Boss Shotshells Happenings

Ramsey Russell: I’m your host, Ramsey Russell. Join me here to listen to those conversations. Welcome back to Duck Season Somewhere. Thank you all for joining me today. I’ve got my long time for him, Mr. Brandon Cerecke with boss shot shells on the other line. How are you Brandon?

Brandon Cerecke: We’re hanging in, doing good. Blue sky today, a blue sky, 54. A little chilly. But we’re doing all right.

Ramsey Russell: You’re a hard guy to get in touch with because you’re so darn busy and I stayed busy too. But man, your last, now wait a minute. Last time I talked to you, you finally called, you sound kind of out of breath and you were man, you were burning, you’re burning the world down as you all duck property. What’s going on out there? How’s that habitat management going?

Brandon Cerecke: Well, we got 226 acres of wetland and we bought it last October, second week of duck season we got to hunt it. And it’s been not managed. A bunch of old guys had it and they were dying off and retiring and property had been managed in probably 20 years. So we’re going through trying to push back about two decades of overgrowth with invasive species with phragmites and cattails and canary grass. So, we hooked up with the local volunteer Fire Department, we told we want to do a controlled burn and where we’re at in St. Joe county Michigan over, you know where the property is. They’re like, yeah, we don’t want to do controlled burns because everyone around here farms seed corn and all they want us to do is clean up all the underbrush in between their tree lines. So we said, no, well come here, take a look at this. And we brought the fire chief down. He saw 226 acres of yellow dried up phragmites and cattails and canary grass said, hell, this is going to be good, we’re going to get the boys out here. So they brought the volunteer guys out at bottom lunch, made a donation to their little group and we torched that thing and it went up and we had people driving cause on a dead end road in middle of nowhere. People were driving from 60 miles away because they saw all that smoke in the sky. And it pissed a lot of people off. That we’re to the, let’s see which way the wind blowing from to the southeast because about two miles away there’s a lake with all the high rent vacation homes on it. And we’re dumping some ashes on their house and whatever, but in the name of habitat, right? So there are people on Facebook that got to go on Audubon Society members and they’re saying, no, it’s a travesty what this new owners doing to this property, it used to be the best birdwatching sanctuary, this and that, the other thing. So someone said it to me and I messaged that lady privately I said look here’s what we’re doing with this place. Well she talks to me now on social media almost every single day. And we’re letting them have access to this thing. We told them, hey we’re going to kill these birds that you like taking pictures of but trust it’s in the name of conservation. Everything we’re doing is ecosystem driven. We want to create true clean, pure habitat for these ducks to nest, birds to have to migrate both ways on and on and on. And she thinks that we’re just the greatest thing now because they see that hunters are not just people that are going to kill all their birds but they’re actually putting more back into the habitat more so than the Audubon guys are doing with their cameras. So, we got that all burned out. We’re doing some work out there, draining the water off putting flow control structures in rebuilding the dikes and levees. We bought a whole bunch of sevylor [**00:07:33] but what we’re realizing now that we got the water drained off is there’s so much native duck food in there that’s reemerging.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely.

Brandon Cerecke: Yeah, that’s been in their sitting dormant for 20 years just by draining that marsh out like nature normally would. In the wintertime, everything spring melts, everything goes out and then it starts filling up in the spring. Then it drains out in the summer that natural ebb and flow of water. We’re controlling that now, but we’re starting to get all kinds of millets and smart weeds and duckweed and you name all kinds of stuff is popping up out there right now. It’s awesome. We still got the issue with the phragmites and canary grass that we’re going to have to fight through for the next couple of years. But man, is it awesome? It’s awesome.

Ramsey Russell: Was that the first time you’ve ever burned a big track like that?

Brandon Cerecke: Hell yeah, it was. And it was something else, man. I had my 10 year old out there because we have the firefighters out there lightening it with propane burners and torches. We brought a pack of road flares with us. I told my 10 year old, so get out there and get after it. So we’re going in the areas where other people weren’t they couldn’t get to because we had waiters on so and so forth. And it only, we burned of the 226 I would say there’s probably 160 acres of it was covered in something that had to get torched and that burned up in less than two hours.

Ramsey Russell: So you started a little, probably started a little head fire, just kind of going against the wind to get a barrier and then run around the whole thing and let it burn hot to the center.

Brandon Cerecke: Yeah, we started with doing something back burn and then before you know what I mean? You start going here, going there, going here and we’re just watch and make sure no one got wrapped up in the middle of it. But it burns so hot and so quick that man, it didn’t take long at all.

Ramsey Russell: Well, what we’re burning those phrags and canary grass. How do you, I’m assuming you want to get some good native grass or native plants species habitat out there.

