EntreLeadership - How I Built An 8-Figure Business From My Garage

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Today we’ll hear about:  ·      How Montana Knife Company grew from a passion project in one man’s garage into a coveted American brand—and the lessons its founder, Josh Smith, learned along the way Next Steps: ·      📞 Have a question for the show? Call 844-944-1070 or send us a message: https://ter.li/ask-us ·      📚 Learn about the EntreLeadership System: https://ter.li/system-p ·      💻 Get EntreLeadership Elite for your business: https://ter.li/elite-p ·      ✉️ Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://ter.li/enl ·      🏢 Attend EntreLeadership Summit: https://ter.li/summit  ·      🎤 Attend EntreLeadership Master Series: https://ter.li/masterseries  ·      📖 Order Dave’s new book, Build a Business You Love: https://ter.li/b4kru2 ·      📺 Watch a free sample talk today: https://ter.li/om7p3e ·      🔪 Learn more about Montana Knife Company: https://www.montanaknifecompany.com/   Connect With Our Sponsors: 💼 Go to Belay Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource! 💻 Visit NetSuite today to learn more. 🧾 Visit Payority for a free consultation! 📈 Grab ⁠Sales Gravy's⁠ free resource to help you hire and lead better. 📝 Use code ENTRE15 to get 15% off your first year of Trainual.   Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🪑 Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💡 The Rachel Cruze Show💰 George Kamel   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I quit my job January 1st of 2021. And we told the insurance company that year, our goal is $100,000. And we ended up doing $1.9 million. And you're getting ready to hit the $60 million. Well, that's the goal. Today you've got 80 folks? Yeah, we have 80 employees. We're building a 51,000 square foot facility on a piece of commercial property.

What is the appeal? Why has it blown up? We are evidence that people still desire American-made products, and they want companies that are doing things the right way. From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is the Entry Leadership Podcast. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience in leading just like you. I'm down in the trenches shoveling just like you are. I actually make payroll.

Today we got a special episode for you. Co-founder and president of the Montana Knife Company, Josh Smith, joins me to share his incredible story that is proof that the American Dream is alive and well today. When he and I sat down, we intended for this to be one segment on one of these podcasts, and it went so well that we just decided you needed to hear the whole thing, non-edited. So this guy's one of us. You're not going to want to miss this.

Josh Smith, the president and co-founder of the Montana Knife Company, just dropped by. We're going to hang out. He's got an incredible product, but he's also got an incredible success story. And he does stuff, he didn't even know it, but he does stuff the Ramsey Way, the way he takes care of his folks, and he runs the whole thing debt-free, and it's blown up. They're growing at unbelievable paces, and I have a fabulous product, but the business stuff behind the scenes of the product is also a lot of fun.

Josh and I met at a Tucker Carlson thing. We did at my barn here a little while back, and I reached out to him and said, hey, I want to tell your story here on the Entree Leadership Podcast. Welcome, my friend. Yeah, thanks for having me on. This is awesome. Well, we're so glad to have you, so glad to have you.

Appreciate it. So for those that don't know, the Montana Knife Company, I'm going to reach over here and get this knife, is absolutely producing incredible product. And this is all blown up in a fairly short period of time. And, I mean, you're pretty cool, but you've been spitballing this thing pretty heavy. I mean, you've been getting it.

Yeah. You've been stepping and fetching. But let's go back to the beginning. You started making knives how young? Yeah, I was 11 years old. That's the thing. It's blown up fast, but it's a 30-year overnight success story. My little league baseball coach started teaching me to make knives when I was 11.

I went up and made a knife at his shop. And I think his way of getting rid of me was to tell me, if you want to be a knife maker, you got to have your own shop. Well, I had a lawn mowing business, and I also worked in my parents' excavation business, so I went and bought a belt grinder, set up a grinder in my dad's shop, and started doing stuff from there and made enough of a mess that he finally kicked me out and gave me a little, we enclosed a little lean-to out in a different shed, and I started making knives all the way through junior high and high school,

and I ended up becoming the youngest journeyman knife maker in the world at 15, and the youngest master blade smith at 19. So those are designations. Yeah, there are tests you go through. And you have performance blade test and masters judge your knives. And at the time there was about 80 masters in the world. Now there's about 150. So I definitely...

Master blade smith is the top. Yeah. And I definitely, you know, so the point is I got pretty serious about as a kid. I was pretty driven for sure. And then life came along. Yeah, life came along. Got married. Duck hunted my way right out of college after a year.

year. Just didn't see the point and this knife thing was pulling me. So I worked an excavation job all summer. And as soon as I bought my home, I quit that job and went full time making knives. And I made custom knives, had four kids real fast. And I made custom knives all the way through like 2010. And during that 0809 time period, the housing crisis started happening. And the market started to kind of fall out. I was making four or $5,000 knives per knife. They're very high-end, very like collector pieces. And it was kind of a starving artist situation, you know, and I had four kids, and I was kind of seeing what was going on at the economy,

and I just wasn't sure that this was maybe the best career as far as making it for the long-term, especially the stability for my family. So I applied for a job, and I got a job at the power company and ended up getting an apprenticeship and became over the next five years, five years I became a journeyman line. And so I kind of stepped away from making custom knives, but I always had this dream of starting Montana Knife Company, and in fact, I registered the name when I was 19, but I didn't start it until I was 39.

I didn't have the money, I didn't have the experience, the know-how. But the whole time as alignment, I was talking to my buddies about this idea of this company, and I thought about it for 19 years, a lot, like really did. And a good friend of mine was a marketing guy. he kept telling me you need to start this. And so I ended up divorced. That next year, my house burned down.

I was a lineman. I had four kids. I was living in a camper. And that summer, at the end of that year, I met my new wife, Jessica. And what was really cool about that was, once we were married, I was telling her the idea of this company.

And this was about 2019. She's like, well, I've got the house and kids. go do it. And so she was really the one that pushed that and her dad passed away. We didn't have a lot of money, but her dad passed away and he left her about 20 grand. And she said, take that $20,000 and start your company. And so I went and bought steel and made some prototypes and happened to be, decide to start my company in February of 2020, which was the beginning of COVID. Well, your timing sucks. Yeah. Or it's genius. One of the two because it probably turned out pretty good. good. People sitting at home and they're seeing this stuff and they're looking in their drawer at their

cheap but target knives that they need to throw in trash and instead they start seeing this stuff pop up on the internet. Yeah. And I, you know, in 2010, I kind of ran from the breaking news on television. You know, I saw everything going on. The world's ending. Recession, depression's coming. And in 2020, I was like, I'm going to ignore the news. I'm going to do my thing and ignore what's on television. I'm going to start this, you know. And so I made some prototypes. We built a website in July of 2020. You're still working as a lineman. I'm still a lineman.

This is before work. You're doing this in your garage. Yes, before work, after work, we're in my two-car garage. And it's just me. And to be honest, my kids, you know, my four kids, they were still in junior high in high school. And they were helping me put together knives. I was doing everything wrong.

I didn't know how to make production knives. I'd been making $5,000 apiece knives. And now I'm trying to figure out how to start a production knife company and you can't just call the competition and ask him how. And so I was doing it all wrong through 2020, but trying to figure it out, I met a guy that I hired to build me a website and I realized I don't have enough money to pay this guy to do all my marketing, but he's really, really good. And so his name was Brandon. So I offered him a partnership in the company in the fall and I was like, let's do this together. And he joined up. And that was the fall of 2020.

and so he had built the website and we started kind of getting a little traction and by the end of the year my wife was like you need to quit this lineman thing like there's something here so what kind of volume were you doing by then you know we were dropping a couple hundred knives every few weeks

so probably making in 2020 we probably made 350 knives total and then so your gross reps were yeah in 2020 it was probably you know 40,000, like it was really low in 2020. In 2021, okay, I quit my job January 1st of 2021. And in 2021,

that's when we started to push. And we told the insurance company that year, our goal is $100,000. And we ended up doing $1.9 million in 2021. So it really started to blow up. I started to hire some help. And we just started bootstrapping it. And really the model was, I didn't have enough money. in 2020 to just blow this thing up. And I'm in my garage. So we made 200 knives and we sold them. And then I made 200 knives again. And I was like, wow, I think, and they sold fast.

