Sam Clikeman – From Fireline to Founder: Building a Global Mead Empire

Biggest win is when I give somebody this thing that I

created from my brain to somebody's hand and watching

them drink it and just be wowed. Booze makes culture, food makes

culture, song, dance, you know, expressions of humanity.

And so when we can do that and hits their mouth and they're

just like floored, that feeling never goes away.

That's that's the ultimate point.

I remember the very first time I saw somebody wearing one of our

shirts that I didn't know. If it's your fault, it's yours

to fix. The good news about that is you

don't ever have to do it again. When it when it's your fault,

you can fix it like. I'm a firm believer in the

concept of hard to kill. Your job should be to be hard to

kill physically, tactically, emotionally, but also

spiritually. You should be spiritually hard

to kill. Hey there and welcome to From

the Ground Up Show, the show where we encourage and inspire

the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the

stories of those that have been there, done that and are still

getting it done. Building a life that they love

with their hearts, their hands and their hustle.

I'm your host, Eric Loden. If you guys are enjoying the

show, enjoying the content, please help me out.

Like share, subscribe, follow. That's the best thing you can do

to promote the content and get it out there.

If you guys would take the time to leave a five star review or

leave a comment on whatever platform you're listening on,

that is really huge for highlighting the content and

getting it out there for others. And if you guys make sure you

click that auto download button on your podcast app, that'll

make sure you download every episode each week.

And getting those early downloads really helps promote

the show and get it out there today.

I'm really excited. I have Sam Kleikman joining me.

Sam is a former firefighter and the founder of Big Lost Meatery,

which he has expanded to two locations in two states.

Shipping need to 8 States and three different countries.

He has won numerous awards and recognitions such as the SBA

Exporter of the Year, Campbell County Entrepreneur of the Year,

and Small Business of the Year. Sam is a husband and a father.

So, Sam, thank you for joining me.

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Eric.

Happy to be here. Yeah, this is exciting.

I don't think I've ever talked to somebody in the the alcohol

business and definitely not in the meat business.

So this is. New territory of us around,

yeah. Well, I'm excited to learn all

about it. We start every show just getting

a little bit of background on you.

So can you tell me a little bit about your childhood and what it

was like growing up? Yeah, so I grew up in Gillette,

WY, born and raised. You know, I've spent a few years

when I was a little kid outside, but came back by the time I was

6. And, yeah, I mean, kind of a

standard Gillette upbringing, if you will.

Not a whole lot to it, you know, played sports, did a lot of

outdoors stuff. My mom was a teacher.

My dad did finance work at L&H, another company in town.

And yeah, that was kind of pretty normal childhood.

It was good. And then when I was 13, I joined

our cadet program, like a youth fire program at Campbell County

Fire. And that kind of turned into an

itch and became my projected career path.

And so, yeah, then when I turned 18, went full firefighter, went

to college, worked for the Forest Service for a couple

years on Hotshot Crew, we just kind of travelled around the

country fighting fires. But while I was doing that, I

was living in Utah at the time. And at the time, Utah had three,

two beer only. I may or may not have been 21

yet. And we got tired of drinking

Utah beer. So me and this guy, Ned Von

Schultz, decided, you know, we're going to make our own

beer. And so we were living in a

Forest Service cabin. And by the way, if you work for

the federal government and live in government housing, you're

not supposed to do this either. But we, we decided we're going

to make our own beer. So we went down to Salt Lake

City. We've got beer supplies.

We've built our own little brewery out of a Culligan jug,

fiber tape and some tubing. We had sporadic electricity at

this cabin. We had no running water most of

the time and it's his 100 year old cabin.

So we decided we're going to brew beer over an open fire with

water. We pulled out of the Logan River

and that's how we started brewing beer.

And since then, Net has also quit fire service.

He's the head of operations for Wichita Brewing, which is a very

big company. But that's how we got our start

in brewing. And Fast forward a couple years,

I moved back to Wyoming, back to Gillette, joined the fire

department there. And I'm just kind of making beer

and wine as a hobby, spent a lot of time doing that, you know,

outside of like playing sports still and doing the outdoor

stuff and working as a single guy at the time.

So I had a lot of time on my hands.

And I had a guy asked me if I would make me.

And I told him there's no way. It's too expensive, it takes too

long. I just jokingly said, you know,

if I ever did it, I'd do like an entire barrel of it because

takes like a year to make. So hog your carboy for the whole

year. And I didn't have a lot of

equipment. He's like, well, I got a guy,

he'll sell you honey at a dirt cheap price if you just like

give him some when you're done. Like, all right, so I bought 125

lbs of honey off this guy and made a 59 gallon barrel of Mead.

And yeah, that got my start into actually making Mead, but we'll

dive more into that. Yeah.

Other stuff growing up that, you know, I was never really

planning on being a business guy.

You know, I was going to be a fireman, right?

That was my goal. So when I went to college, I

technically went to college for business.

But let's be honest, I drank beer, played rugby for four

years. That's that's what I did looking

back. For your current career.

Yeah, I got good at drinking beer and got good at sales,

trying to get people to play rugby with us.

But looking back, I should have spent a lot more time and paying

attention in school than just getting by.

I could actually use the skill set now.

Yeah. And other than that, just did a

lot of traveling, traveled all over the world.

You save up all my vacation, Go somewhere.

When you're working as a single guy, you have a lot of time and

money on your hands go do things.

So yeah, export a lot of the world, but that all pays

dividends to who you are in the future.

Other personal stuff, you know, been Been married now since

2018. Had kids in 19 and 20, so I got

5 and a six year old son and daughter.

My wife's from the East Coast, so she was on a travel

assignment in Wyoming, supposed to be here three months, and

that was 10 years ago. And how how was that adjustment

for her? I know life here in Wyoming is

just a little bit different than most other places.

Is she adjusted well? Does she like it here?

Yeah, well, we're not there anymore.

So we're in Sioux Falls, SD now because when we opened a new

facility, we moved out here a little year ago almost to the

day, and it was a drastic adjustment.

She was in Baltimore and DC prior to Gillette, WY.

So. There's not much anything close

to that. But no, it was good.

She really enjoyed Wyoming. She's glad to be back in the

city again. And you know, Sioux Falls is

good, halfway between like big city and Gillette.

So yeah, it's been good. We're enjoying it.

Kids like it well. Good.

Well, what was it that initially got you excited about

firefighting? What?

What was it about firefighting that got you fired up?

Well, so when I was 13, my buddy, his dad was on the fire

department and then he joined this cadet for I was like, dude,

you got to come do this with me. Sure.

So I just kind of started doing it.

And at that time, the cadet program that just rebuilt it

again within the last year. But you know, this 20, five

years ago, things were pretty different back then.

So like we got to do a lot. So we would go to fires.

We, you know, we couldn't go inside buildings or anything,

but we could, you know, rolling hose, changing air bottles, you

know, just doing stuff on scene. You know, we go to other calls,

we do go to car wrecks and rescues wild and fire.

We got to do a whole bunch of stuff.

And, you know, if you're, if you remember what it's like when

you're a young man, it's it's kind of a big deal when you're

around like older guys that you look up to.

And of course, they love their job.

They're excited about it. So that's all we ever wanted to

do is like, yeah, we just want to be.

And so I never had those challenges as a young man to

figure out what I wanted to be. You know, I've known since I was

13 years old what I was going to do for work.

I was going to be a fireman. And that was that was what I was

going to do. And then, you know, when I

turned 18, graduated high school, you know, the question

became like, you know, do you go straight into the fire service

to go to college? I had a Fire Chief at the time,

so I could go to college. Like, it'll pay dividends down

the road. So, yeah, but I want to work

now. But so I went to college.

And that's part of why I didn't take it out seriously because I

was going to be a fireman. You don't have to be educated to

be a fireman. At least at that time you

didn't. You do need to now And then got

the opportunity to work for the Forest Service, which is great

because we just traveled all around the United States

fighting the biggest, baddest wildland fires that there are

and got a lot of experience. And I was also a college college

kid that made a year's salary in 3 1/2 months.

And so that's nice. Yeah.

And yeah, it was good work. And, you know, I still keep

contact. A lot of those guys learned a

lot. And as soon as I got done, I got

promoted my third year. So I had to skip a semester of

college because I couldn't because I used to leave this

season 1-2 weeks early and I'd start school two weeks late

every year. But once I got promoted to an

officer position that I couldn't leave early.

So I'd take a whole semester off and that's when I started

traveling. But during that year, they

offered me another position. The next year, you know, full

time, you're going to be done with college, like make it a

full time thing year round. And I asked my boss at the time

and I was like, so JP, I got to ask you, is it worth doing?

Because it's kind of nice. I mean, yeah, you don't see your

family for five months. I mean, you're, you're just gone

four or five months. You don't see your wife and

kids, but every two or three weeks for a day or two, you

know? So but you got 7 months to go to

school with them be lunch. It's like, you know, is it worth

it? And he's like, Nope, not at all.

And I always wanted to have family.

And so that was my catalyst to get out of the Forest Service

because he just said, yeah, it's, it's not worth it if you

want to have a family. And hotshot superintendents,

their divorce rate is almost 100%.

I've only ever met two of them that haven't been divorced and

made a career out of it. And they were both my bosses.

But other than that, every single hotshot Superintendent

I've ever met divorced. And it's a, it's a pervasive

issue in the industry. I'm so that's what made the deal

to go back and work structural while in chill out camera time.

OK, it's a good move. Yeah, yeah.

If you could go back and do it again, do you do you think the

choice of going to college was still a good idea?

Or if you were to do it again, would you go straight into

fighting fire full time? I would go back to college, but

I would also, I've matured a lot since then, so I would take

college a lot more serious. And it's one of those things

that even if you go into something like the trades, like

FIRE work is being able to understand very well

profitability of research, understanding you're reading,

you're writing your math, a lot of those skills that you think

you'll never need. Or you end up getting into

something like me where I don't fight fire anymore and I run a

business. I only guess what, there's

pretty good education in there that you just kind of wasted.

I got, it's not that I got nothing out of college from the

academic side, but I could have got a lot more out of it.

Yeah, but I would recommend it. And more and more places in the

trades are requiring that to move up and move on and do

different things. And even if, you know, you never

get into a bigger company where there's promotion, but you start

your own thing. I mean, some of those academic

skills are pretty good to have. Yeah, I think looking back, even

clear into high school, I did pretty well in school, was a

good student. But I I regret the wasted

opportunity that I spend a lot of money on education nowadays

in a lot of different forms. And here I had all the time,

like you were talking about a young single guy, you have a lot

of time. And I had free education in

front of me with experts that cared about me, wanting to teach

me things. And when I was in school, it was

all I just checked the boxes, what do I have to do to get the

grade? And if I could go back and do it

again, I would leverage those resources to try to maximize the

education instead of just just checking the boxes.

Well, that's The thing is when you're that age and you're in

the trenches of it, I mean, if you have a decent capacity for

book work and education, you can play the game and get through

with just to find GPA and not actually learn, if you will.

Yeah. And that's where I was.

