“All I knew is that nobody was going to outwork me,” says Mojo founder Terry Denmon in describing his abrupt departure from federal government employment decades ago to become an engineering consultant that did not yet even have one single client. Many years later, a new fangled decoy concept dropped into his lap and while it’d be easy to say that the rest is history, it wouldn’t tell the entire story. Today’s episode is more about working hard, thinking outside the box and never quitting than it is about the world’s most recognized namebrand waterfowl decoy, with plenty pearls of wisdom about succeeding in the outdoor industry, other businesses and just life itself.
Meeting at Dallas Safari Club
Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m in Dallas Safari Club meeting with world famous Mr. Terry Denmon. Terry, how the heck are you, man?
Terry Denmon: I am truly wonderful.
Ramsey Russell: We decided we’re going to meet at breakfast this morning. What time did you get there? The doors open at 7:00, I had not even left my apartment when I get a text from you at the front door.
Terry Denmon: I’ve been there 30 minutes when that happened. I stayed in a hotel because I needed to meet with a guy last night west of here. I had no idea how long it was going to take me to get here, so I left early, but I got here because the road, the interstate was full of traffic, but it was all doing 100 miles an hour. There’s 14 lanes and I don’t know which one I need to be in to get here. So I said, well, I’ll just go early and I’ll beat the traffic, but apparently in Dallas, Texas, you can’t beat the traffic.
Ramsey Russell: No, especially out here on 30 around convention and I’m a mile and a half from here in my apartment. And every time it will not route me if I drive my truck, it will not route me here on the back road, just got to put me on that interstate and you’re looking down at your maps on GPS on your truck and it looks like somebody dropped a plate of spaghetti and they say, take a right, I’m like, which right? Well, it’ll be a second off now. I don’t pass it, now I got to go 2 miles out of the way and come back. I’d rather walk than get on that interstate.
Terry Denmon: I love this convention center and I’ve been coming to Dallas Safari Club, I guess since the first year they had it here because I went to it when it was up here in north the trade center up this way but it’s not easy to get to 2 major interstates in the United States go right by it and you have to get off and go all kinds of different routes that are not logical, they’re not intuitive.
Ramsey Russell: I know.
Terry Denmon: And so I don’t usually use the GPS, but you can’t get here if you don’t use it.
Ramsey Russell: I stay lost in Dallas, Texas. I just stay perpetually lost and we had planned on leaving. Anita and I had planned on going back Monday morning, sleep in Sunday, whatever. After the convention, go back Monday and we’re leaving Sunday because here comes some ice, finally, winter is coming to the deep south and we’re getting out here because with 400 miles of concrete overpasses on our interstate system around Dallas, this city turns to ice when a little snow and ice hit. So we’re going to get out of here about 3:00 or 4:00 or 5:00 so we can pack our stuff and head back east. We’re getting out of here.
Terry Denmon: I got caught in Dallas with ice, one time. This was before we had cell phones and all that stuff and me and my, actually, Murry Crowe, the guy that invented the Mojo mallard my original partner or I’m his original partner. He and I came over here and I took a rifle. I had a Sheiland, you probably know who Sheiland was, some of the fastest long range shooters in the world in target competition, target season in the world. And I took a 243 pre 64 model 70 Winchester to him and had him rechamber it to a 6.5. What’s the 6.5?
Ramsey Russell: Creedmoor?
Terry Denmon: No, the one they shot the long range, the things with –
Ramsey Russell: 6.5 Creedmoor, I thought.
Terry Denmon: I got one of those, too, but no, this is way before that, so this was a really hot bullet. I had them rechamber it to a 6mm or 243, one of those, whatever it was. Then we went up north of town and picked up some farm parts, they were merged in the farming business, well, we didn’t have anything to check the weather with and so we just stopped down here in Dallas and got a room. It was dark by the time we got back to Dallas, we got up next morning, all the roads are glazed over and I know you’ve been over here where Interstate 635 runs into Interstate 20.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Terry Denmon: There’s one of those overpass ramps that goes way up in there. I don’t know if they were going to fly airplanes on it or what exactly and it’s on about a 200 bank. And fortunately, we were driving Murry’s crew cab dually farm truck. But I didn’t think it was going to get across that.
Ramsey Russell: No, I’m telling you, when this city turns the ice, it grounds you and the first time I ever came to this convention, Milhous and I, it snowed and iced and they shut down. They got gates on all the own ramps to the interstate and we had to drive about 2 hours east of here to find an own ramp and it was like an ice skating rink all the way to Jackson, Mississippi and it was a mess. And I was thinking about when you got up early this morning, sent me that text. Now look, we was in Wyoming riding around with – Had a great hunt over there with our buddies at WyoBraska and you and I riding around, we visited a whole lot about everything but duck hunting the same light, but you got to telling me, having trouble sleeping and about some little device and is that why you’re able to get up early in the morning? Tell me about this little magical thing you got that makes you sleep. I personally think it’s just in your mind, not your body, but let me hear about it.
Terry Denmon: Well, all my life, I’m kind of a hyper individual, as you know and I prefer to be called high energy, but hyper probably be a little more accurate term. And I’ve never slept very good and most of my life, I would sleep about an hour, maybe 2 at the most, I’d wake up, I’d go back to sleep. I’d sleep another hour or 2 and I’d wake up and I’ve been doing it my whole life. In fact, one time my wife brought home something I thought was the greatest invention it was ever made and it was one of them nixie tube clocks that would shine the time on the ceiling. Of course, I’d have to pick get that clock and try on their hands and try to figure out which one of them hands is a long hand, which one’s a short hand you wouldn’t be within 12 hours of having the right time brought that thing to shine on the roof. I look up there and see what time it is and go back to sleep, well since that time, I’ve kind of gotten a little older, I’ve kind of converted to the – I’ll go to sleep, I never have trouble going to sleep, I’ll just go to sleep. I’ll sleep 2 or 3 hours, wake up, I can tell it’s over with. I don’t need any more sleep I get up. Well, I don’t get up in the middle of the night, that’s kind of stupid if you ask me and I just stay. But I don’t use an alarm clock, I wake up about 04:00 every morning anyway.
Ramsey Russell: 04:00.
Terry Denmon: 04:00, yeah. So we do a lot of business in China and I think Chuck was telling the China lady about that because I don’t typically go around telling anybody about that kind of stuff. So, she tells me one day, she says, I’m going to send you a device, let you sleep and of course China’s got some funny remedies, but some of them they’ve had for 200 or 3000 years, they ain’t had this one 2000 or 3000 years because it’s electrical. So she said, only question she asked me says, you don’t have any metal in your body, do you? Pacemaker, artificial, whatever. I said, no, I don’t have metal in my body and things. So she sends this thing over here and it’s a little handheld deal, battery operated. It’s got, you turn it on.
Ramsey Russell: One of them little hand warmer deals.
Terry Denmon: Oh, smaller than that. It’s a little more pear shaped like this and you hold it in your hand and it’s got 4 settings. It’s getting a little more and it’s putting electrical impulses in your hand and I didn’t have any –
Ramsey Russell: It run through your whole body.
Terry Denmon: I guess, I don’t know. I didn’t ever try. I was scared to try it once I got it. So I researched a good bit of it and from the Google research, about half the people or some major portion of the people said it didn’t do anything for me, about half of them says the greatest device I’ve ever seen. So from that, I quickