His shocking sales are meter made.

• Position: Austin International Owner Randy Austin

Need 80 121-foot steel powerline towers? Randy Austin can cut you a deal.

"A utility originally bought them for a new transmission line. Opponents sued and stopped construction," explains the owner of Belmont-based Austin International Inc., which hopes to sell $2.5 million of surplus electric meters, substation equipment and the like.

"Utilities pay 62 cents a pound for these |towers~, and they had to sell them as scrap for pennies on the dollar before we came along," Detroit native Austin, 39, says. "We're asking 40 cents -- $930,000 for the lot."

In the 1970s, Austin got turned on to electricity as an enlisted man in the Navy, where he earned a two-year general degree from the University of Maryland. The son of a Michigan small-business owner, he left the service in 1980 and, after a couple of years working for electronics companies in Michigan, headed to Charlotte.

First he worked for electrical-equipment supplier Process Systems Inc., then co-founded Aptech Inc. to...