And I thought, well, let's try 500. Made 500 and they sold. And we just kept taking any money we made and not spending a dime. We just kept putting it into the company. And I refused to borrow money because I already quit my job. Like in January 1st, I already felt like I was putting our family at risk. I had a great job. Benefits, good salary, job you retire from. And I was like, we are not going to borrow a dime. If we can't do it on our savings, I had about six months of savings. We didn't take a paycheck until August of 2021, worked that whole year, and just burned through savings and just took any money we made and putting it back into the company.

So you rolled a million dollars back in that year. We did. Yeah, we rolled a million dollars back into the company that year. My wife quit her teaching job. that fall because they told her going back into the school year of 2021, she had to wear a mask coming back to school. And she said, well, I'm, she told me, you either hire me, I'm going to get another job because I will not wear a mask with this COVID stuff. She just didn't believe in that with kids. And I felt it was a little bit early. I'm like, man, I don't know. And we talked about it, put her on a real modest salary. We hired her. And about two months later, I was like, thank God we hired her. Because she started handling all the customer service, fulfillment,

To this day, she's in charge of that. Wow. Completely blown up. Today, you've got 80 folks? Yeah, we have 80 employees, and what's cool is they still report to work at my house. Like, they park in my driveway. It's right out my back, right? It was in my horse pasture.

In 2022, we knew we needed more space beyond that two-car garage. But I didn't want to go borrow money and buy commercial land and build a commercial building. Because I was like, is this a fad? Like, is this going to pop up? I'm going to borrow a ton of money, and then it's going to fall right. right out. And so we built a 10,000 square foot building in my horse pasture, tore down horse fence. I grew up in excavation, so I did all my own dirt work around it. And I hired a couple guys. I generaled the project, and we built that 10,000 square foot shop. And I thought, we'll either

be in this forever or we'll grow through it. And by the time we grow out of this, we're going to know the right move is to go by land and build. And we moved in January 1st of 23. And by January 1st, of 24, that building was full. And that's when we got real serious about looking for property. And so today we're building a 51,000 square foot facility on a piece of commercial property right up at the exit. We'll have a retail store in that, a black rifle coffee in that, a gym for our employees, a bunch of really cool things. So it's... It does not shock me that you know Evan. Yeah, Evan and I are phones, yeah.

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What is the magic of these knives? What is, because I mean, the business story, the blowup doesn't happen without these things just being magic. Right. I mean, these things, they're beautiful. Yeah. obviously not only a work of art, but they're obviously quite a tool for somebody in the kitchen. But what is the appeal? Why has it blown up? Yeah, I mean, it is. It's a high quality product.

And it was intended to be a tool. We started as a hunting knife company. We've gone into chef's knives like this one. We're developing our folding knives for next year. But they were intended to use. That being said, I kept looking around in the previous 20 years and seeing less and less stuff being made in America, especially knives, more and more being sourced from overseas. And people literally buying replaceable blade knives and just throwing the blades away. And as men, we've generally passed down knives and guns for generations and women. And I found it tragic. I mean, I sharpened thousands of knives for people that brought them in and said,

hey, my grandpa was in Vietnam and this was the knife he carried or whatever story it was. And this was my grandfather's knife. the only thing I've got from him. And we're throwing our heirlooms away. And also, I also started seeing Americans started to desire American-made products more and more and bringing back American manufacturing. And everybody told me that what I was about to build was impossible. Knife makers are like, you have to bring it in from China.

