Becoming a Niche of One With Matt Everett AKA NC Scout

About This Episode

In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with With Matt Everett AKA NC Scout. Join Matt as he shares his incredible journey from Army service to teaching and entrepreneurship. With years of experience in combat and specialized communications, Matt found his true calling in education and writing. Discover how his WordPress blog, BrushBeater, skyrocketed in popularity, leading him to publish best-selling books and launch a thriving business selling tactical gear and communication products. Don’t miss out on this episode!

Insights In This Episode

• Matt identified a gap in the prepper community, specifically in communications, and started writing about it, offering a unique perspective as a former soldier.
• Leveraging his success, Matt expanded his business to include selling hydrogen, thermal gear, tactical equipment, and survival food.
• How they target impulse buyers by offering high-quality, affordable gear that customers want immediately, understanding the psychology of sales.
• Why it’s best to have your retail store aim to provide an immersive experience where customers can test and interact with equipment before purchasing, enhancing trust and satisfaction.

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 will 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 am your host, Wade Skalsky. And today I am fired up because, as they say, this person we’re about to talk to, I’m not only a client as well as an interviewer today, so we’re interviewing and talking to Matt Everett, also known as NC Scout, also known as Brushbeater. Matt, how are you doing today, sir?

Matt: Doing good man. Thank you for having me on. Uh.

Wade: I’m excited. So like I said, I follow your work on Twitter at Brushbeater as an NC scout on Twitter, or is it @Brushbeater or.

On Twitter @brushbeater is the handle. And then NC scouts the the screen name. Definitely worth.

Wade: A follow. And so anyway, so I’m excited to talk to you today. Where I always like to talk with people to start with is like your origin story, right? Like how did you get to where you are now? Right? So how did that happen? Because one great thing about this podcast is everyone has a different path to the business space that they’re in. So how did you get to what you’re doing right now?

Matt: It’s unlikely. Story spent seven years in the Army and I was a trigger puller in the Army. You know, a lot of different units, line units. I was in a long range surveillance company for a while and spent a lot of time overseas in the height of the Gwot years. And lifestyle is going to going to bust you to pieces. Some people are lucky to survive it. I was certainly lucky to survive. It got blown up seven times. One of those IEDs that that we hit. I actually had broken my back during it and wasn’t aware of it. So come back from Afghanistan, started having some issues and some pretty serious ones, and it was very obvious, like I needed to make some decisions. So I ended up getting out of the Army and going back to school, doing what everybody does, going back to school, and then got into teaching. Interestingly enough, just complete didn’t really plan on any of these things. It was just like every juncture in life was like a what’s next kind of deal. And one of the nice things, though, is while I was in school, while I was teaching, I started writing a WordPress blog called BrushBeater, and that took off in popularity, mainly because there’s there’s a lot of shooters out there.

Matt: There’s a lot of martial artists out there. There’s a lot of guys out there with a ton of combat knowledge, combat experience, who are all really gifted at sharing what they know. And that’s a wonderful thing about this era in which we live, is that there are so many awesome guys that are sharing that knowledge, but one of the areas where I thought a lot of stuff fell short was in the communications realm. And so part of some of the things that I did over my career dealt with more of the specialization of communications. And really, how do you conceptualize this in an organizational sense, which is very different than the typical amateur radio, or just use Gmrs or like whatever the typical quote unquote prepper answers are or whatever? And so I started writing about all that stuff, and it was very different than what I think most people had been served to, because it was a very different way of thinking about it. It was coming at it from a perspective that you’re a trigger puller. Kind of how everybody conceptualizes what they’re doing online is I’m the trigger puller, I’m the hero of my story or whatever it is. So fast forward a bit. I was teaching kind of another life juncture. It’s like Covid was on the horizon and there were a lot of decisions being made in academic spaces about moving all courses to online and whatever, and I was totally against that.

Matt: The thing was that I was teaching courses part time to people at that time, and it was like, well, I can do this full time. Or I could continue to try and work these two jobs, which are both full time jobs, and be miserable at one and really happy at the other. And then home life is suffering, uh, in the meantime because you never get any time off. So it was it was another juncture point where you have to make that decision about your next step in life. And I can say that I have not regretted any of those decisions, not once. It has been absolutely incredible. And the shooting community, this prepper community, this survival, whatever you want to call it, the political activist community and conservative circles has been so incredibly good to me and has embraced, you know, everything that I’ve been teaching. So class sizes are absolutely huge. It has taken off like a rocket. And I’m so blessed to have this community. So wrote some books. They did very well, um, and wrote some books, really, at the prompting of some friends of mine who said, hey, we’re training people or certain things in Ukraine, for example.

