Nathaniel Boos from Southern Defense: Mastering Your Core Business To Build A Foundation For Expansion

About This Episode

In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Nathaniel Boos from Southern Defense. Discover how Nathaniel’s business journey in the ammo industry began and thrived! From starting with high-demand ammo to growing into a comprehensive outdoor store, Nathaniel shares insights on building a foundation, securing recurring customers, and navigating challenges in the industry. Learn about their focus on retail and wholesale operations, the importance of supporting mom-and-pop shops, and their strategic approach to scaling and providing value. Join us for an in-depth look at the strategies and passion behind their success.

Insights In This Episode

• Starting with ammo was profitable and in demand, providing a strong customer base and recurring sales.
• Launching a wholesale division supports smaller vendors, ensuring the survival of mom-and-pop shops.
• Investing in SEO and high-quality content drives traffic and customer engagement.
• The ammo business requires long-term investment and scaling for profitability.
• Partnering with tech companies that understand and support the firearms industry is essential.

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.

Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Podcast. I’m your host, Wade Skalsky, and today I have the pleasure to speak with Nathaniel Boose from SouthernDefense.Com. Nate, how are you doing today?

Nathaniel: I’m doing good, Wade. Thank you for having me.

Wade: I’m excited to talk to you because we’ve been on a run of talking to brick and mortar dudes. So now I’d love to go to an econ side now because they both have their positives, for sure. But what I want to do before we get into specifics of your site and kind of your guys’s philosophy and your strategy from a business perspective is run me through a little bit about like how you got to this business, where you came from, how you got into the firearms vertical. Because one thing about that I love to hear about is everyone’s story is different in the way they got here.

Nathaniel: Absolutely. So I was raised around firearms for the most part, shot with my grandfather, brothers, etc. BB BB guns in the backyard type of deal. So that was always in my nature. My brothers in the military, my grandfather was in the military, so being able to do that was just a pastime for us. And as I got older, got into real guns, started shooting in high school with my dad and with some friends, and then in college, obviously bought my first gun. My junior and senior years is when Covid kicked off. And so I did my last two years of school online, essentially, when ammo got really hard to find, it was our $2 a round for nine mil on Gunbroker. We were like, there’s got to be a better solution to finding ammo to go shoot, because that was one of our ways that we went to go blow off some steam at the range after finals or after exams is just go dump a bunch of holes in paper. We quickly realized that Academy and Dick’s Sporting Goods and some of these other stores had ammo. It’s just you had to go there at four in the morning and sit in line on the days that they restock, and you could go in and buy two cases of ammo, 2000 rounds of whatever you wanted. And we did that for ourselves. My co-founder and I went to school together and we’d go at four in the morning, three days a week to buy ammo, when we realized very quickly that we could buy it for $0.30 a round and sell it for $1.50 a round.

Nathaniel: And we did that for four months, and we made, I think, 20 grand in profit. And we just sold it to people on gunbroker people locally, friends and family. And that’s what started it when we realized how much money we made, we were like, hey, we probably should pay taxes on this and we probably need to do it as a business, right? And we ended up taking all of those profits and essentially building the company that we had. That was a part of our seeding, which is the hustle from when we were in college. All of our stuff was online, so we were sitting in line filling out exams and paperwork, and we took that money and put it towards our business. We also had one other seed investor that helped us out, my brother, who I worked for a long time and that’s how we got going. It was fell into our lap almost. My co-founder and I were both supposed to go to grad school, but we looked at this and we were like, hey, grad school is always going to be there. We have an awesome business opportunity that is right here in front of us that is really hard to pass up. So we took it, we ran with it, and we really haven’t looked back. So that’s how we got going.

Wade: So is this your first gig out of college then?

Nathaniel: Yeah, that’d be correct.

Wade: Nice. So I love it. So now this is a new one, right? So you by definition you are the the next. I wouldn’t even say you’re the next generation of business owners in the vertical. I would say like you’re the next generation. Right. So because this is it’s very rare, at least from my experience, from a business perspective, to see people go right in the firearms vertical because it’s a very highly regulated industry. Right? It is. So you’re not selling toothbrushes and ammunition has its own level of complexity when you’re selling it online. So I’m actually fired up that you did that because that’s a very entrepreneurial spirit. And what was your first gun that you bought when you could buy again?

Nathaniel: So when I turned 18 I bought my first. It was a Remington 700. I still have it. It’s it was in my closet and I bought that at, I think it was Cabela’s on Black Friday. I paid 200 bucks for it. It was a great deal. It was like one of the first ten people online. And it’s a great it’s got the walnut stock on it and it’s great. And I think the second one that I got was actually a graduation gift from my dad, which was a it’s an old police trading P226, one of the all steel ones made in Germany. And my brother has that one right now. But that was that was the second one.