You can't sell a $300 knife. They're $29-99 in a store. And I said, I think there's enough Americans still in this country that respect and understand the value of American-made product. Yes, the product is really, really good. But we have also been documenting this really well all the way along and showing what we're building and that we're creating jobs. We're given back to our community. And so all of that together, including my business partners, marketing, everything that he's done. But I built it through relationships, to be honest. Those first two years, we didn't buy a dollar, three years. We didn't buy a dollar of advertising,

not a dollar. I built it by going to like total archery challenge and developing relationships developing a relationship with somebody that knew somebody and we gave, we couldn't buy advertising so I gave product away but with no ask. Just like use it. Just take it and use it. Let me know what you think. And we started to develop real relationships and that panned out and it ended up working out that

when you don't ask for something, it just somehow, comes back to you. And people started spreading the word, telling people about us. And to this day, our best form of, like in our customer surveys, post-purchase,

the number one thing about our company, how did you hear about it? Friends or family. Referral. So your, a buddy of mine that's a hunter says he uses your, I guess it's probably your number one seller.

What's it called? We have a speed goat. Speed goat, that one, yeah. He said, and he said, feel dressing a deer. it's the fastest, it's the most beautiful knife he's ever used. He's got probably got a handful of them, more than a double handful of knives over the years,

but that's his go-to. Yeah. And he said, you're going to meet Josh. He's like, oh, you got, it's like I'm meeting, you know, a freaking country music star or something for him. Well, you know what's different about our company is, I'm a hunter. I'm an end user of our product, and I'm also a master blade smith.

You can't name another knife company in America that's large on any scale that the CEO makes a knife. He can't make a knife at all. Like, I'm a master bladesmith. When our guys are having trouble in the sharpening room with a new model we come up with and they're struggling to get them sharp or whatever,

I go down and teach them and I work alongside of them. And that's what's different about us. Like, I can make the product, you know. Well, and if you're hunting and you're trying to field dress a deer or whatever, whatever the task is with speed goat, then you can, that's product, that's R&D for you. Yeah, and I was saying that all these companies are making these hunting knives,

but it's just because they need a honey knife category, but they're in Portland or wherever they're at, they don't have any hunters working for them or any hunters that are in the executive team or whatever, and they just make something that looks like a honey knife, I'm a hunter. And so when I go out and make a chef's knife, I'm not a chef.

So I go out and I look for chefs to get feedback from, and a knife maker Mareko Malmasi helped us design these knives because he's a chef's knife maker. Our tactical line for the military, I'm not a veteran, and I'm not going to pretend to know what those guys go through. So, you know, I lean on my relationships in that military community to help us build a product that they need first. And then... So the speed go is the number one seller. And what's the price point on that? $225. Okay. And then our Blackfoot's $300. And the thing is, we sharpen these knives for life. Our generations promise is that if you buy it, I don't care if you bought it off eBay or from a friend or you buy it from us. If it's our knife, you send it to us, you pay to

ship it to us. The day we receive it, we will sharpen it, clean it up, and we will send it back at the latest the next day. And that's for free and we'll pay to ship it back to you. And so, yeah, you buy a $300 knife, use it all season, maybe you're struggling to get it sharp. You send it in to us, we'll sharpen it all up. You don't have a brand new knife and you use that knife for the next 10 years, how much did you really pay for that knife? You know, and we have some people that use our knives a lot. They're guides or they may be chefs. They might send their knives to us every other month to dial them in. We sharpen them and we send them back, you know. And that's the thing. When you bought American-made products back in

the old days, you could send them in and they stood behind them, you know. And so that's the promise. That's how I found my director of operations. He was working at Amazon. And I saw, this was in 2021, I saw a post that he commented on. I had one of those knives and my truck got broken into and it got stolen. I just looked him up in the system and I shipped him a new knife. He went home that day and told his wife, I'm going to work for that company someday. A year later, I posted a director of operations job.

He came and interviewed. I didn't know anything, frankly. As it turns out, he interviewed us. He asked us all kinds of questions I couldn't answer. I'm a lineman and a knife maker and a backel operator. Like, I don't know all this stuff. He asked us a pile of questions, and it was very obvious, like,

this is the kind of experience we need. Offering a job, which he should not have taken at the time. And he worked with me in that two-car garage. He said his laptop up on my workbench and worked next to me. He was managing a store of 5,000 employees in Spokane and came to work in my shop with three of us, shoulder to shoulder, and help build the operations side of the company.