Matt: Or maybe some other parts of the world that are potential flashpoints and the battle thing. Radio is really the most common piece of equipment in the world that these guys are being equipped with. So how do you do all the things? How do you how do you write a basic, essentially a dummies guide, how to use this thing in the field, how to maximize it, how to introduce communications security to it, use it in a clandestine role. And so, you know, I sat down and wrote the book on that, wrote a book on signals intelligence as well, since there really wasn’t anything of its kind out there. And from there, I mean, the financial success of those books and really the notoriety of those books and how well they’ve been received propelled me to get into other ends of the business. And now we sell hydrogen, we sell thermal. I’ve got few gear manufacturers that are good friends with. I sell their products. I have my own bespoke line of tactical gear as well communications products, survival food, I mean, you name it, we’ve got it. And it’s been the success of this community and the embracing of this community that’s propelled all of this success.

Wade: Yeah. No, it’s there’s so much to unpack there, both from a personal, personal sort of approach but also a business approach. So the first thing I want to start with is this idea of niching down. Right? So I always I write for the firearms industry, and I always tell people the power of a book, right? Or the power of writing like, like your blog. So you can there’s not a lot of people in the firearms industry that are writing like you are either a book or a blog. And so it’s a very powerful business opportunity to put your yourself out there and never sleeps. Right? Your books are always selling, your blog is always out there. People have been discovering you. Right? So and then the second thing though is that niching down is what’s really interesting is so like I said, we talked a little bit before the podcast where I’m like a normal person in my shoot and I try to train. And so the big, the first big aha for me was medical, right? They’re like, well, yeah, you can shoot. Can you do better? Right. Like, do you know how to do you have a tourniquet. Do you know how to use it. Can you stop the bleeding. And so that started to open my eyes although these other things. So then when I come across your information on the radio, right, which is this is the book, right.

Wade: That Pentagon this was my The Girl’s Guide to the Radio by Scott. Yeah. This is the gateway drug to yourself. Right. So this is you can get this on Amazon. And it really opened my eyes because before that my only the only two things I knew about radio were that there’s something called a ham radio, which made me think that there were these people with these gigantic radios in their house that were the size of a dresser. Right? Yeah. And then from the movie, we were soldiers and we once we were young, where they have the guy who’s in the forest or basic training, and he picks up some radio signal from faraway. I’m like, can you do that? Which actually, I guess you can. And so, yeah. And so that the cool part about from a business perspective is that no one else is doing that, that I’m aware of. All right. Or I at least so few people are doing it that when I came that when I came aware of it, you were the only person that I, that that was this. So you became a niche of Warren now was that on purpose or was that something that just happened organically?

Matt: I think it just happened organically there. There’s been a lot of, I would say, amateur radio people, which I am, I am an amateur extra, which is as high as the licensing class cares. I don’t think it’s not really that big of a deal. You can memorize the test. It’s not particularly difficult to do, but the real learning happens when you’re on the air. But with that said, there were other people who had amateur radio backgrounds or very technical backgrounds who were writing to differing degrees. And over the years, and a couple of them, I think, were offering classes. But it’s a case of when people are overly technical, they’re going to lose the laity. That’s an academic academia. Insider kind of term, is when you’re overly technical to people who are not indoctrinated to a lot of the the nuances of things, you’re going to lose them. And so there really wasn’t anything that I saw that approached these topics from a common man perspective of, hey, how do you do this? And more importantly, why do you do the things that you do and the way that you do it? And so the amateur radio world, a lot of the, I’ll say, a lot of the personalities who were influencers in that space and the the prepper space, a survivalist type space, they were not very good at conveying that, that knowledge at all that that I saw.

Matt: And I was trying to learn from these guys too. And it just really I saw that it was very polarizing. There was a lot of language that looked down on people who were using inexpensive equipment, which is a big pet peeve of mine. That’s a very big pet peeve of mine. There should be no gatekeeping in any of this stuff. You. You have to embrace what people have and then you can teach them, hey, like this is your entry level. All right. Cool. Guess what? You were able to do all this with that. Now, if we step it up a little bit, maybe now you can justify that expense. But it’s like that with anything, and it’s like that with firearms. It’s like that with optics. It’s like that with night vision, thermal, you name it. I mean, it’s any community you’ve got that golfing community comes to mind where you just have your elitist snobs. It doesn’t make you better at what you’re doing. The amount of money you spent, you can’t buy your way to skill. But, um, going back to the whole radio thing is that a lot of people were thirsting for that knowledge and they just weren’t getting it. And it’s like, well, I understand how to conceptualize these things and like put them together in a workable package.

Matt: So do that, do that, introduce that to them, and explain that to them as best that you can. And I did or I did what I could and it became very well received, very well received. And it I have people all the time that reach out to me or like, you’re the reason that I got into radio. I had a guy who is a team member of a special operations team, Alpha, which is a signals intelligence arm of special operations and had him in class. This is a guy who’s had a whole lot of training. Sigint is what he does for a living. And I mean, he told me flat out, he said, no, I got into this stuff because of your war, because you’re writing. And that’s always makes me feel really good. Very validating. It’s a positive step because we have to be the change we want to see in the world, and that comes through praxis. It comes through practical application. We don’t need to sit and talk about politics over and over again. I’m not a politician. And you know what? Nothing I say about politics is going to change what is. But what will have a positive impact on things is giving people a skill set that they can use. That’s so, so much more important and much more empowering to a free people.