Wade: That’s cool. Now, the only reason I ask is because I like to create conflict, and anyone that listens to what you just did will have an opinion on it. So either positive or negative. So I’m a big believer that that everyone has the right firearm for them and there’s no right answer for everybody. So I always like to ask that question. All right. So putting off grad school, which I think is wise because I went to grad school and I think being a business person is wise. So let’s talk a little bit about SouthernDefenseCom. So you basically you do ammunition primers firearm accessories. Why did you start there? Why did you not say, let’s just go straight to also maybe getting an FFL? Yeah, go and go into firearms route. Like what was it about ammo. That and I guess ammo adjacent that kind of got you there.

Nathaniel: The easiest answer is ammo is what we started with. That’s what we were buying from Academy. That’s what everybody wanted and that’s what we were making money on. So we started there. We realized pretty quickly after that that this was going to be a really good way to build a foundation for us. We were going to be able to have reoccurring customers that came back to our site and was consumable, obviously. Right. Like you go and shoot it and that’s it. It’s not like a firearm where you have it and you can pass it down for generations, or an accessory that lasts years. It’s one trip to the range. It’s gone for the most part, unless you’re just a really frugal shooter. But I’m not one of those. But we realized very quickly like, hey, this is what was in demand at the time. It still is in demand, obviously, but that’s what we started with. So we focused on that for a long time. We got really good at that one thing, and then that’s what where we split off into other areas after we realized, hey, we got an FFL out of a necessity to buy more ammo is really what happened. There was distributors and manufacturers that wouldn’t even look at you unless you had an FFL. So it was okay. Well, we need to get an FFL now. And so that’s what we did.

Nathaniel: It’s an unknown thing, but selling ammo, all you really need is a business license and. And some cash. Really? In a website, you don’t really need an FFL unless you’re manufacturing ammunition or you’re importing it from another country. You basically just need your state retail license, and that’s pretty much it. We didn’t realize that at first, and we were like, wow, this is actually pretty easy. But obviously if you want to sell firearms, you need to get properly licensed. If you want to sell NFA items, you got to get properly licensed. Where we do all of those now just because it’s been our company has grown to the point where like, hey, we can facilitate these other items on our site, we have enough traffic to make sense that, you know, people are going to come here and buy them. However, ammo is still our bread and butter for right now. We’re still growing that piece of it, and I imagine we probably will be for probably the next two years, if I had to be honest with you, where we’re going to be investing most of our time. But our end vision for this is we’re going to be a full fledged outdoor store. Anything that is outdoor related, hunting, shooting, firearms, we’ll have it on the site. We’ll have a great content for it. We’ll have good reviews and ultimately good pricing.

Wade: Now, how do you deal with so there’s ammunition in terms of its availability in some sense. Obviously there’s challenges with sourcing it. But then in another sense it’s you have aggregation sites like ammo seek and all of that. So how do you position yourself to deal with those two things?

Nathaniel: That’s a great question. Unfortunately, in the ammo industry, the saying of the big dogs eat is very true. It rings very true. Here is, the people that can buy a lot of ammunition have the capital to do so are typically the ones that actually have. They’re the ones that ammo are made available to. It’s sad because that was one thing that we struggled with as a small company is like, no one wants to sell you 20 cases at a time, or five cases at a time at a good price, right? They want to sell you a container of it, which is hard to do. I mean, we didn’t have buying a container of five, five, six is a half $1 million. And when you’re first starting up, that’s a lot of money. And so until you get to the point where you can really facilitate those purchases, that’s the supply part. That’s very difficult to figure out. And we’ve actually made it a I’ll talk about this a little bit later, but we opened a wholesale side to our business as well to basically help those smaller vendors that are just getting going, or the mom and pop shops, the brick and mortars that aren’t getting what they need from the qsrs or the sports stouts or the Zanders, all great companies. It’s just they have a lot of products. They don’t necessarily focus on one thing. We’re focusing on ammo, and that’s what keeps people coming back into their stores and keeps them alive. And it’s very important for us that we keep those mom and pop shops alive.

Wade: So then from a wholesale perspective, then are you aggregating that demand? Right. So you’re saying, okay, well, we’re going to do is we’re going to take all these different, smaller mom and pop stores or smaller vendors, and then we’re going to be able to make a purchase for all that demand and then go out that way. Is that how you do that then or how does that how do you facilitate that?

Nathaniel: That’s a great question. To a certain extent, yes. Our train of thought here is economies of scale, right. Obviously if we have more customers, we can purchase larger amounts for the wholesale side or excuse me, for the retail side. And it just allows us to use the mom and pop shops as a relief, but also it becomes its own business at some point where you’re buying just for the wholesale business, and then it sells to the retail side. That’s our kind of our flow that we’re working towards. And being a B2B business as the wholesale side is, it allows us to buy directly from a lot more manufacturers, which is important because hey, now we’ve actually got pricing that we can make money on the wholesale business, but also give really good pricing to these mom and pop shops that otherwise wouldn’t get it. That is our mission statement at our wholesale site, which is Legacy Outdoor Supply. It’s our mission statement there. That is, we have to keep the backbone of the firearms industry in America alive, which are mom and pop gun shops, their ranges, their pawn shops, etc.