Brandon Cerecke: I’m not an expert and I’ve talked to a lot of smart people and my take on it is, the native sea beds that are in the dirt all over the, I can’t say all over the country, but at least by us. And I think the only time I’ve heard about it too is down in the flint hills just south of flint hills in Kansas, where the hurt locker boys are. They got that blue stem grass that grows naturally. But there is so much native grass seed lying dormant in the soil that what’s happened, there’s been some event that’s taking place that’s allowed these invasive to come in. They don’t just come in on their own and just all of a sudden pop up. Right? So we’re seeing with this canary grass and the phragmites is water. So by these guys, letting this place flood and blocking it off and not letting the water ebb and flow naturally. It’s allowed all the invasive to come in and take root. Okay, if you go just north of my property, it’s the same elevation, but there’s no dams or dikes around it. And that has some of the nicest lush native grasses where there’s ducks that are nesting and geese that are nesting and it’s gorgeous. Well I got all the shit on my property because these guys would dam it up and leave the water in. Right? Okay. So now what we’ve done is by getting the water off, we’re drying that soil out and we got to get rid of the phragmites so we’re burning them. Well, we didn’t kill it, we just knocked down enough that if we start spraying with ground water safe, round up the name escapes me for right now, I’ll come back to it anyway, rodeo. That’s it. We hit it, it’s going to take a couple of years but we got to hit it in the spring, that’s going to take that first push out. Okay, knock that down late spring, early summer, you’re going to get a second push, knock that down then in the fall when it’s taken all the nutrients in, hit that. So we can see now that we’ve got native grasses trying to come through they’re actually sprouting and rising up but in the next couple of weeks or month they’re going to get clobbered by all these invasive. They grow so rapidly. So even though we’re going to be killing the natives that are trying to sprout, there’s still so much native seed in that soil that we’re never going to be able to kill it all chemically. So it’s just going to take a pattern of burning spraying trying to get that to reset. And I think the biggest thing that we’re going to have is being able to manage that water level and drain that down when the ecosystem needs it, it’s going to help get rid of a lot of those invasives.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic. But if those buggers think there’s a lot of birds out there right now, wait until this native habitat comes in because that phragmites is worthless. It’s absolutely worthless habitat. The only thing I’ve ever seen good of phragmites, just somewhere to hide good. But man, it punches holes and dogs feet, it takes over the, it’s worthless, man.

Brandon Cerecke: So, I forgot to say that there’s 160 acres of its WRP. So what I’ve learned is maybe I shouldn’t say this on the podcast but hell whatever. Okay. The federal government has to, they slow things down. So I’ve got this property, I bought that all this land is in this easement and they say you can’t stick a shovel in the ground unless you got a permit for it. Okay. So I told these guys when I talked to the Fed, I said hey we got to knock this out. They said okay, yeah you can burn out that phragmites. Well we burned out the phragmites. And the guy comes, I said, what in the hell did you do out here? I said we got rid of all the invasives. He says, I told you to burn the phragmites out, I didn’t tell you to burn the whole marsh. I said well I go, what are you going to do? I said, are you going to lock me up and throw me in jail? He said no. I said are you going to fine me? He said no. I said, what are you going to do? He said we’re just going to give you a stern talking to you and yell at you. I said are you done talking? Because we got work to do. So, he told me the way to go. Well, you need permits, this that the other. Okay. So well tell me what the permits are like. He says, well you need to get an acceptable use contract this and that. Okay. Well then we got to get the state biologists involved. Okay, well then we got to get the government sign off from the USDA. Alright, well then we got to get the DEQ of Michigan, eagle now it’s called Department of Environmental Quality. They renamed a couple years ago. We got to get them involved. I said okay so if I want to spray knockout invasive species I got to get everybody on board. They all got to be happy with it. Right? He goes yeah. I said how long is that going to take? Well it could take a while. I said I don’t have that kind of time. I’m not waiting five years. I said this property has been in the easement for 12 years and you guys haven’t done a single thing to it and now I’m coming in trying to improve this property for everybody to enjoy. I said you want me to get the Audubon society on you and have him call you every day because they’re on my side. He said no, don’t do that. He says, I think we’re good here. Let’s just work towards trying to clean up and get a contract in place in the future.

Ramsey Russell: Making the world a better place is got some bureaucracy attached to it, doesn’t it?

Brandon Cerecke: Well, I don’t have that kind of time and given the state of the economics and government and all that stuff going on here. I think if I get locked up and thrown in prison or charged with a felony for helping the ecosystem, I don’t mind taking that one as long as doesn’t mess with my ability to manufacture ammunition I guess. Right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Speaking of which, what is going on with boss shot shells? I mean Brandon, I know you all have got a ton of stuff coming up right now. You all are wide open and busy. And I don’t even know where to start but I want to know what’s going on in the world of boss right now?

