CJ Buck from Buck Knives - Chased by Lions
Hi. This is Ain't That Something, and I'm your host Levi Smith, CEO of Franklin Building Supply. We're an employee owned building material supply company headquartered in beautiful Boise, Idaho. I'm a former ranch kid from Texas who found his way to Idaho and into leading this storied company. We're proud to be part of the fabric of communities we operate in and wanna help share stories of other companies doing the same across this great state.
Levi Smith:In each episode of Ain't That Something, I interview founders or leaders about the stories of companies you may be surprised to learn have either had their start in Idaho or now call Idaho home. In every interview, you'll hear about an interesting cast of characters, learn about daunting obstacles, and be inspired by the persistence it took to succeed. Get ready to be surprised and entertained with each episode of Ain't That Something.
CJ Buck:We were in the process of deciding between Oregon, who'd given us about a $1,000,000 incentive plan to move or Post Falls, Idaho. And my dad basically said, well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm moving to Idaho.
Levi Smith:On this episode, I get an opportunity to talk with CJ Buck. CJ is 4th generation owner and leader of Buck Knives, a company that really had its early beginnings in Mountain Home, Idaho. We'll get into a story about how they grew the company and really turned it into what it is today in San Diego, but also why CJ brought the company from San Diego to Post Falls, Idaho almost 20 years ago. So get ready to hear a great story about a great company told through the lens of CJ Buck, 4th generation leader and owner of Buck Knives. And, CJ, first, I just wanna tell you thank you for being on the podcast.
Levi Smith:You're the first guest on this Ain't That Something series, and I'm excited about having this conversation today. Wonder if you could maybe get us started by just giving us a little background about Buck Knives, and then I'd be interested in finding out how your story threads into that. Help us understand what what is Buck Knives. Well, again, thanks, Levi, for this opportunity.
CJ Buck:So Buck Knives is is, we're a 5th generation family with my son involved in the business. My great grandfather was an apprentice blacksmith in Leavenworth, Kansas working in the basement of a general mercantile, and he was making knives on the side with scraps that he would find in the blacksmith shop, kinda your classic American, you know, 12, 13 year old kid trying to help the the family make ends meet. And, just so it was just a hobby. When he was a teenager, they relocated to the Pacific Northwest. So my great granddad's name was Hoyt Heath Buck, h h Buck.
CJ Buck:And he met his wife, married, and raised 7 kids in the Pacific Northwest. My grandfather, Al Buck, joined the Navy as a young man and fell in love with San Diego, California. So my grandfather was raising his 4 kids, my father being one of them, in San Diego, California. In 1945, Hoyt relocated from Mountain Home, Idaho to San Diego, California be for health reasons just to Okay. Winter was killing them.
Levi Smith:And he had continued making knives in Mountain Home kind of as a hobby?
CJ Buck:He had continued making knives. So he was a retired what took him to Mountain Home, Idaho was the, Anderson Dam project.
Levi Smith:Okay.
CJ Buck:And so he was a millwright. And and so that was so the end of his career, he he retired. He was pastoring a small church in Mountain Home, Idaho, but it was just it was killing my great grandmother, Daisy. So so they relocated to San Diego. So Hoyt taught his son, Al, who was a bus driver in San Diego, California, how to make knives.
CJ Buck:So the 2 of them, h h Buck and Son, their, value proposition was handmade, best materials they could find, and guaranteed for life. If you have a problem, bring it back. We'll fix it. We'll give you another one. So it was, in a way, it was kind of, the biblical roots of my family was the golden rule.
CJ Buck:And so they they warrantied what they built for for the life of the purchaser. They only worked together for a couple years before Hoyt passed away. So that was 1945 to to about 1948. And then my great granddad passed away in 49. My grandfather, my father, my uncle, and my grandfather's brother-in-law, so the 4 of them, did the Buck Mower and Saw Works.
CJ Buck:And so they would make custom knives, sharpen saws, and tune, lawnmowers. Okay. That was the and meanwhile, my grandfather was still driving a bus.
Levi Smith:So they're just making blades and sharpening blades full time?
CJ Buck:Yes. So if you so if you asked him what he did for a living, it was driving a bus. But this little side business, built next to the garage at their family home on 1272 Marina Boulevard, San Diego was this this Buck Mower and Saw Works. And I and I gotta back up a little bit about San Diego. Say and, you know, when you think about California, it doesn't always seem like a business friendly place, but San Diego was an amazing place to have a business.
CJ Buck:You had the Navy drew a work ethic from all across the country. The people that were volunteering or the people that were making a career out of being in the navy would come from all over the United States, fall in love with the San Diego weather, and stay. So what you ended up with is a labor force Mhmm. That had this Midwestern sense of values, integrity, and and, and work ethic.
Levi Smith:Just a talented group of people.
CJ Buck:And and so it was just it's just an amazing labor pool Uh-huh. To draw from. Not only that, we there was a lot of manufacturing expertise in the area because of all the defense contracting that went on. So there was state of the art manufacturing contracting that went on. So there was state of the art manufacturing expertise.