Nathaniel: because those guys, ultimately you can walk into an academy or Dick’s Sporting Goods, or go to an online vendor like Palmetto, and you can get a lot of great information, but it’s never going to compare to walking into your local range or your mom and pop gun shop your brick and mortar and talking to the owner or someone that’s worked there for 20 years, and their amount of information will just never compare. And it’s those people that are, you know, passing along safe firearms instruction handling. They’re going to give them a proper instructions on how to purchase a gun that’s proper for them. Ultimately, that’s what keeps the two a community moving forward, right? It keeps people that are never bought a gun before, keeps them buying guns, and keeps more people coming to the to a community. And that’s extremely important. Otherwise, without that, our business goes out of business. That’s our mission statement on that side is we’re going to make it as easy as possible for those people to buy ammo from us at the best prices. And to do that, that requires buying, obviously more ammo.

Wade: Your first point I make that exact point every single time I talk to a brick and mortar person because like you said, is that like online is great and it has this place, but the advantage of brick and mortar is that it can educate the, the, the local retail consumer exactly on the local not only rules and regulations, laws, etc., but also just on. Your guy in Oregon has a different need than your guy or gal that’s in New York City, and you can navigate that. And that’s from an inventory perspective as well, right? Brick and mortar store in Minnesota is going to sell a lot different types of guns and ammunition than someone in a totally different location, even a similar role location and states. But then you make a really good point, which is on why the internet side is important is because you do provide that economies of scale, right? Like if I’m the only way that you get scale is a local brick and mortar is to franchise, and that’s hard and slow on the retail side. If those two things work together, you can take an aggregate. A lot of those things show those brick and mortar locations, your standard operating procedures, what you’ve discovered at scale and compress a lot of time with them. So again, and I think you said it, we can all accomplish more together than we can apart. And that’s never been more important than now.

Nathaniel: Exactly.

Wade: In terms of that thought process okay. You’re like, all right. So we want to help the brick and mortar. We want to be profitable. And eventually you want to have your own brick and mortar. What is do you have a sort of a time frame in mind, or is it just simply, hey, we have to have our own metrics because we don’t want to expand too fast. Like, what is your approach to that right now?

Nathaniel: That’s a great question. Honestly, this is probably one of the more in-depth business interviews that I’ve done, which I love. One thing that we pride ourselves on is we have a very good management team. We have a lot of seasoned professionals on our team. We have three guys that have both operated companies over $100 million in our company, one of them in the billions. And we’re really thankful for that because those guys are like, hey, here’s how we compartmentalize these projects, and we assign someone that’s really good to handle that. So retail is definitely our bread and butter. Obviously, that’s what keeps the lights on and keeps all of our employees paid and keeps our company growing. So we do focus, I’d say 70 to 80% of our efforts. On that specific side, however, we have a wholesale team. We just started our wholesale business in January of this year. So it’s going slowly, but it’s going and that that side of the business, we have someone that has worked in the industry that for the last 16 years. He knows all of the manufacturers. He’s very well connected and he’s managing that side of the business. Obviously, our management team as a whole meet every week and we evaluate each side of the business of, hey, here’s what needs more attention to get to where we want to go by the end of the year.

Nathaniel: And we evaluate every week, every day, and then obviously quarterly we have our meetings as well. So that’s we’ve set out goals for ourselves for each of these businesses of, hey, this is where we want to end up by the week and end of the year. We’ve broken those down into smaller subtasks, which we call rocks, And then your stones or the stuff you do every day, the rocks you get done every month. And then at the end of the week you’ve got a or end of the year you’ve got a pickled I don’t know what a pillar or whatever you want to call it, but um, that’s our approach to that is retail definitely gets the most attention just because there’s a lot going on there. But the the wholesale side is quickly growing and picking up steam. So I would say it’s like a 7030 split right now in terms of where we direct our attention.

Wade: So now you have like how you’re moving forward. You’ve got the plan, but you’re a relatively new brand, right? So I mean, compared to some of the bigger players in the space, I write for businesses in the firearms industry. So this is maybe just a nerd question for me, but how do you connect with your current customers? How do you develop newer customers, like what is your content strategy like? What is your outreach strategy to start growing the tens of people that come under to bring people into what you guys do?

Nathaniel: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. There’s some things I can’t get into specifically, but the one of our partners who has a background in SEO has basically scaled his business to ten figures and just doing SEO and paid advertising on Google. He was very good at what he does. I’m sure you’ve seen some of the content that we’re producing on our site for our pages, stuff like that. That’s a big push for us this year is providing really good content for our customers, as well as informational content that Google’s going to see. Well, right now, southern Defense exists only on, which has been great for us and the guys at Amazon if they happen to hear this, great guys love working with them. It’s two dudes that run that shop over there and they do a pretty good job. But we’re starting to the traffic we’re getting from Google is is our past traffic at this point. And so soon enough, we’ll be transitioning our model to be more of a free ship model. So our pricing is more clear because right now we make money on the shipping, and so we’re going to be transitioning that over so that we can target people coming from Google so that they have, hey, we have free shipping over $200.

