EntreLeadership - What Makes T.REX ARMS a Successful Business with Lucas Botkin

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

What does it take to start a successful business from the ground up? The answer: a few hundred bucks, a mild obsession and the American spirit. At least that’s what worked for Lucas Botkin, the 27-year-old who started T.REX ARMS , a rapidly growing company—with a massive fan following—that specializes in manufacturing gun holsters and other firearms equipment. The young CEO shares his start-up experience, how his company has adapted to their rapid growth, and the content marketing formula that won T.REX ARMS hundreds of thousands of followers.   entreleadership.com/podcast T.REX ARMS’ website T.REX ARMS’ Instagram T.REX ARMS’ YouTube channel Gary Vaynerchuk’s website The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber Jesse Itzler’s website The 8th Habit by Stephen Covey Lucas Botkin’s Instagram Leadership Growth Assessment EntreLeadership Toolkit - Top tools to help your business can grow and thrive Schedule a call with Tim, the Producer   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know, I've talked to thousands of business owners, and most of them want to scale. But it gets complicated because the bigger you get and the more layers of things you've got going on, the more you have to manage. You've got hiring, firing, sales, marketing, product, operations. Where do you even start? From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Lucas Bocken. Today, eight years in, he's the CEO.

of a thriving company. T-Rex arms. They manufacture holsters. And he made the decision early on that he wanted to scale. He knew it was going to be challenging. He knew it was going to be hard. But he made the conscious decision to say,

I believe in this so much that I'm willing to face all of those challenges. And just in the last year, his team's gone from 30 employees to over 70. 72. Wow. As of today, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, we're 71.

One of the two. I'm not actually sure. And you're now at your 28. now. 27. 27. Does that ever feel daunting, 27-year-old leading 72 people?

All the time. Every day. Every day. What's actually daunting on top of that is knowing that our business also employs other people outside of the business, other companies that we support who've also gone and hired 20 people, 30-plus people. So it's not just our 72 and their families, which is actually more like 250 that we're, like, taking care of.

It's all the other people outside of the business who are relying on us retailing their products, us having them manufacture our products. So I think of that on top of our current amount of people, which some people might argue that's not my responsibility. That's on them. Those business owners worrying about their people. But I end up stressing about it as well. So it's more than 70. It's a bit. Yeah, it seems like a huge responsibility. Did you see that when you started? Did you realize it would get to this point? No, not initially. When it was two or three people, I was starting to feel a little bit, but they were all single. I knew that if, you know, the company fell apart, they could go find jobs.

It became more, I guess, more stressful for me or it was more significant to me when I started hiring dads who had children, had people they were responsible for versus single guys who, you know, could go work at McDonald's or something. But when I started hiring dads, then it was, this is next level. There's a lot of responsibility. I need to be very careful from a PR standpoint, from a business owner standpoint. You know, I could do something that could result in a company falling apart. And that means them not having jobs, having deal for new ones, or lesser jobs, or not as good jobs. And then they're kids. And so it snowballs from there.

So as soon as dads started getting hired, that's when it was a big deal. So when you were feeling that stress or maybe the weight of that responsibility, how did you shift your leadership or how did you navigate that in order? to kind of hit it head on. I went and sought a lot of counsel from people. And it wasn't just like my dad and other people. It was other business owners. And I was just trying to study how other businesses did certain things. A lot of praying.

That definitely helps as well. But it was just a lot of sitting down and thinking about, you know, the current situation and then realizing I have things I need to get better at to help prevent catastrophes from happening or mistakes that I might make. So basically I ramped up my own personal competence as a CEO, as a leader, so that the chances of mistakes happening are lessened. I still make mistakes, granted, lesser than, you know, if I wasn't working on those things, I'd probably make more mistakes. But just so that when a mistake happens, it's not, you know, it's not a catastrophe in the company that results in having to downsize departments, lay people off, which is my biggest fear, having to lay people off, and them having to look for new jobs. So it's just more pressing on me to work hard, gain competence, and get counsel so that I can be more effective as a leader as a CEO, product designer, instructor, visionary, all those different things that I do with my job.

Just became more pressing, and I had to be better at it, which meant studying and thinking about it. So, yeah, it's been good. You know, I remember the first time I started leading people, I was in my mid-20s, and I remember hiring people that were older than me. Yeah. Sometimes even as old as my parents. And I remember kind of that awkward, like, are they going to take me seriously? Yes. You know, can I really lead people who have way more life experience?

And I found through hard knocks that it was better just to kind of talk about it with them and address that. I'm curious, like, do you have those conversations with people about, you know, the fact that they may be 20 years older than you, but you're still the leader? Yeah. So what's the interesting part in my situation is, so I started the company at, you know, age 20. It was just me in a garage with $1,000, debt-free, iPod Touch, a $400 WordPress website, e-commerce site, and then about $150, $200 in tools. And after six months, my older brother got involved, eight months. And he's older by me than by 10 years and have a good relationship with my brothers. He came on, but he started working for me. So there was already that,

right off the bat, my older brother's working for me. And then later, it transitioned into working together. He became a partner in the company. So there was some equal stake. But again, I'm the CEO, the younger brother. And then my other older brother got involved, who's 12 years older than I am. So there's that component. But then on top of that, we do have men in the company, quite a few now who are older. The operations man who runs the company is a former Marine Colonel. So not only am I technically his boss, he's also a former Marine Colonel.

That's not intimidating at all. Not at all. Plus, I think he's in his, he's got to be in his 50s, I would think. maybe early 60s. So there's also that component. But he and I actually have very good conversations on that. How can I do certain things to be respectful of you all in your position and your age in relation to my age? And he's actually been one of my mentors as far as coming to me and going, hey, this is a leadership deficiency you have. And he's very respectful about it. Can I speak to you about this? You're my boss. This is something I want to bring up because this is something you can work on.

and I'm like absolutely talk to me like I'm anyone else. Like forget that I'm your boss. And then we talk. And so he explains to me, hey, there's this leadership thing. You're not letting people talk on this. You're not letting, you know, whatever. You should work on this. And he's come to me about half a dozen times with different things.

So there's not this feeling of, oh, well, we can't go and talk to the CEO about this stuff or he's not going to respect me because I'm older than him, sort of a vibe that's kind of been killed off. Because I never wanted that there in the first place. But it is awkward when I'm sitting there, and I've got to tell, you know, the procurement guy who's in his 40s or, you know, our Marine Colonel, this is how we're actually going to do it instead of this way over here. But they're very respectful. I've never had anyone tell me, well, you're just a young whippersnapper. And so that's been good. But it's definitely tricky when you're in a position as a younger person to.

But the Bible talks about that. Let no one look down on your youthfulness. And I grew up hearing that and being taught that by. my dad, so that helped as well. So, but it's interesting. It's, it's all a learning experience. I'm still learning. Well, it seems like it's really key that your, your response to him when he said, can I give you some feedback, was very inviting of that. And I think leaders, whether you're young or old, really need to take note of that. And that is that when we can get feedback from our team, the way that we respond to getting that feedback says a lot about how safe they feel or how

comfortable they feel in letting us know. And like, we need that. We've got stuff in our blind spots. And I think leaders that grow over time are the ones that are constantly mining for that feedback. We have to create that environment, though, where people feel like they can bring it to us. We're willing to listen. And one thing, a big change that I made, because prior to last year, we were in a very small facility. We didn't have conference room. We didn't have office space. The meetings happened, like, outside of the building, because we didn't have space. But last year, we made. moved into a new facility or the end of 2019, where we had a conference room, we had space to have meetings, and I started coming into, because I used to work from home because we didn't

have offices there on site, so I wasn't around the people very much. But starting last year, I started going in every day, being accessible, stopping by the majority of the departments, checking in with them, usually going to them versus having them come to me, which I know is a thing that some business owners do. They have an office. They sit there. They call people in. I prefer the approach of going to the department and walking all around, which means that I get a good amount of steps in in the day, and that's good. And as the facility gets bigger, that'll also get more steps. You get more steps.

But I go to the departments, check in with them, hey, customer service, what's going on? You need anything? Got any questions? This okay. And then move on to the next one. So I started doing that last year, and that was very helpful, being accessible. And then, you know, along the way, walking department to department, you know, a guy from production would stop me.

And I had some good talks to the few of them. I'm like, hey, man, I've got this thing. I've known you since, you know, church, and now you're running this big company, but I have this thing. You might want to think about this perception of, you know, such and such. And then, you know, we talk about it. And some guys have said, hey, I want to talk to you off hours because it's personal. And I'm like, I understand. You can talk to me right now, though. It's okay. Like, it's fine. And so then we talk about it then. And it's cool. But they've also been respectful of that. So trying to be available. They're telling you, like, hey, there's something that I'd like for you to consider in your leadership or how. how you're approaching things. Or maybe something they don't understand

that then I'm like, well, the reason I'm not around all the time is I'm over here doing this stuff over here. That's why I'm not in the shop as much as I was three years ago. You know, three, four years ago, I used to be in there working with everyone, and now I'm having to sit in a conference room or be marketing and producing videos or traveling or I'm here today instead of at the shop.

