Diligent hands will rule.
—Proverbs 12:24
As long as there’s been an America, there have been entrepreneurs.
We started businesses on our kitchen tables and living room couches, and in our backyards, farms, and garages. Sometimes we started with nothing, and sometimes we got a stack of seed money from a friendly bank or family member.
We sweat, strain, cry, laugh, and work our tails off to make something from nothing and build a better life for our families and ourselves. Sometimes we’ve gone bust and sometimes we’ve succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. Even the biggest companies start out small, and we’re the ones who started them.
In the process, we founded this nation, built it into the world’s economic superpower, and inspired the world with our achievements.
America has always been a land of business visionaries, risk-takers, and doers, of growers, makers, wheeler-dealers, traders, sellers, merchants, and go-getters. American economist William Baumol described an entrepreneur as “the individual willing to embark on adventure in pursuit of economic goals.” Management expert Peter Drucker described entrepreneurship as “the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
According to historian John Steele Gordon, “The first patent awarded to an American resident was given to Joseph Jenks in 1646 for a device that improved the manufacture of edged tools, such as sickles. It was the beginning of the ‘Yankee ingenuity’ that has characterized America’s economy ever since, from that first machine tool to bifocal glasses, the cotton gin, automated flour mills, the high-pressure steam engine, interchangeable parts, the McCormick reaper, the oil industry, the airplane, Coca-Cola, the affordable automobile, the digital computer, and Twitter.”
America was founded, fed, financed, nurtured, and sustained, in large part, by entrepreneurs.
The spirit of America is the spirit of entrepreneurship—of risk, innovation, ingenuity, grit, and perseverance.
The history of America is largely the history of businesses, most of which started out small and sometimes stayed that way, but sometimes grew far beyond the wildest dreams of their founders.
My inspiration is God, my family is my life, and my business is my family.
I am the CEO of a family business that my father started forty-six years ago in a dilapidated backyard shed when we had nothing except a life of dirt-poor poverty.
It’s a business that my mother helped run, my brothers and I grew up in, and my wife, in-laws, and extended family and friends have helped build into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse.
Today that business has launched three successful TV shows, including Duck Dynasty, the most-watched reality TV show in history, sold tens of millions of dollars of products and merchandise, generated hundreds of jobs, and entertained and inspired many millions of people the world over.
But our American dream started out smack in the middle of an American nightmare.
My father, Phil, grew up not far from where we all live today, in a house with no running water and no electricity, and a toilet two hundred feet back in the woods. He attended Louisiana Tech on a football scholarship, started as quarterback over Super Bowl champion-to-be Terry Bradshaw, smoked dope and listened to lots of Jimi Hendrix, married my mother, Miss Kay, when she was eighteen years old and he was twenty, got a master’s degree in education, then decided he’d rather hunt ducks than be a teacher. To supplement the family income and just barely scratch out a living, Phil became a commercial fisherman, selling his own net-caught flathead catfish for seventy cents a pound.
One day in 1972, the year I was born, Phil had an idea. He was fed up with the store-bought duck calls he used during duck hunting season. These things don’t sound at all like real ducks, he thought. I can build a better duck call. So he disappeared into the ramshackle work shed in the back of our property and started tinkering around with materials and tools. Weeks went by. Eventually he worked out a sweet design made of two separate cedar-tree-cut reeds rather than the usual one, plus the ingenious twist of carving a dimple in the reeds to hold them separate. It was a design so special that he got a patent for it. He put a lot of hard work and patience into his duck call. He just wanted to make a great duck call for the average hunter.
The result was the backwoods Stradivarius of duck calls, a duck call that sounded more like a duck than a duck did, a sound that reached far up in the sky and invited ducks to come on down, relax, and spend some quality time with new friends, who actually turned out to be the business end of a shotgun. Ducks loved the sweet music the instrument made, and so did the hunters.
To buy a lathe and other gear, Phil took out a $25,000 loan from the Howards, a family of successful local retail entrepreneurs (who eventually became my in-laws), and started cranking out duck calls one by one. My mom pitched in to run the business, handling orders, paying the bills, and balancing the books on the living room couch. Phil and Miss Kay laid the foundation for our family’s success. That first year, they made $8,000, and the Duck Commander Company was born. A business was born.
Then, disaster struck.
Just as the duck call business was slowly taking off, Phil decided to make Satan his business partner. There’s no other way to describe what happened to him. Phil chugged whiskey straight from the bottle, came home drunk, got in fights, operated a honky-tonk, and kicked the family out of our trailer home for a while. One night he got in a fight with the honky-tonk’s owner and his wife, beat up both of them, and threw the lady clear across the bar. He snuck out the back door to escape the police and hid out in the woods to evade the long arm of the law. He spent most of the next eight years as a full-blown heathen, and my parents’ marriage started falling apart.
