About This Episode
In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Scott Howard and Aaron Welsh of Howards Premium Ammo. Scott and Aaron dive deep into their journey of building a top-tier ammunition business. From custom loading for law enforcement to mastering precision for hunters and competitive shooters, they share their expertise in ammo production, quality control, and market trends. Plus, insights on the future of the industry!
Insights In This Episode
- The company primarily operates online but also leverages local sales, contracts, and trade shows to diversify revenue streams.
- Their ammunition is marketed as match-grade but priced competitively, differentiating them from cheaper, lower-quality alternatives.
- By upgrading equipment, they have increased production capacity to 10,000–20,000 rounds per hour, balancing efficiency with quality control.
- They identify market gaps in hard-to-find calibers (e.g., M1 Garand ammo, 35 Remington) and quickly adjust production to meet demand.
- Securing long-term contracts with law enforcement agencies provides a reliable revenue stream alongside retail sales.
Today’s Guest
Scott Howards : Howards Premium Ammo
Howards Premium Ammo LLC, based in Florence, South Carolina, is a family-owned business dedicated to providing high-quality, American-made ammunition at unbeatable prices. Each load is meticulously hand-loaded using components from top-tier companies, ensuring superior quality. They offer custom rounds tailored to specific weapons and bulk ammunition orders ranging from 100 to 2 million rounds. Committed to customer satisfaction, they provide free consultations and 24/7 availability for inquiries.
Featured on the Show
About Tactical Business
Tactical Business is the weekly business show for the firearms industry. The podcast features in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs, professionals and technologists who are enabling the next generation of firearms businesses to innovate and grow.
Episode Transcript
Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Show. I’m your host, Virginia Beach based firearms entrepreneur and copywriter Wade Skalsky. Each episode, we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a business owner in the firearms industry. We’ll speak with successful firearms industry entrepreneurs about their experiences building their companies, leaders and legislators who are shaping the industry, and tech executives whose innovations will reshape the future of the firearms industry. Let’s get after it. Welcome to the Tactical Business Podcast. I’m your host, Wade Skalsky, and today we are talking with Scott Howard from Howard’s Premium Ammunition. Scott, how are you doing today, man?
Scott: Great. And yourself?
Wade: I’m good. I’m really excited to talk to you today. You know, in your business that you’re in the ammunition business. We’ve had a few people on the show, but we don’t have a ton of people that I’ve talked to about that. So it is something that some new ground to cover. So I’m fired up to talk to you today. Before we get into the specifics of what you guys do, how did you get into the two way business? Like what was your path to where you are now?
Scott: It started like a lot of people have a passion for hunting. I grew up hunting. I’ve hunted in a lot of states, and my dad was in law enforcement for about 40 years. And one day I was sitting around and I have this odd caliber rifle I could never find ammunition for. So I went to Aaron, who was a loader at the time, and asked him if he could help me learn how to reload. And he helped me how to reload. And I was able to get ammunition for my rifle because I couldn’t ever find it. And right about then is when the height of Covid came in and him and I started reloading for our friends, family, that kind of thing. And it just went from there. It just grew beyond any dreams I ever had. I was trying to get the ammo for myself and a couple buddies at the time, and that was all I was doing. And then it just turned into a business and grew from there.
Wade: That’s super interesting. You’re not the first person that I’ve talked to that Covid, instead of being like a gigantic negative for them, was a positive because it resulted in their current business. What were you doing before? Were you in the firearms business or what kind of work did you do before you started opening this business?
Scott: Actually, I’ve been in transportation for about 20 years. I have my CDL, I’ve worked for some very large companies managing their fleets. And that was my background. Like I said, this business was just something that I started to do myself. And then when everything went south during Covid, it was easier to be a business and get the components that were needed. Normal people couldn’t buy them off the shelf at the time.
Wade: So you’re making ammo for yourself. What was the leap then that went from, okay, I can monetize this for other people. How did that happen? Is that something that happened organically, or did you start to advertise or what was the kind of steps?