Brandon Cerecke: What’s going on the world boss’s? We talked that have been well obviously ammunition shortages, right? And they’re real, they’re not fake, no one’s making that up, it’s not fake news. What’s driving it? Who really knows? I mean, really what’s driving it is pistol handgun. The pistol handgun ammunition buying craze is consuming the manufacturing capacity of the powder manufacturers here in the United States and the world. So last year when this whole thing was going on with COVID and all that people start to buy guns. There was enough supply of shot shell powder in the US. There’s enough there, they’re not being made so and so forth. Well when all the pistol powder got bought up, all the orders for the powder plants started switching over pistol powder, rifle powder, pistol powder all that. So then our spot in line for us to place orders through our distributor to get the powder is like, well the lines are making this and to make that requires this and that the other thing and buying powder. The big boys are making so much pistol rifle ammunition. What we produce for shot shell is like a fart in a windstorm. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even though it means the world to us and that same or even more so to our customers, they want this stuff, we want to make it. We’re just fighting that. So what we end up doing, we went six months without getting any powder. My powder deal was set to give me so many pounds per month. And even now I’ve only got one month’s powder, what was promised to me. So I should have January February, March, April. I got one out of those four months and never received anything in November and December last year. So we started, we’re not letting product quality suffer. But what we’re able to do is get our hands on some of this hotter powder. And I’ve been wanting to make a square load 12 gauge shell for the longest time and I guess selfishly to, I got guys that want to hunt my duck property with 12 gauges and I don’t want to sound kicking roosting birds out of the area. So I made him hunt with 28 and 410s. Well I made this 12 gauge load, that’s the same noise signature as a 28 gauge. No recoil square loads of the pattern efficiency is even better than a 28. So we’re marketing that we tested this spring. So Stinger, it’s called is coming out two and three quarter square load, fast moving, insane patterns, super lethal boss shell. So we got that rolling. I bought us a building, so boss is going to be moving here.

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute. Let’s talk about the stinger a little bit more because let’s talk about that. You say fast moving. What are the feet per second and what not?

Brandon Cerecke: Just over 1400. So what we’re able to do is because that column height, so a square load is like old school believe that the best pattern is obtained from a shotgun when the height of the shot inside the shell is as close to the diameter of the boar as possible. They call it a square load, even though it’s still rectangular when it’s running down the barrel, it does shorten up a little bit. And my belief is the benefits of that square load come from all of the pressure on the shot column when the soft shot is running down the barrel and being – the gases are expanding, you don’t have as much height or weight on top of that shot column. So the pellets down at the very bottom, don’t deform as much and they fly truer. So what we see shooting out of a Benelli 12 gauge, factory full choke, 30 yards, 87%-88%. 40 yards, 83%-85%. So it’s flying through the air and the ablation [**00:19:57] at Hodgdon Powder retired. Now told me a 28 gauge flies through the air like a flying saucer on edge. So you’ve got this dense center core both in front and behind the flying saucer on edge. And then you get the ring of the saucer vertically to cover the outer part of your pattern. So the densest mediate part of that pattern is right in the very middle. Does that make sense? How I describe that?

Ramsey Russell: It makes perfect sense.

Brandon Cerecke: So I believe we got that same thing going with Stinger, we got guys that land and my 10 year old shot his Benelli M1 shooting an inertia H&K Old M1 I bought on the internet. Probably to the dismay of the liberal left, but I bought it on the internet. Did a background check, registered it the whole bent legal. And it came with a short stock. I even realized that I saw the thing, I’m like, oh, I’m going to pick this thing up. So I took out of the box and my son says dad, I guess I got a new Benelli. I said the hell you got to Benelli, hell, you don’t have enough money for a Benelli. And that thing come out with a stock that was cut like 2.5 inches short. He says, yeah, I do look how short that thing is. I said, oh man, you win. I tell you what if you can handle the recoil of this thing, it’s yours. So he went out there, I loaded up a couple ounces and a hot loads that we had last year and he handled it. So I loaded the stingers. I said, what do you think of this thing Landen? He says it shoots about like my 28 gauge. I said good deal, let’s go shoot some snows with it. So we went down to Illinois snow goose hunted for a day, landed mopped them up with twos. He was shooting twos and threes out of two and 3/4 stingers and love them. So we had some ladies, some older guys throughout the country hunt with us some spring snows and late Honkers. And it went over smashing success. So it’s in the product line up now.

Ramsey Russell: The parallels of boss shot shells with the good old days continue, and I’ve always said this, what excited me besides the ethos was the patterns, and all of a sudden boss shot shells comes onto the scene a few years ago and now I’m shooting two and three quarter inch shells primarily again, which is what I grew up shooting. And now you’re talking square loads, you’re talking these stingers. But because you’ve got a superior copper plated bismuth tin alloy shot that more closely resembles lead. Now you’re coming back because the whole time you were telling us about the square loads. I’m sitting here thinking Argentina, Uruguay, other European countries, Mexico where I go. And I always wondered I tell people all the time to go, what kind of shots do you shoot? I said, we shoot target loads. That’s what we’re shooting. We shooting a lead, but we shoot, its target loads. It’s one ounce loads, but I had no idea at all. I had about a square load. I’ve never heard that concept, but no wonder we’re killing the fire out of birds like that with those little old bitty like target loads.