It was in the same book. Now that being said, you know,

with my kids, you know, I'm not necessarily going to push them

towards college because nowadays there's a lot more opportunity

to gain that education outside of the collegiate setting.

And and especially, you know, if they want to go into something

like the trades or they want to go to business ownership.

I mean, I wouldn't necessarily push them towards college to do

that because if you're adept at reading, you have a passion for

learning and education, you can do all that what you're doing

right now. I mean, you don't have to do

that in a college setting. And it doesn't start them off

with nowadays $120,000 in debt going into this astronautical

interest rates, especially if you don't know what you want to

do. You know, I think you get a lot

more value out of learning to enjoy learning and go travel the

world and get some real world experiences to make you more

well-rounded person. Or go join.

That's a very Civilian Conservation Corps, you know, go

do something in service and gain some worldly experience.

Will make you a much more valuable employee or owner down

the road. Yeah, that's some good advice.

And I think that the specific education you're talking about,

even business education, I mean, you can go audit a class.

You don't need a a diploma to be in the trades or be a business

owner. And if there is a skill or a

specific education you need, it's a lot cheaper to go audit a

business class than it is to pay for a full bachelor's degree.

It is. And I mean, frankly, in the

employment world now, I mean the value of a degree is not there

anymore. You know, it's not like it was

in our grandparents generation or our parents generation where

that that meant something. But I mean, we've watered down

what a degree is. But I won't get on my soapbox or

the education system as it is. I could I have a lot.

Of. Strong feelings on that,

especially coming from a place like Gillette, WY, where, you

know, most of the kids they're, they're not going to go into

professional fields, you know, they're going to go into blue

collar productive labor. But I will, OK, I have one

soapbox thing. I got to get it off my chest.

But it's absolutely criminal the way that we look at this in

school to where, you know, we spend 12 years telling this kid

that's good at his hand, He's good with his hands, right?

And he can understand it. But we spend 12 years

essentially calling the kids stupid because he's not good

enough to get into college. But meanwhile, he's going to

graduate high school. He's going to go into the

trades. He's going to become a

journeyman. You might become a master or,

you know, going to whatever it is, you know, roofing, for

instance. He's going to make really good

money with no debt, and he's going to be just fine.

Yeah. But we as a system have people

that, you know, they're the stupid kids in class, right?

The kids that hang out in the VO tech room.

So, you know, these guys are being very, very productive in

society, very good at themselves.

We should encourage, develop that.

That's a good thing. Yeah.

Sorry. There's my brief.

Oh man, education. I agree 100%.

When when I go see a doctor, I hope that that doctor had an

excellent formal education. And when I call a plumber, I

don't really care if he had a diploma or not.

I want to know if he can stop the water dripping under my

sink. Yeah, he was good with his

hands. Yeah, I won't ever talk down on

education. I think there's a time and a

place for it, but there's been such an emphasis put on it in

the last couple generations that, like you said, it's

watered it down. When you funnel everybody into

that same track, it loses its value.

And there's so many wonderful opportunities for a great

career, a great income that just don't require it.

Yeah, they do. And I think we need to

understand the difference between education and learning.

True learning and growth is very not necessarily education.

I mean, you can go, I mean online, you can do a lot of

learning right now. I got a buddy of mine never

passed 8th grade and you know his and he's a very successful

businessman, but his thing is like he spends a lot of time

dealing in what's his current topic right now is theoretical

physics. He loves theoretical physics,

and so he spends a lot of time learning on theoretical physics,

has an eighth grade education, but he went and he learned and

has a desire for learning. He voraciously feeds.

He's very good at what he does, but he spent his time doing

practicality. And so, like, if you want to

learn American history and you don't want to become a PhD

educator in academic setting, go be a plumber and use that as

your hobby. You can learn as much American

history as you want and be great with it.

Scratch that. It.

Oh man. Yeah, and with AI on the scene

now, it's just become that much easier.

What what used to be a full day of research you can plow through

in a couple of hours. Yeah, and if you.

Kind of just maintain your education, great.

That's why even my firemen that I would train, you know, those

guys like mandatory reading. Like you guys have got to learn

to read, Enjoy it, learn, learn, learn because that's the most

valuable thing you can do. Yeah, good stuff.

Well, imagine as a hotshot travelling the country fighting

fires for a number of years. You probably had a few exciting

incidents and maybe even outside of work, a few exciting.

Yeah incidents. Traveling the country with a

group of guys and and getting to see a lot of different things.

Are there any memories that stand out at the the top of your

mind that you would share with us?

I mean, there's a lot from, you know, the fire specific side,

you know, things that got real hot and heavy, big fights we had

things like that. But you know, this this

particular environment. So you figure, think about this.

So you have 20 guys, mostly guys.

We had a few girls on a crew. But you spend 24 hours a day

together for months on end. Even on your days off, you all

live together in the same housing, same garbage housing.

But they tell you when to wake up, they tell you when to go to

sleep. They tell you when to shower,

they tell you where to walk, they tell you what to wear.

They tell you every everything in your life is regimen.

It's a hyper paramilitary environment and so it's kind of

nice. So the only thing you ever do is

focus on your job, whatever your job is.

And if you're not the food guy, you don't worry about food

because they're going to tell you when you're going to eat,

what you're going to eat anyways, so you don't even think

about it. So you get very, very good at

what you do and you put 20 people together that do that day

in, day out, day in, day out all the time is the connections you

make are very, very strong. And so you see a lot of this in

the military environment as well.

But the caveat there is, you know, you're with the same guys

usually for six months, 12 months, 8 months till you get

moved to new MOS, new job, whatever.

But in the fire service, you do that often times for years at a

time. And so it's even more so when

you get on the structural side. It's not as regimented, but

you're with the same guys for years, you know, as I was with

guys for 20 years. Those are the things that you

really remember is, you know, how close you get to these guys.

I mean, you, you go through a lot of trials and tribulations

together. I mean, you think of, you know,

the trials and tribulations that you go through as a married

couple, you know? That's why you're close to your

spouse. You're not close to your spouse

because you're infatuated with her.

You're close because you go through trial and you come out

ahead and that's where you learn who you really are.

And when you start to rely on other people like that outside

of a marital setting. And it's a very unique thing.

And that's part of why guys, they stick with it forever.

Even if they ever get, you know, distraught with the job or they

get fed up with the politics or whatever, they still stick with

it because you get very close to these guys and you love what you

do know you can rely on them and you're going to do really cool

stuff in the process, you know, go to fires and explosions and

save people, do rescues. And so I know that's not an

exact answer to your question of like, you know, some great fires

and whatnot. And I guess I can get one.

One infamous fire was the caught the last stand at badly rancher

up in the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho.

And we have this fire. And so there's a whole bunch of

other things that made this fire very special that happened prior

to this point. But we're sitting there in this

river bottom and we're in this town.

There's supposed to be two crews there, the town of Mackie Bar,

but one of the crews timed out. So it was just us.

We split our crews who are under strength, have a big wind event

that comes through. We're trying to save all.

We've been spending like a week prepping all these buildings

with sprinklers and we sprinkler bridges and the only way to get

across one part of the river is like a trolley car and a cable.

So you'd sit in this car and again push it across.

We've been there since like, I don't know, like 1880s or

whatever. You can only get to this place

by boat or plane. And so, you know, we

helicoptered in and well, anyways, my crew, my squad,

we're on 1/2 of it and you know, the fire is going to come down.

We're going to prep and we're ready for the big stand.

We're going to save all these buildings being this my buddy

Clink, he's like 40 feet away. We're like waist high grass and

I see this little tiny spot. It's about this big start

smoking. So me and him both run towards

it, you know, 20 feet from each other.

The wind hits by the time we make it about 10 feet each.

This thing's about, you know, size of 40 foot by 40 foot at

that point and the wind hits and it's off the races.

And so you know, this fire proceeds to jump the river a

couple times. If you ever been on the middle

fork of the sand, it's not a small river.

It's a fairly large river. So this thing's jumping, you

know, there's buildings burning and then our lookout, she gets

burnt out. She's coming down.

So we had no lookout for a while.

Well, then the fire hits the crew that's 2 miles down the

road. They'll, our fire passes

through, end up saving like half the buildings on our side with

the nine of us. And so we started going.

Well, our escapes keep getting cut off as we're trying to get

to this other crew, but we eventually make it down there.

And meanwhile, they've got all hell breaks loose.

There's propane tanks going on if they lost like 10 buildings

out of a 25. And so it ended up turning into

this. It was a 39 hour firefight, just

active nonstop 39 hours. And we finally get to the next

day after we've gone through all night, we've gone through most

of another shift and they all right, you guys got to sleep for

like 3 hours before we do it again because everybody just

gas. Yeah, we just slept on the river

that night. And you know, we, we didn't save

every building, but we saved a lot more than we should have.

Like our plant worked. So it was overall as a success.

Had we had another crew there, we probably had a shot and saved

a lot more. But that fire, you know, is

crazy for us. It's a big fire right now.

That fire went that day. It blew up 27,000 acres in our

zone. And, you know, the whole fire

ended up burning for two months and I think burned 300 a couple

years later. I was at class, and this is by

the time I'm back in Gillette and had a wild land class that I

was taking. And there's a guy I want to

shock crews in Region 4. He's like, oh, yeah.

So you were at Logan. When were you there?

It's like, was there 2006, 2008? He's like, were you at the last

stand at Mackie Bar? I was like, yeah.

I was like, what'd you call it? The last stand at Mackie Bar?

Like everybody knows about that. You know, at the time, we didn't

even, you know, we just, it was a firefight.

But turns out it like went off into the whole hotshot lore

world and became the last stand at Mackie Bar.

And for years people knew about that fire because of what we did

up there. For us, it was just, yeah, it

was a big memory. But I'd gotten out of the world

after that, out of shot world. And so I didn't realize how much

that story had travelled. Yeah.

That's awesome. That's pretty cool.

So we kind of covered growing up and your firefighter career.

You said you got into making need somewhat reluctantly.

How do you go from there to launching a business?

Yeah, so I was never going to do a booze business at all.

You know, I'd started a little business in college, got shut

down by the FAA. So this is back in 2009, 2008,

2009, but I was going to do unmanned aerial vehicles on

fires. So UAVs, which nowadays they're

everywhere. At the time it was illegal to

have a for profit company that can fly over 400 foot AGL.

But me and this guy out of Newcastle, we decided we're

going to start this UAV company. So I had meetings with like the

head of BLM aviation, I had had Forest Service aviation and

like, it was like, yeah, this would be hot because nobody was

talking about it back then. It was built our own plane and

you know, we could do, we could fly at night, we could fly

through smoke, we could do infrared, we could do pilot

unpiloted flights. So the safety factor goes way

up. But then I got a call from the

FAA and they shut my ass down. And so that kind of shut it

down. And a few years later, it became

legal in 2013, I think 20/12/2013.

But by that time our competition was Raytheon and Boeing.

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

I didn't have that kind of money in R&D and they can make a way

better product. But you know, it was a good idea

while it lasted. But anyway, so, you know, I'd

always say kind of the sense of wanting to do a business.

I had a little business in college too.