And so sometimes it's just explaining, hey, here's what's going on. You all aren't able to see behind the curtain at all times. Here's what's up. And they're like, okay, that makes sense. But it's been a while since I've had one of those talks. Well, it sounds like you do a good job of helping. It's really helping them see the vision.

Like overall, this is what's going on. And I think that's key. A lot of times people feel frustrated. And the reality is they're just confused because they can't see the bigger picture. But as leaders, if we can help them see the bigger picture, that frustration goes away because they go, oh, I get it. I understand how the puzzle pieces all kind of go together. Yep. And that's something that there were some discussions.

We had some new folks coming in last year because we went from, oh, man, at the beginning of 2020. It was like 30-something employees, now we're at 72, so we more than doubled. So more than half your team has been there less than a year. That is correct. So there's some serious vision casting going on right now because some of them show up. And there are, you know, some guys that knew we were before who were working in customer service, they get it. We have some people who don't know who we are at all, who are, you know, local.

They're not into guns. They're not into what we do. So then we've got to kind of tell them like, here's what we're doing. So last year I had to kind of knuckle down on some of the vision casting. Here's where we're going. here's what we're doing. Yes, the business is exploding. Our sales are up 3.5 times.

It's pretty crazy, but here's what we're trying to do. Here's what we're doing by equipping people. Here's what the media department does. Here's why the media department seem like cowboys, and they're kind of running around doing their own thing, and they're not real involved with production. So last year was a lot of kind of explaining what's going on and why it's going on the way it is,

which is the job of the CEO, is casting the vision, you know, steering the rudder of the ship, seeing what the industry is doing, figuring out where the company needs to go. But oftentimes, and I've had the issue in the past, and I'm still working on it, is in the process of figuring out where the ship needs to go, not telling people when there's a change with the rudder. And so trying to tell them, oh, yeah, we're actually deviating this particular product over

here because of this thing that happened. Or the reason for this price increase on this product we're producing is because of this thing over here or this over here. So trying to get better at letting people know as soon as that decision is made versus months later thinking I did, but I didn't. But really letting him know, yeah, we had to change direction because the industry said this or the community did this or our marketing, strategy, trend setting, in this area, did not work out. And I think, I'm still working on that. But I think that's something a lot of people. Dude, it's so hard. Every leader, I've dealt with that so much in my leadership and just not

assuming people can't read my mind, you know, and I think we forget. It's not like we're trying to leave people out. But we just, we just see so many things and we forget they don't see it. Or we know the why or we've been thinking about it for three months. And by the time we make the decision, that's the first day that it impacts everybody else. And we're on to the next decision. We're thinking about the next problem coming. And I think it's just a, it's a really key discipline that we've got to develop that habit of over communicate, over communicate, assume they don't know. And it's hard. I mean, it's one of those things you've got to get outside of your own head and think differently.

Yeah. And one thing, and actually a pretty good example is, so I do a lot of educational content with shooting and teaching shooting, and I also do contracts for the military on special operations for classes and stuff. It's easy for me to teach the basics. And then I want to go on to doing more advanced stuff. And I forget, I haven't talked about basics in six months, eight months, or a year on our YouTube, on our Instagram, on our Facebook.

And so every once in a while, people come to me and are like, hey, this thing you just did a video on, I didn't understand any of it. And you haven't done a basics thing in a while. So you really need to come back and do how to draw a pistol and why this thing exists. And I go, oh, you're right. I need to actually rewind and keep basically talking about the same thing over and over. So that's been a learning experience too. And the same thing has to be done with the vision, which is like, we produce this product for this reason.

And then I go to work on a new product. And oh, yeah, I've got to come back. This product we've been making for years. We're still making it for this mission, this customer base. This is why we're doing it. I can now go back to design new weird products. are the next level stuff. How do you communicate that?

Do you guys have a staff meeting? Do you have internal broadcasts? How do you keep everybody in the same? We have a, we have managers or departments have meetings every week. I organized a meeting a couple years ago. I wanted a meeting with all the managers once a week so that I could figure out what was going on. So we did that on Wednesday.

Wednesdays is just packed with meetings and broadcasting. But Wednesdays, I meet with all them, find out what's going on. And then I also do meetings with individual managers to let them know what's going on. but when there's a significant change, like with our redundancy plan for if we get nuked off of YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, that's an individual meeting I call. Which apparently can happen these days. Correct. You can get completely wiped off the face of the earth, basically, by big tech. That's a meeting that I'll organize, you know, an outlook, I'll send out invites, make a PowerPoint, put all my stuff in it, and actually something I've been doing for this year.

And I haven't issued it out to everyone to be able to look at quite yet, because I'm still working on it. It's basically a PowerPoint of my brain where I document all of the projects I want to do. That's a fantastic. A PowerPoint of your brain. And you can view it at any time. Can you guys in the booth make a note? I need a PowerPoint of my brain. I want to work on this.

It's all the stuff. I'm working on it now for like a month. All the stuff I'm thinking of like products, website changes, new products, people we want to work with, people we don't work with, people that, whatever, just everything going on for the year. Things that we learned from last year. streaming numbers like hey this platform over here is really cool so basically anyone any of the managers can get in there show their people like oh yeah he's thinking about making this significant website change oh he's thinking about this training thing he wants to do or this video thing he wants to do so and that's something that i didn't do last year it was more or less just having meetings

telling people what was going on but now i'm actually just building out of PowerPoint and whenever we have a meeting and i ask for feedback from people like what do we do well last year what did we do poorly last year. That goes straight into the PowerPoint. Everything goes into the PowerPoint. It's the PowerPoint, essentially. And then that gets shared through like SharePoint or however all systems worked in Microsoft. I'm still learning all that. It's complicated. So yeah. Was it hard for you to go for, you know, you started this thing as you mentioned a few hundred bucks and a couple tools. I mean, just really bootstrapped it, which is super inspiring. Yep. Was it hard for you to go from the maker to the CEO? Yes. The shift from like, you're the guy,

touching it, building it, shipping. I mean, you really started, like, as an artist. Yes. And now you're full-time leader. It's been tough. So the biggest issue I had, so the biggest thing that I'm learning, maybe not the biggest, one of the biggest is delegation, which is an art. You can do it well, you can do it poorly.

I grew up doing it poorly. I'd be given a job. I would quickly give it to my younger brother. Not good delegation. I should have done the job myself and not immediately pawned off on him. So there's good delegation, there's bad delegation. Early on in the company, I was the craftsman. I designed the product.

I had standards for the product. When new people came in, I did not want to give them the product to make because they weren't making it the same standard I was. I had a very hard time taking the time to train them. Months of training for some products, some things. It's very common with founders. It is. So I had a very hard time. My older brother had some good talks with me on that.

He was like, you really have to let go of this, trust people, train them, then we train them, then we'll figure it out. Early on, it was very difficult, stepping aside. But eventually I did. and then I focused on marketing, which was great, running around shooting guns, which you would think is all good and fun, running around shooting guns, doing videos, YouTube, Instagram, all and stuff. well it gets old after a while but i worked on that they worked on the holster process manufacturing uh creating systems that were more effective i would come in to make sure everything was still happening to my standards or what i need as a shooter because i'm the principal shooter in the company so if it doesn't work for me it's not going to work for customers we're not going to sell it so coming in every

once in a while checking over things going back to my thing but this year uh 2020 in particular i had to go from being sort of a marketing kind of a wizard which is what i was doing in 2018, 2019, building our YouTube. We're now at 950,000 subs, most of which is from those years. We're about to hit a million. Maybe if everyone on this podcast goes and subscribes, maybe we can get you over a million mark.

And then YouTube will not send me the gold button because I never got the silver one. That's okay. I don't care. It's fine. It's fine. You know, it's not a big deal. It's just a little fake thing anyway.

So we... Well, but here's the key. I want people to not miss this. And Gary Vaynerchuk talks about it. If you're going to be a great company in 2020, you have to have a media mindset. It's true. And there's a lot of people go,

we're not really a media type company. Well, manufacturing gun stuff is not a media company, but you chose to make it one. That's correct. Say more about the decision to build your own megaphone, to build your own platform. So when I started the company, I was making holsters,

but my goal was not to just make product. My goal was to build a platform where I can help people with education. Because my dad, that's what he did. That's what he always taught us. Education's more important than stuff. And I was taught, I was homeschooled. I have, oh, well, fun fact, I have no college degree.

