Mitch Barrie of Mesa Tactical: Niching down, the halo effect, and building a 2A manufacturing business

About This Episode

In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Mitch Barrie of Mesa Tactical. Mitch dives into the distinct challenges and perspectives of small businesses, especially in niche markets. He shares insights from his company’s journey in the tactical shotgun accessory industry, emphasizing the importance of quality over price competition. Mitch also discusses the evolving law enforcement market, the role of organic marketing in their success, and the importance of staying focused on a specific niche. Tune in for a deep dive into entrepreneurship, innovation, and market strategy!

Insights In This Episode

• Avoiding competition based on price, Mitch’s company emphasizes superior product quality and innovation.
• The company’s marketing strategy includes targeting law enforcement to appeal to civilians who aspire to own professional-grade equipment.
• Despite the decline in shotgun use by law enforcement, the company remains optimistic about growth, attributing this to their specialized focus and loyal customer base.
• The introduction of the Urbino stock, tailored for tactical applications, underscores the company’s commitment to addressing specific needs within law enforcement.

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 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 am your host, Wade Skalsky, and today I’m speaking with Mitch Barrie from Mesa Tactical. Mitch, how are you doing today, sir?

Mitch: Good morning, Wade, and doing really well. Good.

Wade: I know I told you this in advance, but we’re on a snow day today, so my kids are home, so we may hear them being rambunctious or my dog being rambunctious, but it seems there is no actual snow on the ground. And you and I are in the only two parts of the country right now that don’t have that problem.

Mitch: Apparently.

Wade: So you’re out in Reno?

Mitch: Yeah, yeah, Reno.

Wade: So that’s a beautiful part of the country. I lived in California for 16 years and like to get up to Tahoe and Reno and loved it up there. So it’s a just a beautiful part of the country. It’s very nice. How did you get up there? How did you get into the business that you’re in? Give me a little backstory.

Mitch: I’ll do the Reno thing first because that came later. I’m a California native. I was born in California. I grew up in California. I lived in California until I was in my 50s. I moved to Europe a couple times, but basically I’m from California, Southern California. And we’ll talk about firearms in a minute. Obviously, California is not very firearms friendly place, but the biggest problem I had with California, having grown up in the 60s and 70s, is it’s just a very crowded place, and especially in Southern California, they just they didn’t know when to stop. They just developed everything. And the California that I grew up in disappeared basically by the time I was 25 or 30. And at some point after I’d already started the company, we’d been in business for a few years. I said, I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to go someplace. And because at that time especially, I was doing a lot of mountaineering, I looked on a map. I literally just looked on a map and I said, that looks nice. I decided to move to Reno without ever visiting it, which maybe is an admission of some of the impetuous decisions I make. But I made a few trips up here, just were delighted with it. It’s a beautiful place. It’s an absolutely beautiful place. I had no idea. And as a Californian, I’ll tell you the best thing.

Mitch: The thing I like most about Reno, frankly, is the climate. We have four seasons here, and if you grow up in Southern California, you don’t have seasons. You don’t realize how wonderful it is to have seasons. And so I just sent to the employees on a van, sent them up here, said, you guys want to come. And most of them did. And we just picked up the whole company and moved it. Because we’re a manufacturing business, we can pretty much be anywhere in the country. So I’m not relying on retail business at all. And the way I got into the business was started when I was 18. In a way, because I’ve had several careers. And for the longest time, for about 15 years, I was in technology in Silicon Valley. And that was gratifying in many ways. But in other ways, it was a real problem with that. Everything that I did in that business was obsolete within a few years. And I guess it doesn’t bother very many people. It bothered me, though, because I think people think about legacies and things like that sometimes, especially as you get older. But the entire time I had been working, I would always remember the best job I ever had. The job that literally when the alarm went off in the morning, I jumped out of bed.

Mitch: That’s how much I enjoyed this job was a job working in a machine shop when I was 18. And I have tremendous respect for any kind of business that makes things things, actually. There’s a saying that we have around here in Northern Nevada because there’s so many miners. It’s basically if it wasn’t grown, it was taken out of the ground by somebody. To underline the point that everything in our daily lives is manufactured, somebody had to make that. And working in the machine shop was such a gratifying job. And I was just 18, just a kid. And through the rest of my career, I always thought about that. So at the end of my tech career, I wanted to get into manufacturing, into what I call I wanted to make things you can drop on your foot. I didn’t want to continue in technology making software. Nothing wrong with software. It’s just think after 15 years I felt it was too ephemeral. And the firearms thing was, I had the privilege of being able to turn a, I guess, a hobby. This is a dream that everybody wants to do, turn to hobby into a business. It was either going to be firearms or automotive aftermarket, because those are the two big interests that I had at the time.

