ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Profile Radio Spotlight. Profile of Traverse City offers fast, accurate retrieval and archiving of documents and secures shredding with guaranteed recycling. Profile is HIPAA, FACTA, & Grahm-Leach-Bliley compliant. For more information visit them on the web at
www.gtprofile.com. Profile the professional document manager. And now here's your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: Hello, I'm John Bentley and on today's program we are speaking with Jim Kirby. He is the owner of Profile of Traverse City, Michigan. Welcome to the program, Jim.
JIM: Thank you very much, John.
JOHN: Now tell us a little bit about what is Profile? What do you guys do at Profile? Who are you guys?
JIM: Profile originally was set up to professionally file people's records and documents and it's evolved into besides just storing documents is shredding documents and we also microfilm and scan documents.
JOHN: Ok. Let's just talk about the shredding aspect of it. Certainly there is a lot of businesses that have very sensitive material that is going out into their trash cans, and depending upon the bulk of business you have, it seems to me a service like yours would be very helpful for that.
JIM: Well the shredding comes into the factor when the retention period for different documents are up like 7 years for the IRS documents. Some employee records have to be kept for 10 years and once that retention period is up the records need to be disposed of and depending on certain agencies and organizations has to be disposed of in a certain fashion. The new laws that you hear of HIPAA and FACTA require that it has to be incinerated, pulverized, or shredded and disposed of and recycled, and what we do here is take those documents usually can be done on a purge that's done once or twice a year when people are trying to clear out documents after tax season, or if their fiscal year ends at a different time of the year, we'll pull those records off into boxes, and we'll either pick them up, or they'll drop them off here at our location in Traverse City, and we have a large shredder that we call the Shred Monster that will chew up those records in a quick fashion, and then we bail it and we recycle it by selling it directly to the recycling mills.
JOHN: Now you said it's right in Traverse City. Where is your location in the Traverse City area?
JIM: Our address is 3820 Cass Road. We're about a mile south of downtown just north of Sara Lee if people are familiar with Traverse City.
JOHN: So I'm certainly glad, and I'm sure our audience is glad to hear that a lot of this paper is being recycled. You said also that it can be incinerated also?
JIM: Yes, it can be. I'm sure that because of pollution the fire departments don't want to hear that anymore, but the governments have allowed that to be one of the disposal criteria.
JOHN: Is that something that you do right there on your location, or is that something that is per se shipped out?
JIM: No, we do not incinerate at all. In fact, right here we shred and bail. We do not pulverize or incinerate.
JOHN: There's a really good market for recycled paper right now, isn't there?
JIM: Yeah, right now it because of specific nations China and India. They are really buying up all the recycled paper they can so demand is very high. Prices are probably twice as high this year than they were a year ago.
JOHN: Now you can actually install a shredder in a business operation, can't you?
JIM: Well we can, but the shredder that you will find in a business, you know, something they might buy from a Staples or an office store is going to be something for a few hundred dollars, and they're probably if they have any kind of volume of paper to be shredded they'll probably go through two or three of those a year. And that cost is really minimal compared to the labor they're going to put into doing it themselves. With those one or two horsepower shredders, it doesn't match up to our 75 horsepower shredder here. We can chew up a box of documents like a copy paper size box in probably 2 or 3 minutes where a normal office shredder could take 3 - 4 hours.
JOHN: 3 to 4 hours, boy that is a big monster shredder you guys have at your location. Now don't you guys provide a service for secured shredding cabinets?
JIM: Yeah, we sure do. In fact, what we've got on our website at www.gtprofile.com you'll get a picture of the cabinet that we place in people's businesses, and in some cases we might have one or two of these cabinets and some we have 20 cabinets depending on the volume of paper generated in the business, and we can pick these cabinets up once a week, once a month, whatever the customer needs and that is in a locked cabinet where the owner and ourselves are the only ones with a key, and our bonded and insured driver will come by as often as necessary to pick that full contents out of that cabinet and replace with an empty bag and bring it into a locked vehicle back to our location here which is a very secure location. Besides being set up with the normal fire and security alarms, we also have built a separate section into the building to handle just the shredded documents. Some additional security, because we think that's so important. In fact, in that area we video tape everything that is being done 24/7 and keep those tapes for 90 days just in case if anybody had any question as to how we handle their documents.
JOHN: Sounds like a smart way of doing business, Jim.
JIM: Yeah, we've been doing this for about 14 years now, and we have not had any issues, and I don't expect and I don't want to have any.
JOHN: Certainly not. Now we are on the phone with Jim Kirby. He is the owner of Profile, a shredding service here in Traverse City, Michigan, and we will be right back after these important messages.