Brandon Cerecke: The other half a stinger, what it is, it’s using a hot target powder and it’s built off of it’s a higher speed version of what the people over in Europe are going to use for their international trap competition shooting like when these guys are shooting for money. I mean they’re doing this for a living, right sponsorship the whole bit. Their limited, I believe its 13-30 ft. per second. So we started at 13-30 and work this thing up until we started losing the patterns and back down a little bit. So we’re up over 1400 with it. And then I guess, you want to talk about another product or no, we’ve done with stinger?

Ramsey Russell: Of course. Yeah. Go ahead.

Brandon Cerecke: Okay, so next one, so you said, back to the old days we got one that we’re going to be doing now. Hopefully we get, I mean it’s going to roll. I got a new line that took a year and a half to get built in Italy. Finally got done and I’m having Airfreight and should be here probably in a week and a half. Even with air freight, it takes a minute to get here. So air freight in this thing in and it’s going back to the 1950s with a true fiber wad, old school style, old crimp, paper top, overshot card. So the powder, hard nitro cards made out of paper, fiber wad shot, put the over powder or overshot card on, roll it shut. So it’s going to look like the shells did in the late 50s, early 60s before plastic wad got to be a big deal. So that runs a little slower, lot less recoil though. Chamber pressures are up there nice right around 10,000. So good cold weather performance. But what’s cool about that is because there’s no wide petals in there. We’re getting more towards that square column height. You don’t have 60 thousands of plastic going on the barrel. So it shortens that shot column less pressure. And that thing is a patterning son of a gun. Man, is it cool.

Ramsey Russell: And what do you call that?

Brandon Cerecke: Well, I think we’re just going to call it fiber wad for now. I don’t know, fiber wad like true old school fiber wad. There’s virtually zero plastic in it. There is like a little wafer that’s laminated on the fiber wad itself. But when we weigh it after it’s burned up with the ignition of the powder, it’s like 99.9% maybe 99.5% biodegradable. What goes into the environment? Tiny, tiny little bit of plastic that is virtually nothing, virtually zero. So that’s going to be a cool one for the guy that doesn’t want to be putting plastic wads and fields or in lakes and ponds and rivers.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Well, I wonder why the mainstream ammo manufacturers got away from that in the 1950s or 60s. How did they evolve to all this plastic and non-square columns? Would it just cost to produce?

Brandon Cerecke: Man, I mean, if you have to ask me and it’s probably opinion based with some my knowledge in the background is velocity, marketing, got to go faster. To get the velocity of the plastic wad was able to seal up so much better. So if I take a boss shell, my nominal powder charge for two and three quarters shell a plastic wad, I’m going to get 1375 ft. per second out of it. Okay, most of the velocity. I take that plastic wad output a fiber wad in with the nitro card and the same payload, close that thing up, I’m going to get about 100 ft. per second less 1275ft. So when it got to be high velocity, they had to keep up with that plastic wad and they were able to control the patterns and still get good patterns at higher speed with the plastic and it was easier to manufacture. It was cheaper to manufacture as well.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, so profit drove part of it and more junk science velocity and steel balancing that equation kind of drove the rest of it.

Brandon Cerecke: And then once you went to steel wad I mean, you have to have the plastic covering the shot to protect the barrel. No two ways about it. So, I mean, it was kind of the evolution how it went. But over in Europe and England, you’re not allowed to hunt with plastic wads. It’s all fiber over there. But what they’re trying to do now is their qualifying the biodegradable plastics and jury’s still out on that. I mean, I know in order for us to switch to a biodegradable plastic resin, the price of our wad would go up five times. And I’m nervous about that one because I don’t know enough about the rigidity of the polymers, how they behave in low temperature when firing, humidity, moisture that whole bit. So I think our environmental play for the biodegradable thing is use a paper fiber wad and we love it. It’s a good one.

Ramsey Russell: This material’s shortage you were talking about earlier. That’s global. It’s affecting everybody. Is there an end in sight? Do you see an end in sight have these powder manufacturers increased production to accommodate everything now or what?

Brandon Cerecke: No, I mean well the places that – where powders manufacturing United States are owned by the military industrial complex. One of them is owned by ATK which is like rocket dying. The other one is owned by General Dynamics. Who build F16s and all that whole thing, military. So their number one customer is the federal government. And then when they have the federal government happy they sell John Q powder to make trap loads and pistol rifle and shot shell. So they’re always running at max capacity from what I gather they’re running 24/7. What I had heard is they were using their pilot lines to use that for production and that’s where their additional capacity is going to come from. But the thing that freaks me out is if someone starts a war, then our powder dries up, our supply dries up because all that’s going to go for howitzers. We might use, 30 grains of powder in a shotgun shell, which there’s 7000 grains in an ounce. So a pound of powder will make, several 100 shotgun shells. Well, howitzers going to take probably five or 10 or 15 pounds of powder. So that’s where all of that consumption would be and we’d be out. That’s what worries me the most, us get into a stupid war that would really screw things up. You never know. If someone wants to take guns off the street that bad and not let us have ammunition, go start a war with someone and then dry up our powder supply.