And that's the thing, when you hire, I think if I'd have started this company when I was 21, 22, I'd have probably had enough ego and arrogance to do all the marketing myself and not delegate anything, right? And think that I can do it all. I think by the time I got to the point

in my life where I was at, I realized what I don't know. And I've gone and found the absolute best people Our hiring process is hard. Culture is you can be the greatest at your job if you're not a culture fit. We're not hiring you. And these people that are working in our company,

all of them, they're a culture fit, they buy in, they treat it like they own it. And that's how you scale this fast. I didn't do this by myself. You know, I hire really great people. I'm like, do your job. Like, go do your job. These days, business as usual is anything but

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We're, because not if you spend $59. And that's literally. If you're building a new building, I mean, it's all gone. That's literally. That's, like, and that's actually no exaggeration.

And so we're still reinvesting into everything into this thing. That's how we do it. It's the same way. It's like, how do you run a debt-free company with 600,000 square feet? Right. You know, you know, what are you doing with 300 million in revenue?

It's like, it's, you're sitting in it. Yeah. You know, it's not like I took it home and piled it in the garage. Oh, my God. Yeah, and I've seen comments like, MKC's getting so big or whatever, and, you know, this or that, whatever things you see on the internet.

And it's like, we're still in my horse pasture at my house. Like, you know, we're building this building. We're going to move into a building that's pretty much empty. And over the next seven years is the plan. Like, we have to fill that. Oh, you know, you have to buy CNC machines and you have to hire people. and, you know, there's a lot of, there's some processes that we don't do in-house.

You know, when I started my two-car garage, I was sourcing these different parts out to shops around America, machine shops, right? And then as we started to grow, it's like, okay, now we can make our sheaths in-house, right? Now we can start making our handles in-house. And so I started looking at each process and where can you gain some margin or some time back in the process? And, okay, I can afford to do this. and we didn't know how to do in these processes, so we also had to hire people and figured out. And so this is a, it's a model of basically starting as an assembly shop and then slowly turning it into a full-on manufacturing facility,

and we're half or three-quarters of the way there. So it's a really cool, cool process. So I hear gear and accessories are in the offing as well. Yep. Yeah, we, for the, From the very beginning, and this is really branded with my business partner, we weren't starting just a knife company. We're starting a brand.

And that brand should mean something, like Evan with Black Rifle, you know, when they were coming up. The world didn't need another coffee company. And the world doesn't need another knife company. But when you see that hat on somebody, when you see that Montana knife company on someone walking down the street, that means, oh, that guy believes in American manufacturing. And he believes in, you know, taking care of his community,

taking care of his employees. you know, giving back in conservation groups. Last week, we just donated a bunch of employee time to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Yesterday, we gave a home away to North Carolina flood victims where we raised a bunch of money through a fundraiser for them.

So when you see that, there's values attached to that brand. And we've seen, and this has become a big part of our business, people want to wear that apparel. They want to rip that because a knife is hard to rep. You know, you could be sitting right now with a knife in your pocket of ours right now, no one would know. But if you're wearing our shirt, that helps us get the word out. And so, I can't express it enough.

For our customers, wearing our hat, wearing our shirts, that's as important as buying one of our knives because it helps spread the word of what we're doing. Plus, we have all kinds of other accessories. And those accessories, what's cool about it, like our leather sheets are made by Teton leather in Idaho. She was in her basement as a sheath maker. She's now in a commercial space with nine employees. just to serve our business. Montana Block in Billings, Montana makes all our cutting boards and our stands and all that. He's hired four or five people.

