How to turn mushroom into iron?

I’m nearly 100% sure that you have never heard about his name, Herman Knaust. He was called “the mushroom king” during his early business life. Indeed, he was the largest grower and canner of mushrooms in the world back in 1930s. His business was so large and booming, he ran out of space and he was looking for a much larger space for his mushroom planting. Thanks to the Great Depression in the 30s last century, he got what he wanted, a large, dark, cool, cave-like structure from an abandoned iron ore mine in the south of Albany, New York. The price he paid? $9000 in total! Even factored in the high inflation growth during the past century, it was still a fire sale price, an entire mining area for less than $10K. The area was so large that was much more than he really needed for his mushroom growing business, he got a genius idea. That is the real interesting story I want to tell you today, not how he grew his mushroom business into the moon but rather how he turned his mushroom into iron via this abandoned iron mine.

Of course, no one has the magic to really transform mushroom to iron chemically but at least by name, he was successfully doing so, turning a low profit margin mushroom business into a decades long high profit margin business. Again, most of you likely have never heard about this company but indirectly via your companies (if you are working) you may be unknowingly using its services. I’m talking about the company called Iron Mountain (IRM). If you indeed have never heard about it, can you guess what its business is? You probably will never guess it right also, not me included when I initially heard about it! No kidding, it sounds really odd for its business, record archiving services, with the name. I was also wondering where this name came from but now I understand why. While the iron mine was perfect for mushroom growing, it was too large for Knaust and that’s why it triggered him to think about what to do for the extra space and then a genius idea hit him. Since the mine with bunkers were so strongly built up and so secured as it could even survive an atomic attack, why not rent his space to companies for archiving records? What a brainiac! Long story short, he was really successful as he eventually ditched the mushroom business entirely and offered the whole space to New York companies for record archiving. It makes a lot of sense now for me why he chose Iron Mountain for the company’s name. More than 80 years later, IRM is not a local company anymore. Actually it is a globally dominating company in record archiving services for more than 230,000 modern offices. Today, IRM makes $4.2 billion a year in revenue worldwide, which could never be made via Knaust’s original mushroom business!

It is enough for today for the introduction and I will come back more for IRM later.