Wade: Yeah, I know, I couldn’t agree with you more. You know, I was thinking like a personal anecdote and I think that this could be helpful to anyone that’s thinking about talking about the gatekeeping. Right. And thinking about a firearms business or firearms adjacent or whatever. Right. So because I bought your book, I bought some baofeng radios, right? So I then was able to program them and give one to my mother in law and give one to my brother in law. And so, like, they don’t know anything. I said, look, just here’s the radio, keep it charged, here’s an envelope, just turn it on. If something happens so that we can reach each other, that’s it. That’s all you got to do. So they just throw in a box, they throw it in somewhere, right? But now, because they’re within range and everything of where I live, my family and my extended family is safer because of this book that you wrote. Right. And so and I and I always tell my firearms instructor every time I lead a class is like, my family is safer because of this time that you spend with me today. And if you were if you approach your service, product or experience from that perspective, you’re going to be successful. Because now let’s say my brother in law gets interested in it, or even my mother in law gets interested in it or whatever.

Wade: That’s how you create brand loyalty. And I think it’s really important for businesses to not maybe think about that all the time, but to think about that from that perspective, because I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, I never would have bought a radio. And and I do have a question and I’ll just read it. But I wanted to share that with you because it’s important. So I live in Virginia, I’ve lived in Virginia Beach, and we have very inclement weather here. Right? Sometimes. So yeah, you’re right. So so the last time that happened, I just got off my radio and I knew where to go to and to listen to the proper, the proper, uh, the proper weather channel on there. It was like I felt better. So, so that’s a practical application for a normal human being that’s not gatekeep. And, and I think that there’s so much competition for like, the Gucci High tier. Oh, we have the Gucci High Sierra trading and we’re going to teach you CQB and all that. But there’s such a huge unmet market for the type of the sort of the top of funnel entry level market. Do you think that your time as an educator helps you in your business to get to where you are? Has that been helpful to you? Oh yeah.

Matt: 1,000%. I look back on it, even though I really didn’t enjoy that world that much. So I got asked literally that same question during fighting for me when we were coming off the range on Sunday. And my student, who he wrote off the range with me and he’s like, man, like he I just want to know, like how he’s because I’ve been to a lot of other classes and there’s usually really whoever’s teaching it is a really good shooter, but they’re not always the best at instructing and whatever. And do you think that your time as a teacher helped out 100%? Because had I just come out of the Army and started doing this, I would have failed. And I’ve seen several colleagues of mine. I refer to everybody that teaches and, you know, the firearms community or the rapper community or whatever. They’re all colleagues. I look at, you know, when people think of like, business stuff, your competition is yourself because you need to be putting out the best product every class, every time, every opportunity you have. You need to be putting out the very best product that you can. And don’t worry about what maybe some of these other guys are doing because they have their products, and if their product is good, then that’s going to make your product better. If their product is not so good, then that makes your product look better.

Matt: Whatever the case is, you don’t have to get into that stuff. But where I’m going with this is, is that when had I just got out of the Army? There’s a particular way that’s very rigid military by the numbers way of teaching that even though you’re my army, I never really took a lot of stuff very seriously. And I was just there to have fun, just ended up at different places, mainly because I wanted wanted that higher degree of freedom for of not being. I wanted to be treated like an adult. That’s what everybody in the Army seeks, is like that one place where you get treated like an adult. And, um, but with that said, you have a you have a by the numbers approach to teaching things. It’s a total different perspective. And you’re teaching soldiers. When I got out, I’m now I’m teaching civilians, I’m teaching kids, I’m teaching late teenagers, early 20s. And even though I was used to dealing with soldiers in that age bracket, so that kind of helped me out. Same time, like, these aren’t soldiers. And so you have to approach teaching them. And I was able to build a very good rapport with all my students. Just because you don’t talk to them like you’re talking down to them, you’re able to make the content of the course relatable and there’s the entertainers aspect to it, too.

Matt: And I really cut my teeth doing that, figuring out how to get across to these kids and got really good at it. And that translated very well to taking what would normally be dry. Radio theory, for example, is very dry, very technical, very boring stuff, unless you’re just into that field, unless you’re just like you’re a physicist and that’s just your thing, but you’re talking about a very tiny group of people when you’re speaking to people who aren’t really indoctrinated. All this stuff, man, you know, like, we don’t need to get way down in the weeds of the minutia. And there’s turns into being more Greek letters than there are numbers up here and facts and figures and all that stuff. But I need to do that. I just need to create a working model for you that you can, in turn, replicate and make the content entertaining and rock and roll with it. And that’s exactly the approach that I took and continue to take. And the I’ll say the other thing that goes along with that, something that being out of the Army really helped me was the realization and the imparting of this attitude onto your students and your clientele. Hey, I’m not better than you like you came to me to learn a skill, but you all come from professional worlds where you do something that I don’t know anything about.