One day, a minister showed up out of the blue, gave my dad a Bible, and told him to put his life in the hands of Jesus. My father turned him down. Until four months later, when he decided it was a really good idea. He begged Miss Kay to take him back, and she did, provided that he stop drinking, lose his old friends, and put his life in the hands of the Lord. He did, and has led a clean life ever since.
As a family, we turned all those mistakes and negative energy into a positive, and we built our business on it.
I’ve always been entrepreneurial. In fifth grade I was constantly selling and trading things. We were so poor I didn’t have an allowance. I needed cash. I had a pretty productive worm farm, and I sold bait worms to the local fishermen every Saturday morning. I filled one of my dad’s old boats with cow manure and put every worm I could find in it.
One day, one of my dad’s hunting friends, who was a candy distributor, gave me a box of Hubba Bubba bubble gum. This created a dilemma for me. I wanted to consume the entire box. But then I thought, Well, what if I sold this gum to other kids?
I took a pack on my school bus, offered each stick for fifty cents apiece, and sold out before we got to school. I thought, We got something here—we got a real business!
I got my mom to drive me to the cash-and-carry store, loaded up on inventory, and it wasn’t long before I was a full-fledged candy dealer. I did candy deals on the bus, out of my locker, out of my coat—I was practically dealing on the street corner.
Pretty soon I had made hundreds of dollars, which to me was a small fortune! I was like Red in Shawshank Redemption—I was “the guy who could get stuff.” I did special orders. I had repeat customers. I even offered revolving credit plans.
I was rolling in cash, and I enjoyed living the high life as a ten-year-old. I bought a new pair of sneakers and strolled around like a prize peacock. My fifth-grade teacher called me the Little Tycoon. Business was going wonderfully.
Then I got called in to the principal’s office.
“Willie, are you selling gum and candy out of your locker?”
I said, “Yeah, and I’m doing pretty good at it, too!”
He said, “Well, I’ve had a meeting with the school concession stand, and their sales are way down. So I’m going to shut you down. No more selling stuff at school.”
I was crushed.
Now I was desperate for money, since I’d grown accustomed to that lifestyle.
I thought, What else can I do to make money? For a while I sold pencils and erasers. For fifty cents, I’d entertain you by popping a june bug in my mouth and eating it raw, as a snack.
Then I came up with an idea that I thought was pretty genius—the Human Jukebox.
We had a long bus ride to school, and I thought, What if I entertained people and they paid me money?
So I announced my new career as “the Human Jukebox” and popped up on the back of the school bus seat. Kids would stick a quarter under my arm like I was a jukebox. I’d robotically put the quarter in my pocket, and I’d sing whatever song you wanted to hear. I’d sing all the vocal parts and do the instruments, too. My specialties were Michael Jackson, the Beach Boys, and Molly Hatchet tunes.
But my most popular song by far was “Jukebox Hero,” by Foreigner. Those fifth-grade girls loved it.
Norma Jean, the bus driver, would look in her rearview mirror and say, “Willie, get your butt down off that seat!” So I’d just crouch down low and keep singing the whole way. The Human Jukebox didn’t make as much money as my gum business, but it was still pretty lucrative.
By trade, neither my father nor my mother was a businessperson. Dad had an education degree, and Mom had a GED. Neither was great at math, and they had little experience in business. Dad was not really a woodworker, didn’t have a lot of tools, had no money to speak of, and was paying the bills by commercial fishing, which ain’t easy. As soon as we kids could pitch in to help the family business, we all did. As the duck call business slowly grew, Dad was the constant motivational speaker to all of us employees, which in the early days consisted of us four brothers, Alan, Jase, Jep, and me, and Miss Kay. It was a firsthand account of how to start a business, how to run a business, and how to work like crazy to make sure it succeeds. My father would do simple math: “If there are two million duck hunters and we got just 10 percent to buy our duck call, then we would sell 200,000 duck calls.”
I don’t recommend this to the young folks out there, but my father actually encouraged my brother Jase and me to skip school to pitch in and help the family business. We would skip the maximum number of days possible from school without failing, which was forty back then. We did all the jobs. The worst job of all was to fill catfish traps with socks hand-stuffed with rotten cheese scooped out of a fifty-five-gallon drum. We didn’t get paid for our work, though. Dad would always say, “Well, you’re getting to eat tonight!” He wouldn’t ever pay for worms or bait, either. “Crawfish will eat anything,” he said. “Snakes, other fish, they’ll eat you if you lay out there long enough!” So if there was a recent roadkill and you could bear the smell, we would take that varmint or whatever it was and I’d chop it up into little pieces and we’d throw it into the crawfish trap. “It’s free bait!” my dad would say.