I don't have a GED. I have no paperwork. I have nothing, pretty much. No official education, except that I was homeschooled. And the biggest thing my parents taught me is to love learning and how to teach myself things. And I had to teach myself, Premiere for editing, Instagram marketing, marketing mindset in general, all sorts of different things.

But when I started, I knew the thing that I want to do for people is spread education. Now, that means I got to learn some stuff. to educate them on because, I mean, you can't educate people and stuff you don't know. So I had to study, had to learn. So it was a lot of investing in my own education, purchasing things, spending time, doing things, thousands of hours on the range, you know, hundreds of hours, building stuff, testing things. So I would have something I could give back to people. Now, when that time arrives to give back, where's the platform? So I realized I need to start building the platform before I have necessarily a lot of messages I can, you know, give people.

So I focused on Instagram. That was where the gun community was. Focus there, built an account, took cool pictures, tried to sprinkle in education or my experiences as I was learning them, which for some reason people thought was cool. So they followed me. The account got big. And then later I transitioned into YouTube. But along the way, you know, I learned things, personal experience that I was able to share with people. So they keep following. Oh, this guy knows things. Oh, now he knows more things. Oh, now he's making some cool things. So it slowly got bigger. YouTube kind of blew up. By the time I went to YouTube, our Instagram was already 100 plus thousand followers. So people knew who.

we were, you know, we were already being talked about many times negatively. But then people went to YouTube to watch our more fancy videos or longer videos because we couldn't do it. I was on Instagram back when you were allowed 15 seconds. And then finally you were allowed 60 seconds. And then you were allowed Instagram TVs, which can go up to 10 minutes now. So we moved to YouTube before then. But you know, even if, I mean, now that the limits are higher, I'm curious what you think. I think it's great to start with Instagram because every little post is a test. It is. And it's very low risk to just put something out there.

And you can see engagement. You go, oh, that didn't get any engagement or, oh, that one really hit. And, like, you can really learn a lot. You can. And a lot of frequency of publishing things without a lot of lift to get that stuff out there. That's true. And I think that's where I think I was very blessed and fortunate with some of my decisions early on, which I think were good decisions, but not necessarily because I had a lot of experience to make the good decision. It was just the Providence of God that I made that decision.

I think Instagram was one because I was able to low effort with my iPod touch, take pictures, put them up. Then I got an iPhone, took pictures, put them up. Then I borrowed the family camera, took pictures, put them up. So I was able to build a platform for cheap. I was not having to spend a ton of money doing YouTube videos. And the thing about YouTube, when we switched over there, is I had pretty high standards for equality, which I had a guy asked the other day, why do you have so many subscribers on YouTube? Well, it's a combination of appeal and substance.

So the content needs to look cool. It needs to be cool because that's what gets people in the first place. And then the substance inside of it has to actually benefit them. You know, we're not just there for entertainment. I'm not just there to blow a car up and then like have a little scene of me walking away for an explosion looking cool. Like that's not quality content. That's not giving back to people. They won't remember you for it.

They won't come back. You're not a leader in your space if that's all you're doing, in my opinion. So there has to be substance attached, but there has to be appeal attached as well. So how do you differ? Like if it's not just blowing up a car, what is it that makes it that substance? Is it that it's teaching specific things for them? So I'll use the car blowing up as an example. So let's say I want to do a video and I want to blow a car up.

Well, I would probably throw in some educational content regarding the weapons that I'm using. Hey, I'm using this weapon. Why I pick this weapon is this, this is this. Here's what it has. I'm going to be blowing up this kind of car. Here's some considerations. I need to probably be about this far away to prevent shrapnel from killing me. I'm using these explosives.

This is what they do. This is how the military uses them. Now let's do it. So there's some educational content in there. We let her box the video so it looks like it's from Hollywood. We color grade it really blue, so it looks all cinematic or green. You know, that's my look. And then we film at 24 frames a second, which looks like Hollywood.

It looks really nice. We don't film at 60 or anything, you know, like that. And then people, we put some music in there. Not too corny, but, you know, high tech and nice, depending on the demographic we're trying to hit. And then we have a video with appeal and substance. And that's the fine line, the balance that a lot of gun companies or companies in general have a hard time hitting. They focus on entertainment or they just focus on a boring, dry, 30 minute, here's a gun, here's how I take it apart, which to some people's great. But those videos don't make millions of views.

How did you figure out, I mean, you just unpacked like this beautiful recipe that's very dialed in. It's like a formula. It is. I imagine you didn't start with that clarity that that's what it should be. How did you figure out this is the, I mean, were you testing it? experimenting along with it. I had that theory from the beginning because I had been watching other pages and basically, and this is my advice I give new business guys, is if you want to start a business, there's

one of two things. You need to do something nobody does or do a thing everyone does but do it better. Now if you can do both, you're awesome, you're golden, which we got to both in two years in at the beginning. The holsters weren't amazing. But our pictures, I focused on photos because other companies didn't do good photos. I focused on marketing on social media because companies don't want to. weren't doing that at the time and they still don't do a real good job.

But the formula itself, I kind of thought, you know what? If my Instagram is only entertainment, it's kind of useless. If it's only education, it doesn't get follows because unfortunately the content that gets a lot of views is entertainment. You got to have some eye candy. It's got to pull people in. Got some coolness. So you got to mix both.

So basically my formula was have a cool thing, have an educational thing, have a controversial thing, a question that I pose that, you know, I'm like, hey, this. concept. Is it good? Is it bad? And then the comments rolling. And I also learn what people, what my demographic think. And also, depending on the question of phrase, it can also affect how people think about the things. They're like,

oh, I never heard it asked that way. And then I go back to it, cool. And then I do educational. And then I do product. The other thing I notice the companies do is they like to push their product a lot. And that becomes spam. People don't like, I don't like it. I'm a consumer just like everyone else. I don't like getting pushed with products all the time. I want to decide

on buying a product when I'm good and ready and when I have the information. Yeah. So I focus more on, let's give the information to the customer and they choose when to buy. We don't push product every day, every post, whatever. So a lot of it's just sneaking product into pictures, not even talking about it, but it's there. And then we talk about product every six posts, seven posts.

So it's no spam. And people appreciate that. I've had people message me and say, hey, man, your company's the only one that really does that. Most companies, they just push their product, big close ups of it. It gets old. It's boring. There's no substance.

it's obviously spam. It's a very good approach and it's very much, you know, Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk again, jab, jab, jab, right hook. You know, the idea is you're jabbing, you're adding value, adding value, adding value. And then it's here. And then there's a nice ask. It's not in your face. Yep. But if you've added enough value, then people rush towards the offer because now you're friends, now they respect your brand.

And now they've got entry. You've been nurturing the relationship along the way. Yep. That's exactly. And the funny thing is I heard that from him. it was like, man, I think I first heard that from him about three years ago. And I had already been executing it. So when I heard that from him, I was like, oh, sweet.

There's some, you know, a credible individual who brought up this concept that I've been doing. That's pretty cool. But we've followed that sort of formula this entire time. It works very well. And it's not necessarily a formula that I don't think it needs to go away because it's basically core principles. You have to have content that gives back to people, but you also have to have content that is appealing. Now, that appeal is what changes, you know, trends for what's core principles. cool people want to watch. That changes, but education does not. Teaching people, stuff they need to know,

core basics of shooting, that doesn't change, which makes my industry easy in some ways. But the cool aspect, that's what I have to be in tune with. Like, what are people wanting to see right now? What kind of content? What kind of weapons? What kind of gear? Or am I in a position with my platform that I get to basically build what they want to see? Do I get to set trends now? Which has been an interesting change for us the past couple of years is actually having some leverage on what we can actually push trend-wise. Before, we couldn't do that. We weren't big enough, didn't have a platform big enough. Now we've got 1.7 million followers over all of our accounts, which is like 1.2 million people. So now we have enough sort of influence that we can actually say, this is a thing

people need to think about. And here's why they need to think about it. And here's how we're going to show it. We do that for three, four months, and then it's more or less solidified. People are talking about it, people are interested in it, that kind of product, that kind of concept, whatever it is. But what goes along with that is responsibility because we can use that influence to potentially influence the wrong things. And that's another thing I think companies don't think about, or I should say influencers in general.

Just because you have 800,000 followers, doesn't mean you should just say whatever you want or advertise for whichever company you want or sell whatever product you want or take money from whatever company you want because it could be a bad product you're leading people astray they look up to you um and that's something that i talk about quite a lot because it's something i've i've seen seen behind the curtain knowing influencers and knowing what goes on underneath the tables and there's well just like in every industry there's a lot of corruption it's like you can't get lazy you know yeah and you can't get fat and the things that you had to do to earn your first 100 followers i mean you have to very honest, genuine connection and be true to what value you're building for them.