Scott: There’s no hidden secret. It was just word of mouth. And I tell everybody, when I first started, I was doing reloads. No new ammunition at the time, and I felt like the ammunition milk guy would go around. I had a little route and people were buying ammunition, and I would sell it to them and deliver it at the same time. Everything was pretty local at that time, and it it blew up and we and we didn’t have the machinery to really be doing what we were doing at the time. And I’ll put it this way, my arms look like Popeye when we got finished. We were loading on single stage presses, maybe some two stage progressive presses at the time, and we were loading thousands of rounds, and I would just sit there at my house and load, and Aaron would sit at his house and load, and we would just team up and he’d say, hey, I made this much last night. And I would say, hey, I made this much. And it was gone before we made it.
Wade: Well, that’s a great that’s a great problem to have. So you see there’s this demand out there, right. So you’re like, okay, we’re doing this locally. There’s this demand locally. Once you went from there, what I know you’re online in terms of and that’s probably, I would guess the bulk of your, your sales now. How did that work. Or do you have a brick and mortar store or are you completely online or what does that look like?
Scott: So we’re online. That’s mostly the bulk of sales we do. We still have a lot of people locally that come to us for ammunition. We don’t have a brick and mortar store per se. We do have some contracts that we fulfill with some law enforcement agencies and some different shooting ranges and things like that. And so we’re just all we’re a little everywhere, to be honest. We do a few of the trade shows. They always seem to do very well for us, because we just like going out and talking to people, whether they buy something or they don’t.
Wade: That’s a common theme among successful businesses that I talk to is that they really value that personal connection. And I think people say to themselves, well, whatever my business is, it can’t really benefit from going to a trade show or getting out there. But you never know what. One conversation can lead to a lot of different opportunities.
Scott: Yeah. Hey, we have met a lot of great people over the years and a lot of gun stores and repeat business from the trade shows, and it’s just nice to go out and talk to people. I tell everybody, no matter how big we get. Obviously there’s not enough Scott or Aaron to go around, but we want everybody to feel that small business kind of feel when they call, and they can talk to one of us. And I tell everybody, if you have an issue with the ammo, call and talk with us. We’ll make it right. And the one thing I can say that I’m very proud of is over the four years we’ve been in business, I’ve had one issue and it was a brass issue, and we got it taken care of that day. So that is something I’m very proud of.
Wade: Yeah. I mean, I always say no matter how big or small you are, you can always compete on customer service. That is something that’s completely within your control. All right. So you start to branch out online. You’re still doing like this outreach in terms of going forward and going to trade shows. Ammo to me seems like it has its own set of challenging manufacturing process. Right? So are you still reloading or now you’re just doing wholesaling for the ammo or what’s going on now with the reloading? Or are you are you making your own ammo with that? What are you guys doing?
Scott: We’re still loading. Um, bulk of our business is loading. We don’t distribute as much anymore. Some of our law enforcement contracts do state that there are certain brands that only these departments can use. So we will do a little distributing there, but we try to use our ammunition where possible.
Wade: Perfect. And then so how did you breach that gap then. Right. Because I’m sure you’re hand loading all this stuff anymore. Right. Like you’re actually going into buying manufacturing equipment for this. And I would assume you’re doing commercial grade equipment. Talk me through that process. How was that?
Scott: That’s 100% correct. We couldn’t keep up now at this point with hand loaders. So we have actually upgraded our equipment, and we’re somewhere in the range of about 10 to 20,000 rounds an hour. We can produce, depending on what the caliber is, any ammunition we have. I tell everybody it’s match grade ammo, but more in the middle. With the pricing. We make sure that the doubt, the powder, everything is precise on every round that comes down the line.
Wade: And how did you learn how to do that? Right. Because like you said, like you come from a hunting background. I know that you were in transportation before, but I assume there wasn’t like a manufacturing component to your previous gig. So how did you learn to do that? Is that something where you just said, okay, we’re going to learn on the fly, or what was the process for that? Because if someone wants to do that themselves, I think a lot of people would be intimidated by that.
Scott: Absolutely. There’s a lot that goes into it. Who helped me the most was my partner, Aaron. He had been loading for over 22 years, and he had a little bit of a manufacturing background. He also has a mechanic background, so if anything breaks he can easily fix it. So he is the biggest part of this business. I tell everybody I wouldn’t call myself the face of the business because obviously I have the face for radio, but I’m more on the sales and business side and he handles all the loading. He is one of the best ballistics guys I know when it comes to loading anything.
