The History of eCommerce with Rob Snell of GunDogSupply.com - EP 004

Meeting Rob Snell of GunDogSupply.com

In this episode of the eCommerce Masters Podcast, host Ethan Giffin sits down with a pioneering figure in the world of eCommerce, Rob Snell, co-owner of Gun Dog Supply. With nearly three decades of experience, Rob, alongside his brother Steve, has transformed a passion for outdoor sporting into a thriving online business. Their journey has built a community that leverages the power of the internet to connect with like-minded individuals worldwide.

Rob shares insightful strategies that have contributed to the success of Gun Dog Supply, emphasizing the importance of customer service, product knowledge, and creating value beyond transactions. His pivotal moment came from the transition to online sales in 1998, marking a significant turning point for the business. The discussion also dives into Rob's contribution to the eCommerce industry through his book, "Starting a Yahoo Store for Dummies," which has equipped a generation of entrepreneurs with the tools to succeed online.

The conversation between Ethan and Rob is filled with personal anecdotes that highlight the evolution of eCommerce and the lessons learned along the way. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the dynamics of building an online business, the challenges and triumphs encountered, and the evergreen advice from a seasoned expert.

Quotes From The Show

"My parents started, it was a micro-business side hustle, is what we call it today. I mean, it wasn't really anything. And then the writing was on the wall with his job, and he's like, man, I gotta go full time."  - Rob Snell, 06:47 "I built her a website. And so I went and got like NetObjects Fusion and I took all the photos of dogs and stuff that we had and made like a little five-page brochureware site."  - Rob Snell, 11:41 It's not my dream working at Gundog Supply. 21-year-old Rob Snell is crying right now. You're going back in time and you're telling him, it's like, hey, not only are you gonna be working at Gundog Supply, you're gonna be running it."  - Rob Snell, 21:34 "You need to maximize the opportunities that come to you. As a shrew living in the time of the dinosaurs, you don't get a ton of opportunities. And when you do, you need to be all in."  - Rob Snell, 31:34 "We're at that, at some point, if it shrinks much more, it's not viable, it doesn't have enough resources to support it. We'll have to move, and I'll have to figure out a way to do Steve's picks on BigCommerce or Shopify."  - Rob Snell, 40:22 "Every single client I went to would have one or two things that they did way better than us, and I would just kind of cherry-pick all those little bitty things and kind of stick it onto my stack of stuff that we do." - Rob Snell, 56:39

Chapters

00:00 - Chapter 1: Origins of Gun Dog Supply 3:32 - Chapter 2: Authentic Content Creation 05:32 - Chapter 3: The Dynamics of a Family Business 11:07 - Chapter 4: Stepping Into the Online World 33:38 - Chapter 5: Evolution of E-commerce Strategy 51:40 - Chapter 6: Growth and Physical Expansion 57:09 - Chapter 7: Looking Toward the Future

Resources

eBook: Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Best Email Marketing Platform for eCommerce - https://www.groovecommerce.com/klaviyo-vs-mailchimp/ Yahoo Store (Now known as Aabaco Small Business from Yahoo!) - https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com VioWeb (pre-Y Combinator) - https://www.ycombinator.com NetObjects Fusion - http://netobjects.com MailChimp - https://mailchimp.com Klaviyo - https://www.klaviyo.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com BigCommerce - https://www.bigcommerce.com StoneEdge -
and today we have the
pleasure of welcoming
another remarkable guest to our show.
There's so much to say about Rob Snow.
Rob is one of my

(01:00:20):
favorite people in the industry
and probably the world.
We met 15 years ago in Las
Vegas when Brett at PubCon
threw us on a panel
together to talk about e-commerce
and it's been Step Brothers ever since.
Rob and his brother Steve have operated
Gundog Supply for nearly 30 years,
also having a comic
book store along the way.
In 2006, Rob altered the book

(01:00:42):
Starting a Yahoo Store for Dummies,
which taught an entire
generation of entrepreneurs
how to set up a Yahoo
store and start selling online.
Yahoo Store is the
original cloud platform.
Rob, welcome to the show.
- Thanks, Ethan.
Good to be here, man.
It is great to see you.
- I thought I got out.

(01:01:02):
10 years, I thought I got
out and you brought me back in.
(laughing)
- I can't even see you
because of all the camouflage.
I am just--
- What are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
- You know.
I can't tell if it's a
green screen or real.
- No, it's real.
It's real.
It may fall down in
the middle of this thing,
so watch out.
(laughing)
Now I want to recreate the duck blind,

(01:01:22):
my favorite environment,
and we need to take you duck hunting,
but we'll get into that later.
- Well, I am way into duck hunt.
It was my favorite game on Nintendo.
- It's just like that.
- Is it just like that?
- Yes, the ducks have the little squares.
64-bit or whatever, I don't know.
- Does Steve have a
dog with big floppy ears

(01:01:42):
that kind of jumps out and laughs at you?
- Yes, yes, and the ducks can shoot back.
- Fantastic, fantastic.
All right, so tell us a
little bit about gun dog supply
and who your target market is.
Do you actually have dogs that own guns?
- No, no, no, so there's
a lot of confusion there.

(01:02:03):
We sell training
supplies for hunting dogs,
so the majority of our
customers are dog owners,
and about half of our customers are folks
who use a gun with a dog,
and whether that's the cops,
or duck hunters, or bird
hunters like my brother,
or coon dog hunters there, mountain lion,

(01:02:25):
all kinds of dudes who
are hunting with their dog,
we sell the stuff that
you need to train that dog,
like tracking collars,
training collars, leashes,
anything that you would
need to train your dog,
we've got it at gun dogs supply dot com.
- Great, great.
Are you a dog owner yourself?
- My family, I grew up with dogs,
and my brother has 17 dogs, 17,

(01:02:50):
yeah, 17 dogs that I pay for half of,
so I mean, technically, I'm buying a--
(laughing)
- Dude, I don't know how
I got tricked into this
with my family, you
know, in the family business.
My brother got the
sweet end of this deal.
Not only do I pay for half his stuff,
but six months out of
the year, he's in the field
doing research and development,
which is he's hunting
with his hunting dogs,

(01:03:11):
or training his hunting dogs,
or recovering from hunting season,
but he's working, he's testing the
products that we sell,
you know, out in the field.
- Absolutely, there's
nothing better actually,
quite honestly, to see him
actually using the products
that you sell. - Yeah, I mean, he does.
- Like, there's no
better-- - That's our tagline.
We train our dogs with
the products we sell, we do.
I mean, he goes through it, and if we

(01:03:32):
sell it on the store,
he's like, he's put it through its paces,
and you don't wanna know
how much stuff is over there
in his half the building that has failed,
or is it just not quite up to snuff,
or is it, or we already
have something that's almost,
this is better, you know,
it's amazing just to see
the dead products
that never quite made it
to the, to gundogsupply.com.
- Well, it's just so
authentic, and, you know,

(01:03:54):
we'll get into a little
bit about the relationship
between you and your
brother here, and a few,
but it's just so authentic to see him,
see him out with the 17
dogs, and kind of the big rig
that he drives in-- - Oh yeah, dude,
he looks like a zookeeper with his,
like he's got this huge
F650, or whatever it is,
you know, with the big old mud tires,
and he can put like, I

(01:04:15):
think, 12 dogs in the little cages
in the back, and then
sometimes he'll take a trailer
with him that goes on the back of that.
But usually he's got like a
string of three or four dogs,
he's running at a time.
And it's just like, you
know, as soon as they,
it's like pitchers in baseball, you know,
as soon as one gets
tired, he subs another in,
so he's got a bullpen,
and these dogs are running,

(01:04:36):
you know, for their life, I mean,
this is what they live to do,
this is what these dogs are made to do,
and so they're out in
Texas, and they're running,
I mean, 25, 30 miles a day, and it's fun.
- I love seeing the
photos, and I do wanna go,
I do wanna go duck
hunting with you sometime.
- Oh dude, yes, you've got
to come when we've got ducks,
you don't wanna come

(01:04:56):
when we don't have ducks,
but when we've got ducks,
and you know, half of
duck hunting is sitting there
looking at each other going, you know,
how much do we pay for
this lease, you know,
where are the ducks gonna come?
But man, when it's,
this past season, dude,
it was raining ducks, it was short,
but it was like, it was the
best season I've ever had,
it was crazy, it was crazy.

(01:05:17):
- That's great, well you and your brother
have been operating
the business for like,
I feel like at least 30 years,
but it's a much older business, right?
- Yeah, my parents started gun dog supply
on their kitchen table in 1972,
my dad was working for the
Mississippi State Government,
he was a liaison between
Congress and the state guys,

(01:05:38):
basically making sure that
any time the feds, you know,
had a grant or something,
that the Mississippi boys
jumped through the
hoops to get the money,
so he's like shuttling
back and forth between
Jackson, Mississippi,
and Atlanta, and D.C.,
and he hated it, he hated
it, it was like a, you know,
had to wear a suit all the time, the
politics were crazy.
- There's a little corruption on people
trying to get stuff done.