Ramsey Russell: I hope nobody on the Biden administrations listening.

Brandon Cerecke: You never know anymore, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Okay. Which brings me to a point how is this, because I keep up of course you all in social media. How is this driving your orders and need to pre-order and things of that nature?

Brandon Cerecke: Okay. I hate selling fear, I am not, I stay away from it as much as I can. I’m the last half full kind of guy. But at the same time, we know that there’s retailers that have already gotten their nontoxic allocation for the year. We know of two in California, one got all his stuff. He sold his ammunition already, doesn’t think he’s getting anymore. The other guy that we know of in California’s got his stuff, but he’s sitting on it and not going to sell until the season opens up. So people who people know already retailers know already what they’re going to get. And this happened last year too, where guys were out of ammunition, to sell for. And this is all what I’m talking here is just all nontoxic waterfall. They were out by October. September, October they were out. And we’ve been working like hell back then we were the only ones that had ammo because our supply chain was just in time, so we didn’t need to have all of our orders built in March, April, May when COVID shut everything down. That’s when all the OVM’s had produced all their nontoxic for the season. So they lost that window to build the inventory, get it to distribution, and get it on the retail shelves with COVID. So now what we have is all these shortages. So it’s going to be like two years and this may carry over the next year of people being hand them out. So we have not seen based on our orders that have been placed with pre orders and standard orders for stuff we do have in stock. People are not, they’re not hording our ammunition, which is good. We’re not saying you can’t buy more than this or that you can buy what you want. But what is nice to see is there’s enough respect out there that people are getting what they need and not stocking up buying 6, 8 cases. It’s on average, each customer is buying a case of ammo at a time. And that’s the way we like it.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, I mean the season’s going to be here before we know it. For a lot of us, the season starts in September and October. We need to go ahead and get our orders in. What we think we’re going to shoot next?

Brandon Cerecke: We did one pre-order based upon what we knew we had in the system. At that time we had powder was our constraints. So we allowed guys to pre-order and that was January. We said we’re going to have the orders sent out in April or May. Well today’s the last day of April and it’s going to be maybe 3 or 4 hours of production after hours. I don’t know if we’re going to work late tonight or not. But if we managed it so to a point that by the end of the month of April, all of our pre-orders in January are gone. We close the books when we knew this is what we had for powder. So now there’s guys that are wondering, hey, can we pre-order now? Like no, we’re just going to go right into the next set of orders. Well, we got outfitter inventory to build and we don’t, we got more constraints, coming were like, you know what, let’s open up. The books will do a second round of pre orders. Yeah, we opened last night and I swear to God Ramsey. So you think that it’s peak season? So we’re covered up in pre orders now and we’re going to let that stay open probably, well we know how much we can book on this next round with the supply chain coming in over the next month. But we’re just going to be real cautious. We’re not going to over promise and under deliver. It’s going to be the flip side of that. So it’s going to be calculated measured. We’re monitoring by the hour. I’m not kidding. Every hour I’m having conversations with my guys on both sides of all the businesses here that are all helping out with keeping us going. Every hour I’m talking about something with supply chain. Where is this, what are we going to get this? How are we going to do this? What are we going to make that? So that’s kind of how my role in the company is sort of changed a little bit that I’ve always been the manufacturing guy and the guy that gets into everything, but I’ve had to kind of become more like structured and I hate structure and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t care so much about my customers. I’m forcing myself to do shit that I don’t want to do for the benefit of this business. And it sucks that we’re hand them out on things, but we’re figuring a way to have fun with. It’s like playing a game of chess, how close can we push it and promise our customers that we’re going to make this happen. So like I said, by and large for me, I said, guys, we’re three hours away. If we can get three hours of extra production today, we can end the month knowing that we got all of our customer orders out on pre-order ahead of schedule. And given the state of the COVID shutdowns, everything else, I’d say that’s a win for our little company.

Ramsey Russell: Heck yeah, it is. I guarantee it is. You were telling me earlier, you all are so busy now. We’re finding out, your role in the company has changed, become a little more structured, a little more corporate and I know you ain’t a corporate guy. Neither of my but sounds like you’re breaking ground fixing to on some new headquarters. A new shop.