Wade: The last podcast I did, we were talking about load development for precision shooting, and it’s amazing. You wouldn’t think that it could get so complicated with making a bullet, but it’s incredible the amount of you change. One factor on the bullet, what it can change for everything else. And so why that precision in manufacturing is so important?
Scott: Absolutely. And he is a stickler for making sure that it is exact. And the difference like I tell everybody, if you shoot our ammunition, especially guys that are hunting, you will see a true difference when you harvest that game. I can sit here all day and tell you stories, but I do have this one story that I tell everybody. This year, I was actually deer hunting and one of the larger bucks on the property. I actually harvested that deer with a 2 to 355 grain FMJ and the deer went straight down. But you will not do that with factory loaded ammo.
Wade: I don’t know anything about ammunition. Right? So I’m just a normal dude. So walk me through why that is though. What is the difference between what you guys do and something that I would buy in a box from the store.
Scott: So it’s using the higher end components. It’s knowing how to set the depth of the projectile using good powder, how many grains you use, making that precise. We can even customize ammunition specifically for someone’s gun. We can measure the barrel length. We do some custom loading for a lot of customers who have either odd calibers. Maybe they’re long range shooters. It’s just a better quality bullet in the store. A lot of times they take powder out, try to build pressure with a crimp. We don’t do that. Everything we do is tested and it’s down to the science. And like I said, Aaron is behind all that now.
Wade: And I also see that you guys have ammo, but you also have optics and sights. How did you guys decide to start to branch out a little bit from ammo? Is it just something that you’re like, okay, let’s add something on because we’re getting requests for it. We have a lot of hunters that come in. Was that something that you’re like, let’s try this out. How was that decision made?
Scott: So with the optics, we had a lot of guys that were coming in, and it really started with everyone kind of getting in the hog hunting around here. We were loading a lot of subsonic 300 blackout. And most of the scopes that we have are your night vision scopes. And a lot of guys were just wanting that at the best cost that they could possibly get. I mean, it gets very expensive. So we were just trying to help out customers here locally. Typically we don’t sell a lot of those online. It’s more of a local thing.
Wade: Yeah, I’m big into night vision and thermal is like that’s a whole nother section of rabbit holes to go down, right? But it’s one of those things where everyone should eventually either go thermal or do night vision, just because you’re going to want to be able to see in the dark at some point, right?
Scott: Absolutely. Hog hunting. They’re a nuisance animal here in the South, and they’re pretty plentiful across the state. And a lot of people have gotten gotten into that. And we try to help where we can. I know I was looking at some big distributors the other day that one of their number one selling calibers is 300 blackout, and I think a lot of that has to do with the hog hunting.
Wade: So how do you guys decide on the round that you’re going to make in terms of. Because obviously there’s a demand aspect of it, but you started the business because you had some obscure round that you could not find. Right. So when you’re going through the process of deciding, all right, this is the ammunition that we’re going to make. Do you have an overall philosophy or do you just go straight in demand like this is what people are asking for and then go from there.
Scott: So typically what we do is we do it in small batch runs. So we always like to have everything in stock. So if someone orders 36 150 grain we want to have that in stock. We just look at the stock we currently have on the shelves and we go from there, but we try to make a long run. I call it a small batch run. Obviously nine millimeter, five, five, six. You would do a higher volume in those. But on our hunting grounds we try to do a small batch as possible.
Wade: And I think because you’re a smaller company that allows you to be super nimble, right? So when you’re going to make a manufacturing decision, you don’t have to say, well, we’re going to do 2 million rounds. You can make the purchasing decisions for whatever you need on a smaller. You’re more nimble in that way. Is that what you’re finding is that advantage?
Scott: Absolutely. That is the biggest advantage to our company. We can tailor it towards specific customers, specific orders we have. We can do smaller batches. It also makes them more consistent where we’re not running a million rounds where you may have some problems we can tailor directly to our customers orders come in, or kind of what we’re looking like on our back stock on the shelves.
Wade: Scott, you were talking about your about your partner in crime, Aaron, and he was trying to join the podcast. And I kept saying no because I thought it was your phone. Redialing and Aaron, how are you, sir?