Matt: So you can’t talk now to people and you shouldn’t that that’d be very wrong. And real hubris. And I think that arrogance that I’ve seen out of unfortunately, some in the shooting community and we all know who those are. We. Yeah. I don’t need to name any names and I’m not going to you don’t need to do that. That arrogance doesn’t need to be there. It doesn’t need to happen. One of one of the other things too, is I like to have a good time. I like to hang out with the students after hours you come out with. It’s a very fraternal atmosphere. We’re we’re here to have a good time. You work hard, you play hard, and you enjoy the company of of others through the duration of that weekend or that three day course, whatever it is that builds so much too, because we don’t get to do that enough in our day to day lives. And I’ll say one thing like when I started teaching and teaching these classes professionally, I had only trained with a couple of guys that had come from the civilian space. Jerry Barnhart was one of them, and I didn’t know really anything about this business, or I didn’t know anything about how any of this stuff was really run.

Matt: I just ran it like, okay, man, we’re here. Zero nine just like typical duty day in the Army, we’re going to wrap up at 1700. We’re going to cram this entire POI into that time. And then after hours, now we’re going to have a good time. We’re going to hang out. And I had somebody tell me who had been to a lot of civilian side classes, and he’s become a very good friend of mine and got him to teaching courses of his own, but also in the communication space, by the way, because it’s just something that he’s good at and he is a really good rapport with people. But he said, every course I’ve ever been where there’s been the guys teaching it, they pop out into the day they’re gone and they’re not hanging out with the students or nothing. And you’re here drinking beers with us. And that blew my mind. Why wouldn’t you want to hang out with the guys that are coming to learn that knowledge from you? And maybe they let their hair down for a little while. Something that I’ve learned over the years is that people, especially when you have a very technical class like communications, some people won’t ask questions during the course because they’re scared to. They think like, I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but I don’t understand this one thing that you asked or that you were talking about.

Matt: So I’m not going to ask you about it because this is so far beyond me, I don’t understand. But they drank a couple beers with you and they realize, like, this guy isn’t going to talk to me like a dude. I can actually talk to him like a normal person. We’re here to have a good time and learn some things. This is really cool. And then they’ll open up to you and they’ll ask that question. And I have absolutely zero problems after hours. That’s when some of the best instruction has happened where it’s like, okay, so we covered this one way in class. We got a couple beers in us. Now we’re a little more relaxed. The liquid courage is flowing a little bit. And let me explain it a different way, since you brought the question up and that I’ve seen that, that that has helped a lot of students who have come out and after hours. Because when you’re talking again, very technical types of information, some people will just have this innate fear of, I don’t want to sound like an idiot. I don’t want to sound like a dummy. I’m just going to write the notes down and maybe I’ll figure it out later.

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. There’s a couple of things in there, too, and I don’t know if you’re doing this on purpose, but you’re talking about like the gatekeeping people who are like, oh, I have this image or this ego that I have to uphold. That’s like a authority selling in business. Right? So like, okay, well, I’m the authority. I’m going to talk down to you. My time is so precious that when I’m done, I have to leave. And that’s one model and it works really well. And we all know who those people are, not just in the firearms industry, but any industry like it has them. But your approach is more of a competent selling, right? Where it’s like, look, I’m competent and secure what I’m doing. So I don’t care if I and I just live the same way through the course that I do off the course. I’m the same human being. And if you have a question, be confident enough in my own abilities to answer them to you.

Wade: And I think people really respond to that, especially people who don’t consider themselves the Gucci people. And I always and I don’t have a problem with Gucci firearms and all that and that whole world. Right. And I think, cool. But like, there’s I will never be more than, I will never be more than what I am. I’m just a dad. I got two kids. I’m just trying to be safe. So what attracts me to your content is exactly what you said is that it’s very accessible to normal human beings. And from a business perspective, there are more normal human beings than there are special courses. Guys looking for more trade. So right now, I want to talk to you a little bit about this other thing that you brought up too is I think when I look at your business and kind of the arc of your business is all you did really was, was stack platforms on top of each other. Right. So you said, okay, so I’m not going to do the whole world. I’m going to start with this book and I’m gonna start with this blog. Then I went to this book okay. Now I’m getting more demand. Now I’m stacking something else on top of that. And all you did was you just kept stacking things that you met demand with, but you didn’t expand too quickly. Is that a fair assessment of what you did? Was that oh, and is that something that you feel was on purpose or again, was that organic?