CJ Buck:So my grandfather was able to tap into 2 of his fellow church choir members who were who were executives in some of these, defense contracting businesses. So we incorporated 1961. We introduced the 110 folding hunter, which when when most people think of Buck Knives, they almost generically think of the 110 folding hunter. It was a folding lock back, you know, about a 4 inch handle and a 4 inch blade, so 8 or 9 inches overall.
Levi Smith:That's what I think of when I thought of buck knives. I mean, I remember a a a grandfather and even my dad having one of those, and it's just, you know, that that that's what buck knives were.
CJ Buck:It just took the marketplace by storm. So my grandfather introduced that knife in 1964. For the next 15 years, we could not make enough of them no matter what we did. And so it propelled our business from about a $1,000,000 business to a $30,000,000 business in about 15 years, beyond my grandfather's wildest dreams.
Levi Smith:I'm curious. You know, he said he thought of himself as a bus driver. That's if someone asked him, what do you do? He would have said bus driver. Yep.
Levi Smith:When did his identity change? And he started answering that question as I'm a knifemaker or I'm a business owner. Do you have a sense of when that identity shifted?
CJ Buck:Yeah. He told me so his his decision to incorporate also included him quitting his bus driving job and doing the knife thing full time.
Levi Smith:Okay.
CJ Buck:He said that was the hardest decision he ever made in his life. My grandfather was a very personable, loved to joke with people, so he had his day route in San Diego, which was kind of a coveted you know, nobody wants to be the, you know, the midnight to 3 AM shift bus driver. So, you know, he had the day route. He knew his customers. He recognized them.
CJ Buck:They had conversations. He loved what he did. He said the hardest decision he ever made was quitting that job. And so it was in the early sixties that he quit his bus driving job. He and my grandmother owned a VW van, the as my dad would say, the scourge of the American highway, the the underpowered VW van.
Levi Smith:They spent a lot of time on the side of the road.
CJ Buck:Yes. Yes.
Levi Smith:That's my main memory of those vehicles. They're just they're they're meant for the side of the road.
CJ Buck:Well, yeah, you know, to to to think about it, it was a it was a VW bug, which was an amazing little car Right. Trying to power a camper van. And so, so they went all over the country, and my grandfather would go into these dealers, and he would put it lay the knives out. They were an unknown. I mean, nobody knew Buck Knives at all.
CJ Buck:So they were an unknown. So he would lay these knives out. They were obviously better than anything else the guy was selling, but they were super expensive comparatively. And so my grandfather would leave them in on consignment, and, and he said he never got a single knife back.
Levi Smith:Do you remember the price difference? So give us a feel like I mean, when you say they were expensive, then do you remember what Yeah. You know, hardware store would have carried? And then when he's walking in on this VW bus tour with an underpowered engine, showing him something that's American made by craftsman that's much better, what what was the gap?
CJ Buck:You know, the gap was about double. So Okay. You know, at that point, knives were selling for 8 to $10 a piece, and wholesale would have been 4 to $5 a piece. So my grandfather was walking in with a knife that would cost $15 wholesale.
Levi Smith:Right.
CJ Buck:And they would ask him, oh, so $15, is that retail or wholesale? Well, that's a really scary question to get from someone you're trying to sell something to. Mhmm. And so he would say, no. That's tell you what, I'll I'll, you know, I'll leave you these 3 knives or 4 knives and, you know, pay me when you sell them.
CJ Buck:And and he said he never got he never got a single knife back. You don't know what your customers will pay for. You don't know really what's valuable to them. And sometimes it's a race to the bottom where you're trying to you're taking quality out of your product to try and meet a lower price, and you don't realize that customers will pay more for a better product.
Levi Smith:But they have to be exposed to that quality. They have to know that it even exists to your point. And so now they're walking in a hardware store at that time. They've got this this cheap knife they've gotten used to
CJ Buck:Yeah.
Levi Smith:And then this this this new buck knife staring them in in the face at twice the price. You know, there
CJ Buck:are and and in the knife industry, and I'm sure this is with all industries, but there are elements that are self evident, that are visual. You can feel it. You can feel the weight of it. You can you know, there are things that you can tactically feel, and then there are other things like the heat treat of the metal, how it's gonna resist corrosion or not. I mean, there are other elements that are not obvious in a store.
CJ Buck:And that's where you get the combination of it feels good in your hand, but it's backed up by a strong brand with a great reputation. Mhmm. So that the things that you can't see, you can trust are there.
Levi Smith:So he does this tour, starts to build up, in essence, a a dealership network. He wouldn't have described it like that at that point, but they built the business really in San Diego and and created the the real core of the business and the volume there.
CJ Buck:Yes. We grew for the next 15 years. So from 1965 to 1980, we grew on average 30% a year. So it's just an amazing success story. We could make no mistakes.
Levi Smith:Selling everything you could make.
CJ Buck:We were really proud of ourselves. And and as the Bible says, pride cometh before the fall. So so once we got into the eighties, we had this nice dealer network. Sure. But retail continued to evolve.