He was also part-time. So when you support American manufacturing, it's way bigger than just that company in that one location. It spreads all across the country. No, there's all these spinoffs that are being, all these families are being fed. Yeah, exactly. Because of the hard work and the quality. the quality pretty incredible what i want to point out too is i heard you ask ben sheperrell on your show

is american is the american dream dead that was one of the questions you asked him the american dream is alive and real and ben responded to you that you've got the supercomputer in your pocket right and free marketing with social media um any question you want to ask it in the world you can you can answer um i had to get up really early in the morning and i had to go to go to bed really late at night. You know, and I didn't quit my job. I kept working my job until I physically could not, and I had to quit, right? And, you know, I'm just a regular guy. I think people need, what I think resonates a bit with our company. I grew up operating backos and excavators, and I watched my parents go from $50 in an open cab backo in 1981 to, you know, four backcows in an

excavator and, you know, a couple dump trucks and grow a business. Yeah. And I worked in that. I was a lineman, right? I had to change my career and change the way I was going to do this and step back. You know, 11 years ago, when I tried to rebuild my house, I had to go borrow some money from a knife collector of mine to just get through that house burning down phase and then paid it back in about six months back to him. But I had to really, like, figure it out.

You know, when you're living in a camper with four kids and you're in a pile of ashes right outside the door. And you can't even afford it. I had to buy an old truck from my foreman for $1,500 and drive that with my four kids and things break down on me all the time. The point is, is there's a way to accomplish your goals. You can take your hobbies

and you can turn them into a full-on career. But sometimes you've got to eat a lot of crap in the process to do it. I would say 100% of the time, not just sometimes. That's just that there's a price to be paid to win. Yeah. And the American dream is not dead. It's the, and I knew that was an underhand pitch for Ben.

You know, it wasn't like he couldn't get that out of the park. But it's not dead at all. But what is harder to find than ever before is people willing to pay a price to get the dream. Yeah. And so, but that's always been the case. That's why we've always looked up and said, hey, something successful. Somebody's doing something different here. they're paying a price that no one else would pay.

They're doing something nobody's done before. So I want to circle back on one thing, because the marketing you guys are using, I mean, it's a classic product marketing process where you're creating a sense of scarcity and urgency. But you and I were talking, before we turn on the microphones, you kind of backed into it. But doing these drops has created like a,

constant cycle of product releases. Yeah. And it's driving demand probably more than if you just had them up there for sale all the time. Yeah, we definitely backed into that a little bit on accident. And it was more around I didn't have the money to make enough product from day one. And then as the excitement for the brand grew and I made more product, it still was never enough. Right. And so we drop our knives every Thursday night on our website.

You know, and we'll make as many basically as we can make. but we also have to have enough capital to make knives for next Thursday and the 50 Thursdays after that. And so it does. It drives people to our website. People now go on our website and just watch a drop on a Thursday night, just as a viewing party basically. But it did create, and I think a lot of people think that,

like, oh, you just make two knives. And it's like, well, when you see my videos on my Instagram of the next day, because my other promise is when you buy something from us, we ship it the next day. No doubt. So if we sell 1,000 knives on Thursday night, they all go out of the shop on Friday, and we do all of our own fulfillment.

And so it did create a lot of it fervor for the brand. But that being said, we're also trying to get some knives in stock as well because we were missing a lot of customers. And people would write us the nastiest emails, which go to my wife, chewing us out about a knife that they couldn't get on our website. And it's like, do you not think I want your money? I want all of your money.

But, you know, it's like we want to make more knives, but we're doing this in our garage, right? And so we've scaled through some of that. We still definitely have, like the knife we're doing this week. We'll probably sell out in two minutes. And there's, you know, a bunch of them. But that being said, it did create an excitement about our brand, for sure. There's no doubt about it.

Yeah. Well, it's just constant. knew and improved every Thursday. And I have to highlight our marketing team on that. We don't use agencies outside. We create all of our own content. We make all of our own emails. We make our own...

They quote us like 150 grand to make our first TV commercial last year. And Brandon looked at our three video guys and were like, you guys can make a commercial just as good as that, right? Go make it. And we make...

So we make our own TV commercials. Like, we... Where are you buying TV? My business partner, honestly, is handling some of that stuff. So we've got some ads. We're trying to be frugal. So sometimes it's on, you know, like off-network type, like smaller channels, and we're doing some testing and seeing if that works, you know.