Nathaniel: Now. What they see is what they get. We’ve made a lot of efforts to provide useful content that Google is going to use for a lot of our long tail stuff, as well as provide it gotten building our backlink profile, which is super important for our for SEO. Obviously, if you’re familiar with that, that’s, you know, a big part of it. We’ve done a couple of different things there lots of interviews, lots of producing articles, you know, unique articles for ourselves about price increases that kinetic group is doing, or Vista Group, the one in the same now. But we were some of the we were one of the first ones to break the last two price increases, which is we pride ourselves on that. So things of that nature, that’s really how we’re getting into it. We have a whole backlog of auxiliary content that we want to do gun comparisons, round comparisons. We’re going to be doing some ballistic testing similar to Lucky Gunner. It’s stuff that’s actually useful for the customers, right? That’s what the content we want to provide. That’s what Google likes. That’s what the customers actually use. Right. To make an informed decision for purchasing an ammo or a firearm, whatever it may be on our site.

Wade: Yeah I know, and for example, like I read for a holster company and people they they discount a lot content because they’re like, well, how much can you write about the same thing or and over again and they forget that your customer actually is very interested in those things and will continue to read content if it’s good for like till the end of time, you know what I mean? And so exactly. And so I think that’s great that you guys have a plan for that. And I, I have two takeaways for that. Is that one, is that there when guys like you were younger and tech savvy, they come in people who are more of your, I would say traditional, um, from enthusiast to business owner are older. They have to be cognizant of these things or they’re going to get wrecked, right? Yeah. And then they just won’t be able to scale to the number of people that they need. And then two also is like, I love your model where you make money off the shipping, because that is a newer model. In some ways it’s a newer model, but I think so many people get into like look at a business and say, well, how can I get into this business? How am I going to compete with the big boys? I can’t make money based upon price, but there’s almost always a way to have a model to do that. If you’re if you take a look at it now, how do you and that is how do you determine your pricing. And I know some of that’s proprietary. Right. You can’t probably talk. Sure. But like for just generally like what is your approach to because you need to make money, but you also want to be able to be competitive. So yeah. How do you bridge that gap?

Nathaniel: Yeah. So it’s a fine mix of hey, we’re looking at our business as a hey, we only need to make X amount of money every month to keep the lights on. And so let’s make that and then offer pricing that’s basically as cheap as we can get it. For everything else, our goal is to keep the lights on every month, but also grow our customer base. And so that’s where we find that balance of hey, yes, we need to make money, we need to be able to pay our employees. But at the same time, we also want to offer a really good deal to the customer. And we can’t do that on every particular product just because of the pricing, especially on some of the dropship stuff. But on a lot of the products that we do offer from in-house, typically those are source that are really good price. I do most of the sourcing. That’s one of my main jobs here, and thankfully I’ve built a lot of really awesome relationships with people in the industry that when you’re buying a pallet or container, quantities really do provide some excellent pricing. It’s not pricing like I had one guy last week or two weeks ago and I was at an event. I told him he was like, hey, I need some seven, six, two, three, nine. I was like, yeah, it’s running about 45 to $0.50 a round.

Nathaniel: And he was like, man, it’s gotten so expensive. It used to be like $0.20 a round. And I was like, yeah, the prices went up for us as well. I was like, I think we’re paying like $0.41 around for it, right? And he was like, really? You’re paying that much? And I was like, yeah, like that’s and we’re buying containers of it at a time like that’s we’re getting it directly from the manufacturer. That’s what the pricing is. And he’s like, man, I thought you guys should be paying like $0.10 a round or something for it. And I was like, no, like there’s very small margins in the ammo game. I think that’s a misconception. It’s actually something we’ll be breaking down on. Our site is basically creating an art of an ammo deal at some point. But back to your original question. It’s make enough money to keep the lights on and grow our capital just so we can purchase more inventory or reinvest. But at the end of the day, it’s all about acquiring customers at this point. And so we want to offer the best deal as possible. While we know our minimum margin that we have to make, and as long as we can meet that on every order or 80% of the orders, we’re okay. That’s where we’re at right now.

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Wade: Well, this is a business podcast, so one thing people need to start thinking about because again, a lot of firms, people don’t come from a business background is the idea of lifetime value of a customer. You can break even on a customer, but you have a repeat customer for a while. It doesn’t. You can basically spend an infinite amount of money to acquire customers in the beginning, because that person is then goes through your process, or you want to call it a funnel, you want to call it your customer journey. It doesn’t really matter. That person will keep buying from you. And the nice thing about ammo with regards to versus firearms is that yeah, I’ll buy a new firearm, but I’m only buying maybe a new firearm. Your average person maybe buys a new firearm a year, or maybe 1 or 2 a year, right? Whereas ammo, not only do you consume it, but people also stock it. Right. And so those are all. And from a third perspective, some people, I think even look at it as a hedge against inflation, right? Yeah.