(01:05:59):
- You know, he's the most
ethical man I've ever known,
and it's like, there was,
you know, it's politics, dude,
it's like people are like,
hey, if you can move this road
a quarter mile to the left, you know,
I'll deed you some land, and
he was not having that at all.
And he saw the writing on the wall,
the way the politics
was headed in the mid 70s,
and basically, he was training his dogs,

(01:06:19):
and he couldn't find a
reputable source of supply,
so he and my mom kinda got together,
and they were always
trying to find something
to be self-employed, they
tried so many different things,
but this was the first
thing that really stuck,
and so they started buying and making
their own dog supplies,
like collars, and leads, and leashes,
and they were buying whistles and stuff,
and selling them in
these tiny classified ads

(01:06:40):
and specialty publications.
Yeah, so I mean, they started,
it was a micro-business side hustle,
is what we call it today, you know,
I mean, it wasn't really anything.
And then the writing was
on the wall with his job,
and he's like, man, I gotta go full time,
and so he just put everything into it.
So my folks basically
started making little catalogs
and running more ads,

(01:07:01):
and Steve and I worked in
the business growing up,
I don't remember a time
before "Gun Dog Supply"
that tells you I'm 56, so yeah,
so they started 52 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I was gonna say,
I'm doing the math in my
head, that's 52 years ago.
I mean, that's, you know,
I'm gonna be 50 this year,
so I mean, it's just
tremendous, the, you know,
how many businesses-- - It's a long time,

(01:07:22):
you know, for a
business, especially these days.
But it's cool to see how the business
has kind of changed over the years.
I mean, we were a little
bitty mail order company,
and then people in
Jackson, Mississippi were like,
we had enough customers who
kind of knew where we were,
and they wanted to come see the showroom,
and we didn't have a showroom.
We had like two little bitty rooms
that were written from some printer
in some warehouse in

(01:07:43):
some industrial park.
But my dad built a little showroom,
and so people started coming in,
and then he was like, man,
we can sell these folks stuff.
So he started carrying premium dog food.
This was back before PetSmart was around,
and so there was not really a good place
to get good dog food.
So he hooked up with
Quaker Oats and Kennel Biscuit,
and so my summers in Mississippi

(01:08:03):
were spent unloading
un-air-conditioned feed trucks
and un-air-conditioned warehouses,
character building
for minimum wage, maybe.
Maybe.
And so he kind of built
the business up that way
and just kind of became
like a pet store without pets,
transitioned into this more of a,

(01:08:25):
more of our customers
weren't hunting dogs at one point,
it grew that business up,
and then PetSmart moved into town.
That's kind of where my
story starts with them.
Any of the presentations that I ever do
is that 1996, PetSmart
opened up across the street
and my parents are freaking out,
and they took a 50% sales hit.
For most people, that'd put you under.

(01:08:47):
And so my mom was screaming,
get the catalog out, get the catalog out.
So we went back to the catalog.
I spent the summer of
96 at my parents' house
making this catalog.
I was a graphic design
student at Mississippi State
and just got out of school.
Steve and I had our own
company selling funny books,
which is a whole other story.
But when you're in the family business,
you're still in the family business.

(01:09:07):
And so I would come home on weekends
to help them build out this catalog.
And so my dad and I
wrestled all summer of 96
trying to launch this catalog
the way I would do a catalog,
not the way they had done it,
which was basically
allocating the space in the catalog
based upon the revenue
that the products produced,
not doing something alphabetical A to Z

(01:09:29):
that's logical and methodical.
It's like, what do
you care about selling?
If you sell one thing, what's that?
Okay, great, so do a lot on that.
And then if you sell one more thing,
that gets the second page.
And we basically built this
catalog out, mailed it out,
and it was the biggest flop of my career.
You know, we spent all this time,
yeah, dude, kill me now, you know?
I'm sitting here hot shot.

(01:09:50):
You know, I've got
three comic book stores.
I know what I'm doing.
I'm a marketer.
You know, my dad's just
shaking his head going,
what are we doing here?
And it just turns out we just
didn't have the mailing list
that we needed.
You know, we had 5,000
people on our mailing list.
You need 500,000
people on your mailing list.
It just didn't move the needle.
I think we sold like $5,000.

(01:10:12):
That number sticks out to me as like,
which is not enough to sustain a
business, obviously.
But we had done all this work.
I had all these files in Adobe PageMaker,
which that, you know, that
doesn't even exist anymore.
We had written out all these great
product descriptions.
We'd taken pictures of everything.
We had all this material

(01:10:33):
and just nothing happened.
And the whole time
PetSmart's coming in on us,
my mom gets obsessed with
putting us on the internet.
You know, she sees this commercial,
these AT&T commercial
about these two ladies
who designed these
really cool floppy sunglasses
and no retailer would carry them.
And they would go to
all these different stores
and get turned down while AT&T, you know,
gave them a platform.
They built an e-commerce store.

(01:10:54):
They're selling online
and now they're billionaires
and they're, you know,
jet setting around on their private jet
because they made so much
money selling floppy sunglasses
because they wouldn't
break when you sit on them.
And you know, so my
mom's obsessed with that.
And once she gets fixated on something,
it's like, it's gonna happen, dude.
It's like just nonstop and just,
I love my mom, but to get
her to shut up, you know,
I was like, okay, okay, you
know, I'll make you a website.

(01:11:14):
And this was 96, I think.
So I was like, nobody's
making any money online.
You know, it's all IPOs and porn.
And my mom was like, well, maybe we
should get into porn.
So the story is, and she's kidding.
You'd have to know my mom, but you know,
so this is the story goes,
to keep my mom from getting into porn,

(01:11:35):
I built her a website.
And so I went and got
like NetObjects Fusion
and I took all the photos
of dogs and stuff that we had
and made like a little
five page brochureware site.
You know, you've seen, you know,
plenty of websites that
looked like that in 1996, 1997.
This was like probably
March or April of 97.

(01:11:57):
And the, you know, I've got an ego.
So I'm like, I'm not
gonna build this thing
and spend six weeks designing stuff.
I wanna get some, you know,
I want people coming to the website.
I need some feedback.
I wanna parade, you know?
So instead of just
learning about web design,
I'm like internet marketing, you know,
I'm reading everything I can.
There's a forum I'm on
called Deadlock, which, you know,
this guy's talking all

(01:12:18):
about these different things
you could do to sell stuff online.
So I'm trying to figure out
how can I add a shopping cart to this?
And you know, it's like,
and the guy at the local place
is like, well, I'm 75 bucks an hour.
I'll build you a shopping cart, a custom.
I'm like going 75 bucks an hour, right?
I can't afford that.
You know, I couldn't
afford 10 bucks an hour.
So I built a catalog
request form on there.

(01:12:38):
I wrote a great Yahoo
directory description,
which, you know, that's way
before most people's time,
but that was Google back then.
And we were number one
for the best selling product
that we had, which was Tritronics,
because I included
Tritronics in my Yahoo description.
And all of a sudden we were getting
hundreds of people a day
requesting this
catalog, one to paper catalog.

(01:12:59):
And my dad's freaking out,
because it's like, we're
losing five bucks a catalog
that we're mailing these things out.
So he's like, either, you
know, put the catalog online
or shut the website off.
I don't want any more catalogs going out.
I'm tired of all this postage.
So my brother had been
poking around, my brother Steve,
and he found VioWeb, which
was an online catalog builder

(01:13:20):
that Paul Graham, you know,
of Y Combinator had started in Boston.
And so we got on that
and then it was super easy.
And like I said, at the
time we had a comic book store.
So I first built out a
little comic book shop,
just as a proof of concept, you know,
selling some of the stuff, you know,
that we sold in our store.
Dude, it was so easy.
You know, you upload a
JPEG, you upload a, you know,

(01:13:41):
a, you write a little description,
you put a caption in
there, you put the price,
and it generates an add to cart button,
and I didn't have to do any programming.
So it's like, it's, you
know, it's like Shopify
and BigCommerce and whatever else today.
But back then we didn't have any of that.
I mean, it was truly revolutionary.
And I spent probably a
month putting, you know,
their 24 page catalog online.

(01:14:04):
I had all the descriptions written,
we had done all this work,
and we were able to leverage that content
and to be the first hunting
dog supplier in our industry.
And there were probably
20 or 30 other retailers
who had catalogs who
were much more established
than we were, who we were
copying in some aspects.
You know, and we were first,

(01:14:24):
and man, they were,
everybody was freaking out
because they didn't have
stores and we had an online shop.
And it didn't like, you know,
it wasn't like that UPS
commercial in the Super Bowl
where the order count was going brrrr.
You know, it was pretty
slow to start compared to,
but it replaced the volume of,
that we lost from
PetSmart almost instantly.
And then it was bigger
than the retail store
within six months.
And this was with me

(01:14:45):
doing it like on weekends
and in between selling funny books.
You know, I really
wanted to double down on it,
but it's a family business.
I didn't own it.
I didn't have any equity in it.
It was my mom and
parents, my mom and dad's shop.
And so, you know, I
worked on it when I could.
And it was always kind
of like my side project.
I'd be working on my comic book stores,
which kind of turned into me doing
e-commerce consulting.

