With a working prototype, Phil set out to make his dream come true. He borrowed $25,000 from the bank with the help of Baxter Brasher, an executive at Howard Brothers Discount Stores, and purchased a lathe for $24,985. Later, Phil learned the lathe was only worth about $5,000 and had been built in the 1920s! The lathe was transported from Memphis to Monroe, and Phil picked up the heavy machinery at the train station with a borrowed dump truck. Phil drove the lathe to our house and cut out the wall of an outbuilding with a chain saw. Somehow, he was able to drag the lathe into his shop by tying a come-along to a tree. Once everything was in place, Phil put a sign outside the shop that read DUCK COMMANDER WORLDWIDE.
PHIL PUT A SIGN OUTSIDE THE SHOP THAT READ DUCK COMMANDER WORLDWIDE.
Phil didn’t even have an instruction manual for the lathe or templates to cut the wood for his calls. Obviously, there was a lot of on-the-job learning. But it didn’t take Phil long to get a production line going, and Alan, Jase, Kay, Pa, and I were his crew. When I was young, we spent most of our days helping him manufacture and package the duck calls. In the beginning, Phil cut end pieces out of cedar and barrels out of walnut. He tried all kinds of wood; he even brought back cypress logs from his fishing runs and cut them into blocks.
Our assembly line was out on the porch of our house, which was screened in at the time. Pa was always there helping Phil. One of the earliest problems with Phil’s duck call was that the two reeds had a tendency to stick together. Pa told Phil that he should put a dimple in the reeds to keep them separated. Phil took a nail and put a dimple in the reeds with a hammer. Uncle Si still uses the same technique in our reeds today.
The great thing about Duck Commander is that it was a family business from the start and remains that way today. When I was younger, I helped by sweeping up the sawdust in the shop. My oldest brother, Alan, used a band saw to cut the ends of the calls, and Phil ran a drill press to set up and calibrate the end pieces. Jase and I also dipped the calls in polyurethane and then dried them on nails. Once the calls were dry, we sanded them down to a fine finish. I was embarrassed going to school because my fingers were always stained brown from tung oil. There were always rows of hard tung oil drippings in our yard.
The especially bad part for Jase and me was when Phil figured out that the more you sanded and dipped the calls, the shinier they were. That meant more dipping for us! Phil would tell us, “Hey, go dip the duck calls. There’s about twenty of them.” But when he said there were twenty or twenty-five, it always meant there were seventy-five to one hundred, and “thirty or thirty-five” meant there were probably one hundred and fifty. Phil was a notorious foreman on the duck-call assembly line.
Last, and most important, Phil blew every single call to make sure it sounded like a duck. From day one, Phil was convinced his duck call sounded more like a live duck than anything else on the market, and he wanted to make sure his products were always perfect. Duck Commander still follows that same principle today.
PHIL BLEW EVERY SINGLE CALL TO MAKE SURE IT SOUNDED LIKE A DUCK.
In the early days, the work never seemed to stop. My brothers and I cut boxes and folded them to package the duck calls. I don’t think child labor laws applied to us down on the mouth of Cypress Creek. When it was dark and you went inside to eat dinner and watch TV, you started folding boxes. We sat in the living room folding boxes, and they’d be scattered across the room. There was a plastic sleeve with a logo that we slipped over the boxes. The Duck Commander logo—which is now famous—is a mallard drake with wings cupped and legs lowered, looking down at the land. The logo was printed in gold on a green background and was placed on each of the calls. Phil’s name was also on the package, along with our home address.
Duck Commander is a lot like Phil’s duck gumbo. The gumbo is perfect only when it has the right blend of ingredients—garlic, bell peppers, onions, shallots, sausage, spices, and, of course, duck. When my brothers and I were growing up, everyone in our family played an important role in the evolution of Duck Commander, and we still do today. If you take the onions or sausage out of Phil’s gumbo, it’s not going to taste nearly as good. And if you were to take Alan, Jase, Jep, or Uncle Si out of Duck Commander, the company wouldn’t be as good as it is today.
