June 27, 2024 • 15 mins
How an Iowa startup rocketed to a global powerhouse.
Two firearms industry legends meet, as Gun Talk’s Tom Gresham sits down with Pete Brownell, CEO of Brownells, to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the heralded family-owned firearms supply company.
The conversation covers the company's history, starting with Pete's grandfather, Bob Brownell, who founded it in 1939. Initially a home gunsmith and NRA writer, Bob responded to a growing demand for firearm parts and tools, significantly impacting the industry with his "Encyclopedia of Modern Firearms."
Brownells has grown from its humble beginnings to become a global leader, adhering to values of quality, customer service, and a deep understanding of gunsmithing needs. Pete emphasizes the company's culture of collaboration and personal relationships, reflecting their customer-first philosophy. Initiatives like "Back to the Lodge" foster a supportive community among employees.
Celebrate 85 years of with 15% Off all Brownells products: https://snp.link/644feaa5
Pete also shares his own journey, working in the construction industry and Silicon Valley before joining Brownells. His experiences taught him leadership and modern business practices, which he brought back to the family business. He also talks about his passion for mountain climbing and an upcoming expedition to Kilimanjaro with veterans, aiming to inspire resilience and recovery.
Brownells has expanded into selling complete firearms, with a focus on their acclaimed BRN line. Looking ahead, Pete and his company plan to enhance the customer experience with better information and to explore new markets like preparedness and survival gear.Throughout the interview, Pete's respect for his family's legacy and commitment to innovation and customer service are evident. The conversation highlights Brownells' evolution while maintaining its foundational values, ensuring its continued success and relevance in the firearms industry.
Learn more about Brownells here: https://snp.link/9fc0ef7a
Tom Gresham is the host of Gun Talk Radio, the original national radio show about guns and gun-related topics, and is celebrating its 29th year. Gun Talk runs on nearly 300 stations weekly across the U.S. and is also available as a podcast - accessible wherever you find your podcasts.
Learn more about Gun Talk Radio here: https://www.guntalk.com/gun-talk-radio
Follow Tom Gresham on X here: https://x.com/guntalk
For more content, subscribe to Gun Talk at guntalktv.com, on Gun Talk's Roku, Apple TV, iOS app, Android app, or find Gun Talk on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X and guntalk.com. Listen to all Gun Talk Podcasts with Spreaker, iHeart, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find podcasts.
Copyright ©2024 Fre
Two firearms industry legends meet, as Gun Talk’s Tom Gresham sits down with Pete Brownell, CEO of Brownells, to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the heralded family-owned firearms supply company.
The conversation covers the company's history, starting with Pete's grandfather, Bob Brownell, who founded it in 1939. Initially a home gunsmith and NRA writer, Bob responded to a growing demand for firearm parts and tools, significantly impacting the industry with his "Encyclopedia of Modern Firearms."
Brownells has grown from its humble beginnings to become a global leader, adhering to values of quality, customer service, and a deep understanding of gunsmithing needs. Pete emphasizes the company's culture of collaboration and personal relationships, reflecting their customer-first philosophy. Initiatives like "Back to the Lodge" foster a supportive community among employees.
Celebrate 85 years of with 15% Off all Brownells products: https://snp.link/644feaa5
Pete also shares his own journey, working in the construction industry and Silicon Valley before joining Brownells. His experiences taught him leadership and modern business practices, which he brought back to the family business. He also talks about his passion for mountain climbing and an upcoming expedition to Kilimanjaro with veterans, aiming to inspire resilience and recovery.
Brownells has expanded into selling complete firearms, with a focus on their acclaimed BRN line. Looking ahead, Pete and his company plan to enhance the customer experience with better information and to explore new markets like preparedness and survival gear.Throughout the interview, Pete's respect for his family's legacy and commitment to innovation and customer service are evident. The conversation highlights Brownells' evolution while maintaining its foundational values, ensuring its continued success and relevance in the firearms industry.
Learn more about Brownells here: https://snp.link/9fc0ef7a
Tom Gresham is the host of Gun Talk Radio, the original national radio show about guns and gun-related topics, and is celebrating its 29th year. Gun Talk runs on nearly 300 stations weekly across the U.S. and is also available as a podcast - accessible wherever you find your podcasts.