I might throw parties for money. And it was, have you ever seen

the movie Van Wilder? That's kind of what I did, but

not near as cool. Didn't make that much money, but

provided beer money for the week.

And so, you know, I had this kind of sense of doing business

always sounded fun, but you know, I was going to be a

fireman that my entire goal was to retire as a fireman.

That's all I was ever going to do.

Well, then in 2013, you know, my product I've been making, it's

starting to get fairly good and people were liking it,

especially on the Mead sites. It was so different.

And so I decided, you know what, let's start a, let's start an

alcohol business. And initially I was going to do

a brewery, but at that time, I mean, everybody and their dog

had breweries and there's really good beer being made in Wyoming

around the country. So I figured I'm going to do it.

I don't want just a small, you know, Tavern.

You know, I want to make a business out of a large

business. And so it's like, how about me?

Nobody else is doing it, really. And so instead of trying to

steal market share from all these companies are very good at

what they do, how about we just create our own market out of

nothing? And so I started looking at real

estate in Gillette, trying to get loans.

It was just me at the time. Yeah, I secured a bill.

So I put together my final plan the summer of 13 and then closed

on a loan in a building January of 14.

And that's when it started. OK.

And then I'm still going to do both.

I was not going to be leave the fire service to go do business

was never the goal. Gotcha.

OK, so where does the name Big Lost Meatery come from?

Is there a story behind that? There is.

So within our branding, there's a whole bunch of stories.

And so I'm going to give you 2 different stories on that

question. OK.

So one big loss is this concept. And so like on the back of all

of our labels, I don't even think I have one in my office,

there's this big lost cabin. Wait, actually I do.

I happen to have a poster in my office, but there's this cabin

here that's on the back of all of our labels, and that's the

big lost cabin. And so it's this cabin way out

in western Wyoming that we've never actually been there, but

we heard it exists. And like all of our characters,

the the Wildman, the crazy woman, the island gypsy, the

demented grandpa, the tipsy cousin, they all have stories

behind them. And somehow their stories, they

wind up at this cabin and there are written stories.

Yeah. So they make it to this cabin.

And that's where it kind of it's this cabin in the middle of the

mountains. There's a warm fire going.

You know, it's a place where everyone just having a good

time, but you can just kind of get big loss.

You know, enjoy the moment for what it is.

Get rid of all this external stimuli, get rid of all this

other random stuff in your lives.

Just enjoy this moment, right? And and so that's kind of become

what big loss is. And it translates into even our

buildings, you know, there's no TV's.

We have quiet music and forbid people have a conversation

again, you know, it's built like an old cabin.

So all the all the furniture is random.

It's whatever we could acquire or build.

It's not, you know, a nice polished modern industrial look

and it's it's wood, it's random furniture.

And so that's kind of what big loss is from the marketing

sense. The other side of that story is

how we actually got the name is I lived on big Loss drive and

Gillette. And so I would, you know,

brewing at my house, my whole basement essentially turned into

a brewery. I had hundreds of bottles of

wine and beer and everything that I was making down there.

And we were just jokingly call it the Big Loss brewery.

And as I started looking more into a business, I just kind of

use it as a placeholder, but starting to build the brand

around it actually made sense for a good brand.

And so that's where the whole concept of Big Loss came.

And In the Street itself is, I mean, that's also a unique name,

but the street itself, our whole subdivision was named after

things in Idaho. And so the big Loss River is in

Idaho, which I found out after company started.

But yeah, that's that's kind of where all that came from.

Cool, cool. And so you're launching your

Mead business and also firefighting.

At what point did you decide to go all the way in on the

meatery? Day one, I mean, it was, it was

always going to be do both, but I mean, it was day one of the

company was like, we're we're going all in.

So like that first year. So I spent 10 months renovating

an old building downtown. They've been burned down in

1895, burned down again in 1929, was rebuilt in 1931.

It was the original daily general store in Gillette.

But I've gutted the whole building.

I took over 30 tons of material out of the building and then

rebuilt everything on the inside.

We did all the utilities, everything I could legally do

myself, I did because I didn't have any money.

And so paying contractors, I didn't have a lot.

And you know, of course, whatever friends and family

would be willing to hang out and help.

Yeah, I bought a lot of beer to like, you know, come help me do

this. And there was a few guys that

really took a heavy, heavy hand in that because, yeah, it was.

I didn't have any other ownership or anything at that

point, No staff. And then we opened up in

December of 14. By the time I had and I got

hired 8 people out of the gate. But one of the guys, Bob Hewitt

Gaffney, he's now my business partner.

So he came in the picture about halfway through construction.

He started dating my sister. He's a teacher by trade, a math

teacher, but I didn't have a great history with all of her

boyfriends. So she really liked this guy.

So she'd send him to come hang out with me at the meetery while

I was doing construction to come hang out me get on my good side.

We also had a background in carpentry and so, yeah, he just

kind of, he morphed into my right hand man for about

everything. And then once he decided to

marry my sister in 16, I brought him on his partner and then

start training him to do all the production operations while I

ended up taking all the administrative side.

You know, I'm sure we're getting some of the growth stuff.

Yeah, the plan was always to grow big out of the gate, but it

was going to be to do both eventually.

That wasn't feasible. Gotcha.

So what was the straw that broke the camel's back that caused you

to leave the fire service? Medical retirement, I didn't

have a choice, So otherwise I'd still be there, OK.

But yeah, it was one of those things that that is medical

stuff or my ability to actually fight fire anymore was

diminished, so I was going to be gone anyway.

And it also just it happened to time out with our Sioux Falls

expansions. So that was kind of the impetus

to only do me to not fire anymore.

OK. All right.

What has been your most difficult step so far?

I would say our weakest how that it's kind of two different

questions. So one of the more difficult

things in this is not coming from any type of retail

hospitality business. You know, I'm a fireman by

trade, right? And so there's a lot of little

things that have been very expensive lessons that had you

spent any time in the industry would have been non issues.

But it's also a boon too. So you know, it's little things

like if you order 50,000 labels and you don't get barcodes, did

you know you can't sell any of those bottles at liquor stores?

Little things like that that are very expensive mistakes.

And so for the 1st 50,000 bottles, we had to hand label

barcodes, get them separate printed for an extra $0.21 a

bottle, figure out how to get them registered so you can

actually sell them in chain stores.

And then we had a hand label 1st 50,000 bottles.

You know, little things like that were huge learning curves

that, like I said, if you spend any time in that industry, you

would. Well, yeah.

Do you put barcodes on your bottles or not gonna sell them?

We didn't think about. I thought it was cool.

I had a label, I had a bottle, a cap.

I had good product in it. I'm going to go sell it.

Awesome. But with that, that also brings

up the other thing. Part of why we've been

successful is we had no background.

So we didn't know what you could or couldn't do.

And so there's a lot of things we did on the marketing side,

even in product development, which made our product extremely

unique because we just didn't know any better.

And so there was no preconceived box to work in.

And so it allowed us to be creative and do different things

that people had done before anywhere in the industry.

Other big difficulties is not coming from the industry as we

had zero connections. And so when you're in this

business, especially when you want to get into distribution

and production on a larger scale, if you don't have anybody

else to sell your product, you legally can't sell it in the

United States. And so like, I can't go sell to

a restaurant in Minnesota. By law, I have to find another

company that's willing to sell it for me to that restaurant

because of three tier laws. And so we had zero connections.

And so trying to get into some of these distribution

relationships, you don't stand a chance.

Like there's some small company in Gillette, WY, like you don't

have a pole regionally. Nobody knows who you are da da

da da da versus if you have somebody that's willing to get

you that introduction and get your foot in the door.

Our sales rates very high. We just could never get our foot

in the door. So like our first distribution

relationship, we set up. Once again, I didn't know any

better. So I just walked into this guy's

office one day with 2 bottles of meat in my hand.

I even have a bag. I had a business card and 2

bottles of meat. Drove out to Sioux Falls, SD

walk to this guy's office. It's like, hey, do you guys want

to try some meat? What you don't do that, by the

way, in this industry. But I don't know any better.

But they gave me 5 minutes and you know an hour later we're

still talking. They like to we were and run our

product on and we've since become pretty good friends with

those guys. But he still tells me that

stories like he's never had anybody walk into his office

like that before ever. It worked.

We just, yeah, we didn't know, didn't know any better.

So it's it's both a positive and a negative.

But I'd say the yeah, most difficult things is not knowing

some of the technical side and then just not having any

connections to work with because connections are everything in

this industry. It's huge.

Yeah. Did do you have an example of

maybe one of the creative things you guys were able to do simply

because you didn't know that that wasn't that was supposed to

be done? Yeah.

So I mean, part of it is the product that we made.

So we make it much differently than most meteries around.

And so we put a ton of honey into it in the beginning.

It's, you know, substantially more than we ever needed.

And had we, we'd done a lot of the industry, It wasn't a great

business practice to begin with, but it ended up creating a very

unique product that nobody else makes.

There's only maybe a dozen of us in the world that make a style

like this, but we didn't know that.

And so not just with the amount of honey, but also take the

water we were using, we used Gillette City Water, which if

you've ever been into brewing is horrendous for brewing.

It's horrendous for wine making. It's fantastic for meat making.

And had we been professionals prior to that, we never would

have even touched Gillette water.

We would have built our own water profile and done

everything, you know, that we do on a beer side now, but we

didn't know. So turns out there's all these

like hard compounds, like the stuff that makes our water very

hard is actually good for facilitating honey fermentation.

Any lacks nutrients and so we had this really unique water

profile that nobody in the their right mind would touch the 10

foot pole that we just stumbled into because like, yeah, it

comes out of the tap, it's water, it's clean like let's use

it. And it ended up creating a

really good product. And then we also did things like

when we first started, we served everything in cow horns.

So literally just drinking horns out of oak barrels.

We had no glassware. We only had meat we served out

of barrels. It was this really cool thing

that, yeah, I had. Well, we wouldn't recommend it

now, but it gave us a lot on the marketing push, it just being

something completely off the wall.

But now we have glassware because, you know, horns aren't

for everybody. But it gave us a really good

marketing push in the beginning. And then, like, when we would do

sales, we didn't know what we're supposed to do and what we're

not supposed to do. So I'd literally just start

walking into liquor stores, walking into restaurants.

Hey, I don't know you, but I want to know you.

Here's what I sell. It's awesome.

You're willing to taste it. And so we had no.

We had no. And so, yeah, I'd spend

thousands of miles a year just driving to liquor stores and

saying, hey, I'm Sam. I've got me in the back of my

car, let's do business and it's worked out, but it's been yeah,

it's you have to stay. Know any better?

Oh, man, I can only imagine that'd be, yeah, that'd be quite

interesting, I'm sure for the liquor store owner or the

distributor to have somebody walk in like that.

Yeah. I mean, there's, you know,

salespeople have to do that to an extent, but usually they like

working with distributors. They like people that they know,

you know, they want to know of your brand to an extent, but to

just cold call people with booze in the back of your car is way

off the wall. Usually it comes from a

warehouse or a delivery guy or something like that.

