Welcome everyone Steve Dooley here the president of
Outdoor Hub Media here in what might be a very familiar place, a very familiar
setting, with a very familiar guy in his in his red shirt so here we are at
MidwayUSA's headquarters with its founder and CEO Larry Potterfield Larry
thanks for having us here. So before we kind of dive into
what I think are gonna be a lot of interesting and different aspects of
your business let me ask you about your family first can you tell me about Larry
his family and how you all got involved in this business. Wow, well let me take
you back first and introduce you to Brenda, so Brenda's my wife of almost 42
years. We met in college way back when, so she would be an absolute centerpiece of
why we're here today because unless you have a good long term relationship with
some somebody it's really hard to concentrate on the things that you'd
like to do because you get diverted all the time. So Brenda is a star and she's
been right beside me or in front of me for 42 years leading me. Then our two
kids Russell he's 37 now and Sarah is 35 both been instrumental in the company,
both worked in the company. Russell is working and runs the Battenfeld
Company. So the family's been always involved in the company and it's been a
family company and still is today. So here we sit in your studio in the gun
tech studio, let me ask you why has this video work that you do, I know you film
three days a week here. Why has this become so important to you and so
important to the organization. We film three mornings a week if I'm not hunting.
I think that I have always been a teacher if you will that I've always had
a passion to teach people things in a business you have to teach people all
the time because you that's just the way it works if you're going to be
successful and I've always loved to share things. So
I love shooting, reloading, gunsmithing, hunting, fishing I mean I'm just a
country kid from Missouri you know these are the things that have always been
important to me. I don't necessarily need to share hunting stories very much
because there's lots and lots of people filming hunting stories, but shooting
activities, how-to activities in gunsmithing, how-to in reloading, and just
isn't this an interesting thing. Have you ever heard about this? So we we put all
this stuff together in terms of ideas and then we try to reduce them to a
short little segment that teaches something. It's not a show if you would.
It's just a little topic that takes a minute or two or three to tell and as
you can see we've got a first-rate studio here with great people in it and
so we can take any idea that we have and literally turn it into a huge huge
visual presentation with multiple cameras and high-definition filming that
really teaches you how to do something and that's very rewarding for me
personally to share what I know and we get lots and lots of comments from
people all over the country when we see them with the show,
gee Larry that's great now do this for us. MidwayUSA the name, I'm sure a lot
of people would really wonder how did you come across it. Well we were small
business and if you picked Washington Arms, Lincoln Arms, human beings are not
very good at picking names that's reason we name our kids after dad and grandpa,
makes it easy. So we struggled for a long time we're located in the little
community of Midway, Missouri an unincorporated community.
So we said okay it will be Midway Arms Inc. okay and that name wasn't
trademarked anywhere in the industry so we had it we applied for a trademark on
it and got that trademark. A little bit later down the line as the internet
rolled along, now we're in a position what kind of a URL do you want.
Well Midway was taken up by the Midway Games folks in Chicago. Early on in
the internet process let's say 98 maybe 97 98 and so we are not early adaptors
and early adopters. So when we were ready to put our name and get our your URL
well Midway's already taken, not a problem we had some international
work going on or some international partners so we but USA on it. So you
mentioned the formulation of the URL which then obviously had to come along
with the advent of the internet. You'd been a leading catalog retailer.
How and when did you really know that the internet was truly gonna change the
face of your business? I don't think anybody knew that,
notwithstanding what people might say in retrospect today. You remember when we
got copy machines. Yes sir. You remember when we got fax machines. I remember
talking to one of our leading vendors on the phone and he saying Larry
"Do you think we ought to get a fax machine?" I mean it's just a fax
machine, it was a great thing. We were calling in all of our orders
because we order every week. Now we're able to fax the orders in and his
question do you think we ought to get a fax machine. Well fax machines didn't
really change the world for very long for a little bitty bit of time we have
fax machines today, but frankly they're of no use today.
So now here comes along the internet well so it's just a fax machine,
it's just new technology. Well you either going to adopt new technology
or not. We certainly are not ever going to just run and grab new technology and
think that's what it would be, but today 82% of our business comes through the
internet. So what other major accomplishments, as the founder
and CEO of MidwayUSA, what other major benchmarks do you have out there, of
pride and success that you have that you've achieved along the way. The first
and most important thing about Midway I think is the absolute insistence on
satisfying Customers. It's our number one goal is Customer satisfaction and has
been literally forever, but until we got into the 1990s and into the 21st century
and really started pushing on modern leadership and management principles
we didn't measure Customer satisfaction. We just did everything we could to
satisfy Customers. Now that we're able to do that and now that the internet is
here and it's easy to measure Customers satisfaction, we're running 93 or 94 percent.
We benchmark against different companies on the internet and the very best
practices companies in America are running 93 or 94 percent. Midway is
absolutely at the top of its a game in satisfying Customers and by design
and now benchmarkable, you couldn't have benchmarked it 20 years ago, you can
bench market today. I think that's our very greatest accomplishment here is the
number one goal of satisfying Customers we are acing that. We'll never get
to a hundred percent, although we'll always be trying, but that drives
everything that this organization thinks about. How do you satisfy Customers? How
do you get new Customers? How do you keep the Customers that you have? That's
that's the single greatest thing that we've ever done