Aaron: I’m doing well. I hope everybody’s doing great today.
Wade: Good. We’re all doing good. We were talking about you the whole time you were gone, so you’re going to have to listen to the podcast to find out if Scott was singing your praises or complaining about you the whole time.
Aaron: Oh, I know how he talks about me.
Wade: I know right? So yeah. So what? We’ve walked through sort of how the business started. We’ve walked through some of the manufacturer, how you guys went from handloading to manufacturing. And yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about your origin story, how you got into the business. Obviously you guys started it together through Covid, but what’s your background?
Aaron: So my background is I mean, I’ve been loading ammunition since the mid 2000, um, spent years as, uh, diesel tech and a senior fleet manager. And Scott and I started working together back in 2017. And then, of course, during Covid, the supply was non-existent and whatnot. And that’s where the dream Started there again. Like he said, we started the hand loading and then, uh, he’s the one who came up with the idea. He said, let’s get our FFL an LLC. And I thought, oh boy, that’s going to be a hassle. But surprisingly, it was simpler than what we thought. That’s where we picked up and ran with.
Wade: It, at least from what he described. It sounds like your guys’s skills complement each other, right? So you have a lot of the the technical background. He has maybe some more of the sort of the outreach and the sales side. What do you think from a technical or manufacturing aspect, was the biggest challenge that you faced going from the Handloading or Handloading? All the ammunition to, okay, now we’re actually going to be a we’re going to create a manufacturing business. Well, walk me through your thought process of how that went and some of the challenges that you faced and what your kind of philosophy was during that transition.
Aaron: So the biggest technical side of it was when you go from extremely small batches, everything handcrafted to the tee to trying to do it on a little bigger scale was just not sacrificing any of the quality or the quantity. That’s where we put our little niche was. And again, we knew we would never be the cheapest. Didn’t want to be, but we wanted to provide an excellent product that to stick right on top of the tier and really be a good player in custom loaded ammo as well as just normal 308 stuff or I mean anything, but you know, the quality and the accuracy. And the big thing we focused on was the cleanliness. Nobody likes shooting dirty ammo. And uh, so that’s really what we went through. So to get it upscaled and be able to manufacture it quicker, just making sure all the quality was there with the tooling, with the quality checks. And that was the biggest challenge for me to make sure that everything was still as top quality as it. Absolutely. Yeah.
Wade: From a manufacturing perspective, I think in the firearms industry. Domestic manufacturing is obviously we don’t have enough of it, right. So I believe there’s a built in demand for USA manufactured products. And that is one nice thing that I think that all the people that I talk to that are in some type of manufacturing that they’re discovering is that, oh, wow, there is a lot of demand for what we’re doing. Are you hearing that back from your client base?
Aaron: Oh, yeah. You get a lot of people, like when you talk about where you’re based out of and what you do, and then it’s literally all made here. It’s something you don’t find a lot. Again, you’ll get some of the customers that talk about, well, I can get it here for this price or here. Well, it’s hard to compete with some of the overseas companies, but again, they don’t have the quality or the precision that we do either.
Wade: Well, and the nice thing about ammunition from a business perspective is that it’s a consumable. You know, it’s not like a firearm where, okay, yeah, I’m going to buy a firearm and then maybe I’ll buy a firearm a year from now. Right. Or maybe, you know, most people they’re not buying a firearm every month. Okay. I mean, there are some people who do that, but ammunition, it’s a consumable. So, you know, if you can make your customers happy on the customer service side, then that really creates some stability for your business. How are you guys addressing that? Do you have a philosophy on sort of client retention on repeat business? How do you guys approach that?
Aaron: That’s a good one for Scott because we do get repeat customers. But Scott, I’ll let you speak more to it.
Scott: For repeat business, it’s really having a quality product. We want people to go to the field or to the shooting range and really see how precision our ammo is, how much better it is just from the cheap ammunition you can buy off the shelf. That is our marketing strategy. When you have a really good product, people keep coming back to buy more. And typically what I have noticed is that people buy more than one box of our product at a time.