Learn more about Gun Talk Radio here: https://www.guntalk.com/gun-talk-radio
Follow Tom Gresham on X here: https://x.com/guntalk
For more content, subscribe to Gun Talk at guntalktv.com, on Gun Talk's Roku, Apple TV, iOS app, Android app, or find Gun Talk on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X and guntalk.com. Listen to all Gun Talk Podcasts with Spreaker, iHeart, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find podcasts.
Copyright ©2024 Fre
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
It's a name known throughout the firearmsfraternity. Whether a professional gunsmith or an
amateur tiquerer, when you need toolsor parts to work on or build your
gun, you've probably turned to BrownElves, the family owned Iowa business which
has applied pretty much everything we needfor more than eight decades. Pete Brownell,
(00:26):
the CEO of the company and thethird generation to run the outfit,
dropped in to visit with us andshare a few stories about this legendary company.
Well, we can never run youdown anywhere. You're always going somewhere,
geeze man. So Pete Brownell,CEO of Brown Els, You guys
(00:48):
have been around for eighty five yearsnow, that's that's right. This is
our eighty fifth anniversaries in June,so it's coming right now. And it's
also my father's eighty fifth birthday,so kind of core. Yeah. Yeah,
we doing well. Your third generation. I am third. Yeah.
My grandfather started this whole thing backin thirty nine. He was a tinker.
(01:10):
I mean, he was like doinghome gunsmithing for himself, right.
He was so back in the gosh. He was born early nineteen hundreds and
been kind of a jack of alltrades. Actually wrote for the NRA for
a while, so he was justlike, you man did not know that.
So he wrote for the NRA onhow to articles back in the early
early days nineteen twenties. He gotthis great idea from his audience and from
(01:32):
people at the NA to start writingcorrespondence and to gun stores or those customers
out there and say what do youwant? What do you need? And
then what the customers basically said were, Hey, we need parts, we
need tools, we need all kindsof knowledge. It was just a everybody
coming back right around well between WorldWar One and World War Two. All
(01:56):
those guys were fixing those firearms becausethat they had at home and they had
they needed parts. And so hewrote Bill Senior and said, hey,
I need some parts and started alittle business that way, just out of
the house. Kind of a nice, neat little start, just listening to
the customer. Just one more ofthese companies that starts like in the garage
or in the kitchen or whatever instance. What is tinker with this and see
(02:17):
what happened? Yes, yeah,it was a really neat uh po Actley
his grandson showed up with a letterthat he had written. My grandfather and
and po said, Hey, thisgun thing you're this gun tool thing,
and this gunsmithing thing you're you're starting. It's a pretty good idea. You
should lean into it. Your grandfatherstarts this thing, how does it go
(02:38):
from like the kitchen table to startingto become like a real business. There
wasn't much information out there on firearmsback in the day. What fit with
what everything? When you had aproblem, you basically sent it back to
the shop, to the to uhruger or smith or at the gun companies
at the colt would take it backand fix or you just There wasn't really
a professionalization of the gunsmithing trade backthen. So one of the first things
(03:01):
that my grandpa did was the Encyclopediaof Modern Firearms, where he took every
firearm in production at that time,broke it down into its parts, took
three of each and then measured themall put them in an encyclopedia. It
was a long process and that becamethe kind of the bible for gunsmith's and
(03:22):
it really broadened it out to beyou don't have to have a shop anymore.
You could do this at home becauseyou had all the dimensions, what
spring, what screw what fits where, So he mapped modern firearms back in
the twenties and thirties. It's areally ambitious project. Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it's cool. We've gotWe've got the drawers and the diagrams and
(03:42):
all that kind of stuff at ourshop there in Grenell, Iowa, where
he had stored all that stuff andall his all the history he did around
all that. I don't think it'sgoing too far to say that your grandfather
Bob changed what being a gunsman itis, because I mean before it was
kind of like you had to findsomebody who knew how to do this.
(04:04):
Yeah, and people who did itat home didn't think of themselves as gunsmiths.