Wade: There’s a lot to unpack there. I mean, first of all, let’s talk a little bit about the before we get into the specifics about what you guys manufacture and what you guys do. Let’s talk about the decision to move your team up there. Right, so that most people, I think, in that scenario might say, okay, we’re just going to use this as an opportunity to reset and maybe find people locally where we’re going. What went into the decision on that? You were like, okay, we’re going to actually offer this to our people to move up there. Like, how did you arrive at that? How did that happen?

Mitch: Well, it’s actually very obvious to us. First, we’re a very small company, so it’s not like I had to open a facility and find 50 or 100 people. Secondly, as a small company, It’s almost like a family. Your employees are kind of members of your family. We literally had family members, brothers and sisters and other relations working in the company here together. So it was never a question of, oh, I’m just going to leave everybody behind and start another set up someplace else. The company is the people. I feel that very strongly. The company is me and the people. And without the people, you don’t have a company. We offered literally to everybody in the company to go. And as you can imagine, especially mostly with the younger people, a lot of them didn’t want to go. And never they had grown up where they lived in Santa Ana and Orange County, and they weren’t really never considered ever leaving. I think a lot of people are like that. The irony is, most of these, almost all of these people, their parents came from other countries, from Mexico, usually, or El Salvador. And yet they didn’t want to leave. So it was quite an adventure for them. I didn’t get everybody to go. I got a few people insisted on staying home, but it was also an opportunity. These folks in Southern California could not buy homes. That was out of their reach. And that’s one of the reasons we decided to move also so they could buy homes. And they did. Several of them, they bought homes for the first time, and that just would not have been an option in Southern California.

Wade: My dad, he had a concrete company like he was a subcontractor with concrete. And when we were in North Dakota, he decided to move down to Arizona at that time, from the coldest place to the hottest place. But, you know, and I think he did the same thing. I think he just picked on a map. He said, well, what’s busy right now? Where can I take my company? And he brought his poor crew down there. They all everyone moved down there. They went into an apartment. And I think one reason why that works is because when you start a business like you remember, it’s pretty difficult to find people to train them up. And in the beginning, parts of that move, it’s a tenuous time for your business. So I think that was very wise to take that human capital with you and set yourself on a path for success for that. And I think the maximum that the people are the business, I think, is very true, because I think a lot of times business owners will think that their labor is fungible, right? Like, oh, I can just move people in and out. And I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Mitch: I think of a smaller company that’s it’s almost inconceivable to me that a smaller company would even think that way. If you look at the business newspapers and magazines, they’re not talking to people like me. They’re talking to a managerial class where the people really are fungible, their inputs like anything else. But I think if I go down to a business park here in Reno or even in Southern California, and you find small businesses, fewer than ten people, fewer than 20 people, I don’t think you’re going to see that attitude amongst the managers. I think there’s a very different mentality when you get to a smaller business that having the people, people are important to every business but specific people, and the lower that they have when you have a small business, there’s lower in terms of how you do things. And then there’s of course, the relationships that the people in your in your business have with your vendors and with your customers. These people aren’t interchangeable. And then there’s just a moral thing. You don’t treat people like a pallet full of steel. They’re part of your business. So it wasn’t even a difficult. It wasn’t a difficult decision. It was just, okay, this is going to be another cost in 2016. The cost of moving, the cost of moving the company and the cost of moving everybody up there.

Wade: Well, for you, it’s not it wasn’t a decision. But I think that speaks to just you as a business owner. Right. Like because to a lot of people, I would say you’re in the minority by doing that decision. And but obviously it turned out great. Well, let’s get into brass tacks a little bit about what you guys do, like walk me through what the business does, what you manufacture and how you position yourself in the marketplace right now.

Mitch: Well, we’re a very niche business. We make shotgun accessories. And by that I mean stocks oriented on gun shell carriers for tactical shotguns. And the tactical shotgun is basically a shotgun used by law enforcement. Our focus from the beginning was very much on law enforcement. My father was a cop, so I’ve had some exposure into that from a very early age, and law enforcement’s kind of a nice specific market to focus on, rather than trying to do something that’s very broad. Our products work on hunting shotguns, and we get a lot of people calling hunters turkey hunters, especially asking about this and that. Can I do this? Can I do that? Hunting is so broad. There’s so many platforms. There’s there’s so much variety to what people are trying to do. And honestly, I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t even understand hunting. Tactical shotguns are very easy for me to get my head around, but all the things involved hunting, not so much. So we’re narrowly focused on tactical shotguns. We’re narrowly focused on about 6 or 7 different shotgun platforms. When I started the company, I made a decision very early on. I’m not interested in competing on price as a business man in my earlier career, I just always decided trying to compete on price is a losing proposition. Always. Somebody’s going to come in cheaper than you. And to be the lowest cost guy, you’re going to have to make a lot of product compromises.