Wade: This episode is brought to you by TacticalPay.Com. Every few years. It seems large banks and national credit card processors suddenly decide that they no longer want to process payments for firearms and firearms related businesses, and so they drop these businesses with almost no notice, freezing tens of thousands of dollars in payments for months on end. If you want to ensure your partner with a payments provider that is dedicated to supporting the firearms industry, or you just want to find out if you could be paying less for your ACH, debit and credit card processing, visit TacticalPay.com. Again, that’s TacticalPay.com. From a shooter’s perspective, I’m an amateur. I’m just a normal dude. But I will say that there are certain types of ammunition that I like to fire that are like, okay, that’s what I buy. Just like the type of gun, like I’m a Glock guy, right? Which half the people listening to the podcast will now hate me, right. Because I’m a Glock guy. But that’s my gun. I like that gun. And the same thing for ammunition like you find ammunition you like, you will keep going to use it. And I think that’s a very powerful advantage that you guys have.
Scott: And I also think one of our advantages and I talked about this earlier is that if there’s something you don’t like about our product, we’ll make it right. And most ammunition companies will never tell you that.
Wade: Well and I think to go ahead, Aaron, sorry.
Aaron: And if I remember right, in the years we’ve been doing this, I think we only had one, am I correct, Scott?
Scott: That is correct. We’ve only had one issue. Correct.
Wade: There’s a brass issue. Scott already talked about that. So that think that’s powerful. I mean, and you think about the thousands and thousands of rounds that you guys have made over the last, like whatever number of years it is. That’s very impressive from a just from a manufacturing perspective. Aaron, I got a question for you. So in terms of your manufacturing capacity, do you foresee you guys expanding that capacity soon or are you standing pat where you are? What are your expansion plans?
Aaron: This has been a little bit slower of a arm a year, in my opinion, again, is the supply as a whole has come up. We’ve had very good luck at gun shows and doing some custom stuff for people. I do foresee in the future doing more. Scott and I have talked a little bit about adding more machines, different line of products, but I definitely see growth in the future.
Wade: So and I don’t know how that works for the on the machining side. So like can you for the machines that you have, can you manufacture different calibers of ammo on the same machine, or do you have to have a different machine for different calibers or types of ammo? How does that work exactly from a manufacturing perspective?
Aaron: We have a couple machines, and some of it just depends on batch size. And you can load multiple calibers on one machine to tear down and set up is time consuming. So if I was going to load 500 rounds of 308, I wouldn’t tear the big machine down just to run that small batch. It’s just you lose all your time in the setup and tear down versus the other machine. That’s quicker and simpler to set up. So but we can run multiple calibers. We do. I can’t say everything, but a lot of things. Everything from 25 ACP up to 338. We even do the big Magnum stuff as well.
Wade: It’s interesting when you talk about that because it sounds a lot like commercial food manufacturing, right? Like you, there is a lot of like, okay, we have to set the machine and there’s a lot of time to get that up and get that down and change it out. How do you guys do you have a production schedule where you plan that out, or is it something where you’re just like, it’s by a need, like, we need this now. You know what I mean? Like it’s something you plan it in advance or is it a combination of both?
Aaron: I would say it’s a combo of both. Something that is a big consumable, say, nine millimeter. We’ll run a volume run of that because it’s going to sell and you’ve limited selection of again, when they go to the range, they just want Full Metal Jacket. So you’ll get some guys that are very particular on a grain, but you’re usually looking at your one fifteens, your 120 fours or the Or the 147. So we can run a volume of that. And then you have it on hand to either fill an existing order and then you still have more for the rest.
Wade: So Scott, do you guys, in terms of from the business side of things going forward on the ammunition side, looking more at expanding market share, or are you looking more towards expanding into different products on the ammunition side? Right. Like, I mean, you guys are pretty much hitting all the big boys in terms of what you would expect. What is your kind of your view on on how you’re going to position yourself going forward over the next couple of years from a business perspective?
Scott: So I was thinking about this the other day, and I think we’re going to go for the market share and stay with the niche that we currently have, and still keep some of our contracts that I just recently resigned for another two years. So that’s really what drives our business. And I was proud to get those because we’d already had them for a while. And obviously we’ve lost a few here and there, but to keep some and and keep us going is It’s been a big proprietor. I don’t see us changing a lot of what we’re doing. We probably do have some new marketing that we’ll probably be doing here shortly. I’ve been in negotiations with a guy that helped me with that, and I think that’s going to be our biggest push this year in 2025. You always have to talk about this when it comes to ammunition and the firearms business. When you have a new president and things like that, you have to wait for them to get there and see what they’re going to do because the ammunition market changes daily, monthly or yearly. It’s just it changes all the time.