Ian we call them kitchen table gunsmith's. Yeah, But in a certain
way, what he did and throughbrown Els through all these generations in these
years, you kind of legitimize thewhole idea of working on or even building
your own gun. I never thoughtof it that way. I kind of
(04:25):
grew up in the whole space andwe were always tinkering at home. So
I think, yeah, that's prettynice that that's a nice sentiment to have
about your grandfather, how he couldchange the arc of a profession. They
never had a chance to work withmy grandfather. I worked with my dad
quite a bit. But there werebattles on technology, on change. This
(04:45):
whole thing called the Internet was abig battle. A vivid argument was if
customers hear us clicking that keyboard whenthey're on the phone with us, they
will think we don't care about them. Really yeah, yeah, So it
was it was a battle to say, hey, this is if we're going
to serve more customers, have morerelationships. It's hard for a call center
(05:06):
agent or somebody that's working for youand with you to pick up the phone
remember who you are. What you'rereally describing, at least to me and
with my history with brown Ews isit's always been a company built on culture.
How do you describe the culture ofboth Brown Owls and your employees?
(05:27):
We work together. Nobody works foranybody at brown El's. We try to
keep things personal. I believe businessis personal, and we try to I
would say rich people's experience when they'reworking with us. We are an organization
that has helped entrepreneurs go from theirgarage like we did to Great Heights.
(05:51):
We just had something called back tothe Lodge today's world is there's a lot
of remote workers. People have thingsat home that they got to being a
mom or a stay at home dadto help their family out. So we
allow them to have a lot offlexibility in that space, kind of respect
who they are as people. Butthen we have come back to the lodge
(06:11):
where we have all kinds of microadventures for them, from fire building,
how to cook in the Dutch oven, go out on a bike ride,
go on a big hike course.There's a lot of range time and there's
a lot of safety training that wedo as well. So we try to
get people involved in what we're doingis delivering an adventure and stretch who they
(06:31):
are, because when they feel thatthey can do more, then they're a
lot more confident in who they are. And that's the kind of culture and
that we want to have and wewant to exude that to our customers as
well. I don't know if younotice we kind of recreated the brown HIL's
logo with these ram horns back there. Where did that logo come from?
It's a dull sheep. Dull sheepwere mountain sheep up in Alaska and the
(06:56):
Yukon Territory. That was a symbolthat my grandfather picked because it was a
it was a dedicated, intentional,difficult hunt, and you really got one
shot and it was a long rangeshot usually, so in order to get
the Canada back in the twenties andthirties or into Alaska. I mean,
it was a steamer ship. Itwas dedicated. Everything had to work,
(07:16):
your your firearm. You had tohave practice, you had to have determination,
you had to be thinking about thefuture and all the scenarios that could
have gone right or wrong up inthe mountains, and you got one shot
and usually three to seven hundred yards. So the firearm had to work and
you had to work, and wewanted that to represent what our company was
all about. We're gonna make surethat you're prepared. The stuff that we
give you works. It's gonna workthe first time, it's gonna work throughout
(07:41):
its life. That's where our guaranteeis kind of based on that same philosophy.
It's all the tools need to bethe right tool. And that was
on their philosophy of if you buya cheap tool, you've got the wrong
tool. If you overspend on atool, you've got the wrong tool.
It's kind of finding that goldilock zone. It's got to work the first time,
it's got to work every time,and it's got to bring value to
you. And we wanted that dullsheep ram to kind of represent what we're
(08:05):
all about. You're CEO now,but you didn't jump right from school to
brown Els. You actually took quitea while off. What were you doing
and what was that path? Yeah? One of the family rules is you
have to go work for somebody elsebefore you come back here. You have
to have a legitimate career before youcome back, or if you come back,
(08:28):
go test it and see what itwas. So why is that thinking
about it now that I have kidsin the fourth generation. Possibly go lose
money on somebody else's dime. Gomake your mistakes someplace else. Learn how
to be a leader, learn whatgood leadership is, and find find your
own path. If you don't havethe chops to lead outside, you don't
have the chops to do it inside. So it was a good experience for
(08:50):
me to go out and I workedin construction, which is pretty tough.
I got a chance to learn goodleadership there on the professional side and also
do the construction side too, Soit was a union shop, so I
had to make sure that I couldbe the right kind of person for those
workers in the field and we weredoing elevators and escalators, and then be
(09:11):
the right kind of person to understandhow all that connected with big construction jobs
or remodel jobs. But I wasdown there in the Silicon Valley when it
was really entrepreneurs, really interesting peopleto talk to about modernization and what the
next trends were going to be,and it was pretty impactful. When did
you start climbing mountains? So thatwas actually going to be my first job
(09:33):
was to be a mountain guide.The guy that was my best man at
my wedding, we started off.We would do fourteen ers out in Colorado,
and I was a big rock climber, the vertical rock climber as well.