(01:15:06):
Cause after I did that
for them, man, I was like,
this is great.
I got to get in on this.
And it just slowly grew.
And it was kind of like the
tortoise and the hare story
where I'm the rabbit
running around, you know, crazy,
going from one project to the next.
And, you know, Steve's
riding the tortoise slowly
but surely building up our customer base.
We're selling the same stuff every year.
We're adding more content to the website.

(01:15:26):
And, you know, all of a sudden we look up
and we're doing like a
million or $2 million a year.
And it's like, it's crazy.
Because in Mississippi, I mean, I'm
limited to the number
of people who could
drive to my store in Jackson,
which, you know, is
like a 300,000, you know,
people Metro area at the time, you know,
and then, and then from
an advertiser standpoint,
I remember trying to figure

(01:15:47):
out when I was in college,
what am I going to do?
How am I going to reach an
audience advertising wise,
Rolling Stone magazine
was the only thing I found
that had significant
reach that had an affordable,
you know, it was like a
hundred bucks, a square inch,
a column inch for ads in
the classified section.
You know, some, you
know, it blows my mind
what we can do even 20 years ago.

(01:16:08):
But today with, you
know, you got 20 bucks
in a credit card, dude,
you can sell anything.
There's no excuse at all for
anybody not doing anything.
- It's crazy, it's crazy.
I mean, that's how I-- - Yeah, it's nuts.
It's nuts.
- That's how I got, like
our first client at Groove
was a guy that had just set up a website,
kind of similar story,
started selling a million dollars

(01:16:29):
a year by accident, just like kind of
putting things online
because he thought he should.
And he had a kid, you know, a college kid
working summers for
him that like figured out
how to make it work.
And so, you know, those
early stories are amazing.
- Well, I thought we missed the boat.
It was 97, you know, Amazon was what, 94?

(01:16:50):
So I mean, it was like, it
was over by then, you know?
I was like, oh, and
we've missed the, you know,
it's already happened.
I remember, do you remember CompuServe?
That may have been before your time.
Okay, so I was on
CompuServe and they had,
they advertised for $30,000,
which might've been
$300 million at the time,
you can be the online
bookstore for CompuServe.

(01:17:10):
You know, they had sent
us a proposal, you know,
in all the different
book and comic book forums
that I was in and participated in.
I just remember going,
I'm missing the boat,
this is happening, I am missing,
and that was probably 92, 91, 92.
So yeah, so I saw this thing was coming,
it's like, and I'm under no illusion
that I could reproduce
this today, given, you know,
if I had to start today
and compete with myself

(01:17:31):
and everybody else who's
in there, it's, you know,
I would not do this.
I would go in a
totally different direction.
I mean, this is the, you know, it's like,
it's like Deadwood, you
ever watched Deadwood,
the TV show, where
like they're building up
the frontier town?
Okay, it was like Deadwood back then,
it was the Wild West, you know?
I mean, they're
feeding the hogs, you know,
with competitors, I mean, it
was crazy what was going on.

(01:17:52):
And now it's like,
everything's corporate,
they're teaching all
this stuff in schools,
you have to have, I mean, you know,
they're established best practices,
there are things that you have to do.
And then you have these
huge dinosaurs out here,
like Amazon and Chewy, who
don't have to make a profit
on every single order.
And we're the little bitty
rats down here, you know,
in the crevices,
getting our little crumbs,
and it's like, but you can make it.
I mean, you can figure
out what your niche is,

(01:18:13):
you can figure out
who your customers are.
There are people who
are willing to support
real American businesses,
they wanna buy American products,
they wanna deal with real people,
that when they call,
they don't wanna phone tree,
or AI operators, they
wanna talk to Steve,
or one of my phone guys, you know,
you were talking about
authenticity earlier,
it's like, they wanna
know that the people
that they're buying from have the

(01:18:35):
solution to their problem.
And that's our advantage,
as entrepreneurs and small
business people, you know,
your advantage is take
your product knowledge
and leverage that to the web,
and don't pretend to be
somebody, be who you are,
and take care of folks and help them
solve their problems,
and they will pay you.
- 100%, 100%.

(01:18:55):
Speaking of dinosaurs,
do you wanna share your
emotional support dinosaur?
- Yes, yes. - To the audience?
- Oh my gosh, this is an allosaurus made
by my friend Eduardo
in Mexico, and it is
a full, professional,
stop-motion dinosaur,
and he doesn't have to make a profit.
He could spend $300 on
customer acquisition,
while Rob's running around, oh, you know,
he's just eating up all
the different, you know,

(01:19:15):
he sits at top, PLA, he sits on top,
he's got six ads running
that cost him $300 a customer
to get customers, and so I
keep him around to remind me
that I have to watch out
for, you know, Jeff Bezos.
- Fantastic.
Fantastic.
So your parents started the business,
they've gone through some different eras,

(01:19:35):
like at what point do
you and your brother
kind of take over the
reins of things, like from--
- Yeah, we had two things happen,
my mom was probably 60, 62
when the e-commerce stuff
started taking off, and
she was still working in her,
you know, selling the dog food at the,
we call it the dog store then,
to take the word gun out to

(01:19:56):
appeal to regular dog people.
So she was still like selling dog food
and had a couple of
people working for her,
and she was just swamped, she was too old
to be processing this many orders
and talking to customers and, you know,
doing email and stuff,
so my brother took over,
probably in 2000, 2001
he took over fulfillment,
and so we moved it up here inside
of one of our comic book stores,
and dude, we had a huge

(01:20:16):
store, we had 4,000 square feet,
you know, on the main drag in Starkville,
that was our big store,
and we put the gun
dog supply in the back,
and it was, it's
funny, I wish I could see,
I wish I could see, you
know, a video of how quickly
we pushed the comic books
completely out of the building.
We started off in this little closet,
took over the whole side of the building,

(01:20:38):
and then we put it in
the back of the building,
and so we had 20 feet, you know,
of order processing in the back,
and by the time we were done,
the comic books were taking
up maybe 10% of that building,
and so we ended up
completely moving the comics,
yeah, to another location, you know,
just because it just took over.
And then, you know, so
Steve was doing the fulfillment,

(01:20:59):
and the comic book
industry collapsed in the late 90s
and kind of morphed into like, you know,
you could buy
collectible card games like Magic,
you could buy role-playing games like
Dungeons and Dragons.
People were still
buying some sports cards,
but the comics are
kind of like, you know,
it didn't really die
because they're still here,
but it's like there are probably two or
3000 comic retailers,
you know, at the low
point in the direct market in,

(01:21:20):
yeah, on the, in the United States.
So we kind of, we saw the
writing on the wall there,
and then the internet was coming along.
- So how did you separate, kind of,
how did you separate, kind of,
what's the division of labor?
Like, how did you, I would imagine,
is it complicated at times,
like being in business
with your brother, like,
- Oh, dude, yeah, the
family business aspect.

(01:21:41):
Yeah, so we started out where it's like,
it was once somebody hits
add to cart and place order,
that becomes my brother's problem.
Okay, so he was in charge
of all customer service.
Let me go back a step.
He's actually the
product knowledge expert
as far as the dog training
and tracking collars we sell.
He actually does work for free

(01:22:01):
for these huge billion dollar companies
who develop these products.
They give them to him and
two or three of his buddies,
and they beat the crap
out of these products
and tell them what's wrong,
and it saves them a
generation or two in development costs.
They're able to kind of leapfrog
because he actually says,
"This won't work when you're in Texas.
You know, your dog's in a low spot.
This won't work.
Do this.
This collar's too tight."
You know, that kind of stuff.

(01:22:21):
So he brings that to the table
as far as like, he's got hunting dogs.
He does mostly bird hunting,
which is probably about
20% of our hunting customers.
But he will go duck hunting if he has to,
you know, to take me.
But he is the dog guy.
I mean, he trains dogs.
He's not a professional
trainer, but he's got 17 dogs,

(01:22:41):
and he can't afford to send
those all to a dog trainer.
He's got to know how to
train dogs, and he does.
And he's really good at it.
He could be a pro dog
trainer if he wanted to.
So he takes care of the product aspect
and the customer service.
You know, somebody
calls and has a question,
and they start talking to me.
It's like, I can talk to
him about where your stuff is,
but if they start
talking about the, you know,
well, I've got this
second generation alpha,
and it's not talking with

(01:23:02):
this third generation collar.
My brother knows what the update is,
and so him and his product guys,
I mean, they have that covered.
I'm more of the
marketing and the tech side,
and the how do we make
money with this side.
Used to be I did the,
I just did the production on the website
and the marketing stuff,

(01:23:23):
and some of the IT stuff like the order
management software,
but my people kind of handle that.
And for 20 years, Steve ran the company,
and he was basically riding this thing,
and my job is to grow it.
You know, and back when I
was chasing my now wife,
Melanie, for 10 years, I was on the road.
I lived in Mississippi part of the time,
and I was chasing my
dot com girl for 10 years.