We try to maybe... I mean, like hunting shows would be obvious, right? Yeah, some of that. But honestly, just regular television shows. Like, I think we're a national brand, and we're trying to be a brand that resonates. with everyone. And I say everyone, everyone that has our values, you know.

Like I at times post stuff and get a little on my soapbox about the way the country's running or politics and a little bit. And if you don't agree with what we're doing and you don't want to buy a knife, that's fine. But there's probably 150 million Americans that agree with me. So that's a good customer base, you know. I'm doing okay out of that. Yeah, I'm doing all right.

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it's a brand new website. We have to promote next week's drop. And so all that work. And I see guys that are running these companies and they're outsourcing to all these agencies and all this stuff. And it's like, no, hire really good people in your company and then make them work, work hard.

And our team works their butt off. Oh, yeah. And people talk bad about youth today and obviously there's a lot of people that don't want to work. But if your culture's right and your hiring process is right, I think kids today are smarter than they've ever been.

I got 400 Gen Zs in here. I love them. And there's more tools at their disposal today than there's ever been. They have a spirit of abundance. Yeah. Because they've had a magic wand in their hand, and they think anything's possible. Yeah. That you push a button stuff shows up on your porch.

Why wouldn't it be it possible? Right. Everything's possible. Yeah. And so sometimes they don't know how hard it's going to be. But they're very possibility thinkers. And they're not scarcity people. And we do meetings every week.

we're very open with our employees and we want them to feel like owners and we probably more open than any business maybe should be quote unquote but I want them to be very proud like we took them on a tour of our new manufacturing facility we're putting in wiring right now in HVAC and I walk them around you know it's a meeting on the clock you know on a Tuesday where we take them all 75 people up there and we walk them around the whole thing because I'm like you guys are building this not me like you guys and the Americans that are buying our knives are building this and I want them to look back someday when that building's full of machines and things are going on and be like I help build this you know sense of pride amen well there's a lot of pride and there's a lot of pride

in the quality of the product and that's that makes a lot of do it that makes all the difference I mean it's it's not a mission and it's not a crusade unless there's something quality happening. And you really can't attract and keep talent unless you plug into that. Right. And that's what you guys have done. It was just your nature to go do it. And it's just blown up. I'm so proud of you. Congratulations. Well, thank you. No, I appreciate it. And I, thanks to Americans that we are evidence that people still desire American-made products and they want companies that are doing things the right way. And we're still learning. And we're still learning. I mean, we're still, I am, you know, I'm a quote unquote CEO.

I look at myself more of a dad of four and a knife maker and a backo operator, and I'm figuring this out. But I'm just trying to treat my employees like I'd want my kids treated if they work to somewhere else, you know. And I'm also trying to hopefully create something that proves that the American Dream is alive and real. And people can go, is the American Dream alive? Yeah, check out Montana Knife Company. They're the evidence of it, you know.

But for those of those people that, you don't want to go off and start their own job, or their own company, it's 100% possible. But you have to shut the TV off. You have to quit listening to the doomsday on the news. You know, it is actually possible. And you start in your garage. You don't have to go start in a 51,000 square foot. Right.

With millions of dollars in debt just to get. started because it's a barrier. It's not a barrier. Your barrier is you need to learn to crawl before you walk. You rabbit hunt before you go hunt for elephants. That way you don't starve the death when you're elephant hunting. And that's the barrier. We started this on a cart table on my living room. And this is the seventh studio I built. Wow. You know, so because, and the first one wasn't even soundproof. We had to tell people not to walk down the hall while we were doing the show. You know, I mean, it's like, hey, it's what you do, man. Yeah. And, but you know what? We ain't gone broke either. You don't go broke making a profit.

Well, and we have been very resistant to drinking our own Kool-Aid and listening to, you know, the people that are like, oh, Joe Rogan talked about you guys, and you guys, we could have easily gone out and leveraged it everything and bought a ton of steel and tried to meet the demand immediately. We have a very, very good thing going, and I'm going to be very careful.