Matt: It was organic. It wasn’t on purpose that that was it. It had you told me even 24 months ago that I would be selling thermal and night vision products. I would have laughed at you. And if you had told me that, I’d be selling them in the volume that I’m selling them in, I would have really laughed at you. And I told you, get out of my face, because no way. Dude, had somebody told me five years ago that you write a book that will be a number one bestseller for a year and a half straight. I will say, too, though it’s not necessarily by accident that I came to understand pattern recognition, because there’s a lot of that in business, and it’s understanding too. So for the Scout Force, for example, it’s a small unit tactics course and people come to class wanting, first of all, to get hands on with a lot of equipment that you’re going to be using more advanced equipment. And so as the instructor, I have to be able to provide some level of that thermal. For example, there’s a lot of misconceptions about thermal imaging, and there’s simultaneously the threat of thermal imaging as a tool. Being weaponized on a potential battlefield is very high. So you need to understand the ins and outs of that. Well, I have to be able to provide that equipment to you.

Matt: Well, you’re always going to have a certain segment of people who are going to want to purchase that equipment now as well. And so I started looking at it like people come to class also wanting to purchase equipment because they’re trying it before they buy it. Something that I found myself saying here recently, because we’re getting ready to launch our brick and mortar location going into the fall. And would you spend Rolex money on a Rolex or a Panerai or Amiga or whatever for high end watch? Would you spend that money on that product sight unseen? The answer is no. No you wouldn’t. I mean, I’m sure there’s somebody out there who would, but typically you wouldn’t. You want to take a look through that. You want some industry guarantee. You want some protection that a the product you’re getting is genuine product. Right. And B, that it it is to the degree of quality that you would expect when you’re talking about spending upwards of close to $10,000, sometimes more on the really high end equipment. But you know, when it’s all said and done, 4000, 5000, $6,000 is a big chunk of change for people, especially nowadays. And so they come to class wanting to utilize that equipment. Will they see the relevance now because like, oh man, yeah, this is a really important piece of equipment that can not just help me keep my family safe in times of extremis, but also could be used for a plethora of other very positive uses.

Matt: People that work in the construction construction industry, for example, doing insulation thermals are really important. I sell a lot of thermals to fire departments because they need that. They’re putting them on their trucks. It. So I have a lot of government clientele that are not in any way, shape or form trigger pullers by any means, but they want the relevance. So when people come to class, they’re taking a look through stuff. They say, oh man, yeah, I need this. All of a sudden they want to buy something. Why would I send that potential client who’s now built that trust with me? Why would I send them somewhere else? Previously, I didn’t have the capital to do that because it costs a lot of money to get into being a dealer. And these companies, the AGM armour site, Trijicon, these companies don’t want to pick up the phone for you, unless you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars with them at a time. That’s the business model. If you want wholesale pricing, that’s how you’re going to have to do it. And success of the books allowed me to get into that business, and here we are.

Wade: Fine. And I think if you were to think about it in like a business class or whatever it would be, all you’re doing is you’re solving the next problem, right? So you’re like, okay, so I’ve got this book now I’ve got signals. Great. Well, where do you use signals? Well, you’re going to use it out in the, you know, in the forest, out in the field. Right. Well do I have the field skills. Right. Well, no. Okay. Well here’s a class where you can do the field skills okay. Now do the field skills. Well can you do them at night. Well no. Here. You know what I’m saying. So you’re you’re all you’re doing is you’re just solving the next. And when I say all you’re doing, I’m not minimizing it. I’m saying what you’re doing. No, no, I know you’re solving the next problem and you’re again, you’re just stacking them and talking to each other. And it’s important for people to understand that, like a lot of people, they want to go right to the end of things. People are lazy and they just want to skip to the end. Like, how do I open the store with selling the thermals? And, you know, for 20,000? Well, you don’t if you want to go out of business and go bankrupt or lose your house, you can do that. Or you can start small and grow it and have a stable, successful business. So, for example, and this is a good time to talk about this. Right? And again I bought this from you. You have not sent me these things right. So this is your this is the Brushbeater chest rig that I bought that I haven’t. You can see it’s there’s the there’s the, the logo I haven’t done anything.

Matt: Got the tags on it.

Wade: So I haven’t done anything with it yet. So I got it. So I’m going to start I’m going to start getting them, getting it all kitted out and everything. But I think it’s important is that how did that come about. Because that now you’re starting to get and I see it along the same lines of the thermals. But when you start to get into actual production of your own gear, that is a much that is a people will understand about the huge undertaking of production. So how did that come about? Walk me through that. What does the future hold for that business?

