- Erkelens & Olson, a Salt Lake City auction house, celebrated 50 years on Wednesday.
- The pandemic forced a shift to online auctions, but it boosted the company's growth.
- Owner Rob Olson values family collaboration and anticipates future generational involvement.
SALT LAKE CITY — For decades, auctions at Erkelens & Olson meant crowds packed into a room, hands raised and an auctioneer calling bids faster than most people could follow.
Today, the auction house still sells thousands of items each week, but the bidders are no longer standing in the warehouse; they're online.
The Salt Lake City business is celebrating 50 years and three generations of family ownership, and the owners said a change forced by the COVID-19 pandemic helped the company grow even more.
Inside its warehouse, rows of pallets hold everything from shoes to tools to mystery boxes.
Owner Rob Olson said that's part of the excitement.
"We say there's a treasure in every single box, and there literally is," Olson said. "My father started this company 50 years ago, and it's more now. Three generations. Just having a blast doing it."
For most of those years, auctions were held live with bidders in the room.
Olson said the fast-paced energy of those events is something he still misses.
"You do miss that," he said before rattling off an example of the rapid auction chant. "500, seven and a half, 1,000, 12 and a half, 15 …17 and a half, 2,000."
That tradition came to a sudden halt in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Robert Olson, one of Rob Olson's sons, said the family had little choice but to rethink how they did business.
"We weren't allowed to hold gatherings, so I'd like to say we did some big innovative thing, but really, we were forced to go online," he said.
At first, Rob Olson admits he wasn't completely convinced.
"I'm old school," he said. "Takes me a little longer to get things. I thought about it three or four days, and I said, 'Let's do it.'"
The move turned out to be a turning point for the company.
"That made it between two and three hundred bidders a week to over a thousand and growing," Robert Olson said.
With more bidders came more inventory. The business that once received just a handful of shipments each week now sees trucks arriving daily.
"We went from getting four to six trucks a week to four to six trucks a day," said Robert Olson.
To keep up with the demand, the company has moved multiple times in recent years and now operates out of a warehouse roughly 80,000 square feet in size.
While many auction houses struggled during the shift away from in-person bidding, Rob Olson said their family business is thriving.
Erkelens & Olson does weekly auctions on its pallet auctions website.
"I'm going to call it a small miracle," he said.
Even with the success of online auctions, Olson said the best part of the job isn't the business itself, it's being able to work with family.
"I'm having a blast working with my sons and family," he said. "It's incredible to me to be able to do that."
With grandchildren already in the family, the Olsons said the possibility of a fourth generation one day joining the business is always there.
For now, they're simply enjoying the success of a company that has managed to evolve while staying in the family for half a century.
