THIS GUY MAKES MILLIONS OFF OF JUNK | Blue Collar Millionaires

get a load of this junkyard collector wandering around mumbling to himself sifting through rusty scraps of useless stuff i bet his house looks like uh like this it looks like this and this and this because this junkyard dog is actually a junkyard god a powerhouse who's earned tens of millions scavenging and selling abandoned auto parts and shame on you thinking otherwise what one man might call junk i call treasure [Applause] how much is this engine worth stony chevy 5'3 bin jack's about an 1800 motor i'm ron sturgeon i'm a junkyard expert i used to own a chain of salvage yards and it made me filthy rich somebody out there driving down the road needs this it's a lucrative business properly managed it's a very interesting business model when you could pay a hundred dollars for a junk car sell the engine out of it for 150 and still have the rest of the car that's pretty good business good more like incredible considering ron eventually sold his empire for a whopping 23 million dollars that's a hell of a payday for a guy who started out practically homeless when i was a senior in high school my dad died and left me a 65 volkswagen 2 000 and no place to live i moved into a mobile home and started working on other people's volkswagens that was all i knew i had to do something to eat i accumulated about 35 junk cars that we were using to fix the other cars so the catalytic converters get a lot of money for those don't we within weeks i realized that i could make more money selling parts off the cars than i ever could working on them every week i would go to the salvage auction buy a few more cars drag them in and we'd sell a few more parts and it didn't take very long for the junkyard business to get quite big but collecting a big pile of parts is something any old junker can do figuring out a way to keep track of them well that's what put ron over the top as we grew and we got more employees it became obvious that we needed better methods of keeping track of what we had because we had four or five phone lines at that point four or five sales people working on the phone lines and they needed to be able to look a part up and see if we had it in 1986 we put our inventory on their computer the computers gave me a huge competitive edge computers allowed us to buy more cars sell more product so that we could grow even more rapidly to a whole new client base over the next few years we doubled sales every year and we grew to six locations 150 employees and 15 million in sales the 30 net profit and when you're making that kind of cash everyone wants a piece of you ford came along and wanted to buy us they paid about 15 million dollars for the company but the only thing more impressive than selling your company to one of the world's biggest automakers so do you think he's going to be willing to negotiate or you think we're just wasting our time is buying it back in the long run it was a terribly bad fit for ford they ended up divesting the division selling it back to me and then i turned it around and made it profitable and sold it to another public company and selling his company not once but twice has afforded rod one hell of a life i always told him that the junkyards were a dirty business but what can i say made me filthy rich how much am i worth i got a million square feet of real estate arguably i have more than i can spend i've certainly got plenty of cars and i've owned as many as 56 but today i own 12 exotic cars worth a couple million my favorite cart is the lamborghini huracan it's the most enthralling car i've ever owned my home is 10 000 square feet with a 10 car garage it's worth two or three million dollars it's a wonderful place and i love it the real estate taxes on that house are fifteen hundred dollars a week this is my museum probably five million dollars worth of toys well we've got everything from boats to cars to dog toys people say it's the repository of cool stuff this is a shipbuilder's model they would have made one of these today a model like this easily worth a hundred thousand dollars here we've got a jerome classic model car made from the 90s today worth about 35 000 and highly coveted by collectors okay boys jump in love the dogs cavalier king charles spaniels have three now they've got their own room their own door and their own address the joke around here is that i'm leaving everything to the dogs i think maybe it has everybody scared where are we going daddy you know i feel really blessed at this point in my life and i'm absolutely convinced the last third of my life is going to be the best headed down that road in an exotic car with the best woman in the world and my three cavalier king charles spaniels i couldn't be happier feels good to be a blue-collar [Music] millionaire you

Channel: CNBC Prime

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Keywords: CNBC Prime, Money, cnbc, tv, television, cnbc tv, finance, cnbc money, cnbc finance, cnbc channel, cnbc television, business, cnbc business, blue collar millionaires, blue collar, millionaire, millionaires, blue collar millionaire, blue collar millionaire show, blue collar millionaire tv show, cnbc blue collar millionaire, blue collar millionaires cnbc, blue collar work, bluecollar, blue collar investor, Ron Sturgeon, King of the Junkyard, ron sturgeon wife, Ron Sturgeon Junkyard

Id: 1b_yatmzkLk

Length: 5min 17sec (317 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020