ARLINGTON — Justin Standish could barely move around the defunct factory in Arlington when he first stepped inside on another hot summer day.
It was packed with industrial machines and spare parts, stacks of undelivered plastic cups, bags of raw plastic resin pellets, assorted shop tools, garbage and foam balls for toy guns.
“There were a lot of Nerf balls and guns around,” he said. “I guess they had that startup mentality — play hard, work hard.”
Standish had come to clean up the place, figure out what was there, price it and get it ready to sell at public auction later this month. The creditors of the defunct company, MicroGreen Polymers, had hired his company, the Brandford Group, to sell anything that could be sold. The goal was to wring out as many dollars as possible from the debris left in the wake of the greentech company’s sudden and dramatic crash earlier this year.
MicroGreen Polymers had rapidly grown in recent years. To outsiders, it appeared poised to upend the food packaging industry. But while company leaders publicly talked about getting bigger, MicroGreen internally was in a downward spiral sped by poor cost control and a string of bridge loans with crushing interest rates.
In short, everything was great — until it wasn’t.
MicroGreen Polymers went bankrupt in April, putting more than 150 people out of work.
The company’s primary financial backer, the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde in Oregon, had decided to cut its losses and foreclosed on MicroGreen’s secured debt.
Foreclosing meant the tribes would never get back most of the tens of millions of dollars invested in the startup.
So it is auctioning off everything that can be sold at MicroGreen’s former plant and warehouse in Arlington. That means everything — mop buckets, shop tools, industrial presses as tall as a two-story building, patents and trade secrets.
The tribes don’t have the experience to stage such an auction so they hired a Connecticut company, the Brandford Group, which runs auctions around the world.
The company runs 80 to 100 auctions a year, which have $50 million to $75 million in sales, according to Andy Duncan, vice president of business development for the Brandford Group.
Standish has run auctions on nearly every continent for the Brandford Group. He’s used to parachuting into a new site in a different time zone.
Preparing an auction often takes weeks; he spent five weeks prepping MicroGreen. Not surprisingly, he is unmarried.
Standish is outgoing and quick to laugh. He has the sort of easygoing manner that whips up personal connections seemingly out of thin air. In between drags off the American Spirit cigarettes he smokes, he can deliver a quip in a way that seems like he shared something intimate.
While he can tell stories about partying on New Year’s Eve in Singapore, he is modest. Talking about how he got into his line of work, he will tell you he went to grad school in New Haven, Connecticut. That’s because he doesn’t want to say he got a master’s degree from Yale University.
Some assignments are for companies that have closed, such as MicroGreen. Other times, he is helping a business sell older equipment.
“Every deal is a little different,” he said. “Some jobs are very pleasant, some are scary.”
He’s been welcomed with open arms, and, on at least one job, he’s been threatened by workers who seemed to blame him for their Middle America factory jobs being moved to China, he said.
In Arlington, “it’s been nothing but pleasant,” he said.
With the plant in such disarray, Standish started clearing out one corner of the building and methodically made his way across. At night, he often cooked dinner on a nearly new propane grill that he found at the plant.
Like almost everything at MicroGreen, the grill will be up for sale at the auction, which runs Sept. 29-30.
He filled seven dumpsters as big as shipping containers and two 18-wheeler trailers with scrap metal. He hauled away about six dumpsters’ worth of trash.
He also had to dispose of 10-foot-tall rows of collapsed cardboard boxes and other shipping materials. There were hundreds of bags of raw plastic resin pellets that weighed up to 1,500 pounds.
With room to work, he could start taking stock of exactly what was on site and calculate where bidding should start. Sometimes that was straightforward, such as with the 16 red tool chests filled with torque wrench sets, knee pads and other shop tools.
“If this place had been in Connecticut, these tools would be in my garage, and my tools would be for sale,” he said jokingly.
Standish left the tools in the tool chests. Usually, he would sell them separately, but this time, there were simply too many items.
“They’ll probably start at $100” for each tool chest, he said. “Somebody will get a deal.”
Other items required more work, such as with some of the production machines.
Standish has been running industrial-equipment auctions for a couple of decades and can figure out what most things are, even if he has never before seen that exact machine. Sometimes he calls up a dealer to help him price and describe the item for auction.
“The one thing you can’t be is afraid to ask questions,” he said.
As much as possible, Standish grouped similar items into lots, often piled together on a wood pallet. He numbered each lot, and then, walking from lot to lot with a voice recorder in his hand, he meticulously described each offering.
“Lot 325,” he said as he squatted beside an orange pallet bearing several black cylinders. “Lot 325 is one lot of seven Yates — Y-A-T-E-S — black, pneumatic cylinders — comma, space — and six Yates —” he paused, eyeing the items, “I’ll go 7-inch pneumatic cylinders.”
That is how he made his way through the 677 lots in the auction catalog.
He uses a mix of market value and psychology to price items, he said.
“It’s simple with something like a forklift,” he said. Four forklifts will be up for auction.
“Everybody needs a forklift. The value is a dollar a pound. If it’s a 4,000-pound forklift, OK, it’s worth $4,000,” give or take.
People often come to auctions looking for deals, especially on run-of-the-mill items such as a forklift. So the bidding often has to start below market rate. Otherwise, it will be a very quiet auction, he said.
Pricing MicroGreen’s customized production machines was trickier.
Lot 170 is a towering machine for converting raw material into plastic resin using MicroGreen’s cutting-edge process.
“There’s only one of those in the world,” he said, pointing at the machine, which stands more than 20 feet tall and has a flight of stairs to a wrap-around catwalk. “How many people need that exact machine? How are you going to price it?”
It was a rhetorical question. But one that Standish has to answer before an auction begins.
The Brandford Group also is offering to sell everything in one bundle as a turnkey operation.
That would eliminate a lot of paperwork, if nothing else.
The company’s visionary co-founder, Krishna Nadella, visited the site in mid-August.
He declined to say if he is trying to put together investors to buy the company as a bundle.
A few potential turnkey buyers have expressed interest, Duncan said.
However, selling everything in one shot happens very rarely, he said.
There already 20 are people registered for the auction.
And Standish has hired a caterer for the two-day event.
“Once you’re here, I don’t want you leaving,” he said.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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