(01:23:46):
And I loved it,
because man, it was great.
I could do, it was my
idea of being retired.
I could work as much as I wanted to,
or as much as I had to.
Dude, I could day drink.
I had my laptop at the
beach in Fort Lauderdale
when she was working for Chewy, you know?
And I could be working on marketing
campaigns or whatever.
And then I'd go for a
five mile walk on the beach,
or then I'd go to the
swamp and take pictures
of all these cool

(01:24:07):
alligators and birds and stuff.
And then I, oh no, I gotta go back,
the server's down or
whatever the problem was.
So for about 10 years, I was doing that.
And then Melanie was working for Chewy,
and she was, they had
fired whoever's doing
their search stuff or
didn't even really have anybody
doing their search engine optimization.
And she was looking for
something after Microsoft.

(01:24:27):
So she called them up, and
they'd called her before,
but she ended up going down there
and kinda starting their
search and content strategy.
And so it was crazy,
somebody who's in the,
like I was saying, we're in the (beep)
not (beep) ish, we don't get
too specific with our sales,
but we're in that kind of ballpark.

(01:24:48):
Compared to a, somebody
doing $7 billion in sales,
I mean, it's just like the,
they're orders of
magnitude larger than us.
So it was really cool seeing,
the pet industry from that perspective.
I mean, it just blew my mind
how much of everything
they sell, it's crazy.
But about three years ago now,

(01:25:08):
my brother had some health problems.
He had a 99% blockage in
his widow maker in his heart.
It should have killed him,
but he's in like
Olympic athlete level shape
because he trains all
year long to go on these,
on these hunting trips, run these dogs.
He hadn't done that, he'd be dead.
And for 20 years, he'd been saying,
hey, if you think you
can do it better yourself,
knock yourself out.
And I'd always been like, nope, not me.

(01:25:30):
(laughing) You know, I mean,
that's like, that's a trap.
Brer Rabbit saying,
come on in the briar patch,
it's great in here, you know?
But it was a situation, it
was kind of my worst nightmare.
It's like, what happens to the business
if something happens to him?
Because it's like, he's
the product knowledge expert.
He is the guy who is the operations guy.

(01:25:51):
You know, this is his
team, he runs this stuff.
And I kind of got put in a situation
where I had to come in
here and run this thing.
And it wasn't my team, it
was a team that he built.
And so that was a challenge
as far as like figuring out
everybody else's relationship to me.
Because I used to be Darth
Vader coming in the building,
wanting to know why we
were doing something some way.
You know, I had a reputation for like,
for, you know, your
department just got robbed.

(01:26:11):
You know, I'd come in
and go, why is this?
You know, I just find
stuff that's, you know,
not the way I would like it.
Yeah.
And I learned that's
not the way to do it.
And over about 18 months, you know,
we transitioned from
the folks that we had
to the folks that we have now.
And man, I got my team now, dude.

(01:26:31):
These are my, and these are mostly people
that I hired in the first place.
So it's really, it's a
really killer crew that I've got.
So now I'm CEO, I've got, you know,
almost 50 people rolling
up into me, which is crazy.
You told Rob three years ago that he's
gonna be doing this.
And he'd be like, you are on drugs.
If we hadn't had a conversation in Las
Vegas in 2009 or 10,

(01:26:51):
no way would have said, well, you're
gonna have 50 people
reporting to you, Rob.
It would have just been like, you know,
yes, no, I'm not, I don't, I
have an art major background,
dude, I had one employee and it's like,
I was trying to find stuff for her to do.
Drunken monkey style is
how they refer to what I do.
Okay.
It's not a process.
It's what do I feel like doing?
I have ADHD.

(01:27:12):
Okay.
I have to construct my
environment in such a way
that I can operate.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I've got, you know, I've got,
I can work in four hour chunks.
No, I just, I just know
what I need to operate in.
And it's not something
where I have to be somewhere
every day at eight
o'clock until five o'clock.
And I have to have me,
we don't have meetings.
You know, we meet up in the

(01:27:33):
hall and man, everybody loves it.
We save so much time not having meetings.
If you need somebody, go grab them.
You know, they're only like,
I have like five
managers and two other people
that kind of report to me kind of,
but they really work for somebody else.
And if they need me, they
come get me or they text me.
You know, it's real, it's
not super, super informal,
but it's not corporate.

(01:27:54):
You know, Melanie had a
hard time wrapping her head
or around the way.
She's like, CEOs don't do this.
I'm like, well, this CEO does.
We just basically had to
re-figure our relationship
because it was, you know,
yin yang, you do the left side.
I do the right side.
You stay on your side of the fence.
I stay on my side of the fence.
And with Melanie coming in, you know,
I couldn't afford to pay, you know,
Melanie Mitchell, now
Melanie Snell, my wife,

(01:28:15):
I could not afford to pay her chewy money
or Microsoft money or AOL money.
This girl's used to
having a billion dollar
marketing budget, okay?
A billion dollar marketing budget.
She used to be in wine
and dine by these, you know,
all these tool companies.
And, you know, she
flies all over the world
and eats five star cuisine.
And here she is in
Starkville, Mississippi,
you know, hanging out with me.

(01:28:35):
You know, I think she's nearsighted.
I don't know how I did
that, but dude, thumbs up.
No, it's like, there's no
way I could afford to pay her.
- You definitely married up my friend.
You definitely married up.
- Yes, so I had to, absolutely.
And so I had to marry her
to get her in the company
and it worked, I
trapped her, she tricked her.
She's mine now.
And now she's my CMO.
And so, you know, working with your
spouse is challenging.

(01:28:57):
Almost as challenging as
working with your brother.
So I'm in this, you
know, you gotta be, you know,
it's challenging at times.
Absolutely, absolutely.
There's a lot of communication,
some of which you might
not wanna hear, you know,
but a lot of communication.
And so she was taking over
some of my marketing stuff
and it was the first
time I'd ever had anybody
who was actually
putting money in the bucket,
not taking money out of the bucket.

(01:29:19):
So that for me was like a revelation.
I mean, I've had agencies before,
but they're basically
doing what I, you know,
tell them to do with
my ads, which are like,
they're parroting what
I say on the website.
They're not really
doing, they're not going out
and finding new customers
that I wasn't getting before.
They may be better at it, you know,
more efficient than I was.
But this is the first
time she's like writing ads
for customers.
She's like, we need to be
going after some of these
non-pet customers because, I mean,

(01:29:40):
non-hunting customers,
these pet customers,
because they're 200 times as many as them
as there are hunting dogs.
And so, and she's like, we got to get
that gun out of here.
We got to come up
with something, you know,
I call it dead raccoon.
It's like just, you know,
tone down the dead raccoon
on the website, you know,
it's like this, this doesn't,
you know, the pet parents
don't dig this, you know,
this side of the business.
We have a lot of people who apologize.

(01:30:01):
They say, I don't hunt,
but I love your collars
and I love the things that you sell.
I'm sorry, I don't hunt,
but I'm going to buy
these collars anyway,
because they're so good.
- And I'm surprised you
haven't spun some of that stuff off
anyway in terms of, in terms of products.
So speaking of that,
what's your favorite product
that you've ever created?
- The big dog collar.

(01:30:22):
This is the, we sell
regular dog collars too,
not just tracking
collars and training collars.
And so my parents
started out making these,
and this is where, you
know, 12 year old Rob would be
freaking out if he told
me, hey, you're getting back
in the dog collar making
business, because it's not,
you know, most people
are getting these things
made in China.
We make these in
America, dude, with Americans.

(01:30:43):
So it's American, you know,
this is an American material.
You know, now the
hardware is probably Chinese,
because you can't get, you know,
but we started selling these collars.
And one of the things
that I wanted to get across
in this interview was
that you need to maximize
the opportunities that
come to you as a shrew,
living in the time of the dinosaurs,
you don't get a ton of opportunities.

(01:31:04):
And when you do, you need to be all in.
You need to triple down on these things,
and you'll know it when it comes.
And if it's a fast ball
coming down the middle,
you just lean into
that sucker and you swing.
And that has saved us
probably five or six times
over the past 20 years, when so many
things are changing,
Google's taking more of
your money, people can spend,
you know, competitors can
spend $300 to get a customer
when you can spend 30.

(01:31:25):
I mean, it's crazy.
So one of the things
that we decided to do
was starting to make some
of the stuff that we sell.
All right, you're a middle man.
You know, 20 years
ago, you could add value
by being the best middle man there was,
but those days are gone.
These manufacturers can
sell direct just as well,
or just as easily as you can nowadays.
And there's no barrier to
entry for new guys coming in.

