- Very costly.

We've looked at a number of different ways.

We have shipped-- - Stained glass.

- ... stained glass to Saint Simon Island most recently.

And it just, it's learning that type of part of the business that I'm not familiar with, Becky's not familiar with.

But I think ultimately, you have to give people reasons to come to your store.

- [Matt] Right.

- Virtually or in person.

- Yeah.

I mean, so I have so many sports with my kids on the weekends and you're open on the weekends and that's the time I like to have fun and relax, and this is a store you can go in and relax.

So when I was walking around, I looked for specific things.

I like old slot machines and I like Americana, just old restaurants and things, signage and stuff.

And then what caught my eye, stained glass windows, and I wasn't thinking that.

And I go into the back of the store and there you've got probably 15 different and there were a lot of yellow tones to it, but just beautiful.

So you don't even really know.

If you get a job, you don't even really know what you have until you actually walk in.

And I bet you you're just blown away sometimes.

- Yeah.

I mean, it was a pretty big learning curve initially for us when we first started.

Everything that's put into houses is meant to not necessarily come out the easiest, so unfortunately, it's you have to break some door and some... We try to not do that today.

We've got a pretty good understanding of how things come out, how easily they come out, what's worth our time.

In the early days of us salvaging, it would take us days to do a house because we were taking baseboards and flooring and everything, every part of the house.

We soon found out that some of that is just not reusable, either with lead based paint or it's just so time consuming to get out and there's just nobody looking for it.

So over the last six years, we've really slimmed down what we salvage and try to narrow that down to items that we know we can do pretty easily with a good success rate of getting out, and that also on the backend, that have a good resale and preferably that they're easy to ship, so.

- Okay, so people now, and I just really didn't think of this, but you go in, there's 1920s different sets of door knobs, right, and you've got a box of those, and you've got a box of 1940s of this.

And how do you know what era or what year some of these is?

Or I'm guessing sometimes you don't.

- Yeah, sometimes you don't.

It's very...

It used to be, every house we would do would be a new style of doorknob or a new style of escutcheon plate or something along those lines.

Today, it's pretty rare for us to find a style that we haven't seen before.

But that we have hundreds and hundreds of different styles, and there's probably hundreds and hundreds more depending on where at in the country, whether who made them, and that's a rabbit hole in itself of how to find out styles of doorknobs and manufacturers, because there's Eastlake styles and-- - Mid-century.

- ... mid century.

And it's really...

Some of it it's...

The internet's a beautiful thing for some of that.

We have some resource books of nothing but old hardware and it kind of explains what the value is, how rare they are, names, and that type of stuff, which we use from time to time if we get some hardware and that's special.

- Yeah, I mean, in the collecting world, and I'm talking people who either find, here's an example, duck decoys.

They'll find duck decoys and the average person does not know that older duck decoys, some of them are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so if you use that as an example, you may be going into an old building or house or whatever, and find a crate.

Is it kind of like the TV shows where you just kind of lift something up sometimes and?

- Yeah.

A lot of the houses we go into haven't been touched for a long time or had been vacant for a long time, have sat in a family for a long time.

Some of the houses we go in are still full of possessions.

So in times, we've purchased just salvage rights to the entire structure, which entitles us to any of the possessions that we may come across, good and bad.

Sometimes we bring stuff back that it's like, "Why did we bring this back?"

(Matt chuckles) And we're end up kicking it around the warehouse for six months, but-- - Beanie babies.

- Yeah, like a-- - [Matt] Beanie babies.

- Yeah.

- [Becky] Let's not talk about that.

(chuckles) - So, but in some instances, you're right.

I mean, some instances it's, you open something and it's silver metals, ( Bill speaking drowns out Matt) World War II metals.

One of the biggest things that I think we found since starting the business.

We were doing a salvage for the city of Peoria, on Spring Street in Peoria, and like most houses, I usually check the attic, that's usually the last place people go to disturb.

And I remember getting up in this small little hole into the attic and I put my arm on a shelf and I broke something and I kind of looked at it and I saw quite a few pieces of glass laying on this shelf in kind of a rotten cardboard box.

And it kind of struck me.

I thought it was maybe just replacement glass for windows or something along that line.

And then I took one of the pieces of glass and I held it up in one of the holes in the roof because the property was that bad and I saw a face in the glass and I thought, "This is gotta be something."

And at that time, I didn't understand what glass negatives were.

- Oh, wow.

- We ended up finding a couple hundred glass negatives, all of which were taken around Peoria in the early 1900s, some of which were historical moments in Peoria's history.

- Oh my goodness.

- The German-American fire company was at fire that happened in the early 1900s, and there's pictures of that building on fire and after it was collapsed.

So I knew we had something that was historically significant.

I reached out to the Peoria Historical Society.