Korie: The entire business was run out of the Robertsons’ house. When Willie and I were dating, every time I went to their house, I was folding boxes. Phil is very charismatic and people love to be around him, and he learned pretty early that if you were willing to feed people, they were usually willing to work. Kay and Phil often had big fish fries at their house, and they would usually turn into packaging parties. People would call their house from stores to place orders. People from Wisconsin would call to buy one or two duck calls. When Willie was a little kid, he was answering the phone, taking orders. Customers called at all hours of the day. Willie answered the phone and always said: “Duck Commander, can I help you?” It was usually somebody in Texas or California wanting a duck call. Willie grabbed a napkin or paper plate and wrote down the order. There was always a big stack of paper plates or napkins sitting on the counter with orders written on them. The next day, Kay got the orders together and shipped them out at the post office.
I get asked this question a lot: why do Willie and Jase call their parents by their first names? I’ve asked Willie and he doesn’t even know the answer, but we think it is because growing up when the business was being run out of their home, they would have to take these business calls for stores and orders on their home phone. The boys began referring to them as Phil and Kay in the business conversations and it just stuck. Jep, the youngest, didn’t work as much in the family business as a kid, because he was born so much later and by that time they had more employees to take the phone calls, and he still calls them Mom and Dad. So that’s our theory as to why Jase and Willie call them Phil and Kay. I can assure you it is not a sign of disrespect.
With a finished product, Phil hit the road in a blue and white Ford Fairlane 500 that once belonged to Kay’s grandmother—Nanny. Phil liked to call the trips his “loop,” and he was usually gone for about a week. With his calls stacked in the backseat and the trunk, Phil made a big circle around southern Arkansas, East Texas, West Mississippi, and into all parts of Louisiana, selling his duck calls at any sporting goods store or hunting shop he could find. He sold his first duck calls to Gene Lutz of Gene’s Sporting Goods Store in Monroe.
In Lake Charles, Louisiana, Phil met Alan Earhart, who had been making the Cajun Game Call for years. Earhart liked Phil and agreed to make two thousand Duck Commander calls for him at the price of two dollars each. Phil would still cut the reeds and put the calls together, blowing each one before it went out the door, but Earhart cut the barrels. Phil figured if Earhart could handle a part of the manufacturing for a while, he would have more time to concentrate on sales calls and spreading the Duck Commander name.
Phil sold about $8,000 worth of Duck Commander calls in the first year. By the second year, his sales increased to $13,000; they rose to $22,000 in the third. By the fourth year, Duck Commander grossed about $35,000.
About five years into running Duck Commander, Phil realized many of his longtime customers were going out of business. There was a new superstore chain called Wal-Mart (as it was spelled then) moving into a lot of towns in Arkansas and Louisiana. As soon as a Wal-Mart store went up, a sporting goods or hardware store closed its doors a few months later. Phil realized that if Duck Commander was going to survive, he had to figure out a way to get his duck calls into this new chain. After initially being told that he had to go through Wal-Mart’s corporate office, Phil persuaded a local store manager to buy six of his duck calls. He took the Wal-Mart sales order to the next Wal-Mart down the road and showed the manager what the other store had bought, and there he sold a dozen more. Eventually, Phil was selling $25,000 worth of duck calls to Wal-Mart alone, selling to them one store at a time, and his business was starting to expand.
One day, Phil got a call
from one of Wal-Mart’s executives.
“How did you get your product in our stores?” the man asked.
“Store to store,” Phil told him.
“Well, you have to go through me,” the man said. “I’m the buyer.”
Somehow, Phil won over the buyer and the man sent him an authorization letter, which allowed him to sell his duck calls to any Wal-Mart store that wanted them. The next year, Phil even persuaded the buyer to purchase bulk orders of Duck Commander calls to distribute to stores across the country. Eventually, Duck Commander was selling $500,000 worth of duck calls to Wal-Mart each year. Phil’s dream was beginning to come true.