Mitch: So we went the other way, and I think we were one of the first. We’ve been in business 20 years, and at the time, if you wanted to buy shotgun accessories, shell carriers, stocks and things, they were pretty cheap. I would say I want to say, I want to say they were garbage or anything like that. They were just fairly cheap. And especially when we came out with our shell carrier, the shell shell carrier. And we talked to agencies. The prevailing product on the market at the time, many agencies regarded them as consumables. They would actually throw the shell carrier away after a couple seasons because it just couldn’t hold up. Our shell carrier was much more expensive. Originally it was made out of metal instead of plastic. We just focused on making the best thing we could at a price that wouldn’t scare away the customers. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since, just really trying to focus on innovation and quality. And it has gotten a lot harder because in the last 20 years, other people have entered the entered the market with the same attitude. Other people have come in making high quality. But when we started, we had the advantage that I think a lot of the stuff out there at the time was Fisher Price type stuff. Not like that anymore though. There’s some serious, very good competitors at the moment.

Wade: Well, and I think that Niching Down is really can be a very viable business approach because the two way space. I’m not going to say it’s saturated because I don’t think it is, but there is a lot of people in it now. Right. And the barrier to entry is very small compared to what it used to be. But I love what you guys do. My shotgun. I don’t own a hunting shotgun. I just the only shotgun I have is a mossberg 580 tactical shotgun. So that’s my shotgun. I mean, I do own a hunting shotgun, but it’s it was given to me by my dad and all that. But that space people get just people are like, I’m an AK guy or I’m a AR guy or whatever, but there’s a large contingent of on the retail side. I think of people that that dig what you’re doing, even though you focus more on the on the police side of. So I totally get what you guys are doing, I love it.

Mitch: Well, that’s a there’s actually a marketing plan or a marketing technique. We discussed this very heavily when we were about 10 or 12 years ago. We were really trying to come to grips with how we’re going to market this, and that was the phase when we were growing really rapidly. And we talked about two customers. One is the law enforcement customer. And today I think law enforcement is probably a little bit less than half of our sales, maybe considerably less than half of our sales. Law enforcement is changing right now. I’ll get to that in a moment. But then we had what we call the aspirational customer. And the example I think that your viewers would be most familiar with would be Glock. At that time, Glock entire marketing campaign was focused on cops. They advertised to cops and they advertised in the various firearms media. But the assumption was that the audience of this ad, the person I’m talking to, is a cop. You’re going to thanks to Glock, you know, get home from your ship and I’m going to wave some hands here. But I think Glock has something like 60% of the law enforcement sidearm market, something like that. And Glock has a huge percentage of the civilian non-law enforcement market. So plenty of people. And Glock knows this. This is why they were doing this. They want what the police have. And that’s why Glock would advertise to the police. They’re really talking to the civilian customer, the civilian prospect, because that guy wants what the professionals have.

Mitch: And I got this from the automotive aftermarket. I’ve got a car, a 66 El Camino. It’s full of. It’s full of go fast stuff. That car will never go more any more. Now, in my age, it’ll never go more than 80 miles an hour. It could go a lot faster. And why? Well, because I’m a victim of that mentality myself. I want to go fast. Stuff that the professionals have. So by focusing on the law enforcement market, I accomplish a couple of things. First, my product development is simplified. All I have to do is talk to the agencies. What do you guys want? What’s wrong with this? I have an idea. What do you think of it? It’s nice to be able to just go to the agencies and get that kind of input. And then it gives me a target to actually market at whether or not the agency is actually the one writing the checks. So if I market to agencies and if it’s a fact and it is a fact that our, especially our shell carriers are on many law enforcement shotguns today, in fact, in June of this year we will ship our quarter millionth shell carrier. And again, a lot of those are on agency armory weapons. If that’s a fact, then I’m going to get that customer who wants what the police have. And that’s really what we’ve been doing from the beginning.

Wade: Well, and I think that’s really smart because two things. One, you’re developing a market, right? So you’re like, okay, like we’re going to get the information with the specific market needs. We’re going to get feedback from them. And then we’re going to be able to make adjustments to make our product better. But then on the other side, like you said, you get the halo effect from the police agency. So you can say, here’s a case study of why this works with this police agency. And then when a normal person like me, I’m not a SF guy, I never served. I’ve never been a policeman. I’m just a normal dude. When someone like me goes, well, what am I going to buy? What was the first gun I bought? Well, the first handgun I bought was a Glock, and then I got a monster tactical shotgun. For a lot of the reasons that you’re talking about. And I think you’re killing two birds with one stone. But you only have to work in one vertical to get going. And I think that’s really smart. What do you think caused the consumer side, the retail consumer side, market share for you to grow as you were marketing to the police force? Like, was it organic or was it just something where the officers then were getting stuff for their own guns or what was what caused that growth? I think on the market share, to shift a little bit from your initial efforts.