I owe it to my employees to not make bad decisions to kill it. And it's like, I would way rather grow this, I want to grow a generational company. I'm not trying to sell this. I'm good with growing this over five and seven and 15 years versus this isn't to blow it up in one or two and sell it. You know. So that's how we're doing it. Yeah.

That's congratulations. That's the way it should be done. And you make different decisions. Simon Seneca talks about that in his book, Infinite Game, that when you're playing an infinite game, it's a different set of rules than if you have a game with an end date. Yeah. And I think a lot of these principles, some of these are lessons learned from when I was young and made a lot of mistakes. When I was a custom knife maker, I sat in my shop a lot and listened to a lot of AM radio of this Dave guy telling me what I was doing wrong with my finances.

And so, you know, I was in pretty bad debt at an early stage in my life. And, you know, now with growing this company taking some of those lessons learned and like, I'm not, going to run this business how I ran the first 10 years of my adulthood. Yeah. You know. If I had to run that better, I might not have to have gone and been alignment. But I had to go dig out, and that's what I did. You didn't quit until you had, you know, volume enough to justify it.

Right. And you just, you know, you just work more. Don't sleep less. Right. You know, and you sleep when you're dead. So, you know, and you're not going to pass out. You're not going to burn out. There's because there's too much passion and too much fun involved.

Yeah. So you guys are having a good time. It's so fun to watch from the outside. Again, I've said 20 times you probably don't care, but I love these kinds of stories, and I love guys like you that, because we're cut from the same kind of cloth, and most of the audience for this is the same thing.

It's entrepreneurs. And they're running, you know, they've got five team members, they've got 50 team members, and, you know, they're gutting it out, and they're putting up with all the crap that you put up with and all the stuff. And you try stuff, and it doesn't work.

You just fall down, you get back up, and you just keep scratching and clawing. And then some moron says, you're lucky. Yeah. Luck had nothing to do with it. Exactly. No, I've been fortunate to have really great people in my life, fortunate to have great parents, a mentor in Rick Dunkerley that was my Little League baseball coach, that I just got to give the speech to induct him into the Hall of Fame

this weekend. I've been fortunate to have good people in my life, but, yeah, we've worked our asses off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You did. You did. And it turns out it's a quality product. So this is one of the chef's set. Yep.

And I keep bringing it up and featuring it because it's probably making you nervous the way I'm handling it. They're very sharp. Yeah, don't cut your hand off. Yeah, our chef sets, we have three knives in that. They come in a bison leather roll that Francesca Teton makes.

That's it right there? Yes, it is. Can we get a shot of it? Make sure we get it on there. Yeah. But this is the idea. But again, this is, the sweet spot in the center of your wheel is still the speed goat.

The speed goat and really honestly. In terms of the volume that it creates. Yeah. But these things are going, these things have taken off too. They really are. I mean. Well, they're beautiful for one. They really are.

And people might go to our website and not see them there. And that's where it's like sign up for our email list because we are still selling out, right? And so there will be months that go by. We won't have them available. and we are asking people to be patient, but then when they, we are making more and they'll come back around, you know. It's something that I think what I've found is that when the people have those on a woodblock

displayed on their kitchen counter, it's also a conversation starter. You know, they look different than everything else. And I think there's something to be said too for using, whether it's a honey knife or this chef's knife, you're using something in your kitchen, And you can go right to our YouTube page or Instagram and watch the videos that our guys make and see the hands that we're making those, you know, and know that you're using a tool that

somebody real on the other end of just right up in Frenchtown, Montana made. You know, it's a cool connection. Very cool. Well, thanks for stopping by, my friend. Thank you one more time. I'm excited about all the good stuff that's happening for you. You deserve every bit of it. And thank you for putting out an incredible American-made high-peer.

quality product. Thank you so much. Montana Knife Company, Josh Smith. You guys be sure and check them out and you'll learn more about it on their site. All right, folks, remember better a weary warrior than a quivering critic. This world needs more high-quality leaders. So take courage and lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for listening to the Entree Leadership Podcast.