And so that's, it allowed us a lot of growth and we would hit

everything from the highest end place to like the bow down dirty

bar, like we hit it all. We're a little more targeted

now, but. That's great.

Well, I imagine throughout the course of building your brand,

building your business, there's been a a few scary moments.

What was the time that you were most afraid?

So the biggest fear that comes in, especially with what we do

is cash flow. And so you have a lot of

companies out there that have great concepts, they're good at

what they do. But cash flow can kill a

business, right? I mean, that can usually be the

single biggest killer. A lot of times is, you know, you

may have, if you have I would say $100,000 in AR, but you got

$80,000 a bill for right now. That's a problem, right?

You can't make rent, can't make payroll, can make whatever.

And so for us, cash flow has always been a big issue because

you can't just get honey year round.

And so for us, we have to have really good relationships with

our honey suppliers because they pull honey once or twice a year

depending on the year. That's when you got to buy honey

and secure your honey contracts. And so if we don't have enough

cash flow coming into July and all of a sudden we're going to

hit with a $50,000 honey bill and we don't have it, then we

got to go figure out financing, do whatever, which, you know,

the first time or two you do, that's not as big of a deal.

But for the banks, like why are you coming?

Again? You do this every year, like do

not manage cash flow, then I'm going to give it to you and go

find alternatives. So, you know, that's always been

an issue, but I'd say probably the single biggest 1 was COVID

hands down. So we were shut down.

I remember it's March 17th, I was in Sioux Falls getting ready

to go on a sales trip to North Dakota.

And I get a phone call from Bob saying, hey, the city just shut

us down for COVID. I was like, all right, well, at

that time, you know, everybody didn't know what was going on

and everything else. And so I was like, well, I'm

driving home, I'm going to skip the rest of the sales trip.

I'll be home. Let's figure out what we're

going to do. And so we were completely shut

down. We had a beer distribution

company at the time as well, which most of our product was

kegs, which kegs weren't doing anything because nobody was

serving anything on draft. We couldn't sell any of our

beer. We were 100% kegs internally.

And so the way the laws are written in Gillette and in

Wyoming, there was no legal way for us to sell product at all

from our door. So like if you were a

restaurant, you were able to do like they put some to go

provisions in there for restaurants and bars.

But because we are a winery and a brewery, there was no legal

Ave. to do that. A good guy down to the minutiae

of like, OK, my legal sales stops at the threshold of my

door. They're not allowed inside.

I'm not allowed to give them stuff unless they're inside.

But what if they set money inside the door, like blow like

push it in and then I have product that I push out?

Because the transaction has to legally be made on the premises

and so you can't have the exchange of money and booze

unless you're inside the threshold.

But their hand can't cross through.

I mean, just dumb stuff like this, right?

And so I went toe to toe with the mayor, with the city

attorney, with the city administrator, like because we

were the only business and all of Gillette that this affected

that way everybody else had options to make the transaction.

But because of our type of license, there was literally

nothing we could do legally. It's like, well, I'm just going

to break the law then and do it because otherwise I'm going to

go out of business. Like, well, don't do that.

It's like, I mean, what are my options here?

Like either I break the law and chance it and stay in business

or I go out of business. Like I, I don't really have much

of A choice. But the problem is, like in the

state of Wyoming, city councils and local municipalities own

your license. So they're the ones that

determine whether you keep your license or not.

They do this every year. And so if I create too much of A

fuss, you're going to pull my license anyway.

So finally I was like, OK, how about this?

How about I just open up against the governor's orders against

healthcare and I'm just going to go open and see what happens?

And we started talking around trying to get some other places

to do that. We had a few on board and then

one bar in the county, they opened up and just said screw

it, we're going for it. And it was kind of nice because

the sheriff came up and wrote him a ticket.

It's like, here's the deal, I'll write you $100 ticket, you pay

it. You can stay open the rest of

the day. Since I did my job, you guys do

your thing. It's like, that's awesome.

And the county said they wouldn't hold it against their

license. Well, we didn't get the same

thing from the city. They they wouldn't commit to not

holding it against our license. He's like, dude, I'll pay $100

fine all day long, stay open. But if you hold against my

license, I'm not going to have any business.

And we still had enough distribution to justify keeping

it, you know, not risking at all.

And I think it was three days after that that we just opened

up against the governor's orders.

And then a couple other bars did and the City Council and the

county Commission got together with police chief and the

sheriff and they said we're just not going to enforce it in

Gillette, WY. Awesome.

America's still alive. But yeah, I would say Co COVID

was probably the single biggest one because we weren't sure what

was going to happen. And we ended up growing like

hotcakes during COVID. But that first month was I

didn't know if we're going to make it out of it, but we ended

up having as one of our best years for because of COVID.

And then, you know, one thing that we did too is that you're

on 4th of July, we decided we're going to throw a freedom

festival just because I was so fed up with the government by

that point. And so we we put a band shut

down downtown Gillette, put out a band like 900 people on 4th of

July of COVID year 2020, brought in a cannon like a howitzer,

like fire blank cannon shots down like a full size howitzer.

And just as a side note, if you ever there is an ordinance in

the city of Gillette that you have to have a handwritten note

from the mayor to fire artillery and city limits.

Apparently that's been a problem at some point in the past.

So, yeah, we had to get a note from the mayor to fire a cannon

by ordinance. But yeah.

But COVID ended up being a really good year because at that

time, you know, not so much where we were in Wyoming

because, you know, people just kind of disregarded all of it.

But like in our Colorado markets and our other cities was very

different, especially Colorado. But it was nice because you

figure most of your people that drink, you know, they go to

their local bar, they know their bartender, their bartender knows

what they drink. You know, half the time the

things sitting there by the time they even show up.

And so they never really venture outside their standard or, you

know, in the bustle of kids and work and sports.

And they go to the liquor store, They beeline to what they want.

They might look around two or three different beers, but hey,

they're going to grab it. They're going to go.

They're on their way. Well, a lot of these cities

where you couldn't do anything other than go to the grocery

store or the liquor store, they would go in as a social outing.

So they'd spend 30 minutes just wandering around the liquor

store. And so they found people like us

that they never would have found otherwise, like, oh, that's a

cool label. Like, let's try it.

And, you know, they, they expanded their palate.

So we grew like hotcakes during COVID.

It was awesome. Yeah.

But the first few months was. Oh man, yeah, I can only

imagine. It sounds like you've spent a

lot of your business career fighting government of one type

or another. I tell PIO, if you want to hate

the government, start a business.

If you want to really hate the government, start a liquor

business. Because because we're regulated

by cities, by counties, by states, by tax or by federal,

About every two years I get super pissed off and start

writing letters as senators and representatives.

And yeah, we've done some lobbying work because there's a

few things that we did that had never been done in the state of

Wyoming before. You know, I put a brewery and a

winery in the same building had never been done.

And so we had to work a lot with our regulators to figure out how

to legally do that. And it's all nuance.

So anybody that ever been to our old bar, we had this random

board over the bar that made no sense whatsoever.

But it's just a random or two by 8.

It just is up there. Well, because the way the

Wyoming law was written is to have a serving area, you have to

have a header and a footer. And it's in a separate room with

like 1/2 wall and a walkway. Like it's very obviously a

different room, but it didn't have a header.

And so we had to like put this random board up top to legally

signify you're in a different room.

There's another brewery that when they did there, so they

could have youth in the bar, like they just bolted A2 by 4 to

the ceiling and painted the same color.

But it's legally a header. And so it's little things like

that that you're always dealing with.

You know, a lot of businesses are very familiar with dealing

with, you know, building code and fire code and some of those.

So we have all that stuff as well.

But then we have the liquor regulators, which at the state

and local level, they're, they're pretty good.

I mean, Wyoming's an easy state to work with.

Some other states are not. But the feds are absolutely

atrocious. Yeah.

Oh man, I thought I got frustrated with governments as a

contractor, but just hearing a little bit about what you go

through, I can only imagine. I I don't know if I'm cut out

for it. Well, at least with contracting,

you know, you have the ICC code and there's a lot of people that

specialize in that. And it's pretty black and white.

You know, there's some, you know, variance in this

rejection. But in liquor and specifically

the Mead world, there's not a lot of statutory law.

And so it's constantly subjective interpretation by

whoever you get that day and they're not on the same page for

your federal regulators. So like we had one process, like

one of our bottles have been on the market for four years and we

go because all of our labels have to be approved by the

federal government. So everything that's on the

label, what's in the product, there's a whole process to get a

product on the shelf. And so we put a new label in and

it took us a long time to get the first one.

And so we make everything exactly like the old label.

We just change the legally required stuff for what's in it.

Alcohol percentage. Well, they come back like, Oh

yeah, this label is wrong because of this, this, this and

this. And every time you do that, you

have to get it off to marketing. It's another cost every time you

change it. And so I made the mistake

because I didn't know any better of, well, you guys approved all

of these things on our last label.

Like why, why can't we do that on this one?

And she comes like, we approve that in error.

So now you have to recall everything that's on the market

and you have to reprint, redesign and reapprove all your

formally approved labels. And it was going to be like

$100,000 of cost. And of course, you know, they

don't care because they don't pay it.

I'm the one that has to pay it. And that's that whole concept

where regulation becomes a tax. And so, yeah, it was one of

those that I was like, well, I don't know what we're going to

do, so I'm just not going to recall them and hope you never

find them because I can't afford to do that part of it.

And so then we went through the whole label approval and

redesign. It still cost us $10,000 when

I'm supposed to work on their approval.

But that's, it's all subjective interpretation on whoever you

get that day. And that's usually the kind of

stuff that sparks me to start writing letters if I read this

off. Yeah, I think I'd be writing

some letters as well. So, yeah, well, I know you guys

have grown significantly from starting it's a small meetery in

Gillette, WY now to distributing nationally and even

internationally. Did you have a specific growth

strategy in mind or I mean, what does it look like to to grow and

pursue growth? No.

So we had an objective in mind, but not necessarily a route to

get there. And part of that just not

knowing how the industry worked. But you know, the goal was we

always wanted to, I mean our singular goal is we want Made in

Gillette, WY on our products on more shelves than any other

metering in the country that that's our goal.

I want to put Made in Wyoming on as many shelves in this entire

country as we can. And we want to be the biggest,

we want to have the most pervasive shelf space.

That's the goal, right? But to do that, you know, once

again, we didn't have connections.

We didn't really know how to deal with the distribution,

right? And we're still going through

these challenges because we're still not big enough compared to

other alcohol companies to get really hard.

Looks like people don't pursue us.

You know, once you get to a certain size, distributors

pursue those brands. But the problem is, you know,

we're a very large company when it comes to meter ease, but

meteries are so small compared to breweries, wineries,

distilleries that they don't really go out of their way to

pursue meteries. So we have to do this on our own

and try and convince them that this product is good.

A we'll support it. We can support it.

We can support it by production, by sales, by marketing, all

these other things. And so we have to fight tooth

and nail for every distribution contract we get.

And the other thing that has happened in our world is you've

had a lot of meteries get on the market.

You know that, you know, it's the first metry that these

companies have picked up, but they don't have the support

capacity or the production capacity or the product doesn't

sell for whatever reason. And they get burned by these

meteries. And so then they just look as

like, well, you're just another meter.