I've gone all over what mountain rainshave you climbed? So we've been
Rainier is a big one all throughCalifornia. A lot of the fourteeners out
in Colorado domestically. Actually, myhoneymoon was down in Ecuador with Coda PAXI
(10:00):
try to try to summat code ofPOxy and we've been over to Nepaul and
Don the Himalayas been the ANAPARTNAS circuit. So you're getting ready to do a
really interesting one in a month orso. Yeah, we got a cool
one coming up in about three weeks. We're going to head over to Kilimanjaro
and I've pivot a bit, soI'm taking the h a bunch of soldiers
(10:24):
over there and we're sponsoring this.These are soldiers that are special operators,
as we all have if you havefriends in the space or families in the
space. The suicide rate is incrediblefor operators, and these are individuals who
have been over and done that typeof work and have been injured and have
(10:45):
been dropped out of the teams,and they have almost a redemption type of
mission where they've they've fallen down,they've hit rock bottom. And these are
the people are going to tell theirstory about how they have come back from
some dark times to inspire other peoplethat are facing these types of situations where
they're they're not they're questioning themselves.We want to give them examples of just
(11:09):
what life could be by summoning thismountain from people that have been in their
spot. These individuals are, Imean, the fantastic stories of what they've
done for America and their teams andthe people that they worked with, how
they've come back from hips and kneesand dark times, and how they've kind
(11:30):
of redeemed themselves and worked through alltheir issues and summoning a mountain like that
is kind of an inspirational story astheir stories start to unfold for others.
I asked you earlier, can allthese guys make it to the top?
And your answer was if they can't, I'll carry it. You meant that
literally, what's that mean to you? So these guys have been they really
(12:01):
when they're in the military, they'vebeen there since high school, and they
know good good leaders They make acommitment to our country and when they have
their friends around them and they knowa good team is about, they know
what good leadership is. We havea lot to learn from them as civilians.
(12:24):
How do we help do our partfor those people that have helped our
country no matter where they are sentwithout question, And this is part of
what I'm trying to deliver back tothem, is we care about you.
We care about and respect the missionthat you're on. It's a tough one
and we want to lean in andhelp any way we can, and this
(12:48):
is a This is helping inspire someof these people that are still coming through
our military and struggling because it's toughand so if we have to carry and
we'll carry them. Brown has gunsmith, parts, parts, tools, But
now you're selling rifles and guns,right, So yeah, we've we've moved
(13:13):
into the BRN line, right,and it's kind of a retro model to
go back and pay homage to thethat that original AR fifteen with modern technology,
a little tighter tolerances, but ithelps people do building. We have
a building firearms, customizing those firearms. It's uh the BRN line. We
(13:33):
did make a run of special fullfeatured firearms, but it's mostly actions and
uppers so people can customize the firemthat they have. Where do you go
from here? We're gonna stay focusedon that gun smith and that home builder,
but we've got to improve how wepresent products. Like you're saying,
(13:54):
there's a lot of stuff that wehave in the catalog or in the book
in the warehouse, we're available onlineand sometimes that scares people off or they
don't know what to get. Sowe need to provide better information to that
person. Who's building up. Sayit's a six or five Creed Morgan,
there's what do I need for that? If it's a competition or is it
a hunt? Or is it whyam I building it? We want to
(14:16):
be able to answer that question definitivelyfor that person to make good recommendations both
the tools they need and the actionsthey might they might need or the finishes.
So this give them a real goodrecipe. So we need to improve
that and once we get that tothe point where it's pretty good, we
want to look at other areas thatthat gun owner might want to be interested
(14:37):
in, and we've we've kind ofexperimented in the I would say the prepper
market or the preparedness space with foodand water, and that's something that would
be really interesting for people as well, because if you're going out hunting,
you probably need that stuff. Anyway, if you're off on your jeep axventure,
you probably need that stuff too.So we're just looking at the customer
(15:00):
from their view again that empathy.What's their space, what are they looking
at for their adventure, and howdo we help be an outfitter for that
person. Pete, thanks for comingout here and being with us. It's
always fun to catch up, andI'll tell you the brown El story as
one of inspiration what you've been ableto do with it. Oh thanks,
it's you know, it's been threegenerations just like just like you guys are
and many companies in this industry,and it's great to be part of kind
(15:24):
of the families that we've all kindof grown up with together and sharing it
with you again is always a pleasure. Thanks so much.