Mitch: I think if I could answer that really accurately, I’d be in a lot better position than I am. I don’t think our Think our marketing, our promotion, was ever very sophisticated. It isn’t today. It’s actually we do very little right now. At the moment, I would say organic is an interesting word because I think that’s exactly what it was. And I don’t think we could have had the same success that we had over the last 20 years without this new medium, which is the internet, social media, and by social media, I don’t mean Facebook, I mean just thousands and millions of people online talking to each other. And in the firearms community, a lot of that’s on these forums. So there is a lot of discussion. There’s a downside to that. There’s a lot of baloney that’s out there that just never goes away. I still get somebody said something back in 2012 and I’m still getting emails about it. Right. But on the whole, it’s a very positive thing, especially if you’re a small company. You have a good story, very bad thing.

Mitch: If you’re a small company, you treat your customers like crap because everybody’s going to find out. But if you make something that’s good, something that something that you’re happy to stand behind. People will talk about it. And we really never did much advertising. And the advertising we did do, I think, I don’t think was very good personally. We never spent a lot of money on it. We were fairly weak in social media, in the traditional ones like Instagram and Facebook and things like that. I think a great deal of our success is this organic thing, but let’s talk about that. When we talk about success, we’re still a very small company. When people think of businesses in the firearms community, in the firearms space, they’re thinking of people like Daniel Defense and folks like that. I mean, we’re a very small operator compared to a Daniel defense. So you could say, well, you’ve been very successful with this organic approach. What if we did it on a more professional basis? Who knows? We could have been far more successful than we are.

Wade: Well, step one of being able to do that type of marketing is be in business, right? So you can’t expand and grow unless you have a baseline of business, right? And then you can start to think about that. And I think what you’re very astute in what you’re saying about the internet is that if you start to have that law, just like you have that law from your people, you start to get that of your history. And when you’re having those things on the internet, like if you do any writing or any advertising or whatever, it stays on the internet forever. And so people, these leads will start to swim upstream. They’ll hear about you and then they’ll find you. And I think that’s exciting that you are able to manufacture for me where you want in the country, but you still choose to stay where you are, and then just focus on your customers and on doing a great product, and it’s working for you now. Where do you see in terms of you talked about innovation, you alluded that the police forces are changing. Are they moving away from shotguns? Are you seeing that? Are they staying? Is it staying the same? What kind of innovations are they’re asking for. And how do you decide okay, we’re going to try to design something new. Like what’s that process look like for you?

Mitch: Well, you asked a very interesting question about the shotgun or the future of the shotgun and police armories. And it’s actually a very sad story, is that, yes, they actually are moving away from shotguns. There’s been over the 20 years I’ve seen a pendulum effect where they get away from shotguns, and then somebody decides, oh, shotguns are really good after all, and they get back into it. I think they’re moving away from shotguns at this point. There’s a couple reasons for that which might interest your viewers and I’ll get into, but that’s been going on for a while. Our largest deal we ever did, and I guess I can talk about it now because it was so long ago, was with FBI. They bought a lot of these stocks. They’re going to outfit all of their shotguns with our stock and our shell carriers. And then that deal ended abruptly. And I’m talking about this is about a dozen years ago because they made a decision. We’re getting rid of the shotguns going to carbines. And that’s been repeated in many other agencies. And I understand a lot of the reasoning. I think the AR 15 is a very nice platform, especially compared to the 12 gauge shotgun. If you have officers, deputies or agents who are smaller or who are women.

Mitch: The carbine is a very good alternative to a shotgun. I think it’s got some disadvantages, but in general a lot of agencies are moving to the carbine. And there’s another thing that’s happened in the last 3 or 4 years is the Remington Remington business. They went bankrupt. The firearms business was moved to a new company called Remarms. And Remarms has struggled in the last few years with servicing the tactical market. I should just say the agency market, as you could expect, and the Remington 870 was the standard for many years for the law enforcement shotgun. And I think the disruption in the Remington 870 business in terms of availability of parts and things like that, just gave agencies an opportunity to rethink the. What else can we do other than wait 1870. Very disappointing because I personally am a huge fan of the 1870 itself. I don’t like to see agencies move away from it. In many cases they’re moving to Semi-autos and it’s amazing what’s happening with the semi-auto space now with shotguns and police agencies. But more and more of them are going to air 15. We lost right here at Washoe County, no longer uses shotguns.

Mitch: And I heard a rumor that might happen in the city of Reno as well, that they might go to carbines. So that’s a real issue. So we have to ask ourselves, does that mean the Mesa Tactical is in bad shape? Again, we have the advantage of being a very small company. So if I was a large manufacturer and I had a big warehouse and I had a big factory, and I had 500 people working for me, and I heard that there’s this big shift going on with what law enforcement is going to use. I’d be in big trouble, because I’d have to pay for that factory and keep that 500 people employed. But we believe here at Mesa Tactical that 2025 is going to be a good year for us. We see growth in growth and opportunity. Even though I think the broader trend in the market is that the shotgun is becoming less popular or core customer. I know that sounds a little counterintuitive, but it’s just the difference between being a smaller company with fewer commitments versus somebody who has to really look at the percentages out there and what’s going on in the market. We’re lucky we don’t have to do that.