We don't want to touch it because they've had bad

experiences with other ones. And so we're still not fully to

national level distribution yet. We've got 8 states.

We got a few more in the hopper that we're trying to work with

right now, some different contracts we're trying to get

through, but we're still not quite big enough to where that's

an easy road to hoe because people aren't pursuing meteries.

But yeah, so the growth strategy is still in development, but

we've got, you know, a couple guys we're working with right

now that we can pull off about two or three more of these at

that point will become big enough that it becomes a much

easier sell. And the other thing is with our

international distribution kind of kind of fell into our laps to

an extent. But what that does is it gives

us legitimacy in the domestic market.

So even if I only ever sold one bottle a year to Taiwan, when I

go to Texas, like, well, if you can figure out logistics to

Taiwan and sell their like you can figure out Texas.

And so that's helped us a lot building our domestic market by

having this international legitimacy, if you will, that

makes us a bigger company than we are by volume.

Gotcha. OK, interesting.

So I know you guys do ship to a few other countries, Taiwan and

being one of them. How did you develop those

relationships or did you do that intentionally or how did you get

into those markets? Yeah.

So it's, it's actually a hyper pertinent conversation right now

with what's going on in Wyoming Legislature.

In 2018, the state legislature set up the Asia Pacific Trade

Office in Taipei and what it was it was designed initially to

support agricultural exports to Southeast Asia to get in the

market. And so they hired a person, two

people that live in Taiwan that are native Taiwanese, to promote

Wyoming goods in Southeast Asia. We called them pretty soon after

they open and be like, hey, you know, what do you think about

alcohol? Like, it's an agricultural good.

It starts from AG and then, you know, gets value added and turns

into it. It's like, oh, we hadn't really

looked at it, but we'd be interested if you are.

It's like, yeah, we're interested.

Like we want to do it. And so I started working with

those guys and I've taken a trip to when big trade show Food

Taipei in 2019 and brought some product along doing tastings.

We're meeting with distributors and people that would sell it in

Taiwan. We had some really good traction

there. We were getting ready.

We had a contract set up and then we were set to do full

scale distribution in March of 2020.

And course COVID hit. That all went to crap.

We lost that one and that company didn't make it through.

They weren't, you know, they didn't make it through to make

it through the COVID times because Asia shut down hard,

especially Taiwan. And so then we had to start from

scratch again. But we, we had this, you know,

the Wyoming Business Council and Asia Pacific Trade Office to

help us make new connections. And so in 2023, we set up some

more connections and went back over there and now we're working

with that distributor who's been increasing their value quite a

bit. We had to do a complete rebrand

in Asia, had to completely do all new branding, all new

marketing. But yeah, so that started to

expand. And that is since, you know, we

picked up Hong Kong during that, got some things that we're kind

of working on in mainland China, Singapore, Japan.

But the goal is kind of use Taiwan as a jumping point to

Southeast Asian market. But yeah, and the reason I say

that's pertinent right now is because the Wyoming Legislature,

the Joint Appropriations Committee, just decided to cut

the entire one Business Council budget last week.

So we've been actively involved in government and politics

again, because economic development is a good thing, not

a bad thing. You know, it's not like these

guys have given us hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars

to do this. I think I've think I made $4200

off of a federal grant to help me travel once, but that's it.

It's more so there's they have the connections, the expertise

to help companies like us grow and build the Wyoming culture

and the Wyoming brand and all these things that we do.

And so that's why pertinent timing that those guys are in

play right now. Yeah, with all your frustration

with governments, do you ever foresee getting involved in

government at any level in your future?

Yeah. So for a couple years I was the

vice chair of the Republican Party at Campbell County.

So I spent a lot of time in politics there.

I even did the second shortest stint in the history of the

Wyoming Legislature as a representative.

I didn't quite get the shortest. I wasn't there.

But yeah, I was 12 days and solve a political problem and

fill a seat. But, you know, there's, there's

been some talk of it. I enjoy politics.

I don't enjoy government, but I enjoy trying to make it work

better for the people, do things.

But now that I live in South Dakota, that that calculus has

changed quite a bit. You know, we're still pretty

active on the lobbying front in Wyoming, especially with this

stuff going on right now with the Legislature.

So we've been writing a lot of letters and doing things to try

and get some promote done for state of Wyoming.

But yeah, we will see. I've had a few people reach out

here in South Dakota. But yeah, probably at some

point. But right now I've got, I've got

kids to raise. I got a business to run.

I'm OK with that. Yeah, Yeah.

That's probably enough for now. Was there something that

significantly delayed your growth that you would do

differently if you had a chance to do it again?

Honestly, I think I would spend more time researching whatever

it does that we were doing prior to just like, you know, we have

an idea, we're flexible, we can pull the trigger.

You know, especially things like like growth specifically is

really getting spending some time with people in the industry

that understand the politics and logistics behind larger scale

distribution instead of just trying to figure it out on our

own, you know, trying to build some of those connections.

What is significantly expedited things?

I will say that staying in the fire service did not expedite

things either just because I mean, you know, it's not like we

work 40 hours a week. You work shift work, you work

fires. You know, I was on a national or

an incident management team. So there'll be times where two

hours notice, I'm gone for three weeks and you have very limited

capacity to manage your business when you are not there and

you're in a place with no cell coverage, fighting fires for

weeks at a time. So that that did Hanford growth.

I wouldn't have done that part differently, but I'd say the

biggest thing is really finding some mentors in the industry and

finding people that really know it.

That would be one of the big things.

And I think another thing too is, you know, we did everything

on like these shoestring of shoestring budgets.

You know, if it would break, we'd fix it.

We build it and then money for parts.

So I mean, we we manufacture parts, we build furniture.

We built our own tap system, built our own brew, we built

everything we could. But at the same time, you know,

I think looking back, spending a little more time on financing

out of the gate to get some more working capital to avoid that

problem probably would help growth as well.

Because, you know, every hour you're spending fixing

something, yeah, you might save the 45 bucks or the 200 bucks in

labor, but could that time to better spend making 500 in

sales, right? Yeah.

Yeah, understanding the value of your time.

Yeah, there's some wisdom there. There's, I think there's a

balance starting out. A lot of the time, capital's

tight. And like you said, managing cash

flow can be one of the most difficult things for small

business owners. But also like you just said,

every hour you spend saving money is an hour and you're not

building your business. Well, exactly.

And it's one of those that, you know, sometimes you do it out of

lack of choice because you just don't have money, right?

But at the same time, you know, if you start to learn that and

understand it better like we do now, you just become more

valuable with your time. Yeah, Yeah.

There's some wisdom there. That's some good input.

Is there something that you held a strong opinion about early on

that you've changed your mind about through building your

business? Let's see if you haven't learned

yet, I'm fairly strongly opinionated in general.

Ask my wife, but that I really changed about Yeah, there, you

know, there, there's one significant one.

I think this, this ties into anybody that grows a business

beyond themselves. And so this was a big challenge

internally for me personally, not so much within the company,

but with me personally is when you bring on staff, when you

bring on a partner, understanding that your way is

not the only way, right? And so I think I think a lot of

business owners get hyper frustrated with their staff.

They get hyper frustrated with their employees because they

don't do it their way. They don't do it to their

standard. They don't do it to, you know,

whatever it is, you have to understand it's not their baby

and that they are not going to be as passionate as you.

They can't be. You should never expect that of

them. And I think a lot of business

owners, you know, I had my times this where I forget that.

And just like, why don't you get this through your head?

Like this is This is why this is special and cool.

And I've been very, don't get me wrong, I've been very fortunate.

My staff has been amazing. I think I've only ever flown one

or two jobs since we opened. I mean, I've got very loyal

staff. They're great.

But you know, there's been times where I get super frustrated,

but then I have to turn back. Like, no, Sam, that's not that's

an unreasonable expectation of yourself.

You can't do that. And the same thing is when you

bring on a partner, and I'll give Bob a lot of graces on

this. Is he understood that, you know,

for several years it was just me.

And so every decision I make, there's no second guessing.

There's nothing you have to do like this is it?

We're going to go for it. You guys come with me, right?

I'll help you along, whatever, But once you're Rihanna partner,

that dynamic changes and it's no longer like Sam.

You can't do that. Like you now have somebody to

talk to about this. And I'll give Bob a lot of grace

that he was really good about adapting to that and not making

a big deal when Sam would just go do Sam things and bulldoze

his way through it. And that, that was one big one.

That took me a little while. It took.

I'd say that was probably a year to transition, being fully

invested in a partnership versus it's my way or the highway

because I'm the only one I don't have anybody to negotiate with.

And Bob was really good about giving me the grace to like, let

that go. You know, he'd eventually he'd

get a little like, that's a me decision to Sam, you know, you

need to understand that. And he was good about giving me

the time to psychologically get through that transition.

And it was good. It went really well.

But that was one thing that, yeah, my opinion is my opinion,

and there's nobody to say bootstrap about it, but not that

that was wrong at the time when you're your only one.

But transitioning to having that can't carry it to staff and you

can't carry it to your partner. And so that was a very valuable

lesson that I think a lot of emerging business owners

struggle with because it is their baby.

They're the ones with everything on the line.

They're, you know what it's like you're the one that all the

expenses are going to go to or all the costs if it fails.

But it's also part of that mindset is liberating.

Part of the reason I like owning my own business is not only is

if it works or your vision, your whatever is good, you did it

right, But the antithesis is also true.

If something fails in your business, it's also on you,

which is a nice thing to have. It's not like working, you know,

as a fire department, as firemen, I work for the

government. So like there's failures we

would have that. It wasn't my fault.

You know, we didn't get the funding, we didn't get the

staff, you know, whatever it was, there's somebody else to

blame. Not always, but a lot of times

there is, you know, there's systematic things.

There's, you know, this guy didn't do whatever.

But when it's your own business, there is nobody else to blame.

If your staff did something that gets you sued or you get a bad

review or you lose a sale, guess what?

You didn't train them well enough.

You didn't give them the resources, you didn't do XYZ.

It's your fault and that's a good thing to have and

understand because I do think a lot of managers, supervisors, a

lot of owners, we, we have a tendency to blame staff,

whatever. But if they don't understand

your vision, if they don't understand they don't have the

resources or they made a bad decision, the odds of that being

entirely on them or about this big, it's your fault.

I like being able to take control of my own faults and

we've had them, I've had a lot of them and my staff have had

them, but they don't get the brunt of it.

I'm the one that made the failure and so it's a nice thing

to have, but that's one of those things it takes a while to grow

out of. Yeah, it's yours.

If it's your fault, it's yours to fix that.

I had that conversation with my 4 year old recently.

He was upset about something. I was like, dude, this is your

fault. You put yourself there.

But the good news about that is you don't ever have to do it

again when it's your fault. You can fix it like.

Yeah, but watch this, Dad. I'm going to do it again.

Yeah, he's got a few years to learn those lessons, but yeah.

My, my 5 year old's going through the same thing.

I'm like, all right, man, here's the deal.

Here's your options. You can do this and this happens

or you can do this and this happens.