CJ Buck:And and keeping up with how retail has evolved, and it continues to evolve. I mean, the online business right now is a continuing evolution of how people buy stuff. But but at that point, you know, we hadn't sold Sears. We hadn't sold Kmart. Walmart didn't even exist yet.
CJ Buck:But retail in the eighties was about to change dramatically, and we we didn't keep up with it. And then going into the nineties, California became a more difficult place to do business. As a company, we were just at a at a huge disadvantage cost wise. And for a little while, the brand could support that. You know, brands can only support value if it's real.
CJ Buck:And just because you're located in a place where you don't need to be located is not something that customers willing to pay for. So we had to find, which would be in a whole another story, but we had to find a a place where we could continue to manufacture in the United States and be competitive within our industry.
Levi Smith:And your so your dad was really navigating primarily, am I assuming, those issues in the eighties nineties? Yes. When did you really come in to Buck knives and, you know, get get to the point where and and we'll get to this part of the story, but you end up moving the company to Post Falls, Idaho.
CJ Buck:So I came into the business in the early eighties, just out of college. Mhmm. But it was probably the late eighties where I I started finding the branding element and getting down to the definitive components of when people think of our brand, what do they think of? Well, well, first off, when people think of our brand, what do I want them to think of?
Levi Smith:Sure.
CJ Buck:And then making sure that the actions that we're doing and the interactions that are taking place with our customers are reinforcing what we want people to think of our brand. So I I became executive vice president in 1994.
Levi Smith:And you're how old at that point?
CJ Buck:I am 34 years old.
Levi Smith:K. Mid thirties. Completely unready for that. You've got the right last name, but otherwise
CJ Buck:You know, I've I've got the right last name, and I think I have thoughts that are accurate.
Levi Smith:Okay.
CJ Buck:But the the implementation and management skills, I did not have. And and so aligning an executive group behind a common mission and vision and like, there were there were pieces on that side that, that my because my father had not really had to do that. I mean, the company was just at such a dead run for so long. Mhmm. You know, when you're being chased by a lion, it's not hard for everybody to go in the same direction.
CJ Buck:But now once you're sitting calmly and trying to decide, okay, what should be our next thing that we do? That's a whole different skill set. And so my father grew up. His whole adult life was buck knives Mhmm. Just trying to keep up with demand.
Levi Smith:So it had this this really strong, almost, you know, perpetual momentum year over year during your dad's core tenure at the company, and he's just keeping up. But you come in in a season where the company's gotta figure out how to navigate some unknowns.
CJ Buck:Yes. And he didn't have any mentoring to offer me because he never had to experience that. And so his his background was all manufacturing expertise. He didn't he never had to figure out you know, because governments were getting more involved in businesses. Taxes were becoming more complicated.
CJ Buck:He was
Levi Smith:just trying to figure out how to make good knives and make more of them. Yes. That's not over right. Okay.
CJ Buck:We went from having demand that outpaced our capacity to build to having that flip.
Levi Smith:Okay. And he
CJ Buck:didn't know what to do with that. He didn't know how to fix that. And I coming in even with the marketing background, I mean, from an education standpoint, but I didn't have the real world experience of of how to reverse that. How to go out and find those new product, the the new marketplaces, and the and the new opportunities. And so in the eighties, we made up for that by starting to do business with Sears, JCPenney.
CJ Buck:I mean, these are names out of Montgomery Ward, people that don't exist anymore, and then came on.
Levi Smith:But they but they probably gave you tons of volume.
CJ Buck:Tons of volume. Tons of volume. Profit per sale
Levi Smith:Right.
CJ Buck:But tons of volume. So now we were starting to make similar profits on 20, 30% more volume because every additional sale was less profitable for all the discounts and learning to work with mass merchants. And and so now we had so we still had substantial growth. We just weren't optimizing it like we should. So that became a learning experience through the eighties.
CJ Buck:Rolling into the nineties, California be just became a more difficult place to do business. That was the element that I was navigating, and that just became really tedious and painful.
Levi Smith:Did you have moments in the mid nineties there or maybe, you know, early 2000 where you really found yourself wondering, are you the owner and leader of the end of this story? Did that did that really cross your mind?
CJ Buck:Yes. The whole time I was growing up and my entire adult life, you know, Buck Knives had just been this immortal foundational rock. And it it may do well 1 year, not quite so well the next year, but it wasn't in danger.
Levi Smith:The trend line was always positive.
CJ Buck:It was always positive. Yeah. Right. Like, yeah, we're gonna have a bad year. We'll take it on the chin.
CJ Buck:The bank will always come back next year and give us a great deal. And and so all of a sudden, we get to the end of the nineties, and, our bank says, your trend is wrong.
Levi Smith:No more.
CJ Buck:No more. We'd introduced a new product that had issues, and it and it took our eye off our night the knife ball, and it really hurt us. And so at the end of the nineties, we get into whole different banking relationship with very tight screws. It was good for us in that there were financial disciplines that we should have been doing for, for the prior decade or 2 that we never had to. So we were successful enough that we just never had to exercise those, you know, the budgeting disciplines and the, and the research disciplines, you know, doing your homework ahead of spending the money.
CJ Buck:Sure. Like, there were some disciplines that we just weren't doing as well as we should have. We were so successful. There was always money left over at the end of the year that we were trying to figure out what to do with.
Levi Smith:So you're leading buck knives when the this is essentially all new for the company. You know, all all these constraints Yes. The the the systems and processes that we might say are hall markers of a well run business. They just weren't necessary before, if I'm hearing you right, because everybody wanted your product and you just kept making more of it. But all of a sudden, you're having to really lead this company through maturing as a business in a business climate that is maybe becoming more hostile as it's the state's getting more populated, more businesses, more regulation, that's kind of the combination that
CJ Buck:Yes.
Levi Smith:That that you end up having to tackle as
CJ Buck:a No. That's exactly correct. So there we were at the end of the nineties. We put in a new board of directors, and we're finally starting to really exhibit a mature corporate philosophy. California was still difficult.
CJ Buck:Expenses were difficult. Workers' compensation was difficult. Utilities and brownouts. I mean, this is there there were some elements of just being in California that were difficult, but it felt like we were about to turn that around. We'd we'd had efficiencies, and then all of a sudden, 911 happened.
CJ Buck:So September 2001, we'd had a couple of years where we'd lost money. We were on track to make a pro a small profit, but we the, you know, bank was happy with us.
Levi Smith:You were right there with the turnaround.
CJ Buck:Is it 2,001 was going to be this turnaround for us that we were gonna we were gonna now consistently be profitable. And one of the things to remember about the knife industry is our business is very seasonal. Hunting starting August, September, October, and then holiday October, November, December, Those last 4 or 5 months of the year are 60 plus percent of our business.
Levi Smith:Okay. It's a second half of the year business all the way through.
CJ Buck:Yes. It's a second half of the year between hunting and holiday. And we were prepared. We had good inventories. We were in a great position.
CJ Buck:Just looked like it was all coming together. And then September 11th, you pull the wheels off of Q4, and you just kill us. And so we had had 2 years where we had realized losses, and now we're in 2,001, and we're gonna have another loss. Mhmm. As my board called it, it was, you know, it's time to have a come to Jesus meeting.
Levi Smith:Right.
CJ Buck:And and we did. December December of 2,001, we decided that we had you know, there were no more incremental changes acceptable. We had to, you know, we had to just kinda burn it down and start over again. We needed a new business model. So we changed our sales structure.
CJ Buck:We changed our accounting systems. We changed our manufacturing systems. You know, did the lean manufacturing. Right. And, and we said, we're we're relocating.
CJ Buck:We can't we can't be here. This is a 20, 25% cost disadvantage for us to be located in San Diego, California, and the weather is wonderful, but we can build this stuff anywhere in the United States.
Levi Smith:The inaugural season of Ain't That Something wouldn't be possible without the generous support of Truss Joist, a division of Weyerhaeuser. Truss Joist has been a great supply partner to Franklin Building Supply with their array of engineered wood products, including their Marquee Truss Joist, which you may be surprised to learn was invented and first sold right here in Boise, Idaho. Now ain't that something? A quick programming note for this first episode, future episodes will drop every 1 to 2 months, so be sure to subscribe to the podcast in your listener so you'll see the next episode when it arrives. When did you first start flirting with the idea of, you know, maybe Idaho and Post Falls is that place to relocate?
CJ Buck:So the first decision that we had to make was we wanted to continue manufacturing in the US, that that was our brand. Because we had the option of we could stay in San Diego, be a marketing company that outsourced its production, and we could all stay put. But we decided not to do that. We wanted to continue to manufacture our own products. That was a foundational element of our of our brand value proposition.
CJ Buck:Decision 2 was wherever we go, the executive team is not gonna be in a remote location. So the executive team, thus the family, is going to be located in the same area, in the same office, in the same building as the manufacturing facility. So wherever we decided to move had to be a place we wanted to live.
Levi Smith:And was there consensus around that? Or was it you and a couple people sort of saying, hey, this is what we really need to do? The executive team and family all kind of feel feel that way, that we need to be where the business is?
CJ Buck:I think everybody realized that's what we were gonna do. I don't remember anybody having objections to it. I mean, it was a logic that made sense. You know, whether people wanted it or not. I mean, I know we lost people.
CJ Buck:They had family. They had grandkids. They had spouses that, you know, that with good jobs. Like, I I so I know we had people that did not move with us that would have much rather seen us stay put.
Levi Smith:And at that moment in time in December 2001, how many do you remember how many people were working for the company at that point? What what was kind of the range?
CJ Buck:Probably around the, you know, like, the high 200, 280 to 300 range.
Levi Smith:Okay. Alright.
