We've talked about your foray into the digital medium, but you prior to that
really had adopted the medium of television. Can you tell us a
little bit about how you got into television? How that's really becomes
such an integral part of what you do here at MidwayUSA. Hunting shows on
cable television are a very new thing. So in the old days and this has been maybe
early 2000 early 20th 21st century. I begin to get exposed to these things and
I have the idea why don't we produce some content for them because I felt
like they were a little bit light on content. It
was just kind of a talk show and let's go hunt and then the camera will follow us.
So there came the idea of literally creating the vignettes, the things that
we teach on, and literally submitting them as content. From there we
put the studio together. From there we started doing our own advertising.
Writing our own commercials and crafting them and the whole thing just kind of
evolved into this department, if you would, in the organization. Which is
called the gun tech department and its mission to film interesting content and
to film our own commercials where you have the control of them and you can
produce what you believe is directly linked to what the customers interested
in. Well it's obviously proven fruitful as you say you shoot in here.
If you're not hunting you're in here three mornings a week. So speaking
of hunting. Gunsmithing, reloading, shooting obviously three core elements or
components of your business, but recently you've gotten into the hunting business.
Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean obviously you
personally have your avocation for hunting, but now you've made it a major
element of your business model. Pretty much my personality is one if you're
going to do something do it right and don't be trying to jump around and do a
lot of new things until you've got the old things finished up. So
do you really have your gunsmithing program perfectly deployed and if you
don't why don't you go finish that out before you launch something new. Do you
have your reloading perfectly deployed? Do you have your shooting program? So
as a CEO as the business leader, I'm never interested in playing in grabbing
a new toy to play with it until we adequately have mastered the old ones
and so we would be the best in the business I believe in our reloading
products offering, our shooting products offering, our gunsmithing products
offering. Ok when you get that then you can go into archery then you can go into
hunting right and hunting is the big biggest piece to master besides fishing
tackle I believe. So what effort do you have to put into hunting to make it work
and it's a huge huge effort. If you start that too early you'll never finish up
the other stuff. Sso we waited and we waited and we waited to launch hunting
and now we can put a huge amount of resources into it and not feel like
we're leaving something undone that should have been finished. That's the
reason for getting in the hunting. I've always been a hunter right and lots and
lots of folks in here are so it would have been logical for us to not have had
the discipline to wait, but a great business would always have the
discipline to do the right thing even if you have to wait a year or two or three
after you wanted to do it before you could do it and do it successfully.
So you've introduced it you're doing it right. If you were to look into the
crystal ball, is there another category oh what's next that you're looking at
that you're analyzing as to when the right time that might be to introduce
into the business. We have a really really strong strategic planning process
here. So every idea that is worth pursuing flows through the strategic
planning process, gets sliced and diced to decide if we're going to do it to put
it in priority and to get it implemented either this year next year sometime in
the future. So there are lots and lots of ideas that would bounce around that
would get into the strategic planning process that would never get prioritized
and launched. So yes there are things in front of us that we like
to do that we will do as the organization continues to
expand I can't tell you what those are.