(01:31:48):
And after this podcast,
there'll probably be
another gun dog supply ripoff.
Like every time I speak at PubCon,
there'd be three or
four gun dog supply clones
that would pop up.
And they used to just like chat me,
but I was like, you know,
that's the highest compliment.
And it's hard, dude.
And it's like, there'd be
better looking sites than ours.
They'd be better designed,
or it'd be somebody
who's a super dog expert,
and their site would

(01:32:08):
look like a joke, you know?
And we can kind of sit in
the middle where we've got,
okay, our site's not the
best looking site in the world,
but dude, it converts.
It converts.
I have a wrinkly old $100 bill.
You got a brand new
freshly minted $1 bill.
Which one do you want, Ethan?
You know, give me Ben Franklin.
- Yeah, no, that's true.
And it all spends the same.
It all spends the same.

(01:32:29):
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- All right, well, let's, you know,
we're kind of dipping into some things.
Let's talk about the
site a little bit, right?
- All right, I'm ready.
I'm prepared.
Like I said, I got my
emotional support dinosaur here
in case you say something
mean about my web design.
(laughing) - Your brother has guns and
knows where I live, so I--
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- We don't need that either,

(01:32:50):
but let's talk about the simplisticness
of what you're doing, right?
There's no doubt that a
lot of brands and e-tailers
have evolved.
You guys are still on Yahoo, I think.
- Yep, 25 years.
- This is the last
thousand stores on Yahoo Shopping.
- Yep, for sure.

(01:33:10):
- So talk a little bit
about the simplicity.
There's a lot of things that are so
authentic and genuine
with what you have.
I am curious, like, for you
to kind of talk a little bit
about, like, that, but I'm
also curious of, you know,
for somebody that's
creative and other things
that you've kind of,
you've definitely boxed that in

(01:33:31):
in terms of the
technology that you utilize.
- Yeah, the reason-- - So--
- I'll be completely honest with you.
In 2000, back when I
was chasing dot com girls,
in 2004, I went to play on Monster
Commerce Volleyball Team.
I built a, I had an affiliate
site that I still have today
that sells baseball bats.
We cloned his store, I put her on a
Monster Commerce site.

(01:33:51):
My Yahoo store did four to
one with the same traffic,
conversion wise, revenue wise.
And I was like, there's
something to this Yahoo store.
They're doing some stuff right
that web hosts don't understand.
- Man, I hate to get into specifics
because I've got one or two
competitors who are really good
and I don't want to give them--
- No, we don't have to
get into specifics about it,

(01:34:12):
but let's talk a little bit
about what your tech stuff is.
- Yeah, yeah, I use Yahoo store,
which is now bought by Turbify.
It's been, it's almost
like fifth owner now,
but it is an ancient, you know,
it's RTML is the templating language.
It basically, it uses
a templating language
to generate HTML pages.
So anything that you want
to do in HTML, you can do.
I'm not reliant upon the platform itself

(01:34:35):
for anything other than being this thing
that generates HTML
and that has, you know,
and that has a shopping cart.
I can customize the shopping cart.
There's so much stuff
in there that I can do
that I can't do in the
backend of like a big commerce store
or Shopify where they
lock everything down,
which I completely
understand why they do that.
But I've just got, there's
just things that I can do
that increase my conversion
rate to the point where it's,

(01:34:57):
I don't think I can
afford to go somewhere else.
I don't want to be the
frog in the pot, you know,
where they're like, all
right, soup's on, here's Rob.
He's been cooking for 25 years.
Dude, we're pretty nimble.
If you told me that I
had to be off this platform
and up and running on big
commerce or Shopify on Monday,
I could be up over the weekend.
You know, I'm not, you
know, under any illusion
that my sales would be the same, but

(01:35:17):
dude, we move quick.
And I got like four or five people who
are like super ninjas.
So we can, you know, if I got to go,
I got, if it's time to go, we can go.
But I've just gotten the
conversion rate that is so high.
Both desktop and, you
know, man, if you told me
I was getting five, six, 7%
conversion rate on desktop
10 years ago, I'd be like, I'm rich.

(01:35:38):
I got a plane.
I would, you know, I wouldn't realize
that nobody's on desktop anymore.
And mobile, it's like, you
know, three, 4% conversion rate
on a mobile site.
I mean, that's pretty
good, isn't it, Ethan?
I mean, I don't see the numbers
because I'm not consulting
with hundreds of people anymore.
But I think 3% on mobile is something
that a lot of people
would be happy to get, you know?

(01:35:58):
And we have, you know,
thousands and thousands
and thousands of
people a day on our website.
I don't want to say how
many, but you can, you know,
people can figure it out
with Spotify or whatever.
Yeah, and it's funny.
I mean, you know, I think
about it, you know, I think,
and you need to do
what works for you, right?
Like, so--
Absolutely, if you're a
high end brand, you know.
Kind of continuing the,

(01:36:19):
let's just, so kind of,
we're going to go back
a walk down memory lane
a little bit here.
So you're using the
Yahoo stores for your cart.
You've got MailChimp
for your email marketing.
You're using Stone Edge for
your order management system.
So I assume you have a server in the
office, like running--
Yep, a big old, yeah, big old host, yeah.

(01:36:41):
You know, I, again,
that's, I haven't come,
we haven't come across
that in quite some time,
you know, admittedly.
But you're using, you're
using what works for you, right?
And that's the most
important part of all of that.
You know, I do kind of
on the other side of that,
and again, I mean, I
sell sites for a living,
but, you know, I do

(01:37:02):
think there are components
within your site that are
so authentic and genuine
that they would definitely translate.
They're more content, right?
So it's Steve's picks.
Like, you're kind of, like, all of,
you do more content
creation and more authenticness
with your products
than almost anyone else

(01:37:23):
that I see at your level of store size.
I appreciate that, yeah.
And I think that it's a good thing to leave.
Well, that's the only thing we got, dude.
Yeah, I mean, my dad died in 2003,
and that's when my mom
took us on as partners,
which I didn't get to that.
And six months into that, before I went
to Monster Commerce,
you know, our sales flipped.
There's this chasm that

(01:37:43):
when you go from, you know,
$2 million to $3 million in sales,
you need a $5 million infrastructure
to be able to process
all those orders accurately
and do all this kind of stuff.
And I see all my
consulting clients go through it.
I see my friends go through it.
It is a nightmare jump in that chasm,
and a lot of people don't make it.
You either shrink
your business, you know,
or you go out of business
because you make so many people
mad because you screw their orders up.

(01:38:04):
And that's where we were.
We were upside down.
We had about 18 months where it was like,
we don't know if we're gonna make it
because we're self-financed, you know?
So that was when we
said, what is the only thing?
We don't control anything
other than the world's supply
of Rob and Steve Snell.
That's all we control, you know?
We're selling other
people's stuff, you know?
We don't control the
advertising side of it.
We don't control what

(01:38:24):
our competitors are doing.
What do we have that we can leverage?
And it was Steve's knowledge, you know?
And it was my ability to let,
I'm the space shuttle delivery system.
He's the payload.
I can get him into orbit.
And that is the secret to our success.
And I tell everybody,
you know, find your Steve.
Find somebody, find the person,
the champion for what you sell.
It may not be the owner.
It may not be you.

(01:38:45):
It's not me for sure.
You know, Steve kicks the bucket.
I gotta go find somebody
who's an expert on this stuff.
You know?
- Hopefully that
doesn't happen anytime soon.
- Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
But, you know, that's all we had.
And so I've had a hard
time finding other platforms
that have the ability to customize.
I can write an RTML
template literally right now

(01:39:06):
while we're talking, you know,
text it to my IT guy who can like,
he could code it super fast.
I still code a little bit.
But I was like, I need a list
of all the things on our site
that don't have pictures that are bigger
than this dimension.
Boop!
You know?
30 seconds later, he's got me a list.
You know what I mean?
It's just all kinds of
stuff that you can do.
I need everything that,
where Steve's picks is a yes,

(01:39:27):
and it does not have a Steve says on it.
Boop!
Here's a list of stuff,
you know, for my AI to write.
No, I'm just kidding.
We don't use AI.
You know, it's an ancient platform.
It's like you said,
there's probably less than
a thousand people using the platform now.
It got bought by a big company,
and they plan to do some stuff with it,
and they're slowly but surely, you know,

(01:39:47):
rolling some stuff out.
But we're at that, at some point,
if it shrinks much more, it's not viable,
it doesn't have enough
resources to support it.
We'll have to move, and
I'll have to figure out a way
to do Steve's picks on
BigCommerce or Shopify.
You know?
And it's like, I just, it
was very difficult for me
to find an easy way to do that,
other than these, you
know, tons and tons of uploads.