Phil was a pioneer because he wasn’t afraid to take risks. I don’t think anyone ever quite understood what he was doing. But Phil was very self-confident and believed in his dream. He was a real showman and when he took his calls on the road, he was a great salesman. When he started the business, Phil actually carried an audio recording of live mallard ducks. He played the tape and then blew his call, which convinced customers that his calls truly sounded exactly like a duck, thus were the best on the market.
PHIL WAS A PIONEER BECAUSE HE WASN’T AFRAID TO TAKE RISKS.
Phil was always a dreamer and a visionary and was focused on the big picture. He knew he could make his dream come true by pulling his family together.
When I think of the journey it took for Duck Commander to get to where it is today, I think of it as a lot like Phil’s duck gumbo. You can’t go to the grocery store and buy all the ingredients. Well, I guess you could, but it wouldn’t taste the same. There are no shortcuts for the kind of duck gumbo my family makes. It takes hard work, patience, and perseverance on the days when you sit in the blind and wait and the skies are clear. And you need strength of character on the days when it’s cold and rainy and you wish you had stayed in bed. It takes camaraderie and a willingness to work with the other hunters in your blind to set up the decoys and call in unison. And, most important, it takes a passion and a love for what you are doing to see it to the end. All of these traits were present in making Duck Commander what it is today and are still present in the way we work.
There have been tough times in the life of Duck Commander. Times when we’ve lost big accounts, years when the duck numbers were down because of the weather in Canada, and even times when we didn’t know where we would get the money to make it through another season. There have been times when we had to bring in extra help to get an order out on time and times when we had to let someone go because there was not enough work or money to pay them. There have been times when the money came at just the right moment to pay the light bill.
THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS FOR THE KIND OF DUCK GUMBO MY FAMILY MAKES.
Phil tells about one such time in the early days of Duck Commander. The bank note was due and Kay informed him that they simply did not have the money to pay it. They were broke. Phil says that he tried everything he could think of to get the money to pay the debt. He and Kay were at the end of their rope. Kay was in tears with worry over what was going to happen to all they had worked for. Phil remembers telling Kay, “Let’s go check the mailbox, maybe there will be a check in there.” Kay told him, “There is no reason to look because no one owes us anything.”
Phil knew it wasn’t likely, but for some reason, he felt like they needed to look. They walked to the mailbox together and pulled out an envelope postmarked from Japan. It was an order for duck calls with a check for eight hundred dollars to prepay for them. It was exactly the amount they needed to pay the bank note! Duck Commander had never sold a duck call to Japan before then and as far as I know has never sold one since. But somehow, at a time when Phil and Kay needed it, the Lord provided. That’s the only way to explain it.
Phil remembers another time that same eight-hundred-dollar bank note was due and once again there was no money to pay it. This time Phil went out to run the nets, hoping to catch enough fish to sell to at least take care of part of the payment. He took his boat out and began setting lines. The fish started biting before he even put any bait on the hooks! He says he pulled fish in hand over fist. He filled up his boat in no time and had more than enough to pay the bill with the sale of the fish he caught that day. Again, Phil says he never saw anything like what happened that day before or since.
The truth is, the Lord has always provided. Like He cares for the birds in the air and clothes the lilies in the field, He has cared for us. We haven’t done everything right. We didn’t have all the right business plans, goals, or budgets. Sometimes, we didn’t know how a bill was getting paid until the very last minute, but we always had faith that He would provide. Miracles like the two described above didn’t happen every time. Sometimes, we had to hold our checks, and there were times when Kay had to borrow at high interest rates or make deals with one store to get money at a time she needed it. But there was always that faith that the Lord would provide.
THE TRUTH IS, THE LORD HAS ALWAYS PROVIDED.