Matt: So how I got into that, because everybody wants to to buy gear, everybody wants a better mousetrap. And I mean, I have, I have whole totes full of gear that I’ve bought over the years, just over 20 years of doing this kind of thing of between the Army and on civilian side, you accumulate all sorts of crap and you’re always buying a better mousetrap, you’re always looking for a better mousetrap. And so with tactical gear, it’s the same. You have the use case and idea behind one piece of gear, and you take it to the field, and it might do well for you for a little while, and then you want something else. Um, I had a lot of people that were bringing a lot of different kinds of equipment to class. And I sell stuff from other people that work in this industry. Up here. My very good friend John Evans went to go work out in Utah. They make incredible stuff and I carry their equipment as well. But I wanted my own bespoke stuff because it’s I look at it like if you go to a high end restaurant, you can order and you’re going to have wine pairings with different things, right? You can order the high end stuff, or the restaurant typically will have their own house variant of whatever it is like, whatever wine it is, or house bourbon or house whiskey or tequila, whatever it is. I looked at that like, launch your own test route and figure out how to do that. And it took quite a bit of research to do it and to bring it at a price point that is attainable for most people.

Matt: Because the other thing is this when you’re talking gear a lot of times, and this might rub a couple people the wrong way, but if it does, so be it. I don’t mean anything harsh by it, but tactical gear is a lot of times a impulse buy. It’s something that people buy on Friday night or a Saturday night where they’re typically having a beer or five. They’re behind the computer, they’re posting on social media platforms, or they’re watching YouTube or whatever. And that’s you have to understand some things about your intended market coming from a sociological background. Interesting, because when you research like the sociology of sales, for example, there is in psychology there’s a lot of bleed over with this as well. There’s a price threshold that people are willing to pay for an impulse buy, regardless of socioeconomic status or whatever it is. And usually that’s anything south of $150. If it’s under $150, they will be all right with impulse buying it. But the other part of that is, is with an impulse buy, you don’t want to be waiting on that sucker off for the next month and a half, two months, like, no, if I impulse buy something, I want it. This is where Amazon is so successful about their business model is if I buy something that’s an impulse buy, I want it in my hands as quick as possible. So I looked at it like I need to bring a product to the market that’s within that price range, that isn’t gouging people, that offers a very high bang to buck ratio that’s attainable and affordable for most people. Are there better pieces of gear out there? Probably, I don’t know, but you know, ours mine in house is, uh, 500 denier cordura.

Matt: It’s stitched very well and it’s made by a former military contractor, by the way. So I did my homework and and one thing I’ll add in there is in order to get it at the price point that I have it at just over $100, I had to invest a lot of money in that. I had to get them made in a run of a thousand at a time, and that cost you can do the math. That was a big investment, but what I’ll say is that it’s one that has been, again, incredibly well received. People have had nothing but but very kind words for it all. The feedback has been really good. They came out of Fighting carbine this weekend. A lot of guys were rocking that in class, and I made sure that it would be a very ubiquitous rig that you could use with five, five, six. You can use it with seven, six, two by 39. It fits the curvature of the AK mags, uh, so that it that you have positive magazine retention with those as well, which is a challenge for a lot of chess rigs, but it also fits all of your 308 calibers. So M14 mags, F a L mags, G3 mags, scar mags, Sr25, all of those. It’s going to fit all of those. So you really have one chess rig that has multiple purposes. It’s low profile, it’s inexpensive, and you can add on to it anything else that you want to do to it, you can add on to it?

Wade: Yeah. I think one thing that’s really cool about all of your offers is they all kind of feed to each other, right? So for example, I’m signing up for the scout course again, I’m the pro your account, right. You’re a BrushBeater. So I’m inspired up to the scout course coming out in the fall. So when I do that though it’s a forcing function. So I was like, well, okay, do I have what I need? Right. So then oh wait, so I don’t have to go and search for okay, I need to raid. What kind of rig do I get in or whatever? It’s like, oh, you have one. Great. I’m just going to buy that because once someone is in in your universe, you keep them there, right? They don’t have to go anywhere else. Like, literally they could get the rig, they get the magazine, they get the thermal, they get the book and the scout course itself from a price point. It’s very accessible. I was actually surprised. I was like, this can’t be right. In terms of the price point because it’s so accessible, but it just helps to feed all the other stuff. And and again, you’re just solving the next problem. But then they all interact. You come into your world and any of those points. Right. So what’s next then. Right. So what is in terms of I know you’re opening the brick and mortar or talk me through that, like, how’s that? Where is it going to be. What is your vision for that?

Matt: It’s here in central North Carolina. Um, not too far from here at the training area. My vision for it is I was extremely fortunate with this location as well, because it actually was a retail store prior. So a lot of the things that would go into a startup, operating costs, I was able to mitigate because it’s already there. And so that’s a huge leg up. But my my vision for it is we’ve got a dark room in there for testing, night vision, a place where people can come in, they can actually get hands on with the equipment. We’re going to have our own radio station set up for the communications end of stuff. So you get to actually see, like this equipment is working. Here it is. I’ll tell you. Really. And this might sound funny, but but to say is, uh, something I’ve heard numerous times over the years and I’m blessed with with an opportunity to make this happen. When RadioShack folded up, that was this huge problem for the entire community, like, you know, and I mean, like the tech end community and guys that were hobbyists that built different equipment and so on and so forth. When that closed up, that was really a problem because there was no other store like RadioShack.