(01:40:08):
You know?
I couldn't add like a yes,
no switch on the product level
where I could go, Steve's pick, yes,
and it puts a flag on there that said,
that appears on the product
level and on the category level,
you know?
- Well, some of that's more accessible
now, you know, right?
Some of that's more accessible now
with things called meta fields,
and you know, you can kind of create
a lot of customizations around that

(01:40:29):
that are all dynamically
driven out of the catalog.
You can upload those customers, you know,
you can upload into those fields
as you're kind of making edits now.
So there's always nuance
with every platform, but--
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- You know, I do have
a curiosity of like,
your authenticness, if you paired it
with some more modern technology,
things like, you know, like a Klaviyo
or something that like

(01:40:50):
allows you to kind of trigger
and automate more of
what you're doing, right?
- We're looking, we're actually talking
to Klaviyo right now.
When MailChimp, you
know, jacked their rates up
because Intuit bought them,
and now they're like, you know,
inflationizing everything.
Oh no, we have a 30%
increase, you know, in the cost.
I'm like, going, okay, I can
afford to switch to Klaviyo,

(01:41:11):
but we had migrated so
many things at that point,
you know, platforms, it's like,
that's the last thing that
I'm gonna do to my IT guy
to save $2,000 or $5,000 or whatever.
I was like, I'll just, let's suck it up.
And you know, I hate it.
Cause I told everybody,
you know, 13, 14 months ago,
get off a MailChimp and
here I am still using it.
- We've got a great ebook,
MailChimp versus Klaviyo.
I'll send you a copy. - There you go.

(01:41:31):
Oh, that would be awesome.
In exchange for your email address,
Ethan will be happy to give you.
- It's very popular, by the way.
It's very popular.
- I hope it has a lot of pictures.
(laughing)
- So, you know, so, all right.
So thinking about
technology, like I don't wanna harp,

(01:41:52):
I don't wanna harp on
that, but I, you know,
I am curious, like, where do you go next?
And I think that you should, as you,
like if I'm looking at
built with and seeing
that my technology,
there was once 250,000,
I think people running my technology,
and now there's 1,076.
- Yeah, it was like
60,000, I think was the peak

(01:42:12):
of the value stores.
- Maybe that was the peak.
- And it's like, then Shopify came,
they should have been
Shopify, but, you know,
they missed the boat.
Yeah, I know it does
concern you, but it's like,
the thing is, I know the engineers who
are working on this,
I have their phone numbers.
I text them.
I actually have more
access than I ever did before,
even when I was, you know,
the guy who wrote the book
on Yahoo store, you know what I mean?

(01:42:33):
If I, I have a question, they're like,
"Quit posting about this,
it's in the next build."
Or, "Go read the
email I sent you last week
"with the store notes, Rob."
We fixed this thing that
you've been bitching about
for whatever, you know?
I mean, I have three or
four engineers who are friends
who are on the thing.
I got a customer
service rep who's fantastic.
I know, you know, I know that people--

(01:42:54):
- You're probably one of
their biggest customers
at this point.
- Probably, I'm
probably the oldest for sure.
I don't think I'm the
biggest, but I'm definitely the guy
who's been on the platform the longest.
And, you know, like I
said, I can do stuff with it.
Right now, I have a Shopify
store that I'm paying rent on
and a big commerce store
that I'm paying rent on
that are still stuck in development.
You know, oh no, I became the CEO.

(01:43:14):
I don't have the mental
bandwidth to do anything
other than like ride this thing.
And I've been doing this for
like two and a half years now.
So I'm like, okay, I'm in
the, I got time to do a podcast
phase of my CEO career, you know?
And so they see me
doing this and they're like,
"Where's my standalone
big dog collar store?"
That's what they're saying yesterday.
You got time to talk to Ethan,

(01:43:35):
you got time to make us a store.
So we are putting our
little toe in some new things.
You know, P-PAW is exploring.
P-PAW's got Snapchat, you know?
(laughing)
- I've got so many more questions.
I've got so many more questions for you.
All right, so, you know,
yeah, you met, you know,

(01:43:56):
about 10 years ago.
So, you know, right, like I think we met
just after the book had
come out for a few years.
So I think it was 2008 in Vegas probably.
- Yep, yep.
- That you and I met at WIN.
They had this little,
great little lounge.
I think it was called
Blush or Bliss or something
that was like an ultra
lounge in there that was great.

(01:44:16):
We would all hang in
there and have a great time.
And so it was just after
that, you were very popular.
You were starting to
do a lot of keynotes,
very dynamic and
authentic in your presentations
of telling your story and what you
thought was important.
And then you just kind of
pulled back at one point

(01:44:38):
and stopped even attending shows.
You know, and I'm just
kind of curious of, you know,
what created that shift?
What, you know, and you know,
I know that I kind of asked you
from a friendship
standpoint to take your time today
to spend with me, but
like, what created you to shift

(01:44:59):
and pull back and make that change
where you didn't want to present
or talk about what
you were doing anymore?
- Yeah, there were
some competition issues
as far as like, I could
see people who were copying
what I was doing and that
would kind of, you know,
my dad would never talk
about any of this stuff.
Some of the things I've
told you in this podcast,
he's rolling over his grave right now,

(01:45:19):
but some of it's like, you can figure out
what we're doing by
the size of the company.
You know, I got 50 employees.
You can kind of do
some math and go, okay,
they got to be this big.
Some of it was that, but I
mean, to be completely honest,
it was, you know, I got Melanie,
I got what I was looking for.
You know, I was
looking for a dot com girl.
I'm in Starkville, Mississippi, you know,
the Dayton pool's kind of thin, you know,
if you're 40 years old, a

(01:45:40):
whole bunch of 20 year olds,
but that ain't nothing
good coming from that, Ethan.
Nothing.
No, but I was like, you know,
and I would just meet
really interesting people
at these events and it was great.
The networking, I recommend that anybody
who's interested in
speaking professionally,
you know, within their industry, do that

(01:46:00):
just for the contacts that you make.
I mean, I got Matt
Cutts phone number, dude.
You know, how much
was that worth in 2008?
You know, he invited me out to Google
and gave me the tour and it was great.
You know, we're not like best friends,
but you just get access to people
because I can help him with some stuff,
you know, in my little way,
and he can help me with some stuff.
When we had a whole
platform issues with SEO stuff,

(01:46:21):
I would just meet people
that would be doing keynotes
and like in the green room, you know,
getting to hang out with you.
I'm talking shop with you.
You're telling me stuff that
you probably wouldn't tell.
Rob Snell, you know, convention goer
who just comes up to you and goes,
"What's the best mobile
conversion rate you've ever seen?"
You know, I mean, the other
thing is that there was a lot of,

(01:46:41):
hey, give me some free consulting,
and I'm sure you get that, you know,
people who don't want
to pay for your time.
And that kind of like
would rub me the wrong way
because I would help some
people, but then it's like,
you know, no good deed goes unpunished
and you kind of get sucked
into some pro bono things
that are weird.
But the reality was, is
I started dating Melanie
and I was like, this is great.
This is what I was, you know,

(01:47:02):
I was looking for someone, you know,
financially and
intellectually in a weight class
that was more similar to where I was
and what I was wanting to do.
And that's where, you
know, I mean, she was,
she was the corporate version.
I was a small business version
of almost the same
kind of person, you know?
- Right, right.
- And so, and I got her, she's mine.

(01:47:22):
I married her, she ain't going nowhere.
And now we're talking
about retiring together.
- I would say that
many people were surprised
that both of us got married.
- Yeah, oh dude, you did great.
You did, you were so proud of you, dude.
I caught your, I got the
tail into your wild side.
I was like, you know,
we gotta sell Ethan down.
Ethan's not gonna make it.

(01:47:44):
- One of the infamous, we were,
Rob and I were presenting in Vegas
and I'll share just a
funny story of like, you know,
we were presenting the
morning session at PubCon
the next morning and I
think it was like a 9 or 10 a.m.
session and we're
looking down at our watches
and it's like four or 4.30 in the morning
and we're like kind of over-served

(01:48:05):
is the best way to probably describe it
and we were like, we're just
gonna get the wind bathrobes
and where, it was Rob
and I doing a co-session
and we were like, what, you know,
what will they say, the
powers that be, say at PubCon
if you and I show up to our

(01:48:26):
session in the wind bathrobes
and we actually had a,
for as hungover as we were,
I think we were like
still on fumes and had,
I remember that we
actually had so much fun
with the audience that day
that people were in tears
and just had a great,
very open conversation
about all kinds of stuff and you know.

(01:48:47):
- It was the best rated
show we've ever done, Ethan.
Yes, we should have done the bathroom.
They wouldn't fit though, dude.
You got your barrel chest, you know,
I was like, oh, I can't make this fit.
I'm gonna have to get an
extender on my bathroom.
- Well, you know, I had to, you know,
I was 50 pounds heavier than,
so I would have to sew
two bathrobes together.
- Yeah, me too, me too.
- To make it work.
So you guys, I also know that you

(01:49:09):
expanded your facilities
pretty significantly.
- Oh, dude.
- In the last bunch of years, so.
- Yeah, this is one
of those opportunities.
They wanted 400 grand for us to expand.
We bought a building in
Starkville in the industrial park
and we had, it was two buildings.
One was like 11,000 square feet
and one was 4,000 square feet.