Nathaniel: I mean it is it is like it truly we’re selling a commodity in a lot of ways. And that commodity is directly impacted by the cost of raw materials that go up. Right. And it’s a pretty standard increase across all of the industries or all of the manufacturers at any given time of the year. And so as the prices of metals go up and powder and whatever it is that’s felt by every single one of those manufacturers. And so it is. Yeah, in a way, it is a hedge, right. Like you can almost buy this and sell it later and make a profit and almost to beat inflation. It’s a pretty incredible one thing I’ll mention, just real quickly back on the margin and the pricing stuff is there’s a lot of people that will try to get into this business because they want to make a quick buck or they think they’re going to make they’re going to be able to buy ammo at dirt cheap prices because now they have a license to do it. And it’s just the reality of it. That’s not the fact of the matter is, if you want to get into this business, into the ammo business specifically to make money, you’re going to have a bad time. You’re not going to make a lot of money to do that. You have to really scale a business for 5 or 10 years and to get to the point where everything is being paid with cash, and you have such an excess amount of sales and income that you’re throwing off extra cash at that point. But it’s not something that happens overnight. We understand that. We’ve basically taken to that as like, hey, we’re not going to make any money for the first 5 or 10 years that we’re in business, or at least any of the founders are. We’ve we take a small salary, but that’s pretty much it. It’s not something that’s going to produce a lot of cash very quickly.

Wade: Yeah. And that’s the advantage of starting when you’re young. Right. So like I don’t know if you’re married or not married. We don’t have to get into that. But I mean, obviously your responsibilities are going to be a lot lower when you’re 25 or 30 is when you’re a grizzled old vet like me. If, uh, business vet at me at 51. And I think that’s a good business lesson is the sooner you start, the better, in my opinion, because the business conditions are only going to get more difficult as time goes on. That’s my view of it. I noticed on your site I was looking at some of the messaging, right? And I liked it. So I don’t know who writes your copy, but Rob, you wrote it or has somebody else read and I like it. There was a target in terms of where it seems like some of it is aimed towards maybe some a newer purchaser, right. Or some of this more newly coming into firearms. What was your thinking on that? Is that just basically what you’re seeing from your customer base, or is there a specific sort of marketing reason for that, or is that a secret?

Nathaniel: No, I mean, it’s pretty standard. We just really went and looked at what are the volume of what people searching for on Google. Right. And some of the content that we’re producing on there is, is meant to if someone’s looking for what’s the difference between a Glock and a sig, right? Or that specific one, it’s probably someone that doesn’t own a firearm yet. Right. And we want to be able to help them out. That content is if Google thinks it’ll find it useful, it’ll show that to them. And then it brings them to our site. So we’re just getting started in the content piece of it. And so we’re going to have a wide variety of articles, but we do have some writers that are extremely knowledgeable in that space that are writing for us. It takes a lot of time and money to do that. Obviously, writing is not cheap, but we want to be able to help people out that are getting into the industry, but also provide useful and interesting content for people that are already in the two way space. There is a lot of new people buying a gun every day, right? People get scared. They when people are scared, they turn to guns and buying ammo and gold and alcohol and stuff that they can stockpile. That’s going to keep them safe if things go to hell. But that’s one of the most important things, is, hey, we want to be able to provide a wide range of content and useful information for customers, regardless of their background in the firearms. And so that’s why we have stuff pouring in directly at New Beginners. Then we’re going to have stuff that’s more advanced as well.

Wade: And that’s important for business owners to understand, is that it’s really easy for us as people who have been involved with firearms for a long time, to take for granted what we know. Exactly. And that’s true from a business perspective. And it’s also true just from a firearms knowledge in general. As business owners in the firearms, if you can provide top of top of funnel content where it’s like, okay, we’re going to answer some of these basic questions, but in an entertaining and interesting way. Yeah. And it’s not going to sound like ChatGPT did it. Then people will consume that because the demand, in my opinion, is only going to grow because I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, but we’re entering Weekend at Bernie’s territory right now this week. Right. And I think that as more, I would say, like normal people start to get nervous and start to say, hey, we’re not ever going back to 2015. It’s never going to be like that again. I think they’re coming in. The firearms are starting to become more of a good idea.

Nathaniel: I totally agree, we’re in some interesting times. Definitely unprecedented in my opinion. And when people get scared, they cling to things that’s going to keep them in them and their families safe. I can’t say that enough. I can’t count, I can count on. I can’t even count on both my hands. How many people over the last year have come into me that I never thought would own a gun and are purchasing their first gun and getting into it? And it’s more so that like once they start shooting and they’re like, hey, this is actually fun. And then they’re going out on regular outings to shoot different guns. And we work with a couple groups here in Dallas that one of them is bullets, Beast and Bourbon. My good friend Doug Gould puts together an awesome event. He does like 2 or 3 every month. Shoot has it, provides an awesome selection of guns, gets a lot of new people involved that are either just moving here from California, New York that never shot a gun before this corporate events for stuff like that. We help out with events, we bring out some of the machine guns and provide the ammo for it as well. And it’s good to see people go from that, like, Like, oh, I never thought I was going to own a gun to actually enjoying it. That’s where I get satisfaction out of it. And I love to see that.