Wade: Well, we’re going back to that thing we talked about before, which I think is an advantage of a smaller company, is you’re extremely nimble, right. So it’s easy for you to pivot if you have to pivot. I do think that Smart have some existing contracts in place. For example, I write for the firearms industry. I’m a writer. One of my other gigs that I do, I have a stable of clients that pay me monthly to do that, but then I take on other projects. It’s nice to have that stability that you guys have of having, okay, we’ve got these contracts for these police agencies. We know we’re going to have to make them this much ammunition and we can depend on that. It also allows you to take some risks in terms of trying to advance into other areas and chill things out for you that way, which I think is really smart. Now, what do you think your biggest challenges are going to be? I think Trump’s going to be very good for the two way sphere personally. But what do you guys think? Aaron, why don’t you go first? What do you guys think are going to be some of your biggest challenges over the next year or two? And then, Scott, why don’t you go ahead and chime in?
Aaron: I think some of the biggest challenges will be some of the competition, because again, the market where it was very hard to get many different things. Now there’s a pretty decent supply. Scott and I talk on a regular basis of things that are that are hard to get, or people are looking for. Like, we look back two years ago, had we known 35 Remington was going to be nonexistent, we would have made a bunch of it because there’s things that disappear and take years to come back. So we try to keep our eyes on some of the odd stuff that were some of the bigger manufacturers. They’re not going to run something like that, even though it’s a very profitable, and it’s great that you have a supply competing in things like nine millimeter and five, five, six is tough because it’s extremely plentiful. It’s everywhere. So just keeping an eye on the markets, what’s happening where and the pricing of things. I think that’s going to be our biggest challenge.
Wade: What’s the hold on, Scott, before you answer that question. And I am super interested. But before because I will forget this once I turn 50, I can’t remember anything unless I ask it right away. How long does it take for you to see that something’s out of the market? From when you see that, let’s say, and you can be sure that there’s a demand issue there to how much time to spin it up to fill that demand. Like what does that look like in terms of is it pretty quick or does it take a while for that trend to develop?
Aaron: I don’t see it. It’s not usually something you see immediately. Sometimes it’s thing that things that will catch him or myself, but a lot of it in our conversations comes from people we talk to. They ask us, hey, do you have this? I can’t find it anywhere. And next thing you know, Scott and I are having a conversation about it. And he had three people ask him for the same thing. And when you start digging into it, you go, okay, well, hey, maybe there’s something here. So, Scott, what’s your view on that?
Scott: Definitely. I think for us, being a smaller company, that always works in our favor, if we have multiple calls about a certain caliber and we’re able to get the components, we’re able to be set up and running within the week because we can buy the components and get them there. I think a big one for us. What we offer is like M1 Garand ammo. People don’t offer that caliber. Everybody thinks, well, it is 3006. Yes, but there’s some different things that go into it. And those older guns and we found that out quickly being at gun shows, we’d sell out the first day if we ever had any. So it’s easy for us to quickly tailor to the market, and as long as we can get components and get our hands on it within the week, we can have cartridges around.
Wade: Yeah. And I think that social listening again, this is a theme that comes up from successful businesses, because if you guys have 2 or 3 people calling you, like reaching out to you and saying, hey, do you have this or just dropping it in conversation? There’s a ton of other people out there that have the exact same problem, right? It’s just they’re just not reaching out.
Scott: And honestly, a lot of times these customers that call us for a certain caliber, that’s hard to get. Typically they’re not buying one box. They’re wanting 1020 boxes at a time. And it seems like as much as we can make those customers asking for it, buy it before we have a chance to sell it to anybody else. We don’t typically get stuck with anything, which is a good problem to have. And sometimes you’ll have a lull and something might sit. But typically our munition doesn’t fit longer than a week or two. Once it’s made.
Wade: Are you guys limited then by storage space? In that situation. So does that go into your decision on what you’re going to make? Because if you over make something and then it just sits somewhere, you’ve got to pay for that space or is that you’re just not experiencing that at all? Like you’re like, no, we don’t have any of that issue.