It's a name known throughout the firearmsfraternity. Whether a professional gunsmith or an
amateur tiquerer, when you need toolsor parts to work on or build your
gun, you've probably turned to BrownElves, the family owned Iowa business which
has applied pretty much everything we needfor more than eight decades. Pete Brownell,
(00:26):
the CEO of the company and thethird generation to run the outfit,
dropped in to visit with us andshare a few stories about this legendary company.
Well, we can never run youdown anywhere. You're always going somewhere,
geeze man. So Pete Brownell,CEO of Brown Els, You guys
(00:48):
have been around for eighty five yearsnow, that's that's right. This is
our eighty fifth anniversaries in June,so it's coming right now. And it's
also my father's eighty fifth birthday,so kind of core. Yeah. Yeah,
we doing well. Your third generation. I am third. Yeah.
My grandfather started this whole thing backin thirty nine. He was a tinker.
(01:10):
I mean, he was like doinghome gunsmithing for himself, right.
He was so back in the gosh. He was born early nineteen hundreds and
been kind of a jack of alltrades. Actually wrote for the NRA for
a while, so he was justlike, you man did not know that.
So he wrote for the NRA onhow to articles back in the early
early days nineteen twenties. He gotthis great idea from his audience and from
(01:32):
people at the NA to start writingcorrespondence and to gun stores or those customers
out there and say what do youwant? What do you need? And
then what the customers basically said were, Hey, we need parts, we
need tools, we need all kindsof knowledge. It was just a everybody
coming back right around well between WorldWar One and World War Two. All
(01:56):
those guys were fixing those firearms becausethat they had at home and they had
they needed parts. And so hewrote Bill Senior and said, hey,
I need some parts and started alittle business that way, just out of
the house. Kind of a nice, neat little start, just listening to
the customer. Just one more ofthese companies that starts like in the garage
or in the kitchen or whatever instance. What is tinker with this and see
(02:17):
what happened? Yes, yeah,it was a really neat uh po Actley
his grandson showed up with a letterthat he had written. My grandfather and
and po said, Hey, thisgun thing you're this gun tool thing,
and this gunsmithing thing you're you're starting. It's a pretty good idea. You
should lean into it. Your grandfatherstarts this thing, how does it go
(02:38):
from like the kitchen table to startingto become like a real business. There
wasn't much information out there on firearmsback in the day. What fit with
what everything? When you had aproblem, you basically sent it back to
the shop, to the to uhruger or smith or at the gun companies
at the colt would take it backand fix or you just There wasn't really
a professionalization of the gunsmithing trade backthen. So one of the first things
(03:01):
that my grandpa did was the Encyclopediaof Modern Firearms, where he took every
firearm in production at that time,broke it down into its parts, took
three of each and then measured themall put them in an encyclopedia. It
was a long process and that becamethe kind of the bible for gunsmith's and
(03:22):
it really broadened it out to beyou don't have to have a shop anymore.
You could do this at home becauseyou had all the dimensions, what
spring, what screw what fits where, So he mapped modern firearms back in
the twenties and thirties. It's areally ambitious project. Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it's cool. We've gotWe've got the drawers and the diagrams and
(03:42):
all that kind of stuff at ourshop there in Grenell, Iowa, where
he had stored all that stuff andall his all the history he did around
all that. I don't think it'sgoing too far to say that your grandfather
Bob changed what being a gunsman itis, because I mean before it was
kind of like you had to findsomebody who knew how to do this.
(04:04):
Yeah, and people who did itat home didn't think of themselves as gunsmiths.
Ian we call them kitchen table gunsmith's. Yeah, But in a certain
way, what he did and throughbrown Els through all these generations in these
years, you kind of legitimize thewhole idea of working on or even building
your own gun. I never thoughtof it that way. I kind of
(04:25):
grew up in the whole space andwe were always tinkering at home. So
I think, yeah, that's prettynice that that's a nice sentiment to have
about your grandfather, how he couldchange the arc of a profession. They
never had a chance to work withmy grandfather. I worked with my dad
quite a bit. But there werebattles on technology, on change. This
(04:45):
whole thing called the Internet was abig battle. A vivid argument was if
customers hear us clicking that keyboard whenthey're on the phone with us, they
will think we don't care about them. Really yeah, yeah, So it
was it was a battle to say, hey, this is if we're going
to serve more customers, have morerelationships. It's hard for a call center
(05:06):
agent or somebody that's working for youand with you to pick up the phone
remember who you are. What you'rereally describing, at least to me and
with my history with brown Ews isit's always been a company built on culture.