Brandon Cerecke: Yeah, I bought a building down the street. Last year to people who don’t know, I mean, my main business is an 18,000 square foot building, so it’s not a large manufacturing plant. And 20 years ago my dad built a of 40 by 120 pole barn just to store lawn mowers and cars and all kinds of crap. We tied those two buildings together about, I guess 12 or 15 years ago. And it was just used as, extra warehouse. Well, when boss started three years ago, I was in a 12 ft. by 12 ft. office, now it’s our lab where I was making shotgun shells and I would make them three cases at a time per skew. And I had an eight ft. shelf, like a lot of people put up in their basement, you get it from lows, it’s got 3 stacks on it. And I had, at one point in time 3, 6, 9, I had 27 cases of shotgun shells. It took me a week to build. I’m like, you know what? I’m onto something here. And well shit, that was three years ago. Now, last year we moved in, well, it’s two years ago. We’re now occupying my back barn, manufacturing in a 40 x 60 converted pole barn. And the other half of that barn was full of materials and I had four semi-trailers holding various extra machines and wades and all the kinds of crap. Well now I found other building. We’re going through it. It’s old steel building, really good bones, completely gutting it, put a new coat of paint on it, rewiring it, building a killer set of offices, consumer experience center, double decker office kind of set up inside this thing. It’s going to be slicker and hell, we’re going to try to make it as inviting as we can to open the doors even more for guys to come through here and tour the plant. Because there’s a lot of stuff we do now that I really don’t want the general public seeing, we don’t let people take pictures. I don’t want stuff getting out on the internet. I like our privacy. But here we’re going to do it in a way that that it’s going to be respectfully done. So we’re going to include the guys that want to come through and see the process without like feeling like someone’s going to steal something from us.

Ramsey Russell: Right. That’s a great idea. So, I’m imagining, as you’re talking maybe in the consumer experience part of the store, I could see some of the manufacturing going on through a glass window or something like that?

Brandon Cerecke: Yeah, it was really cool. We’re going to build an indoor shooting lane where I got this computerized pattern machine. And that’s going to run the whole length of this building, 50 yards. We’re going to insulate it, have it all done inside. And what I’m thinking about doing is having a railing built because that our offices are going to go right, the mezzanine is going to go right out over the top of the shooting structure and I’m thinking that we can have a catwalk with railings and all that. You can walk down the full length of building and see what’s going on from the warehouse, where the orders are being packed to where stuff is staged and the assembly’s going. So it’s going to be slick. We’re still keeping all the alloying shot manufacturing and copper electroplating at the main building here. But they’re only shoot five minutes away. So for us to run a truck back and forth, hauling back empty barrels and taking plated shot over is going to be nothing.

Ramsey Russell: How old is Landen from getting his driver’s license?

Brandon Cerecke: Yeah. He’ll be able to drive. We got an orange triangle on the back of our gator so as long as he’s going 25 mph on the side of the road, he’ll be able to go back and forth.

Ramsey Russell: Heck yeah, I know, he’s neck deep into all that right now. I guarantee you. Did you ever dream when you went to Canada years ago and you were shooting your first hand load that you made there on your dad’s press? Did you ever dream this?

Brandon Cerecke: Oh, down in Arkansas? Hell no, but you know what, I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow and I really, I’m just so day to day. So like for me, a lot of people talk about wanting to work for retirement and that scares me. I don’t know what I’m doing next week, other than I’m just going to keep working. So it’s really fun to see. I mean, maybe at night, my last thought before I drift off and go to sleep, it’s like, you know what, this is pretty cool, what you’re doing. but I just feel like, maybe it’s my calling, it’s I’m making a difference and I’m allowed to manufacture something, put my hands on something creative process that not only satisfies my ego, but it makes a lot of people happy and we’re making or we’re changing the landscape in the way ducks are killed.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I was leading up to because you’re a business guy, you reload the shot shell. It becomes popular. You start to scale out as the business to make it satisfactory. But in a short a few years later it’s very short amount of time. It’s almost gone from business to life purpose.

Brandon Cerecke: Yeah, May of 2018. So next month tomorrow I guess or whenever is going to be our three year birthday. So we’re only three years old. And I see what we’ve done collectively as a group and that includes our customer base. The community that has become loyal believers in what we’re doing. I mean what we’ve done in three years is remarkable and it’s what boss’s more than Brandon&Lee. It’s more than Brandon&Lee and the rest of the team and it’s more than Brandon&Lee the team and all of its customers. This is scalable. The likes of major conservation pushes like you never know. I mean this DU loves us, Delta waterfowl loves they love what we’re doing because it’s honest. It’s genuine, it’s focused and it’s for the right cause. So and it’s there’s no touchy feely tree hugger type vibe around it. I mean it’s killing, it’s straight up killing is what it’s doing. But we’re just presenting that in an organic and authentic way. And I think that’s what’s caught on.