Chris with the Historical Society immediately came down, looked what we had and-- - (laughs) I bet she did.

(Becky laughs) - ... and was really excited.

They then took the photos and digitalized all of them and were able to... By the people in the pictures, they were able to find out that the gentleman who took all the pictures, worked for the Historical Society back in the 1900s, he also worked at the library, and it was his military service time.

It amazed me, I guess, most that there was a picture of two kids playing on a railroad track, just kind of walking down the railroad tracks, and they were able to localize what part of the track that was, based off of a mile marker they could see in the distance, which kind of blew me away.

- I love stuff like that.

- Yeah.

So that's probably, in my opinion, the most historically significant thing that we've found.

But-- - We found a lot.

- Yeah.

- One day I was off and I got a text from Bill or Brennan, and right there on the grass they're like, "What do you think this is?

"Do you think this is an explosive?"

And it turned out to be a live grenade that we had the bomb squad come out during a salvage.

- When you think about it though, (Bill and Becky chuckling) think about how many, - if you talk about the-- - Why not.

- ...history of just this whole region, I mean, Galesburg, there's some old buildings all the way, Bloomington, Peoria and, you name it.

I mean, I bet you get to see some pretty neat thing.

- [Becky] Mm-hmm.

- Yeah, we have.

Yeah, that was one that I wasn't expecting.

- [Matt] I wouldn't-- - We've dug through a lot of old trunks and boxes and when I found that I thought, "Man, this is awfully heavy to be a fake."

And I remember the pin was still in and it was rusted in it.

And so I went and set it in the yard and sure enough, it was a live grenade that they ended up digging a hole and detonating.

- [Matt] That is... - But-- - That is crazy.

- Yeah, I mean, there are hazards obviously with the job, that's one that you don't really expect.

- Yeah.

So I also am a big fan of old sports stuff.

- So I bet you find a lot - [Bill] We do.

- of that type of stuff, whether it's equipment or memorabilia or autographs or anything like that.

- Yeah, we've salvaged a number of houses, one of which I can remember, the gentleman was a big Peoria chiefs collector and fan, and I think we still have probably five or six totes of signed baseballs.

- Oh, cool.

- [Becky] Lots of... Yeah - I haven't had the time to go through them, but there's been a lot of big players to come through Peoria over the years.

- Yeah, I could probably help you with that.

So how do you find... Do you have with your team experts that know that this stained glass is worth this or this?

I mean, how do you know value to stuff or you just guess?

Because we were talking earlier about how A&W mugs that you found and you're like, "Well, I mean..." But if you knew they were 10 bucks or whatever, would you sell them up?

- Some of it is using the internet as a tool to price, now, granted not everything on the internet it's as reliable.

Over the years of being in the salvage business, you do meet people who come to the shop and they say, "Hey, I'm really into jukeboxes."

Or, "I'm really into..." - Old record players, - Yeah, whatever it may be.

- whatever it may be.

- And I keep a list in the store.

And when we get something in, like we just recently had a jukebox come in that supposedly it was in the break room at Caterpillar in the 1970s.

(Matt chuckles) - [Becky] Yeah, that's some great records in there.

- So I dug through my list and sure enough, I had somebody who worked on old jukeboxes and he came in and fixed it for us.

But it's really networking and maybe shooting prices at them.

I think in this whole business, you learn to rely on other people because you're not going to know everything about everything.

There's people who know more about things than I do.

Some of it is just an educated guess based off of, six years of doing this, what do we see a lot of?

We see a lot of five panel, four panel, three panel or two panel doors.

So those are obviously priced differently than some more or an eight foot tall door that we see once every six months.

So it's a little bit of just general knowledge and doing it.

- I have a lot of people compare to you to the American Pickers Show.

- (laughs)So we do get that comparison.

Over the last couple of years, we've been approached by a number of producers throughout the state to film a TV show.

(all laughing) - I might come back to you on that.

You gave me an idea because-- - [Becky] That's a... Yeah.

- ...it would be kind of fun.

- It was, they came down, did the interview, did the sizzle reel, they were going to pitch it to DIY and all these different shows.

And it was fun.

It was a little more scripted than I would probably prefer.

- It was way scripted.

- Yeah.

- [Matt] That's funny.

- But it was fun.

It was fun to do.

- I'm gonna switch gears.

From a business standpoint, so when you're looking at...

I mean, you've got a lot of overhead too because you've got...

So earlier you talked about, we would take up these extra boards and there's lead paint and all that, but that's wasting time and time's money.

So your business really, as it grows, you're finding these efficiencies to be able to...

It affects the bottom line, which makes you be able to expand the business faster.

Am I right?

- Right.

There's a learning curve with business.

I wasn't trained in business, a lot of it comes.

When we first started, it was maybe a little more fun to do salvage cause there weren't the financial repercussions if certain things got broken.