(01:49:29):
And they wanted 400
grand for us to put bathrooms
and offices in the second building.
It wasn't really, you know, filled out.
Between all the stuff that you have to do
because you're in the city limits,
all the code stuff you gotta meet,
the ones you put in, fire extinguishers,
and not, you know, most
of that's pretty good.
But then when you build a retaining pond
and just all this, you
know, the stuff that,
I mean, dude, we're in Mississippi.
There are not a ton of laws,

(01:49:49):
but sometimes these
municipalities get these ideas.
So my brother's like, 400 grand?
It's like, we can do
it, but it's just like,
this doesn't seem like what we wanna do.
And for 30 years, we've
been driving past the building
we're in now, which is about 19 miles
away from Starkville.
And I remember going, man, one day,
maybe I'll have a building like this.
Oh, there you go, there you go.
And dude, there was a sign

(01:50:09):
out front that said, make offer.
(laughing)
And they had, I mean, it was like,
it looked like a nightmare on the inside.
It had been vacant for 20 years,
right after they built it, NAFTA passed.
So Vanity Fair is a
plant that made men's jeans
and military uniforms, and

(01:50:30):
they made it their showroom.
Hey, this is Mississippi,
this is not a sweatshop.
This is actually, you
know, a very, I mean,
they built that, they built it out.
And two years later, NAFTA passed,
and they were like, we can
pay people what, an hour?
All right, sorry, Mississippi, bloop.
And they just locked the doors and sent
everybody to Mexico,
and they lost all these jobs around here.

(01:50:51):
And they had 300, 400
people working in this plant,
if it tells you how big
it was, 72,000 square feet.
So it was five times the size,
four or five times
the size of what we had.
But it was like, it was,
you would have to gut it
and like do a ton of work on it.
And long story short, you know,
I paid less for that
building than I paid to do a,

(01:51:12):
than what it would have
cost for me to pimp out
that other building with that 400,
plus another thing we were gonna do.
So it was like, it was like less than
half a million, dude.
I got 72,000 square foot building.
And we put like a million,
million and a half into it.
And it's, you know,
it's pretty good, you know?
And it gave us room to
expand into manufacturing.
And that's the, but
no, but it's great, man.

(01:51:32):
It's like the town,
there's 600 people who live here.
You know, they thought
we're bringing 400 jobs in.
And we were like, no, no, no, no, no.
I don't want any more employees.
I want fewer employees, you know?
I'm not trying to get up to 400,
but they let the mayor
was mowing our grass.
Like when it froze down here
during one of the ice storms,
they brought the, they
brought a front loader down here
and they were scraping the
parking lot so we could get in.

(01:51:53):
We had the water main break.
It was our fault on our side of the line.
They had the city people
down here with pipe wrenches.
I mean, it's great in a small town.
The cops look out for you, you know?
And we've hired, you know,
a bunch of people from
around here, you know?
It's just being in a small town.
They appreciate the jobs, dude.
It's, you know, and they
appreciate not having an eyesore
on their highway.

(01:52:14):
It's the biggest
building in town, you know?
It looks nice now.
It doesn't look like, you know,
haunted hill or whatever
the movie would be, you know?
So dude, copper thieves came in.
One of my little nephews
used to party out here.
All the high school kids would break in.
Little nephew had keys on his key ring
to the front door and to the office
because he's an urban explorer, you know?

(01:52:36):
And he knew where everything was.
We came in, the
realtor's showing us the building
and the realtor's like,
"All these high school kids,
blah, blah, blah."
And I see Sam written across,
written right behind him
where my nephew had
written his name on the roof.
It was great.
But yeah, when
opportunities come by like that,
you need to take advantage of them.

(01:52:56):
You know, we bought some companies.
And I say that and it's
like, that sounds highfalutin'.
We didn't.
We paid $50,000 for somebody's equipment
and their patterns and
their overstock inventory.
And they, you know,
people are tired of making,
you know, dog beds.
Or, you know,
somebody, a sofa manufacturer
closed their plant here
and they used to make dog
beds, you know, with the scraps.

(01:53:18):
We didn't buy a company.
We bought the rights to make
the dog beds, but you know,
and now we have a sewing room.
We have 10 sewing machines.
We got, you know, people making dog beds.
You just need to take
advantage of these opportunities.
You need to keep looking.
You know, you need to be
the guy making what you sell.
It's like, you don't need to be selling
other people's stuff.
So you have somewhat,
some control over this.
I had a competitor who was

(01:53:39):
selling these things that,
you go to LL Bean and buy one of these
dog training dummies,
which I can't reach over and grab one,
but they're boat bumpers.
They're things to keep
your boat off the dock, okay?
- Right.
- Retrievers use them to train their dog
to go get a duck and bring it back.
And people need a lot of them.
You know, LL Bean will sell you
one of these things for 10 bucks.
You know, we sell them for
five bucks because, you know,

(01:54:00):
they need them.
And I use it kind of as
a draw to get people in.
I had a competitor
selling them for $2.99.
And I'm like, how in the
heck is this guy getting these,
you know, he can't be making
any money, but he made me mad.
And so I did some digging into it.
I actually found the place on Alibaba
where he was buying
his, you know, his dummies.
And it turns out that I have a guy
who has a relationship with this factory.

(01:54:20):
So a couple of phone calls later,
we're in the dummy business.
I have a container of
these coming over, you know,
every six months.
And now I'm selling $3 dummies
and making more than my margin.
- Right.
- And so that's been
my job is like, look at,
there's still meat on the bone.
Everywhere in your
business, there's meat on the bone.
There's meat on the bone in payroll.
You have people who are working for you
who may not be doing what they're
supposed to be doing.

(01:54:41):
And they may need to go
seek other opportunities.
You know, you have people,
you have overtime that you're paying
in the slow time of the year.
You need to, you know, you have
manufacturers and vendors
who are not competitive.
You know, my new warehouse
manager, she got me a 50%.
She's saving me on my boxes.
She cut my boxes in half,

(01:55:02):
just by going to another vendor saying,
I need better pricing on these.
We were spending $30,000 a
year on those air bubbles,
you know, that you see
people ship stuff with.
She and my
manufacturer manager got together
and they bought for $5,000.
They bought a
cardboard shredder that cards,
the shreds of the cardboard
that the vendor's boxes coming to me,
that I was paying 600
bucks a month to get carted off
because we can't get
recycling here in the boonies.

(01:55:23):
They grind that up and it's
nice little packing material.
So I'm saving $30,000 on
air bubbles and for $5,000.
And I'm saving 600 bucks a month
for a second dumpster pickup.
You know, it's like,
there's meat on the bone.
You can find that stuff in there.
There's margin in there.
You can call your
manufacturers up and go,
hey, I need a better price on this.
What do I need to do to make, you know,

(01:55:44):
to buy more stuff and
to get a better discount?
What close outs do you have?
You know, learn from my clients.
I just like every single client I went to
would have one or two things
that they did way better than us.
And I would just kind of cherry pick
all those little bitty things
and kind of stick it onto
my stack of stuff that we do.
And finding close outs and
deals is one of those things.
Buying people's end of the year
inventory, you know.

(01:56:05):
You know, the building was one of those.
One thing that I haven't talked about
is figuring out people to
partner with on a content thing.
And if I got a little bit more time,
can I talk about that?
- We've got lots more time.
- And y'all can edit this
down or you can make it,
you can do whatever you need to do.
So one of the things that
we have a lot of access to
is that 1% of our customers are
professional dog trainers.

(01:56:26):
They need this stuff.
They want it fast.
They know we sell it at good prices.
They know we ship reliably.
And so we have a ton of
folks who shop with us
who are professional dog trainers.
And over the years, you get
to know some of these folks
and some of these folks
that had some programs
and they're like,
"Ooh, that's pretty cool."
And so we've got five or six dog trainers
that we've partnered
with in different ways.
The first one we did, we

(01:56:48):
had somebody and, you know,
she was selling like $1 a
year worth of these DVDs
on training, on how to train with
e-collar, shock collar.
And we basically ended up
working out a deal with her
to where we would replace that income
by allowing us to give her stuff away,
what, you know, when you bought a
training collar from us.
So when you buy a

(01:57:08):
training collar from us,
you actually get a $40 value, you know,
here's a sales pitch.
You get a $40 value free streaming or DVD
of how to use your e-collar.
And so that was how we could add value.
Cause you can buy the
same e-collars on Amazon
for the same price, cause
they're all Matt priced.
But I can throw in this training material
that the manufacturers
probably should, you know, provide.
But it costs money, so

(01:57:29):
they don't, you know?
So I spend $2,000 a year on, you know,
on paying for that, subsidizing that.
But she's still making money off of it.
She doesn't have to sell anything.
And I have something that I can do,
uses a value add for my customers.
All of these dog trainers
that we've partnered with,
they either make a product
or they have a video series.
We had one guy who
couldn't keep his books in print

(01:57:49):
back when we had Copy Cow,
our copy shop that we started.
- We didn't touch on Copy Cow yet, but.
- Yeah, so the comic
book business was imploding.
And right before we
did the internet stuff,
I had my hands full with
opening up a copy shop.
The Kinko's in our town closed.
When Kinko's went private
equity or whatever they did,

(01:58:10):
or they got bought out by
whoever they got bought out by.
But they basically closed
the bottom 20% of stores.
And it just so happened that our store
was the Southeast Star for 20 years.
And they moved it across the street
to something like five times
as big and was open 24 hours.
Kind of like one of
these metropolitan Kinkos.
And it just totally flopped
and made the numbers look bad.