Wade: I worked really intimately for a while with a holster company. I wrote for them and one thing, and they were small, right? And so one advantage of being small that I really noticed was two things. One, they could really pivot really easily, obviously. Right. So they didn’t have to run anything through committees or R&D or anything like that. And then two is they could take chances when they wanted to, to innovate on something and just try it out because they didn’t have to run it through up the chain, that it really wasn’t a matter of spending a ton of money. It was like, oh, let me just make this because I love making it and see what it does, right? I’ll stress test it by running it over with my car. Right. You know what I mean?

Mitch: I can’t overemphasize that last point we have made over the years, products that if we had accountants in charge of the company would never get made. One of our most successful products, our major product discipline, is our Urbino stock. It’s a fixed stock. It is not fancy. It’s just a high quality, shorter length of pull stock. I don’t want to get into it, but the shorter length of pull is far better for tactical applications. Most shotguns come with a big long stock. They’re made for shooting ducks. But you’re buying a stock. Tremendous success for us. And we introduced it about, I don’t know, 13 years ago 14 years ago. And the first platform I supported was the Benelli M4. And this came out of requests that we originally had from the Marines, but mostly with LAPD people at LAPD. Lapd was not making a commitment to buy these. Lapd does not buy stocks. The way LAPD works is is like a lot of agencies work. The sidearm and potentially certain other weapons are purchased personally by the officers, and presumably they’re reimbursed or something like that, but the agency itself is not making the purchase. So LAPD says we need this thing, but we’re not going to buy them from you because we don’t buy shotguns.

Mitch: Our officers do. But we we do want this stock. So I said, sounds good to me, I’ll do it. And to this day, where I think there’s only a couple of companies out there making a stock for the Benelli M4, because the Benelli M4 is not the Remington 870, it’s not a mossberg 500. It doesn’t have thousands and thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of units out there that a company that’s run by bean counters can say, oh yeah, we can sell into this massive market. Nonetheless, for little old me. So tactical has been a tremendous success. And then we supported other obscure platforms with that Urbino stock, for example, the Beretta 1301 when it first came out. And now I think the Beretta stock is probably our top seller in terms of platforms. And again, how many people are out there making stocks for the bread of 1301? Probably only a couple other guys. So yeah, when you’re a smaller company, you can make these decisions. And also we’ve made some bad decisions.

Wade: Nobody bats a thousand, right? 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. It goes back to what we started. The podcast is your decision to niche down right. You’re like okay we’re going to niche down to shotguns. We’re going to niche to police forces. And we’re going to start there. And you’re not afraid to go to a really smaller market within that space because you’re attacking the die hards in a good way. You’re like, okay, we’re going to supply these die hards. People like, for example, when my range does a defensive shotgun course, the same five people show up to it. It’s always the same five people. And if you service those people that have the Benelli and they’re not getting a lot of support in other places, you create a customer for life, right? And they’ll talk about that, okay. Like, yes, you may not do a ton of units on the Benelli, but it’s going to get you business in other ways. It’s going to get you brand loyalty. It’s going to get you recognition and create these relationships and opportunities in other places as well. Because if one guy on the force gets something he digs for his shotgun, he’s going to talk to his friends and they’re all going to go buy it then, too.

Mitch: Yeah, that’s a big part of our marketing is our marketing has been very organic, focusing on a niche in tech. There was a very famous book written by a guy named Regis MacKinnon. I believe he was the first PR guy for Apple and the focus of his book was how to be successful in technology or basically any business. And his main point was find a niche. Focus on that niche and dominate that niche. Now, I don’t think Mesa Tactical is dominating anything. The first part of that I think we’ve done pretty well on, and I saw it when I was in technology, this tendency that people in a manufacturing business or marketing business have to chase other ideas. And that very common problem in tech, because if you have a capability, you say, I have this capability, let me do this capability might not be a good idea because it’s not in the area of focus that you have that your that your market has. And I have the same problem. I’m the designer, I invent this stuff, and I’m always inventing things related to shotguns and other things. And that’s where some of our problems have happened. I ignored McKenna’s dictums and I said, let’s go off and do this cool thing because it’s cool. And it got us into trouble. I will tell you something that’s happened in the last two years is I hired a boss. We hired a COO who is now my boss, and he’s one of his jobs. And one of the areas he’s been useful is he reins me in, you know, so I can’t do anything anymore without his permission. Most company owners founders have more discipline than I do. But I needed that guy. So we can’t run off and do cool things because they’re cool. Because 1 or 2 guys I talked to said this is a great idea, and I ran with it.