Yep. But you get to 100,000 or a million followers, and then you go, oh, there's a quick buck over here if all of a sudden we just give exposure to this company and you get fat and lazy on that stuff, and then you start to erode the foundation of what you built. That's exactly what happens to all of them. They don't, what the problem is they don't have a long-term vision. They have a, what can I get right now, what can I take and give nothing back? Right.

You know, and they're not thinking, where will I be in five years? Where will I be in 10 years? And I was thinking about that. And again, I got that from my dad early on. So when I had my first sponsors coming to me going, hey, we want to exclusively sponsor you with this gun. I told everyone no. I've only ever taken two guns for free.

And I disclaimed that in the videos when they're used, one of which is gone, one of which I use. And I've bought other ones from that company since. But I take very few items for free, and I don't take sponsor money because it can be very dangerous. Why is that? You feel like it gives you more credit? ability when you it can't uh it can and in my experience doing this it has because people know he can't be bought

so when he recommends a product he means it he's not doing it for money he's not taking you know 10,000 a month from this company to talk about this product which i would still disclaim at the beginning of the video it's still biased though uh so my approach has just been no sponsorships if i take something for free for some reason i talk about it but i far prefer buying it so i can say whatever i want there's no allegiance to the company because my allegiance is with the people first. And that plays into long-term goal. If my goal is to be in the community for 50 years, well, those are the people I'm loyal to, not companies that come and go. I mean, companies, they're cool for five years. They make some cool stuff. Then they're gone.

You talked about having like a five to ten-year vision. So like as you sit here right now and you think five years from now, where are you taking your tribe and how does that affect the opportunities that show up this month? Like in real time, like how does that impact what you say yes to, what you say no to. It all, it's tough. A lot of it, I mean, the core concepts behind our company is helping people be more prepared, which is just so happens that the preparedness that I'm talking about, because there's all kinds, there's financial preparedness, which obviously Dave and your company, you all talk about,

financial preparedness. Ours is firearms and protection. So protecting yourselves from burglars, home intruders, potentially an invading military, although we don't get into that whole lot, or something worse. which is tyranny, which we've seen in other countries recently. We've seen, I mean, our country used to suffer from some tyranny and then we didn't because we did something about it over 200 years ago. So basically our core concept behind the company is getting people more prepared for situations that are beyond the basic burglary or home intruder that most companies

focus on. That's most scenarios they, you know, civilians or regular folks expect they will be put, you know, into that kind of situation. But the reality is that. is there's all kinds of situations that can present themselves. You've got active shooters, domestic terror attacks, all kinds of stuff that can happen out and about, road rage, just all sorts of things. And then, of course, the worst, in my opinion, being tyranny. But basically helping people along with their mindset of, you know, what is our obligation to our fellow man? Do we, you know, step in and intercede in situations to protect others? Do I only protect myself and protect my family, which is generally what most people, that's kind of where they lie. Like, I don't want to worry about anyone else.

I'm willing going to worry about myself. Self defense, it's just for me. Which is my opinion, it's a little bit selfish. I carry a gun for everyone else, not myself. I will protect myself, but that's not why I carry a gun. So it's kind of talking people through that, which those concepts we will not deviate from. Those are basics. Just like Dave does not deviate from his basics that he's been saying for, you know, decades. We don't deviate from our basics. Kind of like your core values. That's essential to who you are. Core values, they're going to stay the same for 50 years, 100 years past, you know, when I'm gone and T-Rex keeps going. At least that's my hope.

Companies, you know, as long as I lay out the vision properly and get the right people, that can continue happening. But five years, ten years, a lot of that is evolving some of those, solidifying them, making our messages more understood. Also more, I don't want to say mainstream, but more of a platform. If I can put in, you know, effort to produce a video that is seen by a million people versus 10 million people, I would prefer the 10 million people. that's more people we're reaching. It's more people we're helping. More people we're influencing. That's more effective.

So building the platform, which is one of our goals, so that we can help more people. It's not even for sales. The funny thing is we have conversations. This is horrible business strategy, probably most business people would say. We have meetings probably about four times a year on how and if and should we throttle our sales

that are coming in, which is amusing. Since most companies, it's always how to get more sales, how to get more clients, how to sell more of our service. We've actually had meetings, which is how do we throttle sales if we can't grow gracefully, if we're not supplying our equipment or our services to our customers to the best ability that we desire, would it be more loving to the customers that's going along with our core values to actually suspend sales, handle the ones we currently have that people have put their trust in us to then provide, which is a concept that's probably against every business book out there.

You never slow sales, never stop the train. But that's something we talk about. We actually talked about this morning. How often does that happen where you actually stop sales? We haven't. Not yet. So you're just saying it's a discussion. It's a discussion.

How would it work? You're not growing so fast that you end up not. You compromise on quality or something. And that's what happens with a lot of companies. They got sales coming in or a big military contract, quickly hire 100 people, buy a bunch of machines, over-extend, maybe get a bunch of loans, maybe an investor,

then the military contract goes south, now they're out all the money, they over-extend, or even if they're debt-free. They over-extend, you know, hiring people. They've got to lay people off. You know, then a recession happens or something. So we have these discussions.

We haven't had to do it. We don't necessarily want to do it. It's not necessarily, I don't think it's a good idea as far as getting people to come back because I've seen it happen before. But if the decision's made, it's the best thing we can do for the customers that have already entrusted

us with their money, we will do it. We will cut sales. We will handle them to the best of our ability, but the promises we've given them of our really good customer service are essentially same-day shipping, also the high quality of our products. We'll suspend sales somehow. Now, the mechanisms that go into that, that's part of the discussion. What can we actually do? Should we do it? But that's a concept that I don't hear people talk about very often. It's probably very counter-business strategy, but our strategy is helping people, because people is business. It's not money or orders. So that results in a lot of unique conversations. Well, I think the thinking that goes behind that is really key, and that is that business is really multifaceted. You know, I mean, you've got sales,

you've got taking care of your customers. Then you've got your product and delivering that product. You've got improving your products, launching new products, then you've got operations and finance, And you just have all these layers to a business. And what you're describing that oftentimes happens is a business gets so focused on just one of those dynamics. And typically it's revenue and sales. And there's kind of this misnomer that if you just make a bunch of money, that all the others are just going to naturally take care of themselves. But you can grow so aggressively or you can make so many sales that you've log jammed the operations to be able to produce on what you promised the customer when you took their money. Yeah.

And then you're screwed from a PR standpoint. you've broken trust. Which we've done. This has been a learning process. I have hyped products with marketing that then took eight months to come out, six months, longer than we thought, because things happen, things come up. Or I talk about a product. We don't actually have stocked.

And then inventories like, hey, we didn't actually have that thing that you just took photos of and people won. I've never done that. We'll sell it and then we'll build it and then it'll all be fun. So there's been some learning along the way. That's a classic entrepreneur thing. You know, because we just get excited. And we see it in our mind and we know we're going to build the thing and deliver on it.

But I think you've got to have some kind of a dashboard that watches all that. I mean, meetings and metrics. And so as you're having those discussions to figure out, does operations and supply meet demand is essentially the kind of most foundational thing you're saying here? How are you guys monitoring that? What metrics are you looking at? What filters are you using to make those decisions? So a lot of it. So, and we do this on our Wednesday meeting.

then I'll do it outside of that. So I'll run over to procurement and say, hey, this vendor, because we retail, well, and what makes the company interesting is we manufacture products in-house. We have some companies manufacture for us, our own label, our own logo, you know, products that we design. But then we also sell for other companies that produce their product. So we have interesting quality control considerations. We can quality control the stuff we make in house. We quality control the stuff that comes in. That's ours that we get made somewhere else. Some products you order from companies, we have to quality control, or we just hope that their quality control is good

and that they're good to go. And then our customer service handles issues with them and forwards them on. So I'm having to grab data from, for our retail stuff, what's in stock? Can we get stock? And 2020, obviously, kind of screwed with everything with inventory and demand through the roof

of our products, of other companies' products that we relied on. It was actually kind of funny because we actually started getting more, I guess, serious on our vendor dealer requirements. Because vendors when you go to them,

they have their own requirements. You got to do this, this much money, buying, blah, blah, blah. And here's what you have to do. Well, now we have our own, which is like, you have to be able to get this

amount of product, or we're not even carrying your product. We need this kind of packaging or we're not even going to carry your product. So we actually are having to institute some policies so that we can effectively sell this product. Dude, that's such a big thing.

And I want you to say more about this because business owners forget your vendors work for you. That is correct. They do. And you've got to set the terms of I mean, you don't want to abuse your vendors, but they're kind of like employees, because if they don't deliver them what they said, you can't take care of your customers. Yeah.