I think that’s the only way you can ever be truly successful in this world. You have to acknowledge that it is from above. And you have to have the confidence that even if you lose it all, things will be okay. You have to be willing to fail, and all the while work your tail off to succeed. You have to continue doing the work, believing in what you are doing, and most important, keeping your faith in who you are. The faith of our family is not in the things we have. Our confidence is not in the monetary success we have gained. It is in the One who made us and who is there for us in good times and bad.
Phil’s duck gumbo is never finished until he knows it’s absolutely perfect. In many ways, Duck Commander is a lot like his gumbo. It took forty years to build Duck Commander into what it is today. Phil has always had a lot of perseverance and patience, which are valuable attributes to have in everything from business to cooking to hunting. Let’s face it: most people today wouldn’t take a few days to make duck gumbo. They go out and buy a mix and throw it together. But if you wait and you’re truly patient, the end result is going to be something that is unbelievably spectacular and special.
DUCK GUMBO
This is Phil’s duck gumbo recipe. Making gumbo is an art and Phil’s is a masterpiece. It takes time and patience to make it just right.
8 ducks
salt and pepper to taste
1 bay leaf
3 cups flour
3 cups peanut oil
3 white onions
3 green onions
handful of fresh parsley
1 clove garlic, chopped
cayenne pepper to taste
Phil Robertson’s Cajun Style Seasoning to taste
sausage
1. Place fully cleaned ducks into a large pot filled with water.
2. Add salt, black pepper, and bay leaf to pot.
3. Boil ducks for 21/2 hours.
4. While ducks are boiling, prepare roux in another large pot: For 8 ducks, mix 3 cups of flour and 3 cups of peanut oil.
5. After stirring flour and oil to a consistent paste, heat on medium low.
6. Stir thoroughly until color is a dark chocolate brown. (Should take 35 to 40 minutes.)
7. Dice up white onions, green onions, and parsley.
8. Once roux is dark brown, mix in onions and parsley. (Watch out for the steam!)
9. Add garlic.
10. After ducks have boiled for 21/2 hours, take them out of pot (saving broth) and separate meat from bone.
11. Take broth and fill roux pot just over half full.
12. Turn heat up to boiling again.
13. When the peanut oil rises to top of pot, remove it with spoon.
14. Sprinkle a small amount of cayenne pepper and Cajun Style Seasoning into pot.
15. Dice up sausage into nickel-size pieces.
16. Dump duck meat and sausage into gumbo.
17. Let it simmer for 3 to 4 hours.
18. Serve gumbo over rice and enjoy!
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FROG LEGS
&nb
sp; LET PERSEVERANCE FINISH ITS WORK SO THAT YOU MAY BE MATURE AND COMPLETE, NOT LACKING ANYTHING.
—JAMES 1:4
Many things in life—whether it’s food, business, or even someone’s personality—slowly evolve over time. They don’t necessarily get better overnight, but if you keep working at them and stay focused, chances are they’re going to end up being better than when you started. Take for instance my recipe for frog legs. When I was growing up, Kay’s frog legs were one of my favorite meals. But as I got older, I started experimenting with ways to cook frog legs and added my own personal touch to her recipe. Kay has probably never heard of garlic-infused grape-seed oil (she’s never used anything but butter or Crisco), but that’s what I like to use to fry my frog legs. And for the record there are many infused olive oils I like using nowadays. Kay still doesn’t understand how they “infuse” oil, but I tell her, “Don’t question, just enjoy.” It took me about three days to figure out the perfect recipe for garlic frog legs, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Believe it or not, after I’d mastered the recipe, I pulled the meat off the legs and turned it into frog soup. I was just thinking, “I have those frog legs left over, they have a great flavor, what could I do now?” Pull all the meat off, make a great roux, and just throw them in. Plus, I never like any meat to go to waste. That’s the really crazy thing about life: you often start out intending to do one thing but end up doing something entirely different.
The Duck Commander Family Page 9
