John John Genovese of Malama Auctions joins host Tim Peters for this episode of the No Reserve Podcast. John John shares how he and his dad co-founded the company on Kauai 13 years ago, going to auction school together as first-generation auctioneers and running their very first sale out of items they found for free on Craigslist and the side of the road.
He walks through what it actually means to run an auction business on the smallest of Hawaii's four major islands, where 70,000 people are completely water locked with no highways or ferries connecting them to anywhere else. The early years were pure grassroots. John John and his dad hit every Lions Club, Rotary, and chamber of commerce meeting they could find, then walked neighborhoods handing out postcards by hand because they couldn't afford the postage. That door-to-door community outreach, more notification than sales pitch, is what built their reputation.
John John gets into the transition that reshaped the business: moving from live and simulcast auctions to online only. He noticed people standing in the room with a bidder card in hand, then quietly bidding from their phones instead. Life got in the way of people sitting through an eight-hour sale, and once he realized he was pouring time and money into something his community no longer valued, he flipped the switch. He talks about the pushback that came with it, the advice to make your best sale the transition sale, and why the people who swore they'd never come back showed up anyway.
The conversation covers the parts of the business that only make sense in Hawaii. Inter-island travel runs around $200 round trip per person, so you can't just take any sale anywhere, and most items have to sell to the population on the island they're already on. That geography pushed John John toward two things that kept the company lean: a collaborated auction model, where sellers handle the physical labor while Malama runs the marketing, invoicing, and scheduling, and a hard focus on reputation in a place where you'll see every buyer again at the one Walmart and the one Home Depot.
John John also talks about 808 Auctions, his newer brand built around Chinese equipment, trucks, and commercial assets, split out by asset class so it doesn't get lumped in with his estate and household bidders. He's opened a second yard on Maui, is working with partners on Oahu and the Big Island, and is candid about why he's building toward a lifestyle business rather than chasing growth for its own sake. The episode closes on his Gary Vaynerchuk influenced take on just getting started: You're better off trying something, failing, and fixing it than waiting until you're certain you'll succeed.
53 min