But there's a mindset there. I mean, you got to have standards you hold your vendors accountable to you. And that's an ongoing discussion. We went and toured up Sweetwater. I think that's their Sweetwater music, Sweetwater, Sweetwater Audio. I'm sure most of this equipment's from them. Big facility, awesome people. And they walked us through their requirements for vendors.

And it's very much the same thing. And that's, we got advice from them. That was something we were getting to because we had been. that were taking advantage of us, because here's what happens, we get product from a vendor we like. I send it through our marketing engine, which is pretty big. You know, people like the product. People then go straight to the vendor to buy the product from them. Vendor decides they don't need to ship us product because they're taking a 40% cut, sending it to us,

because then we have to have our markup. So they just keep restocking their own website while we're marketing their product for them before they send product to us 11 months later, six months later, five months later, it is. So a lot of us is learning as we go. We've had vendors take advantage of us because they know we're marketing to them for free. Some vendors actually will have requirements in their policies, which is every month

we don't have inventory, you pass a marketing fee because we're still marketing your product using our engine, which is probably something we're going to start instituting soon. Because our marketing engine industry company, you know, people know that like when we talk about a product, people buy the product. We would prefer they buy it from our website as long as we have inventory. So what did you do? Like when that happened.

And you're marketing their stuff and they're stocking on their side and they're not shipping you eat this stuff and they market and everything. It's a unique experience. I'll just say. But what's that conversation like? You're fired? We're done? Or, I mean, how? So one of my biggest problems is I'm too nice.

So no conversation happened. That's what happens. But now things are different. But a lot of it is the conversation just didn't happen. Because I was like, I still want to sell their stuff. I like their stuff. We hope to get their stuff soon. Please send us the stuff that we.

We've put POs out for for a year. We're going to keep marketing your stuff because we like your stuff. But being nice, it doesn't always work, unfortunately. It would be easier if it did. It doesn't. So one of our problems is we've been very nice to vendors in the past at the expense of our own people and at the expense of our own customers who have faith that, you know, if we put up a product listing for a product, we are essentially making a promise to our customers.

We will sell this thing. Now, we don't tell them when, how often, how many. but they expect the thing will be there at some point. Well, I think it's a normal thing, especially if you like people. Yeah. To want to be nice. But the misnomer is that the opposite of nice

means you have to be nasty and mean and crude. Right. And I think the learning for all of us, you know, you've got to be firm. You can still be professional. Exactly. You have to have standards and hold them accountable. Yep.

So we're getting better at that. It's a learning process, like I said. We're still developing our standards for vendors, what we can actually ask, what is reasonable, you know, for vendors to do for us. It's different with every vendor. Now that we're putting in POs for the year,

so they have an expectation of how much revenue we're giving them for the year, which last year we weren't able to do because it was 2020, we learned a lot. Now we're able to actually do go to a vendor and say, hey, here is over $5 million in sales we're going to give you this year, most likely, just so you know where we're at. And then they're like, oh, we like you now. That's money.

We'll work with you. Well, I think what you're saying is really key, the more you can set up the relationship on the front end and define this is how this is going to work. Because most of the time that you get screwed is you're surprised by there was an anomaly event. And there wasn't really something accounted for in the vendor agreement. And they make assumptions to their favor and you make assumptions to your favor. And the more you can kind of get all that on the table and say, this is how we're going to operate. And you really got to do the thinking work to think through all these situations before they come up.

But if you do that, you have more power at that point. Yeah. And it's been rough too. is we have not had a year that's stabilized. Every year is doubled, which is great. It's awesome. But we haven't had consistent metrics to be like, ah, here's what we can forecast and plan for,

because every year is just going up. So we've been looking at this year versus last year and going, well, it was an election, there was civil unrest, there was a pandemic. That's a lot of factors that results in sales. So if we remove two of those from the equation, or one, maybe it'll be like this. Okay, now we can forecast about this much.

So we have more data now. It's actually getting easier. Some things get easier when you're bigger, company. Some things get harder, more bureaucracy, more red tape, more leadership stuff. But some things are a little easier. And the conversations we can have, we can have with companies because they see, oh, they have a marketing engine. They're here to stay. They have credibility. Oh, they have this much money. They can promise us. They're up here with, you know, it's like a military contract. They're actually giving us, you know, seven figures worth of COs. They're a little more stable.

We can actually trust them with product. And that's been really good with some vendors that we worked with last year who saw that and stopped taking vendors from other companies just because we started eating up how much they can make. And they were fine with that. They just send it to us and we sell it. So some things have been easier being a larger company. But with that, some things get a little harder. It seems like one of the hardest things would have been going, you mentioned going from 30 team members to 70 in one year. So fantastic. We got 40 more people, 40 more sets of hands, but training everybody and holding onto the culture and the values. That's a big one, yeah.

What has that been like? It requires good managers, first off. If you don't have good managers, if you don't have a good onboarding process, you are screwed. Which is some departments, some departments of the companies are more solidified than others with management or with onboarding procedure. Manufacturing, the job has been figured out. You have different onboarding for different departments? We do.

We do. We have the general paperwork, legal, healthcare, and all that stuff. But once you go to the department, it is a different process for each. So, like, I just hired a new guy in my department. I'm over, so I'm the CEO of the company. I'm also the marketing director. So I run all the marketing operations. I'm also the guy who designs and picks most of the products we sell, which I don't know what you would call that product designer. Procurement, maybe. And I have a procurement guy who does all the dealer agreements and stuff. So I'm doing three jobs right now. You probably argue four. But that's- You need one more thing to do. Yeah, and I don't have an assistant. Yeah, and that doesn't help either. Dude! Yeah, I know. Are you serious? I know.

I actually talk to Dave about that. We got to talk. Yeah. Oh, you got to have an assistant. Yeah, I've been told by people in the company I'm not allowed to do certain things until I have one. It will multiply your capacity. I want to clone myself, but I think there might be ramifications for that. An assistant does that.

I mean, it really does. Because think about how many things are you doing that are administrative in nature that if you had a right arm that was just like, hey, I got that. Let me take that off your plate. Yes. It's a huge. It's fantasy land, to be honest. But, yeah. I'm actually surprised you've gotten as big as you have and haven't made that higher,

which is good news because as soon as you do, like, yeah. Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. Okay, so you're wearing a lot of hats. Benny, but so. And you talked about onboarding in your department. Yeah, so I just got a new guy in my department. And the onboarding in my department is very different than others because we're in, I,

he's our armorer. So I'm having to teach him, hey, here's all the guns we have. Here's all the equipment we have. Armourer. Yeah, we have our own, like, selection of weapons. Like, he holds the keys to the armory? Like, what's the armory to do? So he runs, we have an FFL.

We're in 0702. We can manufacture machine guns, suppressors. Wait, FFL. Federal firearms license, unconstitutional, laws, guns. They don't like us having stuff, whatever. So we have that. All that have been nice paperwork, taxes to the government, the ATF. And he basically runs the books, compliance, make sure we're not breaking the law.

I also have a substantial amount of weapons I have accumulated over the past six years in my own research that I've paid for because personal education. So he has to manage those. All the lasers, optics, scopes, all of our ammunition, our magazines. So I shoot in 2019. I shot 100,000 rounds for the year. 100,000 rounds. Well, I shoot a lot for my job. Oh, and that goes into the CEO job, too, is shooting.

So I shot, it was 90, 100,000 rounds. 2020, I had to drop it. It was like 50 or 60. This year it'll probably be about the same 50 or 60. So I'm on the range twice a week. And I'm shooting a lot, training a lot. But that's a lot of your videos and stuff too. It is.

It's part of the job. Yeah. But originally 2018, 2017, a lot of it was just me figuring stuff out. I had to learn. I had to teach myself shooting. Now I do contract training for people in the military and law enforcement, which is pretty cool, you know, that someone who can become a self-taught shooter can develop essentially curriculum and then can get clients from, you know, high-level units.

They can come in, get some of that learning to shoot better. It's really cool. Yeah, because I mean, you'd expect it to be the other way around that they'd be teaching those courses, but they're coming to you. But the interesting thing that people don't realize about SOCOM is shooting for them is a special operations command. Shooting for them is 1%. 99% of the job is all their other duties. So they generally outsource their shooting instructors and they're usually civilians, competition shooters, stuff like that. So I get to do some of that on the side, which is like my fourth hat, I guess.

But in the process, I'm shooting a lot on the range a lot. So the armor has to manage that. And I'll be like, hey, I've got these guns. I need them zeroed. I need these optics put on them, blah, blah, blah. He'll go and, you know, build them out. So I've been onboarding him, and that's a lot of education on the arsenal that we have. Here's what we've got.

Here's what you need to know. Here's what kind of night vision we have. Here's all the helmets. Here's what I need done. Here's what I'm looking for. You're here to free our department up. You're here to work with the video guys, building them gear to take photos of. So I don't have to do it.

