Steve Dooley from Outdoor Hub Media back with our good friend Larry Potterfield
from MidwayUSA. I want to get into a few more things about the
future of your business and the focus of your business going forward, but one of
the key shareholder requirements that I see as I walk the hallways of MidwayUSA
is that you have to support the hunting and shooting industries in those
sports. Tell me how that became one of these key shareholder requirements of
your business. As you get into modern leadership and management principles
from Baldrige, you really understand that you have to quantify a lot of things and
get things down on paper that are important to you. As compared to just
word of mouth or well you should know that's what I want because we
talked about it before. We do indeed put down on paper and post on the walls
and talk about in our meetings the things are important to us. Whether they
be Customer key requirements, employee key requirements, the vendor, or even the
shareholder. So Brenda and I as the shareholders have key requirements of
the organization. What it takes to satisfy us as owners of the organization
that the organization has to provide that. One of those is that we have to
support the shooting sports industry and have to support the National Rifle
Association of America and Second Amendment. That's fabulous. Speaking
of the NRA I don't remember what year I'm sure you can remind me, but if I'm
not mistaken the first friends of the NRA banquet was here in Columbia. If
I'm not mistaken wasn't that? Yes. So how many years ago was that? Well I'm gonna
tell you the story of how we got started and it will put the date in there. We had
started NRA roundup on the second day of January in 1992 and if you want I'll
tell you about roundup in a little bit. But let me talk just about the friends of NRA event.
Every Tuesday we would send a check to the to the NRA/ILA
division to go into the Second Amendment Foundation. So here we are this is in
January and I'm communicating with a guy named Wayne Sheets at the NRA. I had met him to
talk to him before we ever started it. So now we're at the NRA show in Salt Lake
I'm guessing this is a April or May of 1992 and we've been sending them a check
every week for 120 bucks or whatever. It wouldn't been a lot of money back in
those days for NRA roundup and we're talking there and he's telling me how
great that is and how proud he is a Midway and all this and I say you know
we can do more. I said when Brenda and I get back home we're going to get together a
group of our friends and we're gonna throw a party for the NRA. It'll be a
fundraising party. So here's about a dozen friends we put together who would all
be sympathetic to the NRA and the Second Amendment. All with experience in key
conservation groups. We said this is what we want to do we want to throw a party
for the NRA that would work about like this, so indeed we did. During that
process of having those meetings we came up with the term Friends of NRA. So that
term was coined here in Columbia, Missouri in 1992 during the planning
process in the summer and I believe the October 12th or something like that of
1992 the very first ever friends of NRA meeting was held here in Columbia
and the 20th one is coming up now in 2012 and there will be a big celebration over
that of course. But from that certainly one of the single greatest success
stories for the National Rifle Association of America is literally being
able to start these up all over the country. There's maybe between a
thousand twelve hundred of them now there are very significant fundraisers
and they're able to place that money back into the states where the money is
raised and primarily for youth development for gun clubs and that was something
that Wayne Sheets and I set up way back then as to how the money was to be distributed
that they raised. But more importantly, when you go into a Friends of NRA
banquet if you would. Those are your friends there, that you didn't
even have any idea that the local car dealer was an NRA supporter. The guy who
is digging ditches over here with his backhoe is an NRA supporter and you're
all there in the same room. So the concept down at the grassroots of
understanding who the players are has been a significant thing for the NRA too.
So it's both money and it's getting closer to their customers.
Can you tell us a little bit as we're talking about endowments and foundations
about MidwayUSA Foundation and the Scholastic Shooting Trust. Again more of
how you are giving back to this industry that's given so much to you. The MidwayUSA
company has been very successful. It's 35 years now we have a successful
company, it makes more money than what we need as a family to live on. So what do
you do with money? What can you do with your money to change the future and so
we started looking around the industry. I mean you got all the key conservation
groups and you think well we're could we put money, where's money
needed? There's no source of money for today, and we got to thinking
about high school and college shooting, and we said well you know there's 20 or
22 thousand high school and colleges in America. How many of them have
shooting teams? Well nobody knows? There is no repository of knowledge about how
many shooting teams there are in the American schools, but we know there's
probably maybe a thousand of them or something like that. So you have thousand
schools with teams and 22,000 schools in total and of the thousand schools with
teams there is no money for them. There's no public money going there, there's
no school money going in. So where there are teams there's no money and we thought
well wouldn't it be great if there was money. That if you would set up some kind
of an organization that will allow people to put money into their high
school shooting team. That you would endow and hold forever and then give it
out 5% a year. We looked around the industry and we couldn't find anybody that
wanted to do that. So we went to the effort of creating our own foundation, The
MidwayUSA Foundation. Today it has only one mission and that is to collect money
for high school and college shooting teams. To hold the investment, invest it
and then to give it back five percent a year for the rest of time. It's a wildly
successful program. The family puts lots of money into it, other organizations put
money into it, and ultimately that will drive that opportunity for high school
and college students to be able to, when they go to school in
period of time for the time they're 14 or 15 until the time they're 22, that
they now have the opportunity to shoot when they're in high school or college.
Our daughter shot when she was in college because there was a shooting
team in Colorado State. Our son went to Michigan
there wasn't a shooting team there he did not get to shoot during those those
college years. So we think that that can be fixed and it takes leadership from a
family like the Potterfields and the MidwayUSA company through the
foundation to make that work.