I'm going to do this. Here's the consequence, man.

Yep. Oh man, it's tough.

It's tough watching them make those hard decisions and learn

those lessons the hard way. But I guess especially that they

do it at 5:00, then 15. Well, especially because every

bone in your body is saying, help them, help them not feel

pain, help them, you know, help them be happy, right?

Every single bone in your body is telling you that.

But logically, like, no, they have to learn.

It's this one's going to hurt. It's not going to be good, but

they got to learn. Otherwise, you're just doing

them a disservice. Oh, man.

And you also cannot treat your kids like your employees and you

definitely can't. That's one more leadership thing

I should talk about. Growing up in a paramilitary

environment where you know, you can't afford to have every

conversation or order discussed, right?

I mean, there's times where I say you do.

That's just the way it is. There's no, we have very short

time frames. We have emergent situation, like

things have to happen now. And so your entire career in the

fire service is structured around this hierarchy and it's

very strict. It's very paramilitary for a

reason. And when you go to having

bartenders or people working at the brewery, by the way, Sam,

you can't act that way. So you're a natural inclination

of like, this is how it's done. This is what we're going to do.

There's no questions about it. You can't do that.

And so having to learn to transition hat sometimes in the

same day, you know, transitioning between those two

hats, that's that's a huge learning curve for me personally

that I had to get over is I can't treat my bartenders the

same way I do my firemen. And you shouldn't, there's a

reason you shouldn't do that. And so there's times where even

just, you know, the lingo and the way you carry yourself, you

know, I had to put on a happier face, a little more bubbly, a

little more. I got to deal with feelings a

little bit differently. That's it's a good thing, you

know, it keeps me on my toes and helps me develop internally as a

leader. But that's a transition that

could be tough. And you see that with a lot of

guys that come out of the military too.

They're going to civilian life and they have a hard time

transitioning both not only a supervisor but also subordinate

because you look at your leaders the same way.

And so in the private business, you know, when I'm dealing with

somebody who's for like a better term, my supervisor in this

operation, or we are dealing with downtown politics or, you

know, the Main Street program or, you know, other ancillary

things that we do outside the business itself, Understanding

that as a subordinate, you can't just, yes, Sir, for everything.

It's expected to have some move back and forth.

And yeah, that's it. That was a fun one.

Well, you brought up wins and losses.

What has been your biggest win as a leader or a business owner?

So there's a couple ways to categorize that question.

So I'll, I'm going to phrase it this, I'm going to tell you a

story. So when I first began, there was

a guy, very successful business guy in Gillette and he asked me

this question and he's like, Sam, how will you know you've

made it? That's like, and I just, I had

the answer. I've taught my head.

I was raised like, well, I mean, I figure if I'm making, you

know, $100,000 a year, that means I'm doing $1,000,000 a

year in sales. You know, at the time that was

my, my compensation model that I thought it's like, I'll take 10%

of profit, right. So like I figured if I could

make $100,000 a year, that means we'll have, you know, $1,000,000

a year in sales. That means I beg it.

And he's like, Are you sure about that?

I was like, what do you mean? He's like, I'm not going to give

you the answer, but I'll tell you that that question has

nothing to do with money in a second.

That kind of that's interesting. Went on with my day, right.

Fast forward a couple years and I got to thinking about that a

lot more. I've had that question in my

head a lot. How do you know you made it?

So you know, people ask me this like, man, you're, you're

successful. You've been small business

export of the year for the SBA in Region A.

You've been this entrepreneur with your business, with you,

you're exporting. You're, you know, a lot of the

same things you said and you're like, dude, you've made right,

you made it. And that is not correct.

Like we've done a lot of big things.

We've had a lot of big wins and we've done some really, really

cool stuff for the state, for Wyoming, for our business, for

our families. And we've been involved.

We've done some cool things, but I still wouldn't say that we've

made it. You know, there's still there's

always financial instability. They're going to happen at any

time. You know, we've got this huge

growth thing and massive risk we're taking in Sioux Falls

right now with brick and mortar. You know, we're still not, we

haven't hit our objective yet of being our meet with Maiden

Wyoming's on more shells. Anybody else in United States?

We haven't hit that yet. So we we haven't made it.

But then I think more about it is now let's say we get to that

point, you know, I would say within the next five years,

that's very possible that we will be that, you know, that

puts us as the biggest meter in the United States, right, that

that's a very real possibility. But once we get there is will we

think we have made it right? You know, we we hit that initial

objective. But knowing the way I operate,

the way the company operates, there's going to be another one

on the horizon. And so it starts to look more

like the way you made it is you're doing the thing, right?

You're doing the thing that you're passionate about.

Are you living the lifestyle? Are you doing the thing?

And at that point, you know that that's why we do what we do is

that. And so that's kind of a

roundabout way of answering that question.

But I will tell you there, there are some specifics that stand

out in my mind of big wins. I'm so I remember the very first

time I saw somebody wearing one of our shirts that I didn't

know. That was a really cool thing of

like there's a guy that buys my product, supports my brand, and

I had no idea who they are. It's not a friend, it's not a

family, It's not somebody doing it because they like me.

Like that was a big deal. You also remember the very first

time that you hear somebody talking about your product in a

good way that doesn't know you're in the room.

So like, you know, I'm at this bar in Rapid City, SD, I'm on a

sales trip and I'm just walking through and I hear these two

guys like, dude, if you had that big loss stuff before, like it's

awesome. You know, they're going off on

like how great this stuff is. You got to try it.

And they have no idea who I am. They don't know I'm not branded

at the time. And just sitting there like

these are, these are big wins. And then still to this day, the

single biggest win we have is when I can give somebody this

thing that I created, this thing that I found a way to build and

market and can sell and da da all the things that go into

getting from my brain to somebody's hand and watching

them drink it and just be wowed. That's still like, that is the

ultimate why we do what we do is because booze makes culture.

It's one of those things, you know, food makes culture, booze

makes culture, song, dance, you know, expressions of humanity.

And booze is one of those ways that just happens to be our way.

And so when we can do that and somebody doesn't know what to

expect, they don't know what it is, hits their mouth and they're

just like floored when they get, you just get that wow factor.

Like it's awesome like that. That feeling never goes away.

And it's really cool when you can get your staff to buy in on

that. And so where they just get so

excited when they see that person be wowed.

But that's that's the ultimate biggest win.

I know that's not a great business question per SE, like a

hard business side, but that that really is like, those are

the wins that you really remember you like, I remember

getting the awards. I remember, you know, first time

go to Taiwan. But those, those little ones are

really the big wins. Yeah, that's awesome.

I can tell you care a lot about your craft and the art that it

is. Yeah, I mean, I think art's

important because there's a lot of ways to make money.

There's a lot of things to do, but doing something that you're

passionate about, it's worth a lot more.

It really is. That's part of my life.

The fire service. I mean, I could have made a lot

of money in coal mines, a lot more than I did in the fire

service, but I loved doing what I do and.

And you see that in people too, Like you see it in the trades,

like you see the guy that lays drywall and the guy that's

passionate about drywall. It's a night and day difference

in the way they operate, the way they look at their craft, the

way they enjoy, the way they become asterisk of it.

And that's that stuff's really valuable to a society and it's

valuable to a culture. Yeah, 100%.

I think that's one of the biggest things that was lost.

We, we talked at the beginning about education and maybe the,

the cultural or societal view of the trades that we grew up with.

Is it robbed a lot of kids of that?

There's a lot of value, there's a lot of dignity in serving

people well, providing value with your skill, whatever that

is. And you know, there were a lot

of trades, there were a lot of positions that kind of got

shunted to the side, or there's a whole generation that grew up

thinking that was a Plan B life when it doesn't have to be.

And people that have passion for what they do, they can make a

lot of money. They can have a very fulfilling

life. They can serve their community.

They can serve the people around them by using the skills that

they have and the personality that they have rather than

trying to fit into this cookie cutter personality that does

well in school and can sit still and pay attention and get good

grades and does well on a test. Yeah, yeah.

And not only that, but I mean, like when people are truly

passionate about their work, whatever your vocation is, I

mean, you could be the painter, you could be in the trades, you

can make booze, you could be a teacher, you could be a lawyer.

I don't really care what it is. But whatever your vocation is,

when you're passionate about it, like it makes that thing better.

It makes that thing more beautiful.

I mean, you've seen that, the advent of modern architecture,

right? Where you're like, let's just

throw up slab buildings because they're cheap, they're

effective. And think of how much beauty and

art we lose from guys that were just passionate tradesmen and,

you know, they're putting craft into their stone, into their

wood or, you know, I'm sure you've seen, you know, 1

electrician versus the other electrician.

Like when you walk in and you just see the beauty of like, all

the wires are perfectly put together.

The pipe is straight. Like it looks like it's supposed

to look or a welder when you see, yeah, this is effective,

but this is beautiful. Yeah.

I think beauty is an important thing that doesn't always have

financial value, but it has massive implicit value in

people's lives. That's a great way to put it.

I might steal that and use that again.

Do it. What has been your biggest

resource to grow as a leader? So I was fortunate because in

the fire service we spend a lot of time developing leadership

and management skills. I mean, the the local county

government spent a lot of money training to me to do that world.

And plus I was in a position of very formal leadership.

You know, my last position was a Battalion Chief.

And so that's all I did every day.

And then between that and running a business is I was, I

was fortunate to have a lot of very explicit resources over 25

years to develop that skill set that a lot of guys, you know,

when you're in the private industry, especially if you're

in a smaller company. So I take your roofing business,

for instance, you can't spend 20 years training managers from the

ground up and you don't have the money to send them to classes.

And like most of your time is spent doing the work.

That's what you have to do to continue in the fire service.

You know, there's times where if you may not run a call for

several hours and we can focus on this or like I need you to be

better developed to do this job. So we have money.

We're sending you to training, we're sending you to do this.

We do a lot of internal, we do external, and I was in the

training environment. So I spent five years

essentially in a classroom and a training environment.

That's all we did. So I was fortunate to have a lot

of that skill set already in place that I could from very,

very formal styles. But stuff that I've utilized

probably more so than anything outside of my formal training is

reading, reading, reading, reading.

Like be a voracious reader. I cannot stress that enough.

I mean, you look at, have you ever met like a very, very high

up general by chance, you know, 3-4 star secretary law,

something like that. So if you ever meet these guys,

they're hyper dialed in, right? And so I never met him in their

official capacity. But you know, the first guy I

met, he was at a funeral and we both had a relative by marriage

that had died. And so I'm talking to this guy

and this guy is he's very straight and narrow.

Every mannerism is dialed in. Everything he does is dialed in

just the way that he operates like, huh, this guy, this guy is

unique. And so I started talking to him

then, you know, it's exchanged names like, oh, what do you do?

It's like, Oh, I'm fireman and what'd you do?

Is Oz in the Army? Retires?

What'd you do in the Army? He's like, and I can't remember

what he said, but something like something like I did OP command

staff work or something like that.

Well, we get to talk and the guy's a three star general and

which explains it because I mean, those guys spend, you

know, in that world, they spend 30 years training for that job,

right? And so they're very dialed into

formal leadership and management.