CJ Buck:Q1 meeting in February or early March of 2002 where we really decided that we would we had to relocate to a place where we wanted to live, so the family did have a say in that. We looked at the the Tennessee, Kentucky area as a like, the deep south. No. I'm not a humidity person. So we looked at the Pacific Northwest.
CJ Buck:We visited with Washington State. We visited with, Oregon and Idaho. You know, Washington State, we said no fairly quickly because, you know, if you're gonna go through the the uprooting of moving, don't get a 5 year reprieve to what you're leaving. Sure. And you did that didn't make any sense.
CJ Buck:So so we looked at Oregon, and we said, Oregon made us nervous. Portland outvoting the rest of the state kinda made us nervous. So when we looked at Idaho, the beauty of Idaho was that the rural common sense, which, you know, when you live on the land, you know, it's brutal. I mean, common sense is is not something to be toyed with. It is there.
CJ Buck:In order to survive, you have to know that if you don't plant it, you won't harvest it. If you so there's just this sense of investment. Idaho was just awash with this common sense. We're gonna be kind to business. Business is going to benefit our state.
Levi Smith:It's a different dynamic, different challenge. Yeah. But you're drawn to being in a state in an area where there's a there's a shared, as you put it, common sense or ethos around how to work and how to go about business.
CJ Buck:We we have to run our business to the best of our ability to generate a profit and Right. And generate a vitality so that we can pay our people and we can you know, and we had, you know, utilities were a huge issue. And so moving to Idaho meant that we weren't gonna have brownouts, and we weren't gonna have utility bills that could fluctuate dramatically month to month that you could not plan for.
Levi Smith:Right. Affordable, reliable electricity is significant.
CJ Buck:And then the other thing was workers' comp. California had one of the highest workers' comp premiums in the nation, but also had the distinction of being one of the lowest delivering dollars to employ to injured workers. You know, like, if you're gonna donate to a charity, you wanna know that 95% of your dollar went to mission accomplishment, not to admin. What California was doing with the workers' comp system was just absorbing so much of those dollars into the administration of the program. And by moving, we we saved almost $1,000,000 a year just in workers' comp premium for the exact same people doing the exact same job.
Levi Smith:So when you got attracted to Idaho, what got you zeroed in on post falls in particular? So you're attracted to the state, the business climate, some other elements that make it a great place, not just in the short term, but long term. What got you zeroed in on Post Falls?
CJ Buck:So we had interstate 90. We waved at interstate 90 from our front door. Like, it just so all the trucking logistics, etcetera, freight logistics. We have Spokane International Airport, which is, you know, just big enough not to be restrictive and small enough to be wonderful. So, you you know, it's just a nice compromise there.
CJ Buck:And then we had the ports of Seattle and Portland for the stuff that we do import, and we had train. Mhmm. From a transportation logistic, Post Falls is is an amazing little business friendly area right on the border of Washington and Idaho.
Levi Smith:So you make a decision to move to Post Falls. When did you actually make that move, and what did it mean in terms of what you were starting up there? How many, you know, people were you going to hire? Did you move you said you had around 300 in San Diego. Did, you know, half of them, 200 come with you?
Levi Smith:What what did the new thing look like in Post Falls, and how long did it take you to go from here's where we're going to actually operating there the 1st day and having functional facility and team?
CJ Buck:So we made the decision to move to Post Falls in, 2002. So it was following our our board meeting where we made the decision that we would relocate. Based on some of the travel that we did, We had narrowed it down to the Pacific Northwest. We were in the process of deciding between Oregon, who'd given us about a $1,000,000 incentive plan to move to to to Bend, Oregon, which is where we were targeting, or Post Falls, Idaho. And so my dad, he goes, What are you guys doing?
CJ Buck:We're just, you know, we're comparing this program with that programming. And my dad basically said, Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm moving to Idaho.
Levi Smith:She just called.
CJ Buck:Like, oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Kinda closed the notebooks, and and so at that point, we were moving to Post Falls. That really happened.
CJ Buck:He poked his head in and said, I don't know about you guys, but but I'm moving to Idaho.
Levi Smith:It reminds me I'm originally from Texas, and, you know, one of the sort of sayings talking about Davy Crockett. He's he's in congress, and they're debating about what to do with with Texas having a fight with Mexico and stuff, and he says, y'all can all go to hell. I'm gonna go to Texas. He just he just heads to Texas inside. That's part of the Texas lore, that sort of idea that you have a a gravitational leader like that step in and just say, here's what we're doing.
CJ Buck:I was gonna say, and Texans still view the world in that dichotomous way, don't they?
Levi Smith:That's basically still through baby Crockett's eyes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So so your dad makes the decision for y'all.
Levi Smith:You know, you're going to Post Falls. Yep. How long did it take to make that? And when you move, you know, what did your footprint look like?
CJ Buck:We determined that we had a brain trust. We had lots of long term people. Some of them were very anxious to leave California. They were 5, 10 years from retirement, and so they were looking for kind of a fresh start. You know, they might have been half or 2 thirds of the way through paying off a mortgage.