Wade: Yeah, exactly. And I think businesses like yours that have the right attitude about education, they have the right attitude about, okay, like how can we provide the right information for people? Because for firearms, I view it as you have to get people into orbit. So once they make it into orbit, whatever that takes, whatever that education gap is to get them to buy their guns, start to train. And it’s different for everyone. Then they’ll just naturally start to like, take it upon themselves and they’ll get more educated and they’ll buy more and. Right. But the journey from I’m never buying a gun to to they’re like, okay, I’m going to the range and practicing. I’m getting better. I’m taking training. I have a concealed carry permit. Right. That journey has a lot of different people that participate in that, from your local gun owner to the content that people consume on sites like yours. And that’s why I think it’s so valuable, the service that you provide, because you actually are making people’s families safer. And I think the more that we can make people understand that, the more successful everyone will get to be in the vertical. Yeah.

Nathaniel: One thing in our space is we have to work with two a friendly companies. Obviously there’s a lot of tech companies and banks and whoever else that just won’t work with us because of us being in the firearms industry. And recently we were at the scale now where we’re regularly getting hit with credit card fraud on our sites, which is just part of the game, unfortunately. But we reached out to a couple of different companies that helped. Basically screening, use AI to like take a look at whether or not this transaction was fraud, if it’s the IP address is different, etc. they have a lot of tools, and there was one company that that we really liked, and we get all the way to the point where we’re going to sign up with them and they tell us, oh, we can’t work with a firearms company. And I was like, we should email them back and tell them, hey, by you not working with us, you’re actually making things less safe because now you have criminals buying ammunition that otherwise wouldn’t have it. If we could prevent that fraud. It’s an oxymoron, almost. Or a conundrum, I guess you could call it. But I was just like, man, they probably don’t even understand that. It’s like we’re trying to sell to legitimate to a respectable and responsible gun owners, and now there’s potential that criminals are going to be able to purchase ammunition from us, and that otherwise would have gotten caught because they’re using stolen credit cards. And it baffles me. But, I mean, I guess to each their own.

Wade: A few things going on there. And like, obviously, I totally feel your pain because the main sponsor of this podcast is Tactical Pay. Right? So they do financial services specifically in the firearms retail. So yeah, obviously I get it and shout out to them they’re awesome. And but I think the thing that’s what’s going to happen is that. And what’s exciting about someone being your age. And sometimes people will look at your age as in, I don’t know how old you are, maybe you went to college or you were 40 and maybe you’re like 57 years old. I don’t know, but I know, right? So look, yeah, that’s young and and the cool thing about it though, is that your you and your generation are going to be the ones that are going to make it through this middle period to them, where the two way community has its own ecosystem, right, where it will have its own ability to provide social content, will have its own ability for financial services and lives on ability for distribution along its own. It will have its own institutions, because that is that is a necessity. As to what’s happening right now, is that exactly is becoming a divergence in the economy as to where there’s a group of people who are like, okay, we want to use these other institutions, but they’re not letting us. So now we have to go make our own. Right? And that’s exciting, right?

Nathaniel: It is, it is.

Wade: And because you’re younger, for me, it’s like, man, I work for another 10 or 15 years, but you’ve got another 40 or 50 years of work if you want, and you’re going to be part of that process. And I think in one way that’s a pain in the ass, obviously. But another way, it’s really exciting. Is that something that you’re cognizant of or you’re just too focused on what you’re doing?

Nathaniel: That’s a great question and analysis. There is where there’s a need, there’s opportunity. We’re seeing that every year we go to shot show. I don’t know if you’ve been to the shot show yet, but there’s always new companies popping up that are filling a need because one of the big enterprise companies decided they’re not going to work with us anymore. Obviously, the Tactical Pay and the pay rocks and whoever else those were all filled a need that was. And now there’s competition in the space, which is awesome, right? That’s the great thing of living in a capitalist society is businesses can start and they compete against each other even in subspaces. Right. Like which is fantastic. And we’ll see that for a lots of areas as, as firearms. And our industry becomes more and more polarized. Obviously, I don’t know if you follow with YouTube, but YouTube just made a big change. That said, you can’t have sponsored firearm content on the on YouTube anymore if you have a sample. If we were to sponsor a YouTuber, they couldn’t say our name on there, otherwise it would get demonetized or removed, which is terrible. They can have someone like Tactical Pay or overnight oats sponsor them, but it can’t be a firearms company that sponsors them anymore, which is primarily the people that sponsor gun YouTubers. So it’s lots of things like that where it’s the firearms industry is being vilified every single day. And obviously these big enterprise companies don’t want to work with people in that space. Props to those who do. We use Fedex. Those guys are awesome. Ups gave us the the chop a while back and we went. We went to Fedex and we’ve had a great time with them. I know there’s mixed feelings on Fedex delivery out there. I understand that, But you’re absolutely right. Where there’s a need, there’s opportunity, and that’s going to be the name of the business in our space the next probably 20 years.