(01:58:31):
So they closed that store.
So I had 500 bucks.
So I got me a crappy little copier
and set up a copy shop.
And also we're doing half
a million dollars a year
in photocopying.
But then month three,
it's the same exact
thing every single day.
Hey, we needed some more paper.
Hey, we need some more toner.
I'm like, I think I can
offload this to somebody else
and work on selling some stuff online.

(01:58:52):
And that's where I kind of
took off after the internet.
But so we printed
dude's books at Copy Cow
and kept them in print.
And that's just an advantage.
Somebody comes up and there's a problem.
Dude can't keep, he's got 10 books.
And we're always out of
the second and third book
in the series of training.
You have to have two and
three to get book four.
I have a huge
inventory of five through 10.
Never gonna sell them because I can't

(01:59:12):
sell book two and three.
Let me just print them for you, dude.
And it's great.
We pay him a huge royalty,
triple what I was
getting for my dummies book,
which by the way, it's
still available on Amazon.
It's a...
(laughing) - Five stars, five stars.
- No, no.
- So all right.
So you're manufacturing
all of this stuff now,

(01:59:35):
which is fantastic.
And I highly recommend that.
- Yeah dude, we had to (beep)
sales of stuff that we own, make,
distribute, control.
We just hit that.
Which is for us is huge.
The margins are, you
gotta make two profits on it.
You're making the
profit to sell at retail.
So I pretend I'm a separate supplier,
but my sewing room has payroll.

(01:59:55):
So I gotta make a profit there too.
So it's like, really
you're getting the money twice
when you sell something.
- So like, are you just
selling direct to consumer
through your site or are
you doing any wholesale
with other people for these items?
- I wanna be the only
place you can get this stuff.
Yeah, we have some stuff.
There's some dealers that kind of got,
that came along with
some deals that we've done.

(02:00:16):
Like we import some blank pistols.
And my brother has like,
he still has some
wholesale customers for that.
That's a weird kind of specialty product
like track teams use them.
We have some track supply
places I think we still sell to.
But for the most part,
the people that I would sell to are
zero sum game competitors.
So if they sell it, I'm not selling it.

(02:00:37):
Whether that's Amazon or
Chewy or some of the smaller folks
like us in the hunting dog space.
- So like, I am
surprised some of the things
like the collars and the dog beds,
you haven't spun off
and at least created,
maybe another brand name
that's more Instagram friendly.
Like kind of more.
- Yeah, we will.

(02:00:57):
That's next on the list as far as,
once I kind of got this new role for me,
it took me three years,
but I've got my sea legs now.
I think that's, I have
plenty of time to do that,
these days.
And that's, Melanie's
really excited about it too.
Cause it's hard to sell
gun dog supply dog collars
to a certain percentage of the population

(02:01:19):
because of the first word in our name.
Thanks dad, 1972.
- Thanks, thanks, yep.
So what do you think,
what's the biggest mistake so far
that you've made a gun dog supply
that's created real
personal growth for you?
- I'd say the main thing
was not making our own stuff

(02:01:40):
was like, was becoming,
oh, it was the top line
is more important than the bottom line
because the bottom line
was my brother's problem.
I was like, I got to grow the top line.
That's the only number I'm looking at
selling other people's stuff.
Not realizing that,
you know, if you're not,
it's what you keep,
it's not what you gross.
And my dad said that for 30 years,

(02:02:00):
but it's like, it's what you get to,
what you take home.
So it doesn't matter
how much revenue you do.
I mean, like, you know, one of our,
we had one of the best years we ever had.
And it's like, it was one
of the least profitable years
we ever had because the
things to make the sales,
you had to, you were spending more money
than you should have
because it was like, oh, this is crazy.
You know, so I would say
making sure that you know that,
you know, the main thing

(02:02:22):
is to keep the main thing,
the main thing.
My uncle Paul used to
tell me that all the time.
And it is the main thing is that we make
a living out of this.
This is not a hobby.
This is not for fun.
You know, why are we doing this?
And I had to lose vendors.
I had to, anything that's big and bulky,
that's expensive to ship
now, I'm not selling it.
Shipping goes up, up, up.

(02:02:43):
You know, there's still meat
on that bone that you can get,
but shipping costs are
not going to go down.
Shipping costs until they,
everybody's got free energy.
And then who cares
about anything, you know,
shipping costs are
going to keep going up.
So you need to be
selling stuff that's lighter
and that ships in a
bag, doesn't ship in a box.
And so I've, you know, people are like,
you have to sell this.
You're a gun dog supply.
You know, you have to
sell this type of product.
I'm like, no, I don't.
I don't sell dogs.

(02:03:03):
I don't sell dog food.
You know, I don't sell dog training.
I don't sell bullets.
I don't sell shotgun shells.
I don't sell guns.
I don't have to sell
whelping mats or whatever, you know,
whatever's big and bulky or
our surrogate or quail huts
or whatever.
I don't have to, if I'm
not making my margin on it,
you know, and so that was, that was my,
I just kind of had to
turn, come to terms with,
I am not my top number, you know,

(02:03:25):
I'm not really not my
bottom number either,
but that's the, that's the number.
- Well, kind of, you know,
kind of wrapping things up.
I like to ask everybody,
like, do you have one tip
for somebody listening to this podcast?
One tip for somebody
that's looking to scale
their e-commerce business?
What's the one thing that you would,
that you would say to
them based on this journey?

(02:03:46):
- I would say, I
would say find your Steve.
It's like, I know you
are not doing enough
because I'm not doing enough.
I know you are not
doing enough to leverage
your product knowledge and authority
to demonstrate to your customers
that you are the guy or gal.
You are the person to buy this from.
Take a very, very, very
hard look at what you sell,
compare yourself to
your competitors and go,
hey, if I took off all of the

(02:04:07):
logos on all these websites,
could I tell the difference
between Amazon's, you know,
product page, Cabela's
product page, my product page,
and two or three of my
competitors' product pages?
And, or if I put it in Japanese,
if you run stuff
through a Japanese filter,
sometimes that's really interesting.
Just, you can kind of
see stuff, you know,
take a look at your
website and go, you know,
am I presenting myself as

(02:04:29):
the authority that I am?
And if you're not, you need to, you know,
then leverage that content.
- Fantastic, fantastic, and so true.
I mean, I've always admired
the amount of product knowledge
and authenticity that
you and Steve kind of bring
to the show in terms
of putting it out there

(02:04:49):
for the public on your website.
- It's a bunch of work, dude.
You don't want to
know how much, you know,
time we spend making
some of these videos.
We had like, we spent four
weeks filming a six hour video
on these GPS tracking collars
going over every single feature.
But it, you know, it shows up.
It shows up as, you know,
I have competitors now
doing the same thing,
so I can tell that it is, you

(02:05:10):
know, it makes a difference.
Because if they don't do
that, people are asking,
well, why are you not doing, you know,
why do you not have this?
And Gun Dog Supply does have this.
Do the work.
Do the work.
Do the work.
And in closing, where can
listeners find you online?
Do you have any kind of public presence?
- They cannot, no.
You can't see me.
I'm not here.

(02:05:31):
You can friend me on Facebook.
I still have some Facebook friends left.
- How about LinkedIn?
Are you active on LinkedIn at all?
- I'm linked out, baby.
I'm not looking for a job.
Oh, by the way, if I am
looking for a job, don't hire me.
I am unemployable.
You do not want me working for you.
We may have to delete this video.
If things don't work out, Ethan.

(02:05:51):
But no.
- Oh man, I am so appreciative
that you would take the time to spend.
I have like a whole
other page of questions,
but we'll have to like that, you know.
- Invite me back.
- This goes well.
I'll invite you back again.
- Invite you back.
I enjoy doing this.
Oh man, we love Ethan Givin
here at the Snail House, dude.
- And I miss you.
I wish I could give you a big hug.

(02:06:12):
It's been a long time
since we've seen each other.
- Yeah, you need to go duck hunting, man.
You would love duck camp.
I could give you three days.
I'll fly you into Arkansas
and I'll fly you into Memphis.
It's probably a direct flight from
Baltimore to Memphis.
I'll fly you in.
You go duck hunting two days,
then I'll put you on a flight.
And you might be a
little stinky flying home,
but dude, you will have some.
You will eat the best
food you've ever eaten.
You will see the most
beautiful scenery you've ever seen.

(02:06:32):
And we'll bring you home
with a mess of ducks, dude.
- I'm in.
I'm in.
I'll take them on the Southwest.
I'll carry the ducks on on a stick.
- Absolutely.
Oh, that would be awesome.
- On a stick.
All right, Rob, thank you so much again.
And you know, thank you for your time.
It's always a pleasure.
- Always a pleasure.
- Thanks, Mr. Giffen.