CJ Buck:And so we ended up bringing about 60 people to Idaho. It was a fluid list. The thing that held us up was that we could not sell our building. We owned our building in California. It was very specific for a large manufacturing operation.
CJ Buck:It was overly customized, and it became a detraction for the for our building because it was so specific. And so it took us 2 years to sell our building. So we couldn't move till we sold our building. So finally and it was costing us about $1,000,000 a year not moving. We had continued to focus on our discipline, so we were we were kinda breaking even for a couple years, but I'll tell you a funny story.
Levi Smith:Okay.
CJ Buck:So my dad is up in Idaho and super excited about moving to Idaho. He's already moved. This is like summer of 2. So we've made the decision that we're moving to Post Falls.
Levi Smith:Okay.
CJ Buck:But we haven't instituted any plans yet. We have to sell our business. We have not we have not told our employees what we're doing yet because we don't know what the schedule is gonna be. And so my father goes up to Idaho to speak at something. Speak at a church group or speak he he was doing something promotional.
CJ Buck:And, the paper just kinda asked him how excited blah blah blah. And he's he's just all he's talking to this newspaper in Spokane, Washington about how excited he is to be moving his company to Idaho, not thinking that that's gonna get back to our employees. And we haven't told them that.
Levi Smith:There's like another version of him popping in his head into into the room and just making an announcement.
CJ Buck:Yes. Like, we we haven't had the careful evaluation, how we're gonna do this, what's our communication plan. We're gonna settle everybody. We're gonna have, you know, the severance packages and the
Levi Smith:Well, now you can just hand them a newspaper article.
CJ Buck:I mean, it was. So I remember, you know, we called all the employees together in the cafeteria to just say, This is what's happening. Didn't mean to it to come across this way, but you
Levi Smith:know, rest assured, we're gonna take care of everybody. You lost control of the messaging though.
CJ Buck:He he was so excited. Yeah. Totally lost control of that, message. So we we incentivized about 60 people to come to Idaho. For 2 years, our employees stuck with us.
CJ Buck:Even the people that weren't moving with us for that 2 year period while we tried to sell our building.
Levi Smith:So you have more than 200 people that knew that their careers with Buck were coming to an end because they weren't making the move. Yep. But you needed time to be able to wrap up affairs in San Diego, sell the building, and they they stuck with us. They stayed. They kept at it.
Levi Smith:That says that says a lot about leadership and culture, CJ.
CJ Buck:You know, they you know, I think they trusted you know, because we said, look, we we you know, here's here's the severance packages that are there, and then and they had that trust in us because we were being transparent. We were telling them what was going on. They knew they were gonna have time, didn't have to do something right away and I, you know, kudos to them really good people. Some of which I still have conversations with.
Levi Smith:Did they all subscribe to that newspaper up in Spokane so your dad
CJ Buck:can keep them informed?
Levi Smith:Is that what they It only took one. It
CJ Buck:didn't take all of them. It only took 1.
Levi Smith:You orchestrate this move. When did you actually move? You move with the seed group of 60, it sounded like. When did you actually then when were you able to make the move?
CJ Buck:So there we are for 2 years trying to sell our building and can't. One of our board meetings, and I said, it's costing us $1,000,000 a year not to move. And we haven't broken ground yet. What I want to do is, I want permission from this board to break ground knowing that worst case, we could sell our building at fire sale price so that we can break ground and start building our new building in Idaho. So that was and the board approved that.
CJ Buck:So in June of 2004, we broke ground. And then in July of 2004, we sold our building not for fire sale price.
Levi Smith:There you go.
CJ Buck:So it worked out well. It's you know, you take the pressure off and all of a sudden it works. And so we started so we took the fabrication side and we ran that hard. We got 6 to 8 weeks ahead by November of 2004. Shut down fabrication, put all those machinery on trucks, and shipped them up to Idaho.
CJ Buck:The assembly, we ran hard until, the end of January using all those parts. Meanwhile, we set up the fabrication department in Idaho and started making parts by early February of, 2005. Then we shut down the assembly Mhmm. And now started hiring people in Idaho. This is a hubris moment for me in that everybody told me how much trouble we were gonna have starting up, and I blew it all off.
CJ Buck:Nope. We're Buck Knives. We don't have problems like that. And we had every single one of those problems. We should have under my leadership, our relocation was much more difficult than it needed to be.
CJ Buck:Mhmm. And we should've just took in a much slower approach, a much more careful approach, but we I wanted to hit the ground running, felt like we could. No. We were, you know, we were barefoot in the gravel. Wow.
CJ Buck:You know, what probably should have been a 24 month startup, I parlayed into about a 8 or 9 year struggle. That was a huge learning experience for me of just not to get ahead of your skis. Don't commit to anything. Take your time. Let everybody you know, I'll give you I do you snowboard or ski?
Levi Smith:I started snowboarding, and I've transitioned back to skiing as of late. So
CJ Buck:So there's there's an adage when it comes to snowboarding where when you're initiating a turn, stay over your board. You know, don't lean off your board. Stay over your board. When you feel your board starting to turn, now you can lean into it. And so that was I did not do that.