So he's sort of assisting me in, he's not my assistant. He's assisting me in. But his onboarding is very different than someone making holsters or somebody in shipping because he's in a support role within marketing, not in the actual flow of production and shipping. So where do you fit? I mean, you're wearing all those hats and then you've got all these managers, leaders, department heads. What is your time allocation spent with them mentoring them as leaders versus doing all the tactical stuff? Yeah. Well, so a lot of my time is meetings now. I'm not able to do so. stuff as much. I generally work from, I wake up whenever, depending on what time I go to bed. I go straight to work at home. I have a home office because I don't even have an office at work.

Don't have my own room, not yet. CFO gets one. I don't have one. So I work from home, which is nice, got my big powerful, fancy computer and all the monitors and stuff. Work from home, go in, and then it's literally, as soon as I walk in the door, people come to me. Or I go to them. And so I may have a plan for go to the armory, check on these things, check in with the media guys, checking on this video we're editing. But as soon as I walk in, it's, hey, I got this procurement thing. You want to sign off on this company. Shipping thing, R&D thing, new holster, something, blah, blah, look at this.

So a lot of it's just kind of spur of the moment. It's not in Outlook. It's not in our calendar system. But we do have days like yesterday. It was meetings from 1030 all the way to six. I had just in Outlook. I'm just in the conference room, do a meeting. In top of the hour, new people come in.

Some people stay. We keep talking about whatever. Um, death by meeting is obviously a book that we're reading. We talk about a lot. That's a good one. We had to fix our meeting stuff. We had a lot of just mindless talking and rabbit trails. Um, so we had to fix some of our systems. Have bullet points, action points right at the end. Keep them short as short as can be. Have creative meetings separate. Separate or strategic meetings from our tactical meetings. Yeah. Yeah. So our strategic meetings are on Monday, me with my, uh, business partners. And then, uh, our tactical meetings are at other times fixing issues, transition meetings, stuff like that. it's a lot of meetings now. It's a lot of, at least half of my time is now devoted to checking

on departments, giving them what they need, whether it's vision or it's just, just knowledge, like, oh, yeah, this company over here. It's really the evolution as you scale. And it becomes your job description because it's communication. Yep. It's not because it's meetings. Yeah. But it's, you know, communication and connecting is the thing that CEOs really have to do as they build the thing as they grow. And that's kind of, and so the sticky spot I'm in right now is not only am I the guy who's kind of, running between departments and communicating, here's what's going on, here's where we're at, here's what's up. And our CFO does a lot of that too, which is awesome. I'm also kind of the figure out of the company, as far as like the marketing goes. Kind of a personality.

It's personality, yeah. And so the issue with that is I have to keep doing that. I have to keep broadcasting on Twitch, Instagram, YouTube. And then I also have to keep producing just the un-live, non-broadcast media, Instagram, photos, videos, educational content. Some of that took a backseat last year, I mean, it had to. So I'm in a weird spot where it's, I'm trying to be a full-time CEO, but I also kind of have to be a full-time personality. And I've got to document what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, what I'm talking about. And that's very tricky right now, figuring out the best way to do both. So that's tough.

An assistant will help, though. It'll help. What's your biggest challenge right now? Is that it? Yeah. Balancing that. Yep. That's probably it.

I mean, you could argue the, you know, growth in the company. And, well, another one is, well, this was what's funny, moved into a 20,000 square foot building. We were originally in like a five. I thought, great, we have a building. We'll be here five years. We outgrew it in six months. So we quickly found another building next door.

Providence from God was awesome. It was great. Another 10,000 square feet. We purchased that. We've already outgrown that. So we actually have, we have growth issues, which is we've got to find new buildings, build new buildings, streamline, maybe eliminate. products, certain products

or something free up space or go to drop shipping, which I don't like very much because you never rely on someone else and customer trust and whatnot. You had another component. I don't really like it very much. It can be effective,

but I just don't like it very much. But then there's also the personal stuff I have, which is the CEO stuff, the marketing stuff, how to delegate, what can I delegate? Because I'm very picky about

who represents the brand because I've seen companies take, we don't do the brand ambassador approach. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings on the whole like brand ambassador approach. and just marketing in general. Like what?

You basically grab random people that have following and you go, hey, I'll give you money. You're going to represent our company. Turns out that person's a scumbag or they aren't very good with people or they're not actually competent at anything they do

except for posing with guns. So companies grab these people and use them rather than creating their own marketing engines and it results in their PR their brand not being trustworthy because it's, well, you're hiring this person over here doesn't know anything about guns

and you're paying them money. If you're willing to get this nobody who doesn't know anything about guns represent your company. What does that say about your products? That's how I look at it as a consumer. I want to go to companies that are getting legitimate people to represent their company or are represented by legitimate people inside the company. You know, I'd love to see more companies where the CEO is doing more stuff. There's not a lot of that in the gun industry. Usually there's behind the scenes at a desk, which is fine. But I personally, you know, when I started doing this, I wanted to be a different CEO. I wanted to be the CEO that

would still go out and shoot, still go out in test gear, would travel around and work. with people like different units and actually find out what they're doing, can also go back and be a CEO, which I'm learning is difficult juggling all of this. But that's really, I wanted to be the guy that I was kind of looking for seven years ago, eight years ago. When I was looking at the gun industry, trying to find role models that I could look up to who are testing gear, they're not being biased to certain companies, they're not taking all these weird sponsorships and doing coupon codes and just all that crap that didn't ever appeal to me. I wanted some legitimate people who were, you know, it for me and my interests as a as one of the people as the community so that's kind of what i've

been trying to do is be that guy that i was looking for eight years ago and you know be on the front lines trying to figure out what people really need uh really understand what the community i mean what the community needs but kind of where they're at and uh provide solutions whether it's educational videos products products we're designing companies you might need to work with maybe companies who might need to help who have some inventory issues i mean come alongside and be like hey, here's some things you might be able to do. We'll help with the credibility of your brand by selling your product because you've got some weird stuff going on over here.

Maybe we can come in and help a little bit. We've been able to do that with some companies, which is great. But it's a struggle going from kind of a frontline guy trying to do a bunch of jobs over here to also being a CEO in the conference room, having meetings, having discussions. It's tough. The struggle makes, I get that it's tough, but it seems like there's a real value in that. There is. What do you think being that type of a CEO does for you?

Perspective. I have. Because the job of the CEO is you're looking at the future and you're trying to predict what's going to happen. And you're trying to direct the rudder of the ship. And I've seen this happen with big companies in the industry, publicly traded companies. The board decides, we need a professional CEO. You, get in here, jump down. Turns out he's anti-gun.

It does not help the gun company very much to have an anti-gun CEO who's a professional CEO, which, and I will say, I'm not a professional CEO by any means. There's been discussion of, hey, at what point would it be effective for the company to step aside, let a professional run it, you keep doing vision stuff, how does that work? That's such a big deal. And I mean, we're not, this isn't a conversation about pro-gun, anti-gun. Sure, sure. But if you're not behind the thing that, exactly. If there's not a personal passion for what you're selling, how are you ever going to connect? How can you just steer the rudder to the ship when your passion is not aligned with where the company is?

So the benefit of what I'm trying to do, doing both, is that I have a better perspective on what's going on and I have equal interest because I'm a consumer too. I'm into this stuff just like everyone else. So I think the value that comes from doing both is I can predict a little more effectively, hey, here's what's happening. I have a pretty good thumb on what's going on in the community. We can produce these products safely. We can scale these divisions in the company safely. we can move the company in this direction safely versus me having to ask other people,

yo, what's up, what's up, what's going on, what's up? Okay, now I've got to figure out what's going on. Having my own idea of what's going on with experience is very effective. But it comes at a cost because that's time investment figuring that out, which maybe takes away time for being the CEO. So there's return on investment,

time, tradeoffs, pros and cons. It's worked out pretty well so far. I think it makes a lot of sense. You know, I've seen where Dave as R.C. CEO has had that baked into, he hosts a radio show three hours every day. So he's on the front lines talking to customers. You know, he's got thousands and thousands of hours of engaging with the marketplace. So again, you said perspective. He doesn't have to ask, you know, his team, to ask their team to ask somebody out on the front lines, what's going on with our customers. Like he's in the marketplace every day. And I think that's a really key thing. It's kind of like there's this spectrum where two extremes are not good as a CEO. I mean, one is you stay. in the marketplace as the maker. And you just become what Michael Gerber talks about, the e-myth, where you really just owned the job

and you never can scale because you're not leading a team. You're just continuing to turn out the widgets yourself. The other extreme is you go, hey, at all cost, we have to scale. So I build a team, and then we start to scale. And then I find myself never interacting with a marketplace. I'm only working behind the scenes all the time. And I become out of touch. And I lose that.