Wade: Well, that’s a creative person problem, right? And and you sound to me like you’re a quick starter as well. So that’s a creative person, quick starter problem where it’s like, hey, I don’t really want to live here anymore or I’m going to move to a place I’ve never seen before. Reno looks cool. Let’s go there. And and that’s your strength. But as always, everyone always says that your strengths can be your your weakness. But it seems like you’re taking the steps to rein that in. I think that’s important for business owners to understand. You use the software example, and I like to think about feature creep right where it’s like I buy something and it’s not like, so I’ll write emails for clients and then they’ll be on some platform. And every year that platform adds a couple steps for me to be able to send out their emails. And it just annoys me because it’s like, I don’t want this feature, I just want it simple. And there’s increasing features, increasing friction, and it makes the the user experience goes down because the people who are in charge are more focused. And like we said, okay, let’s just do something to do something. And so I think that’s a really important, um, lesson for people in the firearms space is, is don’t leave your core group behind just because you want to go off on a wild hare.

Mitch: Also, the feature creep is a problem, and it’s definitely a problem with me. And I sit here, we’ll have a meeting and we’ll talk about, hey, we have this cool idea and you’ll say, yeah, that’s a really a cool idea, but is it a practical, cool idea? I mean, in the firearms business, I have an example. This might be controversial. Some of your viewers are going to say, I’m full of crap, but the cool idea that’s always out there that everybody wants to do is a re a field replaceable barrel. So you can replace the barrel with a different chambering and the ACR. The original Remington ACR had, I think, four different barrel chamberings that you could in the field. You could just replace this thing. Added weight, cost complexity. But wow, it was really cool. You could change the barrel. And I remember talking to the product manager about that because we, as Remington was a customer of ours, and we used to go down to Huntsville from time to time. He was very excited about that. And I used to think to myself, well, that is cool. And I suppose if I was a machine gun operator when the barrel or the barrels were getting too hot, I would want to be able to field replace the barrel. But I couldn’t think of too many other times that I’d ever want to change calibers in the middle of a shoot. And if if I did and I was in an AR 15 platform, I could just replace the upper. And in any case, I don’t have a lot of leeway in the calibers I’m going to change because I have to change the magazine. Well, anyway, I mean, just this is really cool, but what’s the point of this? Why are you doing it? And I mentioned that example because I see every year every few months you see somebody pop up with some, here’s this cool rifle that has interchangeable barrels. It’s like they’re doing it again. I do that. That’s another reason why it’s good to have somebody internal who isn’t afraid to talk to you and tell you you’re wrong.

Wade: The barrel example is a great example, because maybe that was cool back in the day when there weren’t a lot of options on the market where everything was really super expensive for different platforms. But today you can trick out one platform in a certain gauge and then just go do another one, and then you just pull up the other one. And for me, also as if I’m using a shotgun, if I’m using a tactical shotgun, I want that thing to work and I don’t want to mess with it. Like once I get it working. I just want to be able to put a million rounds through it and have it always act the same and never touch it if I don’t have to. Does that make sense?

Mitch: Yeah. No, we’re in a we’re in a different world now than my father’s world. I don’t know anybody who owns one AR 15. Right. Everybody’s you get your different guns to either do different things or to try different things that you wanted to try. And whatever your economic circumstances, you’re You definitely today. Most of the people I talk to anyway. They have multiple guns. Whereas again, a person from my father’s generation wouldn’t have a lot of guns. I think the manufacturing process has made them cheaper compared to to rent and eating. And that’s something I often tell people. And maybe I sound arrogant when I’m saying it, because I’m assuming they can afford to do it. But, you know, I’ll get a guy on the phone and he says, I got my grandfather’s Remington 1100, and I want to do this and this to it. And they ask me all these questions about taking the stock off and doing this and doing that. And I just I’ve done this several times and said, look, the things that we make for the Remington H70 don’t fit on your grandfather’s 1100. And you can do this and this, but you know what you really ought to do. You should take your grandfather’s 1100, put it in the safe, and go out to your local gun store, buy an 870, and then you can trick that out with Mesa Tactical products. Don’t screw around with your grandfather’s 1100. Leave it the way it is. That’s usually met with positive response because most of the people I talked to say, oh yeah, I guess maybe I’ll just get another shotgun. And when he tells the wife, he says, well, the guy on the phone said, I need another shotgun, so I need another one. So he gets to get another. Well, it’s a.

Wade: Lineage that my dad gave me a single shot. Ducks unlimited 20 gauge shotgun. Right. I’m not going to miss that thing. I’m going to give that to my son. Right. Like, why would I go get it? Like, I wasn’t trying to trick that gun out. Well, it’s this big, but. Exactly. I agree with you 100%.

Mitch: For some people, it’s the only gun they’re going to have access to. And those people, unfortunately, can’t afford to go out and get another one. It’s easy for me to say, but for most people, I think most of the people I get on the phone. Yeah. Go get another one. Well, even.

Wade: Like your regular people, like, even from the AR platform, I mean, you can get Palmetto Armory AR that you’re never as a normal human being. You’re never going to run too many rounds through that to where you’re never going to shoot so many rounds that you have to replace the barrel. And if you do, then you’ll be ready to upgrade the gun from there. And I think it’s funny when people buy these guns and then they, you know, they put these, you’re going to put $1,000 optic on your $500 gun, right? Let’s everybody get good at the iron sights. Right?

