Illumynt, a Boston-headquartered ITAD firm, has brought founder Paul Knight back to lead the company as CEO and shuffled other leadership positions. The changes come as the company is opening three new facilities globally due to a large contract.
Known as CNE Direct until June 2023, the company was founded by Knight in 2002, and he’s been board chairman ever since then. Illumynt provides a variety of ITAD services and is focused on delivering as much equipment reuse as possible. The company’s U.S. presence is centered on a 100,000-square-foot processing facility in Columbus, Ohio, and a 60,000-square-foot facility in Memphis, Tennessee.
E-Scrap News spoke with Knight to learn more about the company changes and growth, which were announced Sept. 5.
Shuffling leadership team
Knight has “retired” from the CEO role a couple times over the years, most recently in 2018, but remained active on the board, he said. At that time, Chief Financial Officer Jerry Quill took the reins as CEO. Quill returned to the CFO role in 2022, when the board appointed Omur Bagci, formerly of Arrow Electronics, as CEO.
Bagci at the same time was starting up a separate software company, Echonos, which provides a variety of services including reverse supply chain management. Illumynt is actually a customer, using Echonos’ tools to track and serialize IT assets during decommissioning.
Recently, as Echonos required more of Bagci’s time, Knight found he had more time to put into the ITAD firm once again, and he decided he was ready to come out of retirement.
“I said, you know what, it’s time for me to go back: He’s got stuff to do, I have a lot of ideas and things that I want to do with the company, so just decided to make the change,” Knight said.
Along with the CEO transition, the company announced that Joe Conway, also an Arrow alum, has been promoted to vice president of solutions, and that Gavin Wilson, formerly of ITAD firm Reconext, has joined the company as vice president of engineering.
Additionally, Knight has retained ITAD advisory firm Circular Integrity, which was launched in 2023 by Todd Zegers, formerly the top ITAD and reverse logistics executive at Ingram Micro. Illumynt has a plan for Zegers to come in, work with senior management, identify challenges and opportunities, and help the business move forward during a period of growth.
Expansion driven by major contract
The personnel changes come against a backdrop of expansion at the ITAD firm. Illumynt on Sept. 12 began processing equipment at a new facility in Franklin, Massachusetts, and it has two international facilities nearing completion. Knight estimated the company is a week or two away from starting up a new ITAD facility in Cork, Ireland. And in Thailand, the company plans to open a new facility in about a month.
Knight said the current growth is directly a result of “a large contractual relationship that we’ve engaged in recently.” He declined to name the customer due to a non-disclosure agreement.
“Since we’re setting up those other locations, we will leverage that to attract more business, incremental business in those areas as well, once they’re up and running,” Knight said.
That’s the same pattern the company followed when opening its Memphis facility. It was sited and opened due to a contract the firm signed with DirecTV, which was later acquired by AT&T.
“We service that account out of that facility, we’re still doing it … but we’ve also used that as a hub for business coming out of Texas, Florida, all over the southeast, and other parts of the country as well,” Knight said.
Focused on value recovery through reuse
Illumynt is a reuse-centered firm, sending most of the non-reusable scrap materials to downstream partners for commodity recovery. Knight said the firm operates with the mindset of focusing on maximizing value of a targeted portion of the inbound stream.
“I’ve always looked at it from a standpoint that in most of these situations, 20% of the material volume-wise is worth 80% of the value, and then you’ve got 80% of the volume of material worth 20%,” he said. “If you take that 20% of the volume that’s worth 80% of the value, and you focus on maximizing your return on that, you can underwrite that other side of the business.”
For Illumynt, that means evaluating almost everything for reusability, which typically provides the highest financial return. From there, the company’s technicians can determine whether the equipment has retail value, and what they have to do to make it sellable.
“Whether it’s wiping and testing hard drives, testing motherboards, we test about any kind of equipment you can think of,” Knight said.