Aaron: We usually don’t get into something that ridiculous of a volume that we don’t have the ability to store it to, where it’s not interfering with the current production.
Wade: It’s not like Scott and Aaron have their attics filled with, oh, man, we did this. We did this caliber, and no one’s buying it, so let’s stick it in the attic. All right. So and I guess then from an expansion from a like, are you guys ever have an idea of maybe starting a brick and mortar store ever and expanding into actual firearms? Are you guys going to stay with ammunition or what’s the plan for that?
Scott: I have thought about this a lot, and ultimately I would love to have a brick and mortar store. I’ll be honest with you, I have people come by the house to pick up ammunition orders and or I’ll meet them somewhere if their local shipping prices is is a killer for any online business. And sometimes your your searches for ammunition. A lot of people look at the price and they don’t pay attention to what happens after the fact. And to save our customers money. They’ll come by the house if I know them or whatever the case may be, and we do it wherever we can. Obviously, we’re not going to drive to Georgia to deliver it, but you’re around and you want to buy some ammunition. We’ll help anybody out any way we can.
Wade: Yeah, that’s the big bait and switch for ammo. And I can tell you as a consumer that if you don’t buy a lot of ammo online, in the beginning you’re like, oh, this is a great price for this. And this is like a well known manufacturer or something through like a broker or whatever. And then you get to the shipping, and the shipping is as much as the ammo almost sometimes. And then the second issue too, is that I’ve experienced this personally, where I’ve ordered five, five, six, and I’ve actually had it delivered by UPS, but someone actually opened my package and went into one of the vacuum sealed things to see what kind of five, five, six it was. And I guess they didn’t think it was that great because they didn’t steal it. So like there are these theft issues as well. Are you guys experiencing that on the shipping side, and if so, how are you countering that? Or are you just having everybody get the insurance or are you guys having those issues or is that just me? I’m hearing that people are having that issue.
Scott: You deal with that a lot. Anytime you ship anything and people stealing packages from Amazon, things like that. I haven’t experienced any issues with our customers as far as shipping. We have had some issues where a package showed up somewhere and it looked like the delivery guy had kicked it down the road or thrown it somewhere. We tried to package it the best we possibly can, so we don’t have any issues, but we haven’t had any issues with anyone opening and taking anything at this point. Typically we tell all customers to get the extra insurance, but it’s really up to them. Once they’re checking out online, they can get the get the insurance or they can just have it shipped. A lot of people just have it shipped, unfortunately keeps them in the car. Now, to be honest.
Wade: Unfortunately I’m probably the only guy that ever had. I think maybe what happened is someone broke in my package, they’re like, oh, it’s ammunition, I don’t want this, right? But it was pretty crappy. Five, five, six. So it was just for some plinking. But it is a thing I would highly recommend. If you get ammo shipped to you is to get the insurance for sure, 100%. So Aaron, what we’ve talked a little bit about the production side of things. How do you approach keeping everything precise so that if you do decide to scale, that you don’t lose that quality in the same way that you kept the quality going from hand loading to what you guys have now? Like what is your philosophy about that? How do you approach that?
Aaron: One thing I’m really good at is one, the precision end of it, and then figuring out how to make it exactly work the same every time. So things that I’ve adapted to as we’ve grown in producing things faster. So one of the biggest things with accurate Peruvian ammunition is your powder charge. So when you’re talking 2/10 of a grain in a nine millimeter versus 2/10 of a grain in a long range rifle, well, apples to oranges, because the pistol, you’re not going to notice that as much because you’re shooting close range, short barrel things like that. But when you get into somebody taking a precise shot at 500, 800, 1000 yards, that bullet has to come out the same velocity every time. So the powder drop system has been a big thing. It’s not after each run. It’s not only clean. I polished the metal components to keep everything friction free. I actually built a small little vibrating box that attaches to the powder drop. The idea behind that is the constant, slight vibration keeps the powder coming down the funnel at the same charge every time. Anytime the machine is set up for down whatever. Even throughout the run, every X amount of cases come off and the powder’s measured. There’s no inconsistencies. You could take five random boxes of bullets, pull one bullet out of each box, pull them apart, and you’re going to find the same powder charge in each case. Some of the thinking outside the box to make the technical end of it as precise as you possibly can.