Mitch: I got to be careful about that, because with some of our products, especially our hydraulic collapsing stock, it costs more than the gun. But the thing that people say, this thing costs more than the gun.

Wade: Right? But the difference is that the gun that they’re using, it’s like the Glock 17, right? Or the Glock 19, it’s like, okay, the reason why the gun is inexpensive is because there’s been a billion rounds put through it, and it can be when it’s 20, they know it works. And so the if the purpose of the gun is to shoot every time, not jam and work properly, then yeah, then you can add these other things to it, but especially if you’re proficient at it. But for someone that’s just starting out, they don’t need to do all of that. You know what I mean? If once you get good and you start to get around your gun, then yeah, we’ll start trickling it out and get good at it. And but from a, especially from a police officer perspective, that’s why the guns are expensive is because they, they’ve been produced for so long. There’s billions of units out there.

Mitch: Yeah. You can do them cheaper. We had a just one of the most amazing experiences I had was during the pandemic and no lockdowns in northern Nevada. We didn’t have any of that, but as there was a tremendous gun boom that lasted two solid years and unfortunately it was followed by a horrible crash because of the supply chains were all screwed up. But that gun boom, the NSSF, they say, I don’t know, it’s a big number between 7 and 15 million new gun owners in America. Nobody knows exactly the real number, but I’m pretty sure I had half of them on the phone at one time. Nice. It was nice and it was fun. It was gratifying. I like talking to new gun owners. I think many people in this business get impatient with them, but I get people on the phone who are buying their first gun. For whatever reason, they decided it was going to be a shotgun, and they’re on the phone with me because at the shop, the guy behind the counter said, you need to get this and this for me. So practical. I always was fascinated by that. It’s like I never talked to that guy. Where is he getting this impression and why is he telling this first time gun owner that he needs to have my stuff. I’m glad he’s doing it. But it was fascinating talking to so many people every day. I had these people on the phone who never touched a firearm, and I have a lot of experience. When we were in California with introducing people to shooting, because we would every month we’d have an employee shoot all the employees come out.

Mitch: We’d have 15, 20 guns free ammunition. Bring your relatives, bring your friends. And if they’ve never fired a gun, we’ll take them off to the side. We’ll teach them the rules, and we’ll take them with the 22, and we’ll get them shooting. And by the end of the day, everybody’s shooting. 12 gauge shotguns, AR 15, M1, Garands, you name it. Everybody’s having a great time. So I had a lot of experience with new people. It was really a lot of fun talking to these people over the phone, but also very educational because a firearm, what I learned is a very unique consumer item. I’m not doing that. I said, well, look in the manual, you have to take the trigger group out. It’s part of the cleaning regimen and you would get resistance from guys, and then I’d get them back on the phone and they’d say, hey, I took the trigger group out and put it back in and in and it works great. I can’t believe I did that. Yeah, so many people have don’t have that experience in their everyday lives. And for us, those of us who are in the firearms community, it’s just like a second nature thing. But no, a firearm aside from its purpose, is quite a different consumer item, quite a different thing to have in the house compared to almost everything else that we have. I mean, just think of everything that’s in your kitchen, all those machines, and you don’t have anything to do with them except push the button and make them go. You don’t even clean them, probably. I mean, when’s the last time you cleaned an oven? I bet we.

Wade: Cleaned our oven one time. And then it broke. And it was during the middle of the nonsense. So it broke a sensor or something because it got too hot. And so then it was. And we did the self-clean. And then it was impossible. We didn’t have an oven. We didn’t have an oven for like three months. I was so mad. And my wife was like, I can’t believe you cleaned this. Never again. But yeah, no, I.

Mitch: Stopped cleaning the oven.

Wade: Right on. I think that’s a very astute point. Well, because you have to have a safe, right? Like I have to have. I have two gun safes. Right. Because I have kids. And you gotta know how to. You gotta know how to clean it, right? You gotta know.

Mitch: How to take it apart and stripping it. Those are big things for most people. You go down the street to your neighbors and talk and go into their houses and talk to them about it. And again, I was a firearms activist, a two way activist for a long time when I was in California. One of the things I did not like about that community was this sort of, oh, it’s any community you’re going to get. It’s an ideological thinking, and you run into a lot of people who think every problem can be solved by a gun. And of course, that’s not true. And if you say that to people, you just turn them off, right? Because they know they’re not interested in every problem being solved by a gun. We’re just mostly interested in making sure that they don’t take our guns away. But there’s so much that goes into possessing a firearm and having a minimal level of proficiency with it that you just in the closest example I can think of that’s not a gun is a bicycle. I just rode my bike in today. I ride a bike and my bike needs to be fixed and I have to fix it. And there’s just nothing else other than people have in their house. It’s close to that. So it was a big departure for people who were having to buy their first firearm. And obviously, you and I, we both hope it was a positive experience for most of these people. I’m afraid what most of them did was they bought the gun and they put it in a closet and they forgot about it, or they got rid of the gun. After a year or two, when their fears subsided. Whatever caused them to buy the gun in the first place? But I know personally that more than a handful of them got out and shot it all the time, and now got more guns because they thought, this is this is something I want to do. It was a silver lining on that mess.

