From humble beginnings, RMS Communications Inc. leads the way in recycling old, unwanted cell phones

OCALA, Fla. – RMS Communications Inc., now a global leader in the field of recycling cell phones, got its start in a small one-bay garage as a company that repaired walkie-talkies and two way radios in trucks.

James Mosieur, now the company's chief executive officer, had been working for a computer company in his native Connecticut. But when he got laid off in 1985, he decided to move to Florida and join the tiny repair firm that had been started by his brother Michael.

"I had graduated from an electronics school just a few months before I lost my job," James recalled. "My brother offered me a job with his company, so I decided to take it."

With pagers starting to become more and more popular, the two brothers decided to expand their business to include pager repair. From there, they founded their own paging network, a system that covered four Florida counties.

"Pagers were more lucrative than two-way radios," James said. "We didn't have to carry garage insurance to protect us if one of the trucks we were working on got damaged somehow. Also, when we repaired two-way radios, sometimes we had to go to the customer's location.

With pagers, the work came to us."

The brothers remained in their garage location, but now the work was being done in the air conditioned office rather than in the hot garage bay.

"After about two months of doing both pagers and two-way radios, we decided we liked the pager work better, so we dropped the two-way radio business." James said. After about three years, they sold the pager network as planned to a large national pager network company, but they continued to repair pagers, a part of the business at RMS that continues to this day.

In addition to repairing pagers for customers, James and Michael Mosieur began buying old pagers to refurbish and re-sell, a strategy that serves as the basic business model for RMS Communications to this day.

"That practice started when we would come across old non-functioning pagers that we would want to buy for parts," James said. ""We got a bunch of them working, and sometimes we would offer them for sale to our repair customers. More and more, the business moved from simple repairs to buying and refurbishing old equipment."

From pagers, the move to cell phones was a natural migration for the business, and that happened in 1994. CellForCash.com, one of the company's several web sites, was started in 2002 when RMS realized that the Internet offered an opportunity to obtain old cell phones directly from consumers.

"We had always known that there were a lot of old cell phones that people were not trading in, phones that were just gathering dust in the drawers of America," James said. "We had always wondered how we could get to those individuals, but it was really an expensive proposition until the Internet came along."

While the Internet provided the channel that the company needed to obtain large numbers of old cell phones, RMS Communications began to re-think its basic business strategy. That meant re-thinking its relationship to the old cell phones that it bought from consumers.

"At first, we thought of ourselves as a company that refurbished old cell phones," James said. "But now, we think of ourselves more as a recycler of old phones. We still refurbish and sell old cell phones, but we also do other things with them – we extract precious metals from some phones, we provide working phones to shelters, police departments and other worthy users, and we also simply dismantle and discard some old phones in a responsible, non-polluting fashion."

James Mosieur, now 40, bought out his brother Michael in 1997, and the company moved from its original one-bay garage in 1987 and now occupies a large, comfortable 26,000-square-foot building in Ocala.

The company operates several web sites that offer company’s individuals and non-profit organizations ways to sell their old phones for cash to RMS.

The company also partners with individual entrepreneurs who can set up their own independent businesses that purchase old cell phones and then re-sell them to RMS for a profit.

The state of California recently passed landmark legislation requiring sellers of new cell phones to establish ways of collecting old cell phones. With other states likely to follow suit, the future of RMS Communications Group, already doing about $20 million in annual sales, looks even brighter.

On January 3rd, 2007 RMS received notification from the IRS that the RMS Foundation Inc. has been approved as a 501 c3 Public Charity.

"We don't like to look at annual sales so much as profitable strategies – partnerships with other companies, new services, new products," James said. "We aren't that interested in growth for growth's sake."

One such new strategy might be the recycling of printer ink-jet cartridges, James said.

"Recycling in general seems to be a good solid business for us," James said. "We are always looking for products that, like cell phones, can be re-used and satisfy a sizeable market."