Wade: I love hearing stories like that, and that is one of the biggest things I try to drive home about smaller manufacturing companies is like the vibrating box, right? Like what? To me, I’m not mechanically inclined at all. So whatever I’m picturing, I’m sure is wrong, right? But the concept itself is that you can take those types of chances, whereas if you were a bigger operation, you would never be able to just do that. Right. You’d have to go through six different channels of bureaucracy and safety testing and whatever to get that done. And there’s this inertia against innovation. And so when you are smaller, you can take chances like that and discover things like that. And I think that’s a huge advantage not only on the on the inventory side and demand side, but on the innovation side as well for you guys.
Aaron: Yeah. And not just the powder charge, but the bullet seating depth, the crimp on the bullet, just the constant consistency of each one to where you can take a micrometer and go through a box and they’re literally all the same.
Wade: Yeah. That’s the cool thing about precision shooting is that even though I’m starting to go down that rabbit hole a little bit, it is a math problem, right? Like, if you get good at it and you put everything together, it’s not like business, where sometimes in business things are a little squishy when you’re talking about a little marketing here. Is this working? Whatever. But like when you start getting into manufacturing, you start getting precision shooting. It really is just a math problem. And that’s exciting to hear about that. You guys are solving some of those issues and you’re going to keep innovating on that as well. So we’re coming up on our time. But Scott, walk me through a little bit some of your closing comments and thoughts for, you know, the next couple of years. I know we talked a little bit about some plans, but are you looking at expanding to other locations or are you guys going to stay where you are? Like talk me through if you could have a magic ball five, ten years from now, where are you guys going to be at?
Scott: As of right now, we plan to stay here. South Carolina is our home. If we expand, it will actually be around our area. Obviously the brick and mortar store. I plan to be there in the next year or two. That way we can have customers come in. We can tailor the ammunition directly to their guns. Get into a little more of that custom loading to keep some of our contracts, and to get into a bigger warehouse and really take our market share that I know we can take with our product, because it’s just a really good product and we stand behind it. That’s where I see us in the next 5 to 10 years. Who knows, we may open up a place in Hawaii. We don’t know yet, but I think we’ll be staying here in the South. We love it here. We love our customers, and it’s great to get out there and talk with them, hunt with some of them. We’ve actually sponsored some wounded warriors getting our ammunition in their hands. It’s been great to see the smiles on their faces.
Wade: That’s great man. And Aaron, what about you? Any closing thoughts on the path forward for you guys?
Aaron: Yeah. You know, Scott and I have talked a lot about this and we are very, like minded, both very driven. And again, he’s got my full commitment as well as to all our customers to give them the best that they can possibly get is continue to grow. But agreed with Scott, like he said, who knows, we may have a place in Hawaii, are pretty deeply rooted in South Carolina here, and it’s beautiful and we love the people doing that project with the Wounded Warriors. That was one of the most rewarding that I’ve done. That was truly touching, to be able to give back to the men and women who have served our country. So that was huge for me.
Wade: Yeah, it’s the one cool thing about having a business. When you’re your own boss, you can do things like that and give back. And it is great to see companies like yours giving back. And I love seeing manufacturing businesses doing well and growing. So how do people find you guys? I know you’ve got the website which is Howardsammo.Com if they want to send you an email, who do they send an email for if they have questions. And are you guys on social media?
Scott: We are on social media. We’re on Facebook, Instagram. They can send us a message through social media. Our emails are listed right there on the website. They can send us an email. My cell number is actually on the website. They can call me anytime.
Wade: Aggressive I like it. That’s brave. Putting your cellphone on the internet, I love it. Well, listen, guys, I’d love to have you on the show again in the next few months to see how you guys are growing. And like I said, I’m very pro manufacturing. So is there anything we can do here to help you guys? Let me know. Stay on. After I stop the recording. I have a question for you guys, but other than that, have a great day and thank you so much for coming on.
Aaron: Thank you.
Scott: Appreciate you having us all.
Wade: You’ve been listening to the Tactical Business show by TacticalPay.Com. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the firearms industry.