But the other thing they do is they're hyper voracious readers.

And so I talked to him, you know what, what should I be reading

was one of my questions. And I asked him, you know what

he's reading right now. And he's talked about books.

But you look at some of these guys like, you know, General

Mattis, you know, the Bulldog Marine general, they say that

guy's read 30,000 books 30,000. If you think about that, that

number's wild. Yeah.

But you look at, you know, your your best speakers, your most

successful business people, almost all of them are hyper

voracious readers because in our world, we can only process so

much through experience. If you want to grow, you have to

go off the experiences of other people.

You've got to learn. You've got to understand that

knowledge and gain everything you can from others because you

don't have enough bandwidth in your time frame to gain all that

on your own. And so I would say reading would

probably be the single biggest one.

And yeah. Do you have a favorite author or

a favorite book that kind of helps you in the the leadership

or the business realm? My favorite author has nothing

to do with leadership. That's he's just a really good

author. But I mean, you know, like I

keep a list of every book I ever read.

And so I've always got a laundry list to go.

And because people ask me a lot about reading, especially when I

was doing training, so I'd always have book lists ready to

go. But I mean, I'd say like when it

comes to leadership books, you know, I'm a big biography guy.

Yep. I'll tell you one of the big

ones that I got was from that general specifically is there's

a four book series on General George Marshall.

I don't know if you're familiar much with Marshall.

So he's a five star general during World War 2, but he

essentially ran the entire U.S. military strategy in command for

all of World War 2, probably the single biggest military command

in history. And it's a four part series by

Forrest Pogue on his life. And so it took him prior to the

war, through the beginning of the war, the end of the war, and

then right after the war when he was Secretary of Defense, and

then after that when he was Secretary of State.

And so it's his life story. That's probably one of the

single best biographies. Helsa talks a lot about

logistics. He's a logistical genius and you

know, you never had a lot on the battlefield command.

He never did much. He never had a true battlefield

command, even though he planned like the muse Argon offensive as

a major and he planned most of World War Two never had an

actual battlefield command. The only five star general never

have battlefield command. But yeah, that that's a good

one. Also a lot, you know, a lot of

yeah, I mean, it really depends what your interest level is.

You know, I'm not big on like the business help books.

I don't read a lot of those. I read some of the inspirational

books every now and then, but I don't get a ton out of them.

I'm more so looking at what people done, why they did it,

how they do it. Because you'll notice a lot of

those self help books and business leadership books and

things like that, they have like 1 good point.

And they write a whole book about that one sentence, but

it's really like it could be done in an article.

And it's a lot of repeat verbiage to try and reinforce

the same thing there. There is one really good one,

though, that's down that route called It's Your Ship by James

Absaroff. And so he was a Navy captain

that adopted this just not real good crew and boat that

eventually elevated to the single best performing ship in

the entire U.S. Navy.

And it's all about taking ownership and what you do and

getting your guys to take ownership and what they do to

develop the entire concept as a whole.

Yeah, that one's really good. But I also recommend, I mean,

read, read technical books, you know, read things on science,

read things on art, read things on biology, read things on read

on fiction. I mean, read everything around

because it helps develop your lexicon.

It helps develop your ability to write, helps develop your

ability to process information. And it's one of those things

that if you're reading something, there's always

somebody. To talk to.

Oh yeah, yeah, awesome. So if you ever want a list, I, I

got a list. We'll send it over anytime.

OK, I do have a go to reading list for people, but it's kind

of all over the board depending on what they're doing.

Gotcha. And peruse through other

people's lists too. Yeah, peruse other people's

lists. Do you have some?

Well, I just love comparing lists.

I, you know, I have a list of some awesome books that I've

read and, you know, I like having that discussion of kind

of going back and forth. And yeah, there, there's a lot

of books, like you said, that you can kind of get the gist of

it by reading the summary and talking to somebody that's

already read it. You know which ones you need to

read and which ones you can read the Cliff Notes.

Yeah, what's your what's your go to book to recommend to people?

Man, probably kind of like you. Depends on the topic.

I have a few leadership books that I like.

Pat Lencioni has some good stuff out, John Maxwell's of course,

kind of the king of leadership stuff.

I love biographies like you said.

So I've got a few biographies of military leaders that kind of

incorporate their war stories with some leadership lessons and

those are a lot of fun for me. Yet some some of the excitement

of the war story along with the lesson along the way.

So. What's your best biography or

your favorite biography? Oh gosh, that's tough.

I guess it wasn't necessarily a biography, but I I like Jocko's

extreme ownership. Pete Blaber, the Man, the

mission and me. That was a fun one.

He had a lot of really unique stories.

They they definitely weren't leadership books, but the River

of Doubt Roosevelt's or a biography about Roosevelt.

It wasn't an autobiography, but biography about him.

Endurance with Shackleton. Yeah.

Drawing a blank on the name, but there's a fantastic biography

about Lewis and Clark that has some some pretty key leadership

principles and then just tells the story of their trek across

North America. That, man, that one was just

mind blowing. I I couldn't put that down.

That was a big book. And I think I did the whole

thing in like a day. And 1/2.

That was fantastic. Yeah.

Those are a couple off the top of my head.

I've got a pretty good list as well.

I try to keep track of everything I've read.

And. Yeah. 3 back.

And reread some of them. Three of those books are on

standard leadership list for fire service.

Really. OK, Which ones?

Extreme ownership for, like, younger officers.

The man, the mission in me. And then was the one you said

right before. And the man, the mission in me.

Yeah. What was it?

You just talked about it. You had.

Yeah. Jocko's John A blank.

Yeah, you just. Yeah, it was the one right

before you said the man, the mission and me.

OK. Yeah, those, those are all on, I

have a list of like 8 or 10 kind of for specific to leadership

and those three are all on that list as well.

So. Yeah, yeah, you see those a lot.

Yeah, those are some good ones. Well, I know you've fought some

pretty hard battles. Learning, Learning a new

industry, starting from scratch, no connections, fighting with

government at many different levels.

What is it that motivates you and keeps you pushing when

things get hard? I like doing it.

Maybe honestly, like I just I enjoy doing what I do and like

you said, you know, kind of alluded to it earlier, but if

you're really passionate about what you do, the trials are all

just speed bumps to get where you're going, right?

I mean, that's even the nobody likes doing taxes, nobody likes

doing paperwork, nobody likes dealing with the government, but

that's all those are just part of the things.

I mean, I guess to to put it in comparison, it's not a direct

correlation, but it's very close is why do you keep changing

dirty diapers on your baby? Nobody likes doing that, but you

love this kid like you like that's just, it's a thing that

you do as part of raising this kick, right?

And so, you know, that stuff's not going to stop you like, oh,

I'm not going to have a baby because I'm not going to change

diapers. Nope, not going to do it.

And so I look at it the same way as like, yeah, I mean, all these

things that we do that aren't fun or battles or whatever,

that's just, that's part of the game.

I mean, that's if you want to do this work, these are things that

come along with it. You know, if you want to go work

for the Forest Service and travel over fire and great

fires, guess what? You're going to eat cold food.

You're not going to shower. You're going to sleep on the

ground. Like that's you, just you make

the fun out of it. And you know, things like

fighting the government, I actually pretty well.

I enjoy that now. Like I got a kick out.

I got a rise out of it. And you know, even when you're

doing things you don't want to do, like working on your taxes,

your accounting, but make a game out of it, like I finished it.

You know what, screw you, Uncle Sam.

But you know what, at least I got it done.

I did it efficiently this year, didn't have any major problems.

So yeah, I mean, it's it's not hard to keep going when the

vision is sound. And so all those things just

become, that's part of the game. Awesome.

Yeah, that's a great answer. This is my favorite question I

ask everybody. Are you a person of a particular

faith tradition? And if so, how is that shape

your leadership? Journey yeah, so I'm Catholic.

I'm very, very practicing Catholic.

I just like, you know, I was a cradle Catholic for a long time

and then became Catholic eventually.

And my mom has 9 aunts and uncles or priests or nuns.

So she comes from a staunchly Catholic family.

But I mean, we're, we're very active in the church.

But as far as like how that does with leadership, it does a

couple things is I'm a firm believer that.

Do you ever read Augustine by chance?

Not much. I've read a lot of quotes.

I guess I haven't read much of his actual writings so.

Yeah, so he's got a quote. It's the very end of his book

that my heart will not rest until it rests and be.

And So what that means, I look at the world a lot.

That way is where faith causes peace, right?

And faith is not designed for you to have an easy life.

It's not designed for you to go through life without any trials

and tribulations. Once again, you cannot hone the

stone unless it gets hit heated by iron that I can't hone the

iron until it gets heated by fire.

And so it's one of those things that like when your faith is

strong, you have something bigger and better than you are,

substantially bigger and better than you are, and everything

else is a lot less of an issue after that, right?

And so you take those things that it creates peace.

And so it's one of those where you don't have to get super

worked up about the stuff that honestly, it doesn't really

matter that much. Even my business doesn't really

matter that much. I'm passionate about it.

I think it matters a lot. But the same time, there's still

something bigger. So it helps put things in

perspective. And so, and if if you're strong

enough, like in my world, if you're strong enough in your

faith life and it's something that's sort of an active

pursuit, a you have something to take your mind off business, but

you also it helps teach discipline.

I mean, it helps learn to be good.

It teaches you things that are hyper productive in your

environment. And if your vocation is aligned

with where God wants your vocation to be, it's going to be

OK. I don't know if I'm aligned with

where God wants me to be or not. I hope I am.

But at the same time, like that's, that is the primary

pursuit. And with that becomes pursuit of

your family because you can ask business owners all the time if

there's no peace in their family.

You know how much peace there is at work this much, right?

And if there's no peace with your faith, you know how much

peace there is in your family usually about this much because

there's a key component of your life that's missing.

And so if you have that, then you can constantly pursue.

Everything else gets a lot better from that.

Because I'm a firm believer in the concept of hard to kill.

Your job should be to be hard to kill.

And by hard to kill, I mean physically, tactically,

emotionally, but also spiritually.

You should be spiritually hard to kill because otherwise it's

pretty easy to find ways to take you out.

So there's my answer to that is yes, it's important, but because

it causes peace. So there probably are some, you

know, more explicit things when it comes to leadership and

passivity and things like that. But more so it's it puts you in

the right mindset, understanding that your business is not the

end all be all. There's other things that are a

lot bigger. If you're doing your business

for the sake of the business, you're not going to have a very

meaningful life. And if you don't have a very

meaningful life, all you got is your business.

Yeah, Yeah. That's a good way to put it.

I like that. How would you answer that

question? Or can I ask?

Sure. Yeah, I'm a devout Christian, a

follower of Jesus. I think similar to what you

said, that that informs every aspect of my life.

So that means that I believe there is one God, creator of all

things, and that we were created by him in his image with an

eternal spirit. I believe that we have all

sinned, separating us from the perfect, loving God, and I

believe that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, taking on human form

to live the perfect life that we could not live and suffering the

death and punishment that we all deserve.