Wade: You touched on a through line there that that one thing that a lot I would say 90% if not 100% of the people that I interview that have successful businesses and buy successful businesses, I mean, people who are in business, right? They stay in business. That, to me is a successful business. And then you can have levels from there is that they all have this customer service through line with them, whereas they don’t have a problem talking to a brand new person who knows nothing. Um, because they understand that even if that person doesn’t buy from them, that it one, it makes you better at your craft, at talking to people about what you do. But two it’s just a cost of doing business is to educate people, and then you can create a customer for life and a firearms business. Now, not everyone’s going to buy from you, and not everyone that buys from you is going to come back. But but you will create customers for life if you just spread the word about and believe in what you do. And that is a through line for everyone that I talk to. Is the customer service approach that you’re talking about for sure.

Mitch: It’s interesting. Yeah, we we take pride in our customer service and of course we get complaints. Some people have had a bad experience and some people either they fell through the cracks or some people you just can’t please. And that’s in our industry. That’s something that at the retail level is really needs to be emphasized. And I’ve been saying it for years. And again, if I say something. You think I’m talking about you? Yeah. Then you’re the problem. I mean, a lot of gun stores, you walk in and it’s a scary place. If you know anything about guns, and you walk up and the guy’s behind the counter there to intimidate you. Especially for women. Many women, I’m sure, will walk into many gun stores and just turn the hell around and walk back out. It’s just they’re not a friendly, inviting place. And they can be. I don’t want to mention names, just even positively at this point, just because I’ll leave somebody out. But there’s a gun store and they have multiple locations in the country, and they’re a big online store, but they have a retail business in Orange County where we used to be. I knew the owners and I knew them since both of us were starting our companies at the same time. This place. First of all, it’s busy as hell all the time. This place is unbelievable. It’s a very large store, and the people behind the counter are these young guys.

Mitch: They’re young, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and they’re just fantastic guys. And they know what they’re talking about. There’s so many people behind the counter at the gun store who just see all kinds of crazy crap, but these guys know what they’re talking about. And if you don’t know anything about guns and you walk up and you have questions, they will answer the questions. And that was the downside of this place, because you had to take a number and wait because it was a crowded place. They had so many people behind the counter and some of the customers they were working with, they were just hand holding them and really helping them with all kinds of dumb ass. First time customer questions, excellent customer service. And this company is a very successful company, a very successful retailer, both online and at least in this location in Orange County. And I remember asking the owner, as you said in the beginning of the podcast, hiring people is one of the hardest things to do. I said, My God, the guys you have behind the counter, they’re fantastic. Where do you get them? What do you do? What kind of a training program do you have for them? I really wanted to know and I know she said she was being cryptic about it. She wouldn’t tell me anyway. Short end of the story. She wouldn’t tell me. She just said, ah, we find these guys.

Wade: Didn’t want to give up her. Give up her secret. But I.

Mitch: Don’t know. You don’t find you don’t find these guys. These guys aren’t just, you know, sitting around at street corners. Excellent. But anyway, to your point this the customer service in that place was was extraordinary compared to a lot of their competition, which are frankly scary. Well, and we.

Wade: Shouldn’t no matter how big your company is, no matter what you produce a product or experience or service, no matter where you are in the country, you can always gain a competitive edge over anyone else with your customer service, because that is something that you have 100% control over, and that is a through line of what I’ve seen through a lot of the successful businesses that I’ve talked to. Well, listen, Mitch, we’re on the downside here. At the end of our time, I really enjoyed talking to you and want to bring you back on the show in six months or so to see how you guys are doing. How do people find you? I know it’s mesatactical.com is the website is there. The phone number is 775333 9800. Is there an email if people have questions that they can send to you.

Mitch: Yeah. Sales and easy to remember one would be sales@mesa.com.

Wade: Perfect.

Mitch: Great question.

Wade: And are you the one that does the support on that or is that how they get to you if they have any questions for you specifically, if it’s a Leo or I’m the.

Mitch: Guy who’ll answer that email. Yeah.

Wade: Amazing.

Mitch: At the moment I’m the sales guy and the designer guy.

Wade: Well, again, I really enjoyed having you on today. I think that’s a great place to stop with regards to the customer service, and it’s easy to see why you guys have been in business for so long. Thanks for coming on and I’d love to have you on again.

Mitch: Oh, thanks a lot. It was a pleasure doing this.

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.