I also sold German carp on the street corner. German carp doesn’t sound very appetizing, and it’s not the world’s tastiest fish, so I borrowed a trick from my dad and called it “the Golden Buffalo, the Pride of the Ouachita River.” If you can sell uncleaned German carp, in the middle of August, in the state of Louisiana, boy, you can sell anything! That’s how I became a salesman.
A couple of times a week, Dad would go out on the river that runs near our property and rig up 150 hoop nets to catch catfish and crawfish. When we were kids, we all pitched in. My brother Jase, the motorman, would carry the fish to shore in a boat and hand them off to my mom and me, and we’d throw the catch in the back of a truck and take them into town and try to sell them. That’s where I got to be the salesman. If the markets would take them, great. If not, we’d go to a street corner and hang out a sign, FRESH FISH FOR SALE.
Diagrams from my dad’s original patent for his duck call. (Duck Commander)
My dad had big dreams and ambitions, but at first the rest of the family wasn’t too sure if this duck call business would work and whether it could grow and succeed over the long term. We’d sit around the dinner table and Phil would grandly announce, “Boys, we’re going to sell a million dollars of these duck calls one day.” We said, “Well, sure, Dad.” We really didn’t have any other options at the time, so it sounded like a great idea to us. But it really didn’t seem possible. We thought Phil was just telling stories. We were the employees and were churning out duck calls from our two-bedroom house right on the river. Believe it or not, we did it. It took forty years, but we managed to pull it off, and in 2013 we sold not just a million dollars’ worth but more than a million duck calls!
When I was a little kid, we had very little money, but I didn’t even realize how little we had. I could tell how our family business was doing by the school lunch program. In elementary school, I qualified for the free lunch program, so me and a couple of other little poor kids were always put in the front of the chow line, which was fine with me. Then, around the time I was in junior high school, I was moved back to the “reduced lunch” kids group in the middle of the chow line. I thought to myself, Hey, we must be selling more duck calls and fish—we’re doing all right!
By the time I moved to high school I had to pay for my lunch. By then I figured we must be multimillionaires. I thought, We’ve made it! We made it in life! I’m actually paying for my own lunch!
The family duck call business grew gradually through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. One day in the 1980s, Dad had an idea. “Do you think people would want to watch what we do?” He had the idea of filming himself, his family, and his buddies hunting and then selling the footage on VHS tapes in stores. We all argued around the dinner table about it. That’s the way our family works: you throw ideas around, you make your case, you get honest feedback, and sometimes it gets loud. It took my wife, Korie, a few years to get used to it and to realize we weren’t mad at each other—we were just arguing at a loud level to try to get our point across!
Pretty soon, Dad began producing a series of duck-hunting videos called The Duck Men, featuring superauthentic, raw images of hunting, which no one had really done before. They had a kind of bootleg, moonshine feeling to them. They were real fun to watch. We got a pretty good grassroots following from game hunters, duck hunters, and waterfowl guys around the country. The tapes helped our duck call business because we put our phone number on the back of every VHS box. We started selling more and more duck calls, added T-shirts and hats, and kept growing.
Dad would load up the truck with duck calls and announce, “I’m going on a four-day loop.” That meant he was going to drive all around the little towns in the region and pay sales calls on as many hunting shops and sporting goods stores as he could, plus the Walmarts. Back then, you could sell directly into individual Walmart stores, and they had a little section for locally made products like ours. Pretty soon, the duck calls were selling so well that the word went up to Walmart headquarters in Arkansas.
The Walmart buyer called down to our house and asked for Phil. “Mr. Robertson, are you the one who’s selling all these duck calls in our stores?” Phil said, “That’s me.” The buyer asked, “How are you selling into so many of our stores?” He answered, “One at a time!” The Walmart man said, “Mr. Robertson, why don’t you come up here to corporate headquarters so I can see your duck calls and meet you in person.” Dad went up there, and Walmart wound up putting our duck calls in their national chain of stores. That’s what really made it for us as a company. That was a game changer. Eventually, Walmart was selling 500,000 duck calls per year in their stores. And it all came from Dad, out there on the road, busting his butt for days on end and selling into one store at a time. Plus all the help we gave him at home.