I believe that He died and rose from the grave and that only by

grace, through faith in Him, we can be restored to right

relationship with God, saved from the bondage of sin, and get

to spend eternity in His presence.

I believe that the greatest aim of man is to strive to live a

righteous life in alignment with His will, that everything we do

might bring Him glory. And that informs everything that

I do. The way that I live as a

husband, the way I parent my kids, the way I run my business,

the way I treat employees and try to conduct myself.

So, you know, I try to live my life by Jesus example.

I try love others around me and I'm seeking his will in my life.

So like you said, trying to align my life with his will for

my life and, you know, serving, serving and loving the people

around me as best as I can and living a life in pursuit of him.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that, yeah, like you

said, that's the foundation that provides peace from which we

pursue all other things and it brings everything into

perspective. And in life, it's really easy to

get focused on what's right here, what's right in front of

you and and problems get blown out of proportion.

And when you can step back and view life through a different

lens and realize that there are things bigger and more important

than you and in your life, there's things bigger and more

important than the problem right in front of your face.

And then zoom out even farther to kind of, you know, eternity,

that the problem right in front of you gets to be a lot smaller,

brings a lot more peace to life and a lot more purpose.

If our life is just all about us and what we get and where we're

going, that's kind of an empty existence.

So yeah, there's there's something bigger and better that

I lived my life for. Have you ever asked that

question and not got a positive answer?

No one. Of these interviews, I guess, I

mean, I, I have interviewed a few people that don't subscribe

to any faith tradition, you know, so they kind of had a soft

answer there. But no, I've never asked

somebody that. That was like, man, yeah, I'm a

Christian or I'm whatever, and it ruined my life so.

Well, I think you're more still the opposite of like faith has

no dealings with whatever. No, not really.

Even the, the people that do not have a, a faith tradition that

they ascribe to or say they're non religious usually, you know,

have a, you know, but I, I have this moral compass or I have

these standards that I kind of try to live to or, yeah.

I think somebody that really is just totally hedonistic in their

living and, and does not recognize something greater than

themselves, whatever that is, those people are rarely very

successful. Yeah, I think, you know, my

view, I think we are created for community.

We are created to be in community with God and community

with each other. We are created to love and serve

one another. And so a life fully lived is a

life serving those around you and loving those around you.

And divorced from that, life is pretty empty.

Almost like there's a book out there that talks about that very

thing. It's a big book.

It's about this big. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's good stuff. So awesome.

So where do you go from here? I know you're still pursuing

being the biggest metering in the United States.

Well, on your way you said maybe within five years you think you

could get there. What?

What's above and beyond that? What?

What's next for the big lost metering?

Yeah. I mean, you know, right now

we're getting this Sioux Falls brick and mortar off the ground

on, you know, February will be a year that we're open.

You know, we're still in the trenches on it.

We still got a ways to go, but we're getting there.

But I mean, you know, some of the plans are to help pursue

that vision is, you know, if this one works well enough, you

know, we plan on building more of these and building out some

brick and mortar expansions across the United States.

Get a half a dozen or so of these going because that's all

brand building for our distribution network.

And so because as soon as you put one, now people are paying

me to do tastings and not me paying myself to other people to

go out and pay to do tastings to get in their mouth.

They come here to check it out, which just builds your

distribution platform. And so in order to get that

distribution model, either a have to set up distribution or

you know, since we haven't been hyper successful in that because

of our size and dealing with, you know, right now all the

distribution companies are all conglomerating the big super

companies that are kind of shutting down a little guys

anyway. We either have to continue on

this expansion route of brick and mortar going that way.

But we've also been working with trying to set up a new model of

distribution in different places with like hyper boutique

distributors because we're the only product in the United

States that requires somebody else to sell it for us.

And so like if I had, you know, the legal ability, I would put

people in all these different States and just start selling it

ourselves and set up warehouses and do a logistics, make it all

internal. But that's against the law.

And so it's one unique thing that our industry has to do that

not other industries don't have to do that.

And so a lot of them don't quite understand, you know, they see

the benefits of distribution as advanced logistics.

But for us, like we can't even be in the market unless somebody

else says yes and they have their choice to say yes or no.

And if everybody says no, you just don't get to be in the

market at all, even if your customers want it.

And so we're looking at some alternatives of distribution,

just going with really small boutique distributors that hyper

focus on a core set of products. And so like if you go with a big

company like Republic National, you might have 42 states, but

they have 10,000 products and you're 1 of 10,000.

How about I go with a small company that runs one state that

only has 100 products and I get 100th of their time versus A10

thousandth or 100 thousandth of their time.

And so we're looking at some of those, like that's when we just

opened up in Virginia or Maryland and DC and we're

getting ready to open up Virginia over there in that

model as well. And yeah, so we're kind of

looking at that. It's really once we get through

this growth phase of the Sioux Falls operation, then we start

hammering into building out these little distribution

networks with more boutique companies and then work start

working on the next brick and mortar until we hit that vision.

And once we hit that vision and it's like, okay, now what do we

do? It's just we'll see when we get

there because that one's big enough to shoot after that.

That'll keep his occupied for a while.

OK, good stuff. Do you have anybody that you'd

like to see on the show? Somebody that's in a unique

industry has a unique story, Somebody that you'd like to

learn a little bit more about. Yeah.

You think I'm trying to think of somebody to be as good, somebody

that I think would say yes, or somebody that I don't know very

well and want to see that there's two different questions.

Yeah, yeah. I'm open to either answer.

So there's a guy that I think you would he would do well in

this show. His name's Seton Smith.

OK, I'll send you over his contact.

I think he would do it too. So he actually, I'll just send

you an e-mail with an introduction to him.

So Seton exports to Taiwan as well.

And he, he started this gluten free, gluten free snack company

and then now he's gotten into medical devices for diabetics.

And so he's manufacturing in combination between here and

Taiwan with this essentially a gluten free testing kit that can

be done on the fly. It's a really cool concept that

has required a lot of different partnership between like the

University of Wyoming, I think it's a Taipei University

business Industries in Taiwan, in Wyoming, But it's been a

really good partnership across the ocean.

That's pretty unique. It's very, very unique.

Actually, I think they have the only one in the US market and

they're going through some rapid growth phase right now to get

that up and running, but it's been several years in the

process. He'd probably be pretty

interesting to have on the show and I think he would do it too.

See. And he's got a good personality

for something like this too. That helps.

And then you don't want the dry guy.

Another one, if you can get it, I don't know if he would or not,

is Mike Wandler from L&H Industrial.

I don't know if you're familiar with L&H.

So L&H is a company, they start in the 60s in Gillette, but

they're a multinational company now.

And so they do mining, manufacturing, repair for mining

parts, but they've got operations on 4 continents.

They've got multiple shops. And then they're starting to get

into micronuclear reactors. And Mike has been real big and

he's the president of the company, but he's been real big

into economic development and business education, trades,

craft, absolutely fascinating and is very, very well versed,

like 100 times more well versed business than I'll ever be.

And you know, he started off like welding there when he's

like 15. He's done some really, really

cool stuff. But he if you can get him, he's

worth sending a message to try and call down L&H.

Oh man, yeah, trying. To think there's another guy

that might, he might be a good one.

I don't know if he would do it or not.

He's a pretty busy guy. But Steve Van Buskirk, he's here

in Sioux Falls. He, him and his brothers own a

big company that does real estate property development and

construction. They have like 3 arms to this

company, start off as construction company and then,

you know, their dad kind of built it out and these three

have really expanded it into something else.

He'd be worth talking to. But yeah, I'll send you some

names that they're worth reaching out to, but I'll put

you in. I'll send an e-mail to.

I got to get Seton's e-mail. I think I've got his card here,

but I'll, yeah, I'll put you on an introduction with Seton from

me that, but he's where he'd be. He'd be a good one to talk to.

Yeah, that'd be great. I'm always looking for

interesting stories. So well our our last question to

kind of either fuel or settle the debate.

If you have a job to do and need a cordless tool, which brands do

you prefer? I'm going to say DeWalt.

OK. The only reason being is I've

had DeWalt since high school. Like I still have batteries from

2009, they're still working. I just I had to talk 1 the other

day. But but I also have zero

preference. That's just what I've always

had. So I just keep getting the same

things because I already had the parts and pieces for them.

But I really don't. It's just like if you were to

ask me about Ford or Dodge, I could care less For me that

tools, they get me from point A to point B just like a tool.

Like if it if the drill works great, if I can get the screw

in, I'm happy. If I can get the board cut, I'm

happy. Like I really don't.

I'm not a good one to ask. Yeah, well, I my personal

opinion, I think most people just end up buying what they

first got or first liked or, but somebody sold them on.

But yeah, some people get real riled up and you know, I said

you're a die hard Ford guy or a die hard Dodge guy.

And and they'll fight over it. Yeah, Oh yeah, they do.

DeWalt and Milwaukee are kind of running neck and neck here, so

we'll we'll see who wins over the next few months.

Yeah, well, it's like that guy, you see that guy that puts the

two drills together and puts him on the go to see which one's

more powerful. Yeah, he made a whole Instagram

channel out of it. I'm sure he's making pretty good

money. By the way, this is this is me

now. She came to visit my 1010 month

old puppy who's 100 lbs. Oh my goodness, what kind of a

dog is it? English Mastiff.

Boy. Just got her a couple weeks ago

and she's she's massive. That's awesome.

Yeah, she's a good girl, though. Yeah, I love Dog.

So cool. Well, Sam, thank you so much for

joining me. It's been a pleasure getting to

know you and learning about Big Lost.

If people want to reach out to you or if they want to get a

hold of some of your product, where is it available and what

would be the best way to get a hold of it?

Yeah, if you want to get a hold of product, if you go to the Big

Lots website, we have a Mead Finder and so you can just click

on the Finder and it'll show up. You can zoom in like on Google

Maps and see what stores it's at.

You can always get it in Gillette and Sioux Falls at our

retail locations. If you need to get a hold of me,

I'll just put my cell phone out here.

I'm easy to get a hold of three O 703199.

Now if you end up getting 2 million views on this I then we

might edit that one out. We might edit that out, yeah.

Yeah, but I mean for right now, like, yeah, people that are

watching your show like they got questions for me, feel free

call. Like I, I got time, I answer my

phone from any zip codes. So I'm more than happy to reach

out. Anybody's got questions or the

other thing too is we've helped a lot of businesses in the past

with if you're trying to, if you're thinking about getting

into export or you're having problems with the government,

I'm always looking for a fight for the feds.

So you want to fight like, dude, let me know.

I will write letters all day long.

But yeah, I mean, if there's anything that we can help with

like we, we would love to. And of course, if there's

anybody out there in distribution land, give us a

call or we're always in for that.

Awesome. Well, that sounds great.

I really do appreciate it and thank you guys for joining us

here on from the Ground Up Show. You can find us on our website

from the ground up show.com. We're on most social media

platforms at from the ground up show and all.

As always, if you guys would like share, follow, subscribe,

all the things, make sure you click that auto download button.

That's the best way to get it out there for more people.

And if you can leave a review, leave a comment, that really

moves the needle for us. So until next time, keep

grinding.