CJ Buck:I just I leaned into a turn even though this corporation kept going straight. I was leaning into the turn and we just crashed and burned. So that was a learning experience for me, to be a little more, a little more careful. I tell some of
Levi Smith:our leaders, I tell them, you know, think about and there are lots of metaphors, and you just use 1 snowboarder you can use for, you know, leadership in in life. But I tell them, if you think about yourself as a as a pace car on a on a road track, the pace car is not helpful if they can no longer see the taillights.
CJ Buck:It's cool.
Levi Smith:Yeah. You're so far gone. The people that are following you can't see you anymore. That's true. And and you're just too far too far out.
Levi Smith:So you all survived that, and it sounded like to your your point, it could have been a couple years, you know, of careful planning and pace and all that, but instead, you you managed to stretch it out to 8 or 9. Yeah. So I just have empathy as I'm chuckling at that. So you stretched that out to 8 or 9. Fast forward to today, how many people do you have in Post Falls, at Buck Knives, and how many knives in general are cranking out a year just to give folks some some idea of scale?
CJ Buck:So we have, about 320 people right now, and and that's a good staffing level for us. You know, we're we're cranking out about a 1000000 nights a year.
Levi Smith:Took time and effort getting it built up to that, but I but I wanna come back to I know so app on the heels of the long painful transition process for moving from San Diego up to Post Falls, when we talked before, you said the COVID years in particular were jarring to the organization. Can you take me back to that? So You have now assumedly kind of established yourself in Post Falls. You've gotten past, you know, a lot of those those moving issues, and maybe you have a period of some success. You can reflect on that, but then you you have COVID around the corner.
Levi Smith:Help help me understand what happened leading into COVID and then during those COVID years in particular and coming out of it.
CJ Buck:So going into COVID, we just hadn't managed ourselves into a really successful consistent profitability. It was a business model change, and it had to do with MAP, minimum advertised price. It had to do with MAP. What was happening in our retail environment was that we had dealers were competing with each other to under price our products, and then all complaining that they weren't making enough money on our products. Mhmm.
CJ Buck:It's a retail brand management strategy where you you you put out there, here's the minimum advertised price. If you publish, if you advertise a price lower than this, we will not sell you any more product. So we're not dictating to you what you sell product for, but we are dictating if you're going to publicly represent our brand in the market place, this is a guideline that you must follow or we will not ship you product. So that's MAP, minimum advertised price. In order to orchestrate that, you have to control distribution.
CJ Buck:We eliminated about $6,000,000 in business in 2018 in order to give us the discipline to be able to control that our brand in the marketplace. And if
Levi Smith:you don't enforce it, it doesn't matter. Right? So you have to Yeah.
CJ Buck:You can't enforce it. So if you say, you know, if you do this thing, we will not ship you product, and they're like, Fine, I'll buy it from I'll buy your product from this guy over here. And so if you can't enforce that, if there are too many sources for your product, you cannot enforce any of that discipline. And so what we ended up having to do was stop doing business with a number of people, which was a huge, huge impact. And we're like, Yeah.
CJ Buck:We're just it's gonna suck, but we're gonna have we're just gonna have to make it up. It'll be a bad year or 2, and then we'll get past it. What happened was in our industry, and not to get too much into the weeds, but our industry had strongly invested in inventories anticipating that that there was going to be a president Hillary Clinton. And so our in 2016, 2017, the firearms outdoor industry had invested that there was gonna be gun control issues and and fights. And and so they knew that everybody was gonna be buying guns.
CJ Buck:Pump and sales. So they had all invested heavily in inventories, both ammunition and handguns, long rifles. So there was nothing left out. So when Donald Trump won president, it's like, great. Nobody has to panic and buy anything because it's not going anywhere.
CJ Buck:Well, all these people were well over inventoried in these in these items, which left nothing left over. There was no open to buy for knives. So it was a double whammy. So we we just we shot ourselves in both feet that year. And and so 2018, 2019 was difficult.
CJ Buck:So going into COVID, again, it was so similar. We'd had a couple bad years going into 911. So now we'd had a couple bad years going into 2020. Looked like 2020, almost exactly 20 years later, but it looked like 2020 was going to be a solid year for us now because we had taken our bad medicine and we and we'd absorbed this stuff and our marketplace was improving and our business was improving. And so the disciplines we had followed were now starting to bear fruit and boom, all of a sudden COVID hit.
CJ Buck:So we'd all gone to SHOT Show, the Shooting and Hunting Outdoor Trade Show in January. In 2020, we all came back sick. And then and then COVID just ran ran its gauntlet. And that was where I watched some of these other states and how they shut down and impacted businesses. And I called Department of Commerce in Idaho and said, we're we're gonna keep operating.
CJ Buck:I need to know you guys aren't gonna I mean, I'm hearing horror stories of other states where they're padlocking front doors and and I I I I need to know that we're gonna keep operating, and we're all okay with that. And, they're like, yep. Go make some knives. Like, okay. That's that's something we can do.