ANNOUNCER: Profile of Traverse City offers fast, accurate retrieval and archiving of documents and secures shredding with guaranteed recycling. Profile is HIPAA, FACTA, & Grahm-Leach-Bliley compliant. For more information visit them on the web at www.gtprofile.com. Profile the professional document manager. ANNOUNCER: VTalk Radio.
ANNOUNCER: We now return you to the Profile Radio Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: We are back with Jim Kirby. He is the owner of Profile, a shredding service here in Traverse City, Michigan. Welcome back to the program, Jim.
JIM: Thank you, John.
JOHN: Now we've been talking about, obviously, the shredding aspect of your business. You guys also have some other services like record retention, storage, online imaging. Let's talk a little bit about the storage aspect. What are they giving to you, and how are you storing it, and how long are you storing it for?
JIM: Well we store it in three different fashions. First is the normal file box that you would buy from a Staples. In fact, we prefer people to buy our own. We've designed our own file box that will stand up a lot better than what you can buy at a normal office supply store and it's a lot less expensive. But they'll come in these boxes which are usually labeled either a 1.2, 1.8, or a 2.4 cubic foot box, and we've racked our building so we store the boxes from floor to ceiling, and we'll hold those boxes for anywhere from the three years to fifteen years. In fact, some records we keep here I guess have to be kept for life. But the retention period is usually something that the customers can find out from their accounting company, and they'll tell you exactly how long they think any special document needs to be kept. But that's the most usual fashion is in the boxes, but we also do linear storage which would be something you'd see in a doctor or dentist's office. Where you will see those tabbed files on the wall. We have those same filing apparatuses here at Profile, and it's usually used for people that have quite a bit of retrieval. They'll need those records on a daily basis, and we'll be pulling those quickly so instead of pulling them out of a box, we'll just pull them right from the linear shelving. And then lastly we will store pallets. Something that somebody won't see any retrieval on at all, and we'll put it away on a pallet and put it up high and not have to access it until it's time to be destroyed. We'll pull it from the shelves then and shred it. One of the advantages of storing here at Profile is that the stuff is already here and ready to be shredded so there's no additional transportation charges to get it to the shredding room.
JOHN: As well as it being in a very secure environment too.
JIM: Yeah, in fact, we set it up, and we've gone ahead and had our choice...years ago I brought the fire department here and asked them their recommendations on how to handle this. Because, again, being documents we didn't want to have sprinkler heads everyplace and have small..if we ever did have a fire that we soak everything and ruin all the documents. So we use laser alarms to go ahead and shoot beams across the rooms looking for any type of any...it'll probably show up any sort of cloud of dust before it will show up any smoke, but it's probably the best effective way we feel to go ahead and protect the documents without potentially harming the documents if there was any situation. Plus there's other recommendations that we adopted and try to make the fire department happy, but more importantly make our customers' documents safe.
JOHN: Certainly. Now what about the online imaging? What are you guys doing in that sense?
JIM: Well that's something people are certain, because of the fact that they have CDs, I mean to go ahead and scan some of the documents, and they like to keep a copy. They'll keep the hard copies at a location like ours for safety, and then they'll try to have a CD in their desk, but they're finding that they'd have to keep a library of CDs and it gets so unwieldily, that it's easier to go ahead and have a company like ours store that on our servers and they can access through our website, and at that point in time we can go ahead and even document as to who is visiting the website, for how long they were on it, and what they visited. So it's good information if they want to track as to who's accessing, and who they want to charge. Most of the people who use this are law firms for the most part.
JOHN: Now, Jim, I know that you do a lot of business throughout the state of Michigan. What areas do you cover per se, or areas have you done business with so far in this company?
JIM: We're storing documents for people all throughout the state of Michigan even as far away as Pennsylvania and Texas. People who had branches here in Michigan at one time and they've either closed them down or moved away, but they kept their documents here, or they had their parent companies out of state and they have a branch here. So we're billing people throughout the whole United States, but we feel that our market for storage is the state of Michigan, both the lower end and the Upper Peninsula, but when it comes down to shredding, we probably do the best job within 150 miles radius of Traverse City.
JOHN: Now you're dipping into the Grand Rapids area quite a bit, aren't you?
JIM: Yes, we do.
JOHN: Well, Jim, before I let you go, I want to get your website address and contact information please.
JIM: Our website is www.gtprofile.com. Our phone number is (231) 947-4717. Fax number is (231) 947-2477, and my email address is jim@gtprofile.com.
JOHN: Well, Jim, I want to thank you for joining us on the program today.
JIM: Thank you very much.
JOHN: We've been speaking with Jim Kirby, owner of Profile, a shredding service here in Traverse City, Michigan, and I am John Bentley signing off. Have a great afternoon.
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