My dad was a visionary who always believed in his product and its destiny, and he was also a master salesman. Not only was he a living symbol of our ultimate end users—America’s hunters—he understood that selling was show business. When he started the business, he actually carried around a tape recording of what a real mallard duck sounded like in the wild. He played the tape for a sales prospect, then honked on one of his duck calls, which were the best in the business. You couldn’t tell the difference. Bang. Sale closed!
Our family business was literally a living room operation. When we got home from school, my brothers and I would watch The Dukes of Hazzard on TV while we folded shipping boxes. We’d go in the garage, sweep up the sawdust, dip the duck calls one by one in a barrel of tung oil, and hang them out on racks. My fingers were always stained so brown from the tung oil, I was pretty embarrassed to go to school!
I did customer service, too, at nine years old. If you called the number that was on our videos, or if you called our office, which was our house, I’d answer, “Duck Commander, can I help you?” We’d take the orders and write them on the back of paper plates and napkins, put them in a box for Mom, and she’d ship them out the next day at the post office. By the time I got old enough to run the business, I had done every part of it. It taught me so much about hard work and doing things as a family.
In 2002, when I was thirty years old, Phil made me the company CEO, which made sense, since I was the only one in the family with a college degree, and with a concentration in business. Years earlier, he’d heard about my candy- and gum-selling operation at school when the principal blew the whistle on me and called my dad. Phil didn’t get angry. He just put the phone down and said to my mother, “He’s the next CEO!” Once I got the CEO job, my main goal was to expand the business and get our products into sporting goods superstores like Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s in all the big hunting markets.
In 2008, we got an offer from the Benelli shotgun company to do a show on the Outdoor Channel. They said it would be a reality show, half about our family and half about shooting their shotguns in the woods.
At first I wasn’t sure we should do a TV show, but my wife, Korie, was totally in favor of it. She watched reality TV all the time, and she thought we’d be great for it, because, well, let’s face it, we’re kind of an odd family.
“You all need a show,” Korie said.
“Korie,” I replied, “we’re not all that interesting. What do we do on a TV show?”
“Willie, you all just aren’t normal. I hate to say this, but you’re not a normal family. It will make great TV. Just be yourselves!”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I said, “We’re totally normal!”
“Look at you all!” Korie replied. “You’re very entertaining! You guys are a TV show!”
“Well, if you think it will work,” I said.
I asked my father about it, and he said, “I think it’s a terrible idea.” I said, “Well, we’ll take the meeting, Dad. With a TV show we might sell more duck calls.”
Just as we were going into the meeting, Korie announced, “I think they should pay you.”
I said, “What?”
“I think they should pay you money.”
To tell you the truth, this hadn’t occurred to me. And I didn’t want to blow the meeting that was about to start. “Wait, Korie! I’ve got this deal all lined up. They’re going to pay for the making of the show, and we’re going to sell more duck calls. They’re not paying us money, okay? They’re not paying us money to be on TV.”
This is where it comes in handy to have a wife who’s from a family of successful entrepreneurs herself, the Howards. They are a family of entrepreneurs who are used to taking risks, negotiating, and getting their fair share.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t always have the confidence in myself that I could actually pull off running a growing business, but Korie always believed in me and my abilities, and she would give me the encouragement to shoot higher. She later said, “I knew whatever he decided, he would do it with all his heart and be successful at it.”
Korie made excellent grades and graduated at the top of her class, thrives on challenges and never backs down from one, and is convinced she can figure anything out. We’ve got six kids, and she put together all the trampolines, toys, and slide sets because she’d actually read the directions, but I was convinced I could look at the picture on the box and just “figure it out.”
Korie, you see, has business in her blood. The Howards were supersmart businesspeople who were accustomed to starting businesses, running them, selling them, and sometimes having them flop. Korie’s grandfather and his brothers were born and raised poor, and they became some of the most successful and influential folks in our community. Her family owned the retail store I bought toys from as a kid. Her family was critical to the success of our business.
Growing up as poor as I did, I fell into a bit of a trap where I said, “We finally made money; let’s make sure we don’t lose any!” I didn’t want to go back to the way I grew up, wondering: “If the nets run, are we going to eat fish, or are we going to eat bologna sandwiches?”
So the two of us make a great team. Sometimes I’ll go with what my wife thinks, and sometimes we go with my gut feeling. Sometimes I’m more of the “out front” guy, and she is behind the scenes. Once we go, we go. All the way. If something works, WE win; if it doesn’t, WE lose. No blame, no excuses. We also really believe in people and have a good sense of them. Sure, we’ve gotten burned a few times, but we invest in people.
Well, my wife sure came through for us that day in the TV meeting. Korie said flatly, “Well, I’m going to ask them to pay you.”