CJ Buck:And so we we just continue to operate, and and and COVID did a couple things. It drove people outdoors, which benefited our product. It drove people shopping online because they didn't feel comfortable going into stores. And so that helped us. And then the third thing was there was this focus on buy American.
CJ Buck:And so those three things, every single one of those things totally benefited our brand, and we haven't looked back. It's been amazing. So a
Levi Smith:lot of disruption in the economy and a variety of industries. But it all I think you use the word anemic. You would, you know, really came in kind of weak into COVID. But then those three things came together and gave you a moment and opportunity in your inner state where you can continue to operate and you're able to really take advantage
CJ Buck:of yes
Levi Smith:and grow and get stronger.
CJ Buck:You know, I will say that's a testament to us a little, but it's a huge testament to the reason we were in Idaho, that basic common sense that we were so enamored with in order to move here paid off in spades.
Levi Smith:Your dad made the right call. Let's let's let's back up. I mean, he came in the room. Yes. That's true.
Levi Smith:That is so true.
CJ Buck:Yeah. No, that's exactly right.
Levi Smith:Let's move forward just a little bit and think about where we're at today. What are you excited about kind of from a product standpoint? What what what's enticing to you about
CJ Buck:You know, this the road ahead right now? So the the thing that excites me most about the the physical, the physicality of the product, you know, there's so much digitalleness in the world. And every so often, you just need something that doesn't take batteries. You need something that'll perform for you when you are not you don't have access to electricity.
Levi Smith:Mhmm.
CJ Buck:But there's a then the side piece to that is I think consumers are also moving away from a disposable mentality. It's like, okay. I'm gonna buy something that I know is a piece of crap, but I can buy 5 of them. And when one breaks, I'll just use the next one. And when that one breaks, I'll just use the next one.
CJ Buck:I think people are moving away from that as a value system and going towards, I just want something that will last. The element of the the best thing you can do for the environment is not dispose of things. If you buy a product, you may pay a little you will pay a little more for it or a lot more for it. But you buy a product that you know is gonna last you for your entire life, you're never gonna throw it away. You're gonna hand it down to your kids.
CJ Buck:Mhmm. That's gonna be grandpa's knife. You that that they're they're gonna inherit because it was made well enough to survive and to continue to function. And I think that mentality, like, the the youth get into the I wanna be a good steward of the environment which makes a ton of sense. You know, people are buying products that last and and that aren't gonna fill landfills with broken stuff, and that benefits us.
CJ Buck:So we're so that's kinda how we're focusing ourselves. You know, I talk about how many units we make. That's way down from how many units we used to make. They're more custom built, higher end materials. You know, there's more value in the units we're making now than than what we used to make.
CJ Buck:And that's a representation, a reflection of what our marketplace is telling us. You build us good stuff, we will pay you a commensurate price for that good stuff.
Levi Smith:You're kinda back to it makes me think where this story started with your grandfather and the underpowered VW bus trying to, you know, persuade people that I've got something that's better and it's worth paying for. Yes. And you're in that same position today, but maybe consumers have started to make that shift and come into alignment with that value proposition, of course, have the benefit of a longer history and and exposure to buck knives, but a very similar story and value proposition, which for y'all hasn't fundamentally changed in 60 years. You're still trying to make better stuff, add better value, and honest with people that that combination is gonna cost a little bit more, but it's worth Exactly. Well, that may be a good note for us to end on.
Levi Smith:I wanna tell you, I really appreciate you just backing up, sharing the story, some of the the funny things that happened along the way, challenging things that happened along the way. How does Buck Knives today?
CJ Buck:We've been in Idaho for 20 years, but overall, our 125th anniversary will be 2027. Okay. So so 20 a 123 years. Well, so many twists and turns to get to
Levi Smith:a 123 years, getting ready for a 125, so much leadership and stewardship and overcoming challenges and celebrating wins. It took to that. And I love the fact that you're seeing your business flourish in Post Falls, Idaho today.
CJ Buck:Yes.
Levi Smith:And part of this podcast is just introducing people to companies and stories that they just don't know exist in Idaho. And it is a great place to be able to, in your case, grow and develop a business and set it up for a fruitful future. And it's a privilege to be able to lead businesses and and lead teams in this great state, and we got more good things ahead. Yeah. I'm I could not be happier or prouder
CJ Buck:that our business is, is in Post Falls, Idaho.
Levi Smith:Well, it's a privilege talking to you today. Thank you for all your time, sharing your story, and wish you and your company, the very best as y'all keep cranking out better knives, for for folks who are more and more appreciating the quality that you're putting into them. So thank you.
CJ Buck:Hey. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity.
Levi Smith:Our pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of Ain't That Something. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast in your listener and sharing the podcast or this episode with others. Thanks again to our season sponsor, TrustJoyce, and to our guest for graciously sharing their time and story. So go start, create, or build something surprising so I can share your story.
Levi Smith:Until next time.
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