How do you describe the culture ofboth Brown Owls and your employees?
(05:27):
We work together. Nobody works foranybody at brown El's. We try to
keep things personal. I believe businessis personal, and we try to I
would say rich people's experience when they'reworking with us. We are an organization
that has helped entrepreneurs go from theirgarage like we did to Great Heights.
(05:51):
We just had something called back tothe Lodge today's world is there's a lot
of remote workers. People have thingsat home that they got to being a
mom or a stay at home dadto help their family out. So we
allow them to have a lot offlexibility in that space, kind of respect
who they are as people. Butthen we have come back to the lodge
(06:11):
where we have all kinds of microadventures for them, from fire building,
how to cook in the Dutch oven, go out on a bike ride,
go on a big hike course.There's a lot of range time and there's
a lot of safety training that wedo as well. So we try to
get people involved in what we're doingis delivering an adventure and stretch who they
(06:31):
are, because when they feel thatthey can do more, then they're a
lot more confident in who they are. And that's the kind of culture and
that we want to have and wewant to exude that to our customers as
well. I don't know if younotice we kind of recreated the brown HIL's
logo with these ram horns back there. Where did that logo come from?
It's a dull sheep. Dull sheepwere mountain sheep up in Alaska and the
(06:56):
Yukon Territory. That was a symbolthat my grandfather picked because it was a
it was a dedicated, intentional,difficult hunt, and you really got one
shot and it was a long rangeshot usually, so in order to get
the Canada back in the twenties andthirties or into Alaska. I mean,
it was a steamer ship. Itwas dedicated. Everything had to work,
(07:16):
your your firearm. You had tohave practice, you had to have determination,
you had to be thinking about thefuture and all the scenarios that could
have gone right or wrong up inthe mountains, and you got one shot
and usually three to seven hundred yards. So the firearm had to work and
you had to work, and wewanted that to represent what our company was
all about. We're gonna make surethat you're prepared. The stuff that we
give you works. It's gonna workthe first time, it's gonna work throughout
(07:41):
its life. That's where our guaranteeis kind of based on that same philosophy.
It's all the tools need to bethe right tool. And that was
on their philosophy of if you buya cheap tool, you've got the wrong
tool. If you overspend on atool, you've got the wrong tool.
It's kind of finding that goldilock zone. It's got to work the first time,
it's got to work every time,and it's got to bring value to
you. And we wanted that dullsheep ram to kind of represent what we're
(08:05):
all about. You're CEO now,but you didn't jump right from school to
brown Els. You actually took quitea while off. What were you doing
and what was that path? Yeah? One of the family rules is you
have to go work for somebody elsebefore you come back here. You have
to have a legitimate career before youcome back, or if you come back,
(08:28):
go test it and see what itwas. So why is that thinking
about it now that I have kidsin the fourth generation. Possibly go lose
money on somebody else's dime. Gomake your mistakes someplace else. Learn how
to be a leader, learn whatgood leadership is, and find find your
own path. If you don't havethe chops to lead outside, you don't
have the chops to do it inside. So it was a good experience for
(08:50):
me to go out and I workedin construction, which is pretty tough.
I got a chance to learn goodleadership there on the professional side and also
do the construction side too, Soit was a union shop, so I
had to make sure that I couldbe the right kind of person for those
workers in the field and we weredoing elevators and escalators, and then be
(09:11):
the right kind of person to understandhow all that connected with big construction jobs
or remodel jobs. But I wasdown there in the Silicon Valley when it
was really entrepreneurs, really interesting peopleto talk to about modernization and what the
next trends were going to be,and it was pretty impactful. When did
you start climbing mountains? So thatwas actually going to be my first job
(09:33):
was to be a mountain guide.The guy that was my best man at
my wedding, we started off.We would do fourteen ers out in Colorado,
and I was a big rock climber, the vertical rock climber as well.