Ramsey Russell: No, and I see it all the time. I really truly do. I have seen myself began to evolve. I was listening speaking of ducks unlimited. I was listening to a podcast episode you did the other day and when I met you, I didn’t pattern I just shot at ducks. And I’ll say this, a lot of those old day guns were modified to full, to extra full when they were back in the lead days. And this boss shot shell behaves a lot like lead and I have found myself evolving. I think the last time me, you and Lee all met together for a podcast, I stick a modified choke in for starts and I still with you to modify a lot. But I found myself getting tighter and tighter. I just find myself getting on an average day, more improved, modified, more modified. I want to see those ducks and geese die. Clean “Boom”

Brandon Cerecke: And I guess maybe it was a selfish maneuver. But I mean I grew up shooting a full choke gun and I don’t like cripples man. I mean it tears me up, crippling anything. And when we built this thing, I’m like a full choke, look at the pattern of the full choke gives. So we said shoot it full. A tight choke tight patterns is a clean miss or a clean kill. And wouldn’t you know it, people started noticing like man, I’m wrecking these birds. Very seldom would anyone ever post a picture of a duck getting completely blown up right. And that happened maybe in year one, year two on social media. We don’t see that anymore because guys are getting smart. They can still shoot that full choke, but they know, hey, that things in tight, let’s either wait and pull the trigger later on or lead them a little bit more and not blow the breasts out of it. So it started off as a selfish thing that now has become kind of like this mindset. It was tight chokes and pattern your shotgun. Tight jokes pattern your shotgun and learn about what density does, how density kills, ignore everything else, ignore shelling. Hell the reason why when we started, we only had two and three quarter inch shells because I didn’t have a press to make a three inch shell. I mean that’s a straight up and down truth about it. But now what we’re seeing three years later is all of our, you can buy a two and three quarter five, you can buy a two and three quarter four. We got a whole shit house full of them in stock right now. People are coming to the brand who haven’t spoken to us who don’t really know everything about boss other than what people tell them, but they’re coming in buying the heck out of three inch shells and I’ll sell them, but really, guys are spending more money than they need to. But if they want a three inch shell, they can have it. And that’s where a lot of that sales is now. And we know our true core of guys that originally started with the brand three years ago shoot two and three quarter shells. Our new guys will eventually move down to that two and three quarter. But for now they’re used to 3.5-3 inch world and they see boss three inch, that’s what I’m going to shoot.

Ramsey Russell: Scaling mindsets like conservation and like a lot of ethos, it takes time. You’re looking at a second generation really guys your age, guys your son’s age that would have known steel shot their whole lives. And they with the whole junk science of trying to balance that energy equation speed and mass and boy, a lot of these guys have gone to that 3 inch and minimum and 3.5 inch, you can’t hardly find a two and three quarter inch steel shell I’ve looked. You know what I’m saying. But now all of a sudden now and now you all are, taking it further down the rabbit hole with this square load, this little stinger load that I’m all over man. The older I get, the less recoil I want the better pattern I want, which brings up a good point. I’ve never heard of many people going out and pattern I’ve got going and shot a little bit here and there, but never just going out and develop pattern boards and done all this kind of stuff until boss shot shells come away. I mean just that alone is a milestone in conservation. If you’re talking killing these guys going out and starting a pattern of freaking shells.

Brandon Cerecke: And we’re balancing, dominant male egos who like to kill stuff. So you’re going to have on the flip side of everything that I talk about that I believe are the core values of boss. Are the guys that say, well, learn how to finish your ducks and you don’t have to worry, you can kill them with number seven steel trap loads. Well, yes, that’s true. But we also live in what I call the real world and reality is sometimes your ducks don’t finish at your boot bag. And sometimes you got wind, you’ve got other contributing factors that when that third shell gets ripped off out of your shotgun that duck that was at 15 yards is now at 40. So what you do, the dominant male ego, who has to kill stuff is going to say I can do this. And then when the duck flies away carrying steel shot in it, they just say I’ll shoot another one next time. So it’s not a reality. The reality of duck hunting and goose hunting is not everything dies inside 30 yards. It doesn’t happen.

Ramsey Russell: The reality is everybody shooting semiautomatic is going to take it to the plug if they need to. But we’re going to pull the trigger three times. We may start off at 15, but he goes to 40, we’re good. We got another shell and we’re going to pull the trigger. That’s just human nature.

Brandon Cerecke: And that’s when people call in the shop and their new guys, they want recommendation. And we say, hey, it doesn’t matter anything our lineup is going to kill within 30. But you tell me what is your comfort zone at? When you pull the trigger the third shot birds going away out of the decoy spread. Where is your comfort level at? Where do you say? No, I’m not pulling the trigger. And most of the guys are going to say, what do you think of this Ramsey? What do you think the answer that people say us?

Ramsey Russell: Now 15-30 yards. They’re going to pull the trigger where they say whatever. No matter what they say, they’re going to pull the trigger.

