Burke Moving owner to sell shredding firm

CHEYENNE — Larry Shippy didn’t get into the commercial shredding business to become a recycler and save trees, but that’s been an added benefit.

Shippy started Shippy Data Destruction in 1989 to provide a secure, efficient method for destroying documents and papers from banks, law offices and other businesses in the Cheyenne area.

Now Shippy is offering his business for sale, and he’s hoping to find an entrepreneur with the vision to see the potential along the Northern Front Range for the only commercial shredder north of Denver.

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“We’ve never pushed it to the extent it should be pushed, because Fort Collins is a market, Greeley is a market, Scottsbluff, Laramie, Casper are markets, and all we’re basically doing is Cheyenne,” Shippy said. “Frankly, this business ought to be in Fort Collins, where the bulk of the market would be, and it really needs to be marketed and expanded.”

Even without marketing, the shredding business has customers from Fort Collins north to Casper and generates revenues of $70,000 to $80,000 a year.

“You could triple that by just working it,” Shippy said.

Shippy, owner of Burke Moving and Storage, launched the shredding business as a service to financial and business customers who already were storing documents in his warehouse and contracting with him to haul them to paper mills or shredders in Denver and Salt Lake City.

Shippy charges by the pound. His crews pick up shredder material weekly, monthly or on call, sort the documents by paper type and run them through a large hydraulic shredder that converts them into unreadable five-eighths-inch strips. The shreds are bailed into 1,400-pound bails and stored for later sale to paper mills, where the paper is recycled into new paper products.