You said perspective. I think it's a great word. Yep. And I've seen that happen a lot. And I talked to my guys about it too. Like, how can we, you know, because I've got three other partners. I'm the majority. It doesn't really matter.

I'm the CEO. But the four of us, it's our company. We work together. And they all have different perspectives on what's going on. And they have their own passions of what they're studying and what they're researching. And so a lot of these, we have a lot of these conversations. And we do studies on, hey, what's actually going on? And I've got other guys in the company who, you know, keep up with it.

Most people in our company aren't kind of aren't necessarily. gun people on the same channels looking for the same kind of content. But we have a bunch who are, so I'm able to be like, hey, you, what do you think about this? You, how do you feel about that? Okay, and then I can get some feedback. The other thing that I've done, and I'm really trying to continue doing this, and I recommend this to business owners if they have an ability to do so. Regardless of how my time flexes, or lack thereof, something I try to do with our, with my

personal Instagram. I have a personal page. I mean, it's like to, it's a company related, it's still business. I do Instagram lives on there three times a week, something like that, and I get to engage directly with our audience. I get to see the questions. And you engage a lot and learn a lot about your people and your demographic with what kinds of questions they're asking. Are they asking smart questions? Are they asking questions?

Are they asking questions trying to figure out what the next thing is? Or are they getting more interested in philosophical discussions on law or whatever? So I do those because I like answering questions for people and helping them out, but also so I have a better understanding of kind of where people are at or where my community might be growing. And then the other thing I do, and unfortunately, I don't respond to all of them. I read pretty much every direct message I get sent on Instagram, which is over 200 a day. So I try to scroll that when I get in bed or when I wake up or whenever and just kind of see what people are asking what they're talking about or maybe what they're thanking us for, what their testimonies are, just so I have more of a grasp on the community and what's going on. and I don't see a lot of CEOs trying to do that or trying to be on the front lines with the people.

You know, they may have a page run by someone else, like by their marketing team, and you can always tell that it's fake. It's not actually them. But I appreciate guys who are out there, you know, on Twitter or on Instagram or wherever, who are actually reading messages, actually trying to figure out what's going on because it shows with the products they produce or with the content they produce. They don't miss the mark as much. We miss the mark on things still. I'll have my own interests, which are separate from the communities, potentially. And I'll produce a video on it, and, you know, it's not as popular. But it happens less when you have a better grasp on what's going on.

So my advice to the business owners is when you're small, it's easy to like keep up with people. When you get bigger, it's harder, but still make an effort to try to do it. There's so many vehicles now that make it easier. I saw something Jesse Isler posted the other day, and he's got a bazillion followers. And I at mentioned a friend about what was going on in that. post. And I know he personally runs his page. And later that day, he just dropped a little fist bump on my comment. And he's just going through Harding, fist bumping, liking. Like, in 10 minutes, he's seeing him. He's seeing him and he's engaged. And what that does for people is like,

oh, he's a real person. Like, he's actually connecting on the stuff versus he has a marketing department that's just running all of this. And, you know, I don't know how you scale that to millions. Like there's some point you have to be a team. But the more that you can do that, you know, Dave sends his own tweets. Now, does some people on our team help augment that? supplement it, sure, but it's not like he's out of touch with what's going on on his handles. Yeah. You know, all of our personalities are very much personally involved. Because if you look at it as just a marketing mechanism, then your customers are going to feel like it's marketing.

Right. But if you look at it as, this is a conversation I as a person have with these other humans, they feel that. Yeah. It builds trust. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is I try to remind people, I'm an normal person just like all of you. I put on my shoes the same way. I put on my pants the same way.

I have an iPhone just like everyone else. now I have two and it kind of sucks. But I have on a iPhone like everyone else. If you had an assistant, you give one to your assistant. You're not wrong. I totally do that. Although I have one device for all social media because of the new terms and service with Instagram and I have one for work stuff.

So they're separate for work reasons. But you're right. Well, what is that? They can watch other stuff going on your phone. Granted, many companies already have these. Basically, their new terms of service are like, eh, we get more of your data. We get to have more stuff.

It's our stuff. It's big tech stuff I don't really like. So I keep them separate. from my work things. But again, it's, you know, other people been already doing it, and is it a big deal? Probably not. But I don't like having two phones. So, but, yeah, it's just been real interesting, just learning all that.

When you kind of think about where you're headed over the next five to ten years, I mean, you talked about where you're taking your tribe. Your team's going to continue to grow and scale. What challenges do you see just from a leadership standpoint as this stuff's coming down on the population? continuing to give the vision to people as they come in effectively. I'm at a bit of a point now, and it's rough. I don't know everyone in the company. I'm going to sit down with everyone and talk to them. Yeah, that's hard.

I don't know everyone. I remember when I first started happening, it was tough. But at some point, it's just, it's not going to work because I've got to be able to go to other responsibilities over here so that people can keep, you know, having their jobs. So I can't necessarily take a bunch of time to eat lunch with everyone every week because I've got to spend that time working on job security and marketing or whatever. So that's been hard. Do you do anything?

You know, I've seen Dave. Like, I remember that day when I started here, there was 60 people. We knew everybody. Yeah. It was like a small family. Now there's, I don't even know, a thousand-ish. Yeah. And Dave, he's talked about this.

I don't know everybody's name. It drives me crazy. But he's still once a month. And HR sets this up where there's breakfast, new team members. Like he comes in, tells a story, he shakes their hand, that kind of thing. I think it's key to still try to, what types of things like that are you doing to try to make that connection? One thing we started doing, this is fun. Granted, we have different demographics within the company because we're at manufacturing companies. So we got, you know, a bunch of women who sew, with a bunch of young guys who run C&C machines.

We got gun guys. I got gun guys in marketing. I've got other, you know, different kinds of people in customer service. So, and I've talked to, I have another buddy who, he actually runs a Chick-fil-A franchise. And so he kind of deals with the same thing. How do I do something with my 120 employees? Now, his demographics are a little more similar. They're all young, before college, so it's easier to find activities they can all jump in and do. So I'm still trying to figure out what are things we can do as a company, but something that I started doing, one of my guys started, is we have a land party, which some of you all listening will know what this is, a local area network, where we all play call of duty together. So I come in, you use one of the head of computers, we get 15 guys in there. These are all young guys.

They hook up their Xboxes and their PlayStation, and we play Call of Duty until 1 a.m. and we order pizza. It's like a big frat party. Yeah, I order pizza for everyone. It's super fun. We do it like once every couple months. But yeah, that's been something I've been trying to figure out. And I make the rounds and try to talk to people.

It's good. But, you know, what are activities we can do, you know, renting out a whole bowling alley? Like, is that something we can go and do? Rent out this whole restaurant. You know, do XYZ. And actually have more connection with people beyond just the workplace. Yeah. It's really important.

So that's, I'm still learning that part. suggestions appreciated of course but i mean i think any of that stuff where you can shake it up and just create experience i mean food's always great because when you break bed together you know there's this communal thing everybody can eat everybody loves food getting out of the office whether it's bowling or whatever um some people stay away from that because they think it's cheesy but the truth is and uh you know there's a book about this the eighth habit and stephen covey wrote and that is the that trust dictates the speed that an organization grows and where there's not trust, it starts to stifle your growth. And the way you build trust is time together, experiences.

True. Shared experiences around food, shared experiences around, you know, call of duty stuff, whatever it is. And that, you know, that's culture dependent, like, based on what your company is, you may not be a call of duty company, but you may have a thing that, you know, is unique to what you guys do. Or the local geography, you guys have access to things. Maybe you live on the coast and you can go surfing together. You know, maybe you don't do that in Tennessee. That'd be awesome if we could figure out how to do that in Tennessee. You know, so you got to just be, It takes creativity. You got to think, like, what's around here that we can do, get the team out of the office.

One of my favorite leaders that I ever worked for, we would have our meetings. And oftentimes, he would say, hey, let's just jump in the truck and go for a drive. Yeah. And just that little different, like, we're not just sitting in an office. We're doing something different. Same rut that we're in all the time. It's just shaking it up, and it's keeping it creative. But it builds a little trust.

It builds a little connection. Something that I started doing more last year was company training classes where I'm like, hey, we're doing pistol class. Come on out. I'll teach. And so we grabbed 12 people who've just got guns for the first time, are they just whatever, and we go to the range, which is workplace for me. But we go out there and we shoot together. And if it's raining, which it rained on us for one of the classes, we shoot in the rain. And it's fine.

It was a little cold. But yeah, I think that's a really big deal. One plan that I have right now, and I actually think we just closed on the land today, is hoping to build a house here soon, debt-free. Awesome. And, I mean, the land's debt-free. but my plan is to build a house that or an estate, I guess, that will enable us to have everyone from the company over every month for barbecue or dinner or whatever, you know, we make. And we'll be able to have 150, 200 people, scale it and do that at the property. That's something I really want to do.