I've gone all over what mountain rainshave you climbed? So we've been
Rainier is a big one all throughCalifornia. A lot of the fourteeners out
in Colorado domestically. Actually, myhoneymoon was down in Ecuador with Coda PAXI
(10:00):
try to try to summat code ofPOxy and we've been over to Nepaul and
Don the Himalayas been the ANAPARTNAS circuit. So you're getting ready to do a
really interesting one in a month orso. Yeah, we got a cool
one coming up in about three weeks. We're going to head over to Kilimanjaro
and I've pivot a bit, soI'm taking the h a bunch of soldiers
(10:24):
over there and we're sponsoring this.These are soldiers that are special operators,
as we all have if you havefriends in the space or families in the
space. The suicide rate is incrediblefor operators, and these are individuals who
have been over and done that typeof work and have been injured and have
(10:45):
been dropped out of the teams,and they have almost a redemption type of
mission where they've they've fallen down,they've hit rock bottom. And these are
the people are going to tell theirstory about how they have come back from
some dark times to inspire other peoplethat are facing these types of situations where
they're they're not they're questioning themselves.We want to give them examples of just
(11:09):
what life could be by summoning thismountain from people that have been in their
spot. These individuals are, Imean, the fantastic stories of what they've
done for America and their teams andthe people that they worked with, how
they've come back from hips and kneesand dark times, and how they've kind
(11:30):
of redeemed themselves and worked through alltheir issues and summoning a mountain like that
is kind of an inspirational story astheir stories start to unfold for others.
I asked you earlier, can allthese guys make it to the top?
And your answer was if they can't, I'll carry it. You meant that
literally, what's that mean to you? So these guys have been they really
(12:01):
when they're in the military, they'vebeen there since high school, and they
know good good leaders They make acommitment to our country and when they have
their friends around them and they knowa good team is about, they know
what good leadership is. We havea lot to learn from them as civilians.
(12:24):
How do we help do our partfor those people that have helped our
country no matter where they are sentwithout question, And this is part of
what I'm trying to deliver back tothem, is we care about you.
We care about and respect the missionthat you're on. It's a tough one
and we want to lean in andhelp any way we can, and this
(12:48):
is a This is helping inspire someof these people that are still coming through
our military and struggling because it's toughand so if we have to carry and
we'll carry them. Brown has gunsmith, parts, parts, tools, But
now you're selling rifles and guns,right, So yeah, we've we've moved
(13:13):
into the BRN line, right,and it's kind of a retro model to
go back and pay homage to thethat that original AR fifteen with modern technology,
a little tighter tolerances, but ithelps people do building. We have
a building firearms, customizing those firearms. It's uh the BRN line. We
(13:33):
did make a run of special fullfeatured firearms, but it's mostly actions and
uppers so people can customize the firemthat they have. Where do you go
from here? We're gonna stay focusedon that gun smith and that home builder,
but we've got to improve how wepresent products. Like you're saying,
(13:54):
there's a lot of stuff that wehave in the catalog or in the book
in the warehouse, we're available onlineand sometimes that scares people off or they
don't know what to get. Sowe need to provide better information to that
person. Who's building up. Sayit's a six or five Creed Morgan,
there's what do I need for that? If it's a competition or is it
a hunt? Or is it whyam I building it? We want to
(14:16):
be able to answer that question definitivelyfor that person to make good recommendations both
the tools they need and the actionsthey might they might need or the finishes.
So this give them a real goodrecipe. So we need to improve
that and once we get that tothe point where it's pretty good, we
want to look at other areas thatthat gun owner might want to be interested
(14:37):
in, and we've we've kind ofexperimented in the I would say the prepper
market or the preparedness space with foodand water, and that's something that would
be really interesting for people as well, because if you're going out hunting,
you probably need that stuff. Anyway, if you're off on your jeep axventure,
you probably need that stuff too.So we're just looking at the customer
(15:00):
from their view again that empathy.What's their space, what are they looking
at for their adventure, and howdo we help be an outfitter for that
person. Pete, thanks for comingout here and being with us. It's
always fun to catch up, andI'll tell you the brown El story as
one of inspiration what you've been ableto do with it. Oh thanks,
it's you know, it's been threegenerations just like just like you guys are
and many companies in this industry,and it's great to be part of kind
(15:24):
of the families that we've all kindof grown up with together and sharing it
with you again is always a pleasure. Thanks so much.
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