Wade: I have a UPS ammo story. I purchased a good amount of five, five, six, and they shipped it to me at UPS and it got lost. And then I eventually did get it, but it had been opened. You seal it, there’s the exterior seal and the interior vacuum sealing, but it had been open, and I guess the person deemed that the ammo that I had purchased, they didn’t like. Right? Because one of the things that had been sliced open looked at and then suddenly was magically reappeared when I started to think about it. Right. So I don’t know, that was an inspection issue or if that was a theft issue or what, but I’ve heard some horror stories about buying from UPS. So by the insurance.

Nathaniel: Yeah, that’s the big thing is we add insurance to our cart by default, and Fedex has insurance up to $100 by default. But anything past that, it’s if your package gets lost while Fedex has it or it gets damaged. There’s not much we can do if you don’t have the insurance. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not like we’re selling a t shirt where we can send you another one and still make profit, right? It’s ammo. We barely made any money on it to begin with. If anything, we broke even. And so for us to take an another thousand dollar hit on an order that got lost or whatever it was, it’s really difficult. So always buy the insurance. But stuff gets stolen all of the time.

Nathaniel: It’s well and.

Nathaniel: Especially some of the big hubs.

Wade: Yeah. And I think that’s an important thing to bring up to. We need to educate consumers. You are not going on Amazon and buying an honest company hand sanitizer. That’s not the transaction that you’re dealing with. You’re in. You know you are as a consumer you have to work with the in the firearms. You have to be willing to work with the the retailer or the business more than you would normally. Right. Because it’s a different it’s a totally different transaction. And I think that’s important and in why I try to stress that in these podcasts is like, look, it’s like we have to help businesses just as much as businesses has to help us as the consumer. And I think if we all do that together, then we can accomplish more together than we can apart, because it’s a strategic partnership, not just among the businesses themselves, but with the consumers.

Nathaniel: You’re absolutely.

Nathaniel: Right. And I mean, the good news is most of our customers in our space understand that 80% of our packages go out the door with insurance. So we’re able to help out most of the people. And it’s I feel for the people that don’t buy it or they choose not to because they want to save ten bucks or 15 bucks or whatever it is. But and then their package gets lost and it’s like, dude, we can refund you the base amount, but it’s like it would literally wipe out our whole profit for that day in some cases. Right? And that’s not really the case anymore. But back in the day, it was someone had a $1,000 order and that was our profit for the entire day or the entire week for that matter. That’s just one order. It would wipe out all of that if we went to refund that. And it’s like, I’m sorry, but you should have purchased the $10 insurance to cover that. And we do what we can, whenever we can. And we definitely sympathize with customers because it’s hard. The economy is a wreck right now and everyone’s pinching pennies. But, you know, we got to keep the lights on as well. So that’s one thing to always think about.

Nathaniel: We do our best to make sure that stuff is sealed up real tight, and it goes out the door. We triple tape all of our packages unless it’s a real tiny one, in which case it just gets one. But all of the heavy stuff you order, like half a case or more, it’s going to get, you know, stuffed in there. It’s going to be packaged real tight. It’s going to have we use Kraft tape on our packages as we do three strips on that on either side, and we do our best to make sure that it wasn’t our fault if it gets damaged or lost, because there’s some packages we get back and it’s just like, well, clearly the Fedex team played rugby with this one and there’s not much we can do about that. But in terms of just regular transit or even tough transit, that it’s going to get there in one piece. And I would say we have 98% successful deliveries on that. And the other 2% is stuff that either gets refunded or we got to send them a little bit of additional ammo because it got beat up by Fedex real bad or whatever it is. So.

Wade: Well, and I think this goes back to the point we’re talking about is that, like, you can never start a business too early, and because these are lessons you only learn by doing the business, you can’t. This isn’t something where you can Google it and say like, oh, all of these sourcing and shipping and fulfillment issues can only be done by learning. And the more of that you learn, the more you gain your competitors, right? The benefit of time gives you the data and the experience to be able to be nimble and to go. So I would always encourage anyone, if you’re thinking about start a business, just start it from the kitchen table. Do you agree with that or do you wish you would have waited?