I heard another business owner does that at a, I think it was a big IT company. A thousand people invite them all and ends up being like 600 people. So I was like, oh, look, I'm going to need a pretty large outdoor area, a barn or something, like, going to need some things. But when I heard that, I was like, that's what I want to do. That's cool. Have people over to my house. It's also very personal. I mean, it's my house.

And be able to hang out with them, play volleyball, whatever. So that's where I'm going in that direction for something like that. But I'm also still looking for other opportunities or activities or just things. We have a couple guys in the company that do some, like, special snacks on certain days and just little things that are. are fun and different. And they've talked to us about that. Hey, these little things, they seem cheesy, you know, you raffle someone's name in a hat to go have lunch at the CEO, whatever, but those are the things that matter. So we've brought some guys in from other businesses who've brought experience, because this is my first time being a CEO. This is my first time really working a, like a,

I guess a normal job. I did like some contract stuff with my family before. So it's my first job and first time being a CEO. So there's a lot of learning. So whenever we can bring a guy in who's worked at other different kinds of companies for 20 years. You know, we usually sit down right away and I'm like, all right, give me all of your knowledge. Well, it's really key. And I relate to the, you know, oftentimes the CEO mindset, we're just thinking about building stuff, growing, bottom line. We get, you know, we don't tend to be partiers or like we're just, like you mentioned working

all the time. We love it. It's our, it's just we're passionate about it, you know? Yeah. And I think it's key to have somebody who's the champion of fun. Yeah. Maybe isn't, you can't afford. that to be someone's full-time job at a certain stage.

But one of the responsibilities. But someone who thinks that way, hey, we need to have these connections. And I want to put time and energy and money into it, but I need your help with the creativity and the thinking. So, hey, let's have a meeting once a month where you're bringing ideas. I'm going to count on you to draft some stuff that I can help edit. And I'll be on board and I'll be at the party and I'll be out there flipping burgers when we have the barbecue.

But I need people to come around me to help administer and help create some of those elements because it's just not kind of my natural thing. Yeah. You know, some people are better at that. Yeah. Don't, if you're a leader, use that as a cop out to say, well, we just don't do that here. Like, you've got to have that stuff going on. But other people can help you do it.

Yeah. Yeah. So we actually already have that guy kind of now that you're bringing up. That's good. He's the guy that came in and was like, here's what you can do. Here's some things that we did at our company. And just some things to think about. And I was like, nice, thank you.

Take knowledge from your brain, put it into my brain. Now let's execute and figure some stuff out. What do you want to tell business owners about? the future of business in this country and what we need to be thinking about to come together and continue to lead and serve our teams. Well, a big one, and I'm sure the folks here at Ramsey talk about it, but we saw it last year how basically fragile our society is with things being shut down, mandates, not being allowed to operate as a business. So there's a couple things. One, being debt-free is obviously very effective, gives you a lot of leeway, gives you a lot of flexibility,

not having to rely on payments and whatnot, and we're a debt-free company, so we didn't have to worry about any of that. What I tell young people that are asking, hey, what kind of business should I start? I tell them manufacturing, make stuff, because people always want stuff. Now, you have to be careful what stuff you make

because if you make a luxury item and there's a recession, well, people may not buy your luxury item. If it's cheap entertainment, they may. People bought cheap entertainment during the Great Depression in the 20s. but I very much like manufacturing. It's shown people are right now more interested in American manufacturing, especially after what happened last year.

A lot of stuff coming to the country got halted. Countries got shut down. Manufacturing here in the United States is very patriotic, obviously. You're creating jobs for people here in America, and we were able to employ people who lost their jobs because of COVID, and that was super cool. They were able to provide jobs for people. And I think some people, they look down on manufacturing.

They're like, ah, manufacturing is a little widget. I want to go do, I'm going to be a stockbroker. I want to go do something cool. I'm going to go work for like a video game company. And it's like, yeah, that stuff's cool. But manufacturing is really what built this country. Manufacturing and agriculture is what built this country. Inventing things, making stuff.

And if I could have started any other company, you know, seven years ago, if someone had said, hey, Lucas here's a million dollars, you know, or, oh, you're a trust fund baby. Go start a company. I would not have changed it any other way. I would have started a manufacturing company. And I've been looking at other manufacturing that we can do or other manufacturing companies to start.

We don't do any real metal work. Maybe it's about time we start a company that can do metal work. Startup cost is in the millions to get the right machines and stuff and supply lines. But I've been telling young guys look into manufacturing. If you're wanting to start a company, you know, sewing, nylon, there's all kinds of things you can do for not a lot of money. I mean, I started with $1,000. I was very fortunate with the industry I got in. to that I didn't need crazy expensive machines.

Well, there's a lot of stuff now with three-dimensional printing. I mean, you can prototype things like in ways that you never, I mean, used to. It would take thousands of dollars to get a prototype. Yeah. I've seen companies literally, there's a company I'm watching right now that I can tell all their designs are 3D prints, that they are then either going to manufacture with normal plastics, but all their R&D is all 3D prints based on the pictures I've seen and just what the parts are.

So there's a lot of, I think there's going to be a lot of demand for American manufacturing in future with the volatility. and just the fragility of our system relying on other countries. So I don't think, I think the biggest thing is young people should not look down on that. It's like, that's a lesser industry.

That's a lesser job. I want to go do, you know, whatever it is cool kids do these days. I don't know what they do. But manufacturing. I think manufacturing is great. And then kind of like I talked about earlier, look for something that you can do better than everyone

or look for something nobody else does. And if you can hit one of those or both, you should be good to go. And then, yeah, staying out of debts, definitely. It gives you a lot of flexibility. Lucas, I wish at 28 had your smarts and your wisdom. And I love talking to young entrepreneurs who are successful because it gives me a lot of hope for our country's future.

There's a lot of people out there like you. And you're not in the headlines and people don't know who you are. But guys, this country is solid. There's people like Lucas. A lot of opportunity. In this next generation, you know, millennials are not all idiots and duffices and lazy sitting around like, hey, it's time.

It's time for this next generation to step up and start leading the way that you're leading. So I love what you're doing, and I love how you're modeling for your peers and people in their 20s and 30s as leaders that are emerging. There's so much inspiration in that. And those of us that have been leading for a while, I think it's fun to kind of go, all right, this is the next wave of leadership. And I'm excited about what I see. And I'm excited about what you've shared today. I appreciate you making some time to come in the Entry Leadership Studio. It's been great, man.

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Lucas Bacchens, you're the man, and you'll always be welcome back in the entre studio. Thanks for your time today. And as always, we're here to inspire leaders, help business owners grow and be better leaders so they can help their teams and help their customers get to the next level. So that's why we're here. And we appreciate you being a part of it. Awesome.

Thanks so much, man. But guys, I love, love, love having conversations with young entrepreneurs. You know, young bucks are passionate, they're excited, they're just contagious with their energy. And if you've been leading for a while, if you've been in the trenches and you've got a few battle scars, well, hopefully you've got a little bit more wisdom. But if you're like me, you can also get a little tired. You can also kind of lose your swagger a little bit. It's really good to be around younger entrepreneurs who have that passion, that first love.

It's contagious. And I got that today. And I hope you did too. You guys know the Entry leadership team is always here to help you win. If you're a small business owner, we want to empower your growth and we want to give you tools and resources that help you do just that. That's why our team has put together this really cool assessment for you guys. It's a leadership growth assessment that you and your leaders can take to check in

and just get a gauge on your leadership, figure out what's going well, what's not going well, and then help drive some conversations with your leadership team on how you can improve. If you guys want to get this free tool, it's super easy. you have to do is text the keyword leader growth to 33444. Again, that's leader growth, all one word, no spaces, to 33444, or you can just click on the link in the show notes. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entral Leadership podcast. If you did, well, share it with your friends. And be sure to subscribe. That's the best way to make sure that you don't miss the next episode. Thanks for helping us, you know, get the word out and share this with people. That's

the way this thing grows. Now, if you're a small business owner between about two, and 200 employees, we'd love to have a live conversation with you and find out how the podcast is helping you improve your leadership. We'd love to hear also what we can do to improve the show that's going to help you win and build your leaders and grow your business. So if you'd like to help us out with that, you can schedule a call with our production team by just going on the show notes, click a link and our producer Tim, he'll be in touch and get you all squared away. Thanks for helping us out with that. You can follow us on social media at Andreleadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rutter.

I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network like Ramsey Call of the Day. Check out our new Ramsey Call of the Day podcast. It'll give you a quick hit of advice about life and money in Unusy. under 10 minutes. Listen to the Ramsey Call of the Day, wherever you listen to podcasts.