I said, “Korie, don’t mess this deal up. I’ve come this far!”
“Let’s just ask them,” Korie declared.
“Be careful,” I warned.
Well, we went into the meeting, and all was going well. The sponsor and TV folks laid everything out and said they were ready to start filming in a month. All we had to do was sign on the dotted line.
Just as the meeting was about to end, Korie said, “One more thing.”
Uh-oh, I thought. Here it comes!
Korie said, “I think you ought to pay the guys.”
Oh shoot, oh, no! I thought to myself. She’s doing it, she’s doing it! Korie, what are you thinking? Don’t lose it, don’t lose the deal!
One of the TV people asked her, “How much were you thinking?”
Korie said, “Thirty thousand dollars each.”
I was thinking, Did she just say thirty thousand? The deal’s over.
But to my surprise, the TV guy said, “Sure, no problem.” I immediately thought, Shoot, we should have asked for fifty thousand!
Once we got back home, I strolled into my parents’ living room and said, “Guess what? We just got thirty thousand dollars from the Outdoor Channel!” The whole family jumped up and down and told me how brilliant I was. I stole the credit for that a little bit from Korie, to tell you the truth. But now I tell the world how great it is to have a brilliant spouse as your business partner, too.
That show, Duck Commander, developed a good following and got us some notoriety in the outdoor industry. Dad became kind of a cult figure in the hunting world. One day a few years later I got an email in the regular Duck Commander corporate in-box from TV producer Scott Gurney in Hollywood, and the email changed our life. He’d had some experience as an outdoorsman and had made a number of shows about the outdoors. Basically the email said, “Hey, I’ve watched your show. I think y’all have a huge show here that could be way bigger, and give me a holler.”
I called him up and we started talking. We put together a “sizzle” reel, which is a tape of test footage of what the show would look like, and he showed it around to TV networks in New York and Hollywood. There was a lot of interest. A&E asked us for two pilot episodes. We knew A&E appealed to both men and women, and we figured we could hit a big audience and show people what we’re all about. We just wanted to put out a positive show that the whole family could watch, and it didn’t seem like there were a lot of those shows left on TV.
We shot the pilot episodes; they loved it, and A&E bought thirteen more episodes out of the gate. The first season of Duck Dynasty was fifteen episodes. We shot the pilots in the summer, and by that December we were in full production. We didn’t stop for almost the next five years. The overall story of the show was about a family who stuck together through the power of love and faith, and about me trying to run a business in a normal way, in spite of constant goofball behavior and work avoidance by some of my employees. My employees were always foiling everything I had planned, but we stuck together. Somehow the formula clicked with viewers, and before long the show was a flat-out monster hit.
In our family business I’ve been skilled at motivating people, orchestrating the process, and getting the most out of my family. They’re a really talented group of people, but it can be challenging as heck to keep them on task and motivated. I am pretty good at seeing a vision, setting the vision, and recruiting folks to help achieve the vision, and my father is good at it, too. Korie and her family are great at keeping their nose down and grinding out the real day-in, day-out work we need to be successful.
I could not have accomplished much without Korie’s diligent work, intelligence, and companionship. Working this closely with your spouse can be challenging, but it can also be so rewarding. The trick is always knowing how to separate what’s happening at work from what’s happening at home. On some nights I’ll be the one who wants to talk about work and she doesn’t; other nights it will be just the opposite. Sometimes we have to remember it isn’t about “me”; it’s about “us.” Together we’ve been successful beyond our wildest dreams.
At work in my office. (Duck Commander)
Our family has always been a little bit odd and eccentric, shall we say, and my dad was eccentric enough to be the perfect American character on which to build an outdoor business brand. He was a marketing dream: a big, bearded, Bible-toting, backwoods preacher and storyteller, a hard-core hunter and fisherman who looked and talked like he stepped out of a movie about the early days of America. This guy wasn’t just hunting on the weekends. He was out there hunting all day, every day, rain or shine. He was a dyed-in-the-wool original, the kind of guy who seemed like he could psych out a mountain lion in a staring contest and bite the heads off a dozen ducks while taking on a squad of killer beavers in hand-to-hand river combat. He is the real deal, authentic through and through, and even today he doesn’t have a computer or a cell phone. If you want to get a hold of him, you’ve got to go down to his property and try to find out where he’s at. His only professional goal was to make a living doing what he liked to do—hunt and fish—and have time to spend with his family.
I ran the business, and my dad was the inspiration and the symbol. It was a great combination. But until the A&E show premiered, we had no idea that we were building something that would become so huge. Pretty soon we branched out into more and more products and sponsorships and licensing deals and our business got bigger and bigger.