Brandon Cerecke: They want shells that can kill out to 50.I’m done. I want to go 50. So for me even though I know that guys that know how to shoot that are going to, that are on their game, they can kill a duck at 50 yards with boss number five. So Ramsey, you know what you’re going to want it, you want to go down to number four or you want to shoot the 3-5 if you really are going to shoot 30 to 50 yards solely, well then shoot the threes. But I don’t want to say, oh, the boss number five’s magic bullet will cut anything you want all day long with it. No, that’s not it. And I wouldn’t be doing my job of all we did was say boss five, boss five, boss five.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly right. You make a good point. Boss shot shells came along with what I believe to be a superior product. And copper plated that bismuth tin alloy. It just was the trick. But the whole ethos surrounding the brand of know your pattern, take ethical shots, make clean kills. That was a real game changer. And I don’t think it’s just me Brandon that it speaks to because I hunted 22 states with hundreds of people this year and I do not recall stepping into a single blind that one or more people weren’t shooting boss shot shells. That I mean it speaks to a lot of people. It speaks to a lot of people.

Brandon Cerecke: Sometimes I think that maybe like, I like to think that I’m a cool guy but I think I’m more of a nerd than anything deep down and I think my wife would agree and a lot of people that know me know that I nerd out on shit and it’s kind of cool to know that the industry respects what we do and kind of what I do nerding out on things and like obsessing over stuff and Don Collier, one of my good buddies I got to meet through boss is southern kennels north him and Walter wally Shalala and Athens Michigan trained dogs. They did a wonderful job with my dog Holly. But what Don was, he was a process engineer, plant engineer in the automotive world. So he and I both come out of the automotive world and we’re both very analytical and how we view the world. And he told me after the first season, starting the wind up to season two for bosses have been going into 19. He said Brandon, you know what? Just watching social media and Facebook and talking to people. I think you’ve inspired more people to pattern their shotguns in the last year and a half than anyone’s done in a decade.

Ramsey Russell: I guarantee you.

Brandon Cerecke: So, it’s about, there’s education in it. We can have killer brand, we can have killer product. But if you’re not selling the story and telling people what the product is capable of. What your shotgun is capable of. And what you’re shot guns is capable of as an individual, were nothing more than just a guy selling a product and that’s not what boss is all about. And so here you go to 22 states and everyone’s shooting this stuff or you see it all over. That’s cool. But I want people to hear about boss for the first time every day for the next 5 years or 10 years or however long it takes for us to get to the 1.3 million water fowlers at the United States has. I want to get to all those guys, but I want boss and the people who know the product to get to them, not some guy working who doesn’t know the product, never hunted with. It just has a job in a retail outlet and it’s nothing against that retail guy, but it has to be told in the right fashion. Again, otherwise it’s just a product and everyone’s got a product. We have a brand and we’ve got a movement.

Ramsey Russell: You really do you know? And in terms in terms of the starting the conversation, the conversational value, to reflect everything you just said. I point to your social media presence man, that place is happening. My notifications just flood “boom”, everybody starting conversations that the new guys, the old guys, and it’s really become a lot of the participants on that page that have been shooting boss shot shell or have grown into shooting ball shot shell for a long time. That they’re now helpful to kind of like your virtual staff out there coaching people along.

Brandon Cerecke: I think we’ve been able just by being honest, being original, like I said, me nerding out, obsessing over shit. That’s who Brandon is. I don’t pretend to be anybody that I’m not and creating that environment, like with the fan page, I’m assuming that’s what you’re speaking of. We’ve created like such an inclusive group of dudes. We don’t have the banter that goes back and forth. People starting arguments over stupid stuff. They’re all in it for the right purpose. They want to become more proficient hunters and they want to kill their ducks cleaner and they want to have fewer cripples. And it’s so simple, it’s like, I’m glad that we were able to, the stars and moon and sun align perfectly when I met Lee and we got this whole thing going three years ago. I mean it’s awesome. It’s so cool. Like you’re talking with Getducks. I mean the work you’re doing now is your life’s work and it’s going to live on beyond you. I can only dream that what we’re doing at boss is going to be living on 50 years from now or better.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. Brandon, thank you for coming on today. I always enjoy catching up with you and I know you’re busy there at the office. Reminder to myself and to others listening. Get your orders in for reasons noted previously.

Brandon Cerecke: I mean, we don’t want to create panic, but at the same time, I don’t want to be, the guy is going to say, oh, it’s going to be fine, I’m not selling that. I’m saying, if you got the money and you can afford to buy it now, you’re not going to regret it, I don’t think. But again, I don’t want to create panic.

Ramsey Russell: Don’t panic, but don’t wait till the week before and yesterday because it may not be there.

Brandon Cerecke: We’re going to do our best. We’re going to keep going. I’m a dye in the wool automotive background manufacturer. I love working. My people love working. We’re going to do as much as we can. But if we don’t have all the materials, there ain’t a whole lot of work that’s going to be done. So we’ll try our best. But right now is a good time to get on board.

Ramsey Russell: Folks. You have been listening to Brandon Cerecke boss shot shells, which is more than a product, it is a conservation movement. Check them out. If you haven’t already. Order more shells, because I know most of you guys listening already have some. Thank you for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere. We’ll see you next time.