Nathaniel: This is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life. Probably the most rewarding thing if I’m being completely honest. It’s not for the faint of heart or the weak or the weak willed people. But if you’re willing to really get after it and get up every morning, go to work, 80% of it is just showing up. But I mean, today’s the day. Go start that business. Don’t do it uneducated, but do it. Put together your game plan. Find a. My biggest advice if I was going to give someone starting a business is find a mentor that also owns a successful business in whether it’s if it’s a lawn business, then find someone that owns something that’s a service based industry. If you’re starting a restaurant, well, find someone else that will go work under that, someone that has a successful restaurant that you trust and that can advise you if you want to start an e-commerce business, find someone that has owned an e-commerce company before and can advise you. It doesn’t have to be an e-commerce firearm store in a way that the firearms and ammunition yet does have its own niches, but in a lot of ways it could be any product that we wanted to sell. It could be soap, it could be books. One of our partners backgrounds is in books, the other one’s in the gold and silver. So it’s all commodities that are online. That would be my biggest one is definitely if you want to start a business and you’re really passionate about this and you want to do that, start it. Don’t wait. There’s no better time than the present. But do it smart. Find a mentor that’s in your space and listen to what they have to say.

Nathaniel: Listen to the mistakes that they’ve made and a lot of them are more than happy to talk to other business owners about that. I’m sure that you can probably have heard that from other business owners, is that it’s we love sharing that knowledge with someone that wants to start their own business and get up and going. And that’s something I’ve seen. Just getting to talk to people that are way more successful than me. It’s they love to see other people that are getting after they want to spend time with you. They want to influence you because they’ve been through that journey. They know what it’s like not to have that, and they know that they want you to be successful. That’s obviously the always going to run into the people that are there, snakes in the fields. There’s don’t get me wrong, but a lot of entrepreneurs, especially when they’re friends or friends of friends, they have a wealth of knowledge and they will be happy to, you know, share that with you even if it’s not in your space. There’s a lot that you can learn from people like that. So my biggest advice would be find a mentor. That’s it was huge for us. My brother is one of our partners, and he mentored both my myself and my co-founder as we were starting this business. And and now we have, you know, a whole group of people that mentor us, including one of our other partners who’s much more successful than my brother or myself have ever been. And so it’s it’s one of those things where it’s really incredible to see that knowledge and see how someone that’s done this at a much bigger scale.

Nathaniel: Than you have their outlook on this and how they view things, how they think about things. Yeah, finding a mentor is definitely my biggest piece of advice. Oh, second to that is day one hire a bookkeeper and an accountant. Don’t try to do it yourself. Just I don’t care if you don’t. If you lose money for the first six months, hire a bookkeeper. Yeah, trust me, it’ll pay dividends in the end for that one.

Wade: I can’t I can’t agree with you more on the book book bookkeeper part. And then also too is, I think, the difficulty in the specifically for the firearm space is what makes it rewarding, but also helps you helps weed out competition too. So like, look, I think that’s all great advice and I can’t think of a better way to end our podcast. I know we’re coming up on time. How do people find you? Give give the website address we’ll have in the show notes, but also on social. How do people find you if people want to reach out to you for maybe something as a connection, if they’re a mom and pop store or the hotel wholesale side, or just to get a hold of you. How do they do that?

Nathaniel: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question so if you’re a business looking to connect with us, you can reach reach out to us at LegacyOutdoorSupply.com. We don’t have any socials for that just yet, but our phone number is on there, our emails on there. Email is going to be best. You can also register right on the site, and someone from our wholesale team will reach out to you and get you some pricing. And we also have pricing on the website, but that’s just the case. Quantity. If you look looking for bulk, reach out to your representative. If you are looking for retail ammo through SouthernDefense.Com that’s our main store and we do have some free shipping deals at the top there. Um, otherwise just know that the shipping is going to be a little bit more than you would probably expect at checkout, probably end of August October. That’ll be all. Free shipping across the stores. If you have questions about anything on our site, you can call us at 9720196 and basically Tuesday through Friday 9 to 5. Our customer service guys will be there. They should be able to help you with anything you need and follow. Give us a follow on Instagram at SouthernDefenseTX. And yeah, we’d love to connect with you.

Wade: Are you guys on Twitter?

Nathaniel: Not on Twitter.

Wade: Oh no.

Nathaniel: Just Facebook.

Wade: And, uh, well, you’re gonna get. So we’re going to end here in a second and then stay on um after. Sure. End the recording. But all of you firearms people out there. Uh, firearms businesses, gun Twitter is the safest. So in my opinion, it’s the safest social that you can do because of everything else is going to get crushed coming up, I think. So I encourage you, Nate, to think about that’s a great that’s.

Nathaniel: A great point. That’s a great point. I think Elon Musk though knows that now. And he’s very much about freedom of speech. So I think if Donald Trump is safe on Twitter, we will be too. Yeah.

Wade: Well absolutely. And yeah. So all right man. Well cool. Well listen, it was great to talk to you. I’d love to have you on the show again in a few months and just track your guys’s progress. I, like I said, is I want to encourage to promote businesses like yours because I think you have the idea of we have to work together to, to keep our to keep what we have and expand what we can get basically with regards to firearms.

Nathaniel: Yeah. No, thank you for having us Wade. We’d be happy to be back on the show. And any other questions you have, feel free to just reach out.

Wade: Alright man, talk to you soon.

Nathaniel: All right. Thanks.

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.