Maybe one of our business secrets is that we are an authentic American family business, and what you see is what you get. We’re just like the people you see on our TV show. That’s us! As a family, we work together, which is positive for the most part. Of course, we’re not “Kumbaya” all the time—we argue and fight sometimes—but it’s always in the spirit of love. We work together, we eat together, we pray together, we love each other, and our kids are respectful. If people see something positive and attractive in us, I think it’s because of our faith in the Lord. He allows us to work together, and He gives us our core. I feel like the Lord has blessed us and put us here and allowed us to do this. He works in mysterious ways. I mean, who would’ve imagined that through Hollywood, you could have such a popular show that promoted these values? If you’d have told me a few years ago that there was going to be a network television show that was going to have a prayer at the end of each episode, I would’ve said, “There ain’t no way!”
Through it all, I immersed myself in figuring out how the TV business worked, how merchandising and licensing businesses worked, how sponsorships worked, how best to build your brand, and more importantly, how to prepare for the business to plateau, which we knew it eventually would, since nearly all TV shows level off after a few years, and ours would be no exception. I put together deals with sponsors like shotgun companies and camouflage manufacturers, and with movers and shakers like former pro baseball players Adam LaRoche, Tom Martin, and Ryan Langerhans, and country music stars Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan. I executive-produced our TV shows. TV is a business, and I had to figure out how to monetize it while we could. We had a rocky moment in 2013 when Phil made controversial remarks in an interview, but our fan base stayed with us and we weathered the storm.
Together, as a family, we have accomplished great things in business, but I’ve had some business ideas that my dad said would never work.
When I took over the company, I went to Dad and said, “Look, we need to replace our VHS tapes with DVDs. They’re way better. You can just put them in; you don’t have to rewind them.”
“Forget it,” said Dad. “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Everybody watches VHS!”
I explained, “Well, actually, Dad, that’s changing. I don’t think a lot of people are watching VHS anymore.” He countered, “I watch VHS!”
I said, “I know you do, and you probably will for a long time, but most people are going over to the DVD format. We’ve got to do it.”
“It’ll never work!” he declared.
“Let’s just try it,” I said. I was right on that one.
Then one day I announced, “Dad, I think there’s a day coming when people can shop online on the Internet. They’ll see a picture, click it, give their credit card number, and order it. They don’t even need to leave their computer.”
“First,” said Phil, “that’s never going to take off, and second, that’s a dumb idea for us. If people want to order a duck call, they’ll pick up the phone and call.”
I said, “Let’s just try it and see!”
Dad told me to talk it over with Johnny Howard, my father-in-law, who owned the website URL for Duck Commander, duckcommander.com, and was holding on to it for future use by the family business. Johnny was a successful retail and publishing entrepreneur, and he saw the future of the Internet business early on. He’d also been helping my family over the years with business issues like bank loans, patents, and trademarks. My parents sometimes borrowed money from him to get them through the slow periods of the hunting business, which is very seasonal. Johnny and my family worked out a deal where he launched our online business in exchange for the money my parents owed him. We supplied the products and my father-in-law ran the website. Before long, it worked out beautifully. I guess I proved my dad wrong on that one, too!
Then I thought it would be a good idea if we had not just a DVD series but a regularly scheduled TV series to sell our duck calls. Dad replied flatly, “Of all the ideas you’ve had, that is the worst one. Mark my words, no one will watch us on TV!”
Once we had our TV show, I reminded him of this conversation from time to time—especially when we broke the record for the all-time highest number of TV viewers of a reality show!
But there was one idea I had that was definitely not a good one: I didn’t want Uncle Si on the payroll, much less on any TV show. Early in my CEO days, I was tightening up, cutting costs and trimming any fat I could find in the business. My dad’s brother Silas, or Uncle Si, was working for us, but technically he probably only worked eighty minutes in the average day. Three or four hours a day he spent sleeping in the office, which was my parents’ living room couch. He’d spend much of the day sound asleep, snoring away and talking in his sleep, while I was on the phone and trying to conduct business meetings.
“Dad,” I said, “look, I love Uncle Si, but we need to cut him loose. I can’t work with this guy.”
“You leave Si alone,” said Dad. “He’ll be fine.” He stayed on the payroll.
Then when we started Duck Dynasty on A&E, I was against Si being on the show.
“We can’t film Uncle Si,” I insisted. “He doesn’t make sense to anyone! He’s so bizarre I don’t even want anyone to see him.” So it was my bright idea to film around him in the early shows and not show his face.
Well, I was way off on that one! He became a true superstar, one of the most vivid, funny, and downright weird characters in TV history. Nowadays he never misses a chance to let me know that he’s the star of the show!
Looking back on our success, I realize that our goal of doing something family-friendly and godly was the culmination of years of struggle in our life and business and a few fortunate events. If Dad had finally left us, if my parents hadn’t been able to stick together and work out their problems, there would have been no business. They just would have been another statistic of a broken marriage. We couldn’t have done it without each other and without Korie and her family.
The Duck Dynasty show broke a bunch of ratings records on A&E and on cable television as a whole. In our third season, we debuted with 8.6 million viewers, the biggest audience in the twenty-nine-year history of the A&E network, which was double the audience from the previous year and second only to The Walking Dead. The next year, the fourth-season premiere drew 11.8 million viewers, the most viewers ever for a nonfiction cable series. The show caught on in TV markets around the world, too.
We’ve appeared on Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, and Conan. Journalist Erik Hedegaard of Men’s Journal wrote that in the show, we “get into nutty situations—racing lawn mowers, sucking bees out of a hive with a vacuum cleaner, getting busted while nighttime frog hunting on a private golf course—ending each episode with a sweet resolution, a family united in prayer and a meal, all while Willie, in voice-over, enumerates the sundry moral lessons to be derived.” It was good clean fun, with no on-screen sex, no curse words, and no marriage breakups.
What’s the business power of having a pop culture mega-hit TV show? It’s like riding a rocket. In 2012, we sold about 120,000 duck calls. In 2013, the year Duck Dynasty premiered, we sold over 1.2 million, becoming by far the bestselling duck call brand in the U.S. We’ve also sold tons of Buck Commander hunting gear, bobbleheads, hats, T-shirts, apparel, books, food items, you name it. At the Walmart annual shareholders meeting that year, it was announced that their bestselling item of apparel for both men and women in 2014 was our T-shirt!
With the success of the Duck Dynasty show, it looked like we became a global phenomenon overnight, but we’d been laying the groundwork for years. We had tremendous growth, and it came really, really fast. It was chaotic, but it was great, and like a runaway freight train—all you can do is hang on! We tried to ramp up and be prepared for it, but it was almost impossible to predict how fast our business would grow. In the first couple of months of the show, our Duck Commander business grew something like 2,200 percent. Our website crashed, we lost orders, we were shipping twenty-four hours a day, and we fell 7,500 orders behind.
After the show first aired, the hunting season, the holidays, and the show all happened at the same time. It was crazy. Paying customers would watch our TV show, where they saw a bunch of goofball characters slacking off on the job. Then they’d call up our warehouse and ask for me, saying, “Hey, Willie, get those guys to work already! My order is late! Go in there and really make them work—I need my duck calls! It’s not funny!” It took us months to catch up. We had no idea we would grow so big and so fast.
One of the hardest things for us was running our company while we were in the middle of filming the show. It was basically two different full-time jobs happening at the same time, with hundreds of details to attend to each day. It just got crazier and crazier. But our staff did well, and we definitely prepared them as much as we could. Those days we had about fifty full-time people working for us, but around Christmas we ramped up to around one hundred. We still made all of our duck calls here, but we had to have an outside company handle the shipping for us. We just couldn’t keep up with all the growth of that by ourselves.
Off hunting with the family. (Duck Commander)
Our warehouse in West Monroe, Louisiana, has become a regional tourist destination, and people line up to take pictures and visit our company store. They come from all across the United States, Canada, and even overseas. One day, close to two thousand people jammed into the parking lot outside our warehouse. We had to buy extra land around the property to make room for all the tour buses and overflow parking!
In 2014, Duck Commander served as the title sponsor of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Duck Commander 500 race in Fort Worth, and college football’s Independence Bowl, held each year in Shreveport, which was called the Duck Commander Independence Bowl. In 2017, we held the grand opening of Willie’s Duck Diner, a family restaurant in our hometown that features home-cooked recipes by Miss Kay and Phil. The restaurant’s slogans are “Where Saying Grace Is Encouraged,” “Come as a Guest, Leave as Family,” and “Family, Faith, Food.” I’ve just always loved cooking. We had thought about opening a restaurant for years. I love it. I’m there almost every day. I have a room in the back where I eat. I go there and cook sometimes. I was there last Saturday working on this new huge bologna sandwich I’m creating for the menu.
In the spring of 2017, we aired the eleventh and final season of Duck Dynasty. To tell you the truth, I’m just amazed at how long it went and how big the show got. For a couple of years there it was pretty out of control.
Our children have become entrepreneurs, too. Our daughter Rebecca has a clothing boutique with Korie called Duck & Dressing right here in Monroe, Louisiana. Rebecca has done all the buying herself and has opened an online store as well, at Duck andDressing.com. Our daughter Sadie has a “daddy-approved” formal dress line that’s doing real well, and a successful touring event called Live Original. John Luke and Sadie have both published their own books. They got paid to be on the show, and they both do speaking events. They’re making a lot more money than I did at their ages!
Success is how you perceive it. For the Robertson family, we redefined what success means, beyond just worldly goods and riches. For us, success means you can make a living off hunting and fishing, and being together. To us, that is success.
We do what we love, spend lots of time together, and have made some money. For us, success at work means you can show up to work with no dress code, you can grow your beard as long as you want, you can grow out your hair, you don’t even have to bathe regularly.
That’s success in our book. It’s all how you look at things. I think we are the most successful people ever!
I am an American entrepreneur.
I am the mom-and-pop team who owns the corner grocery store, the old man who shines your shoes, the billionaire who started a megabusiness from scratch, and the twelve-year-old girl who runs a sidewalk lemonade stand while dreaming of opening up her own restaurant someday.
I am the refugee from a faraway land who yearns to achieve the American dream by starting up a small business, being my own boss, putting food on the family table, and giving my kids a shot at a decent life in freedom.
I am the businessman who saved the American Revolution at the moment it was about to fail—by loaning George Washington enough money to get his troops food, guns, and ammo.
I am the grandmother who sells cosmetics to her neighbors out of a display case in her living room.
I am the Native American artisan who sells handcrafted treasures inspired by my ancestors to tourist shops and art galleries, and I am their children, who are destined to create new products, new companies, and new jobs of their own.
I am the Silicon Valley husband-and-wife team who starts a business and changes the world, one click at a time.
I am the Latino immigrant family who runs a fruit-and-vegetable stand on the side of the road and whose sons and daughters will grow up to change the world by launching their own businesses.
I am the African American accountants, insurance brokers, funeral parlor directors, and barber and beauty shop owners who struggled and thrived by serving our own people in the darkest days of segregation. I am their granddaughters and grandsons, the founders and CEOs of companies large and small. I am the woman small-business owner, the Asian American entrepreneur, and the military veteran entrepreneur.
I am the fisherman who drags around tubs of fresh-caught crawfish in the hopes that a market will buy them for the aluminum container at the front of the store—so my own family can have enough cash this week to eat square meals instead of bologna sandwiches.
I am the go-getter who outthinks, outmaneuvers, and outhustles the competition and eventually buys them up, creating more jobs, more products, and more value in the process. I am the rural farmer, the suburban accountant, and the country doctor.
I’ve started businesses in my brain, in my parents’ garage, on the back of paper napkins and plates, and around the kitchen table. Lots of times my own family has provided the muscle, the brains, and the cash to get me started and keep me going. I work around the clock to stock the shelves, balance the books, and make the customers happy, and sometimes I’ll give them an item or two on credit when times are tough. I’ve had some real tough times myself, but I am blessed to live in the United States of America, where you can always find a second chance and a helping hand, especially if you work hard, love your neighbor, and stay true to yourself and whatever divine inspiration guides you.
I am the railroad and steamship operators, blacksmiths, manufacturers, construction contractors, freelancers, architects, and suppliers who helped build the biggest economy the world has ever seen.
I am the countless American men and women, young and old, from every race, religion, and place on earth, who borrowed, sweated, fell on our faces more than once, had doors slammed on our noses, had ideas fizzle, bank accounts dry up, and products fail, but kept on trying, till one day we achieved success.
I am the self-made men and women who forged the West, powered the Industrial Revolution, helped build our cities and factories, created the American middle class, and opened the doors of the Information Age.
I am one of the legions of American entrepreneurs who made this country what it is.
In the pages that follow, you’ll meet an amazing bunch of characters who have helped forge our nation.
In the distant past, they established links of commerce across the nations of Native America. In the colonial and post-independence eras, as merchants, tradespeople, and small business owners, they laid the business foundations of a young nation that rocketed onto the world stage.
In the post–Civil War corporate era of Big Business, they rode the new horizons of telegraphy, railroads, and electric power to build the world’s biggest economy.
In the era of the global consumer that unfolded from World War II through the present day, they pioneered astonishing new businesses and technologies and inspired the world.
These men and women were every kind of personality, and their families came from every part of the planet.
But they had a few things in common—they were bold, tough, and resilient. They were dreamers and doers. They often failed, but they kept on trying, through incredible trials and impossible odds.
They were all American entrepreneurs. They are the action heroes of business history.
And this is our story.