- (laughs) It's a hobby, right?

Now that we have a lot of money involved then we have payroll and a lot more overhead, it becomes a little more stressful on my end, as far as bidding out salvage because I know, "Okay, we need to get $800 out of that mantle, okay, "so let's not break that mantle.

"If we do, then I've got to tear up all this floor, "which is more labor, which is more time, which..." - Right.

It could be a half day project.

- Right.

Part of it is having a general knowledge of how things come out and what's labor intensive on our end.

We have a spreadsheet that we go through when we bid out salvage, which eliminates a lot of the question marks.

And then we know what we're paying hourly and transportation costs and fuel and machinery and all the other parts that go into that.

But the bigger the business gets, the more that machine needs to be fed, and it needs to be fed with salvage and monetary.

It needs money, right?

So you gotta buy bigger salvage jobs, more salvage jobs, and you got to have more people to do it.

We're fortunate that we have a good crew of people who can work and do salvage and are knowledgeable in salvage.

Cause it's not like you can pay somebody a low wage to do it.

It has to be done in a certain way so that it's not damaging the goods.

- So Becky you take like... Let's say you find an item and sometimes people like them redone or, and then other times people like them how they are, it could be nicked up.

How do you decide?

Or how does your team decide what needs to be fixed up or maybe just cleaned?

- Sure.

Well, we try to clean things as they come into the shop, cobwebs, years of dirt, things like that.

But for the most part, we don't touch things.

- Okay.

I wondered.

- Yeah, I mean, if we come across a really neat tabletop, we might sand it down and oil it just to let out natural beauty.

But for the most part, we don't repaint, we don't change up too much.

- So what's the difference between picking and salvaging?

- So when we classify, when we get jobs come in, we classify a pick as more of like, buying X item for X dollar.

When we typically do salvage, it's buying salvage rights to a structure and saying it's an X amount of dollar for the rights to anything in or on that structure.

We do picks quite often.

Picks... - It can be a little more tricky as it's, sometimes we label a pick as a home of a collector that has a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff/hoarding, they have a lot of things.

So we can go in and pick rather than... - Right.

It has to be the right thing for us.

I mean, we do branch out and buy some odd things from time to time.

I think that's part of the joy of the business, sometimes you win, sometimes you don't.

That's just the nature of collecting.

- You do that in collecting too.

- Right.

Sometimes you buy something that's not nearly as valuable as you thought.

But for the most part, I think salvage from our perspective is a better use of time and material because there's a little bit more overhead, there's a little bit more meat on that bone, there's a little bit more overhead.

But I think there's less risk.

- Yeah.

So Becky, I'm going to ask you this.

So let's say you're with your family and you're on vacation, do you ever get out of the mode of looking and go, - No - "Oh, I like that."

- No.

- I wonder - I'm always... Because as a collector, I'm always like that.

So you are like that too?

- Yeah.

So I've traveled all over the United States.

I've been to hundreds of salvage stores, A, cause I wanted to see how other people are doing it.

Maybe there's a smarter way to store 600 doors than how we're doing it.

Maybe there's a more efficient way to do something.

And when we first started Whiskey City, part of how we structured the business was selling raw salvage direct to consumer through a brick and mortar and then also offering services of making custom furniture out of salvage materials, which we've done a number of bars and restaurants in Peoria - Oh, really?

- with using salvage materials.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- That's a whole revenue stream by itself.

- It is.

When I first looked, it seemed like some architectural salvage stores were doing the cast and build side, but they weren't really touching this side of the business, they weren't doing barns like what we do.

And then some of them weren't offering custom furniture.

And I thought, "How many people are we going to have come in the store "and say, 'Hey, I like that door, " 'but I really would like it as a headboard. "

'Can you you trim it or can you make it into this?'

" And that's part of the reason why we started Whiskey City Design, which is part kind of an offshoot of the business that handles all of our custom furniture builds, our bar build-outs, restaurant build-outs, whatever that may be, so design services and manufacturing of all that.

- You've got a ton of different avenues you could go down.

I mean, it's not just a store where you go in and collect cool stuff.

- Right.

I wanted different revenue streams.

And not everybody who comes in the store is handy and knows how to build a table out of a door, so how can we cater to that person just the same that we're catering to the person who is handy?

Well, let's supply him with some cool table legs and a cool tabletop so we can make that table.

- Well, your new location's, 1000 Southwest Jefferson and Downtown Peoria.

It's a very cool building.

- Thank you.

- You do great things.

Your business does great things for the community too, because you've done a lot for nonprofits that nobody knows about, and children's home is recipient of that.

And so I appreciate you, Becky and Bill, for coming in.

And this was a very fun topic.

And I'm Matt George, and this is another episode of Business Forward.

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