Happy, Happy, Happy (15 page)

Big Al told me, “Man, you weren’t calling those ducks, you were
commanding
them!”

When the shooting was over, Big Al told me, “Man, you weren’t calling those ducks, you were
commanding
them!”

Al, who knew of my tinkering with his and other hunters’ duck calls, urged me to make my own and sell them.

“And I’ve got the name for it: Duck Commander,” Big Al told me.

I was struck by the phrase and it never left my mind: Duck Commander. It sort of has a ring to it, doesn’t it?

Duck Commander was always in the back of my mind, its implementation only awaiting a trigger. When Kay and I were discussing our future one night, I told her that I wanted to build and sell duck calls but would continue to fish until I got the duck-call business off the ground.

“I don’t know how I’m going to build the duck-call sales yet, but I’ll figure that out. When they get to where we don’t need to fish anymore, we’ll be on our way,” I told her.

The move to Sportsman’s Paradise and my commercial fishing had turned out well. Our family was together again, and I was thriving both spiritually and emotionally. Would another life-changing gamble work again? With the good Lord behind the steering wheel, we were about to find out.

Rule No. 8 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Never Sell Yourself Short (You Never Know, You Might Become a Millionaire)

S
ome of the most successful businesses in American history started as mom-and-pop operations, on nothing more than a family’s dream, hard work, and a shoestring budget. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream opened its first store in a run-down gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978. It was sold for $326 million to a competitor in 2000. Walmart started as a five-and-dime store in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1950 before Sam Walton and his family created the world’s biggest retailer. In 1946, S. Truett Cathy opened a single restaurant, a twenty-four-hour diner outside of Atlanta, which was so small it had only ten stools and four tables. He and his brother named it the Dwarf Grill. Today, Chick-fil-A sells more than $4 billion in chicken sandwiches and other food annually across the country.

Like those businesses, Duck Commander was nothing more
than a dream when I decided to launch the company. Obviously, I had no idea the business would become what it is today, but I had the courage and determination to believe we could compete with the more established companies in the duck-call industry, some of which had been manufacturing calls since the early twentieth century. My idea of starting Duck Commander began when Al Bolen made his comments about my ability to command ducks on the water. But it was during another hunting trip that my business finally started to come to fruition.

Baxter Brasher, a fellow member of White’s Ferry Road Church and an executive of Howard Brothers Discount Stores, where Kay worked, asked me to take him duck-hunting. Brasher had noticed a lot of men and boys asking me questions about hunting, fishing, and duck calls before and after church, and he was curious to find out what all the fuss was about. After I showed him how it was done, Brasher was even more impressed. He told me, “You really, really ought to build a duck call.”

I told him I had a design and a plan to do it but didn’t have the money to make it happen.

“Well, how much money would you need?” Brasher asked.

So I asked around and checked on the price of equipment and everything else I would need. I went back to Brasher and told him it would cost about $25,000 for me to get into the duck-call business.

“Twenty-five thousand?” Brasher asked me as he shuffled some papers on his desk. “Let me see. Here’s what you do: You take this piece of paper—it’s my financial statement—and you take it down to the bank. Walk in there and tell them you want twenty-five thousand dollars. They’re going to say, ‘Do you have any collateral?’ You hand them this piece of paper and say, ‘There is my collateral right there. He’s backing me.’ ”

I told him I had a design and a plan to do it but didn’t have the money to make it happen.

I asked Brasher, “How much do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” he told me. “The reason I don’t want anything is I know it’ll work. You’ll do well. I don’t want a dime. I want to know I helped someone get started. You just go down there and tell them what you need.”

So I went down to the bank and walked in, and a clerk asked if she could help me.

“I need to see Mr. George Campbell, the man who loans the money,” I told her.

She walked me back to Campbell’s office and he asked, “How can I help you?”

“I need twenty-five thousand dollars,” I told him. “I’m going into the duck-call business.”

“Mr. Robertson, what do you have for collateral?” he asked me.

I laid that piece of paper down on Campbell’s desk just like Brasher told me to do and answered, “There’s my collateral.”

I never will forget what happened next. Campbell looked at the paper and looked at the name. Then he said, “Brenda, will you get us some coffee?”

Now we’re getting somewhere,
I thought to myself. He went from “who are you,” “what do you want,” and “where’s your collateral” to “let’s have coffee.”

Duck Commander—and my dream of building my own duck calls—was about to take flight.

After I had the bank loan, I went into high gear looking for the machinery I would need. By chance, I ran across a classified in the back of a magazine that was advertising a lathe, which is a woodworking machine I needed to build the barrels for my duck calls. I called the seller to inquire about the lathe he was trying to get rid of.

“How much money do you have to spend on this, Mr. Robertson?” the guy asked me.

“Well, I only have about twenty-five thousand,” I told him.

“You’re in luck, Mr. Robertson,” the man replied. “The equipment is only $24,985.”

The sucker fleeced me! The lathe was worth maybe five thousand dollars, but he took everything I had for it. It’s one of the reasons we were so poor during the first ten years of operating
Duck Commander. Everything we made was going back to the bank to pay for the lathe! I later learned the lathe was built in the 1920s. It was originally used in Chicago and was in Memphis, Tennessee, when I bought it. The equipment was out-of-date. It was an old-fashioned, flat-knife lathe, but thankfully it actually worked pretty well once I got it hooked up and running.

While I waited for the lathe to arrive, I finalized my model for a duck call. I was able to call ducks from the time I was very young. I learned as a teenager using a P. S. Olt D-2 duck call, which was designed by Philip Stanford Olt of Pekin, Illinois, in the early 1900s. It was an Arkansas-style call, which is a one-piece insert with a straight reed and curved tone board. I always had a knack for making a call sound right or better. My hunting buddies were always asking me to tune, adjust, or repair their calls, and they always seemed to sound more like a duck when I finished tinkering with them.

When I decided to make my own duck calls, I enlisted the help of Tommy Powell, who went to our church. Tommy’s father, John Spurgeon Powell, made duck calls, and I went to him with my concept of how one should be built. John Spurgeon Powell looked at my specifications and concluded that my call wouldn’t work; he told me it was too small. But he promised me if I could get the hole drilled properly, he would turn it on his lathe and make me a call.

A lot of new ideas were going into what I was asking him to build: mine would be a smaller caller and would have a double reed, which I thought were significant improvements. The call’s barrel size, thickness, and a few other specifications were to come later as I refined it. One other big improvement was actually Pa’s idea, and I’m not sure I would have ever come up with it. The double reeds had a tendency to stick together, so Pa suggested we put a dimple in the bottom reed to eliminate the problem.

So we took a nail, rounded off the point, and with a hammer tapped a little dimple in the reed. When assembled with the protruded dimple of the bottom reed against the top reed, it worked perfectly. We later made a small tool from a sewing kit and just pressed the dimple into the reeds we were making. To this day, with all the automation that has come into the making of Duck Commander calls, Si, who has worked for the company since retiring from the army, still puts the dimples in the reeds by hand, one at a time.