Matt: Right. And there still isn’t. But you can make one be really expensive and it has been really expensive. But you can make one. And not only that, it’s one that can sell night vision and thermal and scopes. And I think catering to our market in a way that no other store necessarily has been able to do. And for a lot of reasons. I mean, what I do specifically is so far outside of business model of a Cabela’s or a Bass Pro Shops. I know there’s part of the same company, but you know, you’re not really going to run into that gun shops. For example, I talked to both AGM and Armour Sight quite a bit. I’m on the horn with their company representatives quite a bit because of our sales figures, and they take a lot of product input from me, and I get kind of tips and tricks on things from them, and it’s a very mutually beneficial relationship. But one of the more interesting things that I heard from AGM and one of our conversations was that, um, they don’t gun stores don’t really sell a lot of thermal and night vision.

Matt: They just don’t. And you would think like that. I’d never really thought about that before, but a gun store really doesn’t. They don’t deal in that stuff because that’s you would think that’d be within their business model, but it’s really not. And so if you have a, a company that specializes in these products and not only that, radio equipment, tactical gear as well, because one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the amateur radio community has a very strong overlap with the shooting and the shooting community, you know, kind of those who aren’t overlapped into the ham radio community want to learn about that stuff. And so the handful of amateur radio type business enterprises out there, giga parts down in Huntsville, Alabama, ham radio air, those are the two companies that come to mind. There’s one other one that I’m not really air is, uh, ham radio outlet, by the way. The other one, Universal Radio. They just closed up. They closed up shop because older folks are running those business enterprises and they’re just getting out of it. So we have a very unique niche that’s serving a broad community. And there’s kind of something for everybody out there.

Wade: Well, you basically become a niche of one. Right? So and with different entry points. So like let’s say let’s say that you are someone who’s, you know, very well trained. You’ve got all the gear and all that, but you don’t have the, the signal side of things. Right. Because no one’s really teaching that. So then you come into the signal side of things. Okay. Well now I need you or nots or I need to get some thermal or whatever and or all the way for someone like me who came in with the book just because I was like, well, what else are you to know? I have no idea for for communications. And now I’m. I bought your ring. I’m coming to your course. I’m going to buy. I’m going to get that rattler like that. The clip on one. I’m buying that one. That was. That’s going to be the thermal one. Because just because you can eat it at night, like you can take it off the gun, that’s the thing is, like people like for me, I’m like, okay. Like I want to be able to take it off the gun, look around like, what’s up at night if there’s won’t be able to see what’s going on, if there’s a power outage, whatever, they’re perfectly safe.

Wade: Normal reasons to want to use that. Right. And and so it’s just this is you create this thing where you become a niche of one. And what I’d like to close on is we’ll come on the runway of the, of the hour time is that you talked about camaraderie. Right. And I think as a, as a guy, we have fewer and fewer of those spaces. The only space that I ever really experienced on myself is like in the jiu jitsu gym, right? So like I experienced that in the gym, but I was at for a long time, I didn’t. Uh, as you’re creating this community, like what is your goal, your ultimate goal for the Brushbeater community, right. Because I know that you have a branded things with that idea and the scout. the NC Scout And you’re big on teaching and teaching people to teach people. So what is your. And I’ve also heard you talk about it too in other podcasts and some of your classes and stuff. Yeah. He’s like what is your sort of your like your meta goal for everything that you’re doing? Like what is the mission of what you’re trying to do for this community?

Matt: I would say that the biggest mission of what I’m doing and what I’m trying to accomplish is overcoming people’s sense of despair. Like, so Emile Durkheim, who’s one of the fathers of sociology, he he was living in post-revolution France and he studied suicide. And he published the book suicide, the results of this study. And it was the first time that that an empirical study had been done on why people kill themselves. This is one of the most fascinating things that we do. I mean, George Carlin had the whole bit about it. Are suicides craziest thing that we do, but it’s the most fascinating thing you can do is end your life. But there’s a lot of truth in jest there, because Emile Durkheim studied this and and his leading. Answer or he broke down suicide into four different categories of why people do it. One of the more fascinating ones to me was why I think the 22 veterans a day killing themselves is the statistic why that occurs. Emile Durkheim has a very strong answer for that, and it is his concept of anomie. Anomie. Or if you can think of like mussels, for example, they atrophy, right? Well, anomie is a larger psychological feeling when the individual is cut off or isolated from the larger body social, then they begin to exhibit downtrodden feelings on themselves first. And ultimately, unfortunately, it culminates in suicide and in extreme cases. Well, we’re because of, ironically enough, because of social media and the the level of electronic interaction that we have that has now replaced the, the bulk and the majority of human interaction that we have on a day to day basis. I don’t remember what social commentators said it, but he says that we use human interaction to get away from the internet.

Matt: There was a lot of depth in that. I don’t remember who it was that said that. That’s a genius statement. There’s there’s a strong flavor of despair that people have and that transcends politics. And a lot of times we can apply that to a political label, the black pill effect, or the red pill effect or the blue pill effect, whatever you want to call it, whichever flavor of pill you want. Right. But this overwhelming despair that that people seem to have, and a fatalism that I noticed when I was teaching kids were. One thing I noticed about generation Z was when I was growing up in the late 1990s, as a teenager, late 1990s, going into 2001, we there were all sorts of problems and we were aware of it, but we still believed that there was a strong hope for a better tomorrow. Even in a post 911 world, we thought, hey, this. But with Gen Z and the early millennials trans trans transitioning into Gen Z, they don’t have that. There’s a very dystopian flavor to them that I find particularly disconcerting, and I think that it’s sad. And if we can do what we can to overcome that, and the way that we do that is camaraderie. The way that we do that is, is building one another up and saying, hey, like, yeah, sure. Look, the political situation of stuff sucks, man. Corruption is right there in our face. And hey man, maybe things aren’t going to work out so well at the macro level, but you know what? We’re going to get through this to the other side and we’ll do it together because it takes good people that work together for a purpose that overcomes all of that. You’re not alone. Not alone by any means.

Wade: Yeah, well, I can’t think of a better mission that would get you up in the morning than to do that. Right. And I had to. This is a great I think that’s a great place to get you better than that end of the podcast. But I want to get your information. But before I do so I want to find you. But before we do that, it’s I wanted to thank you for your work because the way that I look at it is for me. It’s like it makes my family safer. And even if I never have to use anything, I have to learn. But if I teach to my son that my line of the legacy of these skills does not have to stop with me. Right? And that is that that is a meaning in and of itself. So I just wanted to thank you for making all that stuff so accessible to me and my family. Thank you. And yeah, it’s I can’t wait for the scout forces coming up here and fall. How do people find you? So what is the best way? I know that on Twitter you are. And wait, I find you. Where are you on Twitter? Brushbeater at Brushbeater, right.

Matt: And beta on Twitter. And, uh, you can find one of the several websites that I run, American Partisan org, which is a daily news aggregator. So you can find a lot over there, as well as when we’re running sales on stuff on the store, and there’ll be announcements that are up over there. But Brushbeater.org, I’ve got content going all the way back to September of 2015, so you can find quite a bit over there. Brushbeater.store is the store and we’ve got a mountain of products over there. Anything that is out of stock is usually back in stock pretty quickly. So all the gear that we’ve been talking about on here, it’s all over there. But and then finally, of course on Amazon you can find my authors page under NC Scout. And you’ll be able to find the books. There’s like a billion rip off versions of the Guerrilla’s Guide to Operating your battlefield radio in guerrilla environments. Or like, whatever while you’re sipping Jan in the hood, whatever. Like, I mean, they’ve got all these rip off books like there’s only one, the genuine one. Nc Scout me, I wrote that one. That’s the one that you’re looking for. All the other ones, by the way. Like all the and I do buy the rip off ones just to to thumb through them for my own morbid entertainment. They’re all written by ChatGPT, and you’re not going to get anything out of it. They’re not trying to rip me off. I mean, even where they are, but they’re really trying to rip you off, is what it is. So I want to tell I tell it to everybody. It’s not me that they’re ripping off, necessarily. It’s you’re losing your $20 for something that is not you’re not going to. Yeah.

Wade: The two things about ChatGPT is, is that I always tell people because I’m a writer and I teach writers, right. So it takes out all the reps that are required to be a good writer. So I’m not I’m very anti ChatGPT for writing, but the only thing that those books don’t have, they don’t have the ecosystem behind them that you do. So like you can buy one of those books that’s a rip off of you, that’s probably written by ChatGPT, but then where are you going to go? They’re going to have to go to you to buy the gear or to get the courses or whatever. So definitely. So that’s the reason why you will. That’s why. And I think this is a great business lesson to know, is that if you are authentic to what you’re trying to do and you build offers around that, there is no competition with you because you build a world for people to come into and to stay into, and they’ll never leave. If you wake up with the same mission that you do is to help make people better and so I and we’ll have all the links in the show. But. I’m just going to tell you that I thank you so much for coming on the show, and this is one of my favorite podcasts I’ve been looking forward to. I don’t want a fanboy. I don’t want a fanboy. You. But like I said, is I’m thankful because you make my family safer and I. And that’s that is the highest praise I can give to someone for the sell something to me is that they make me or my family say that I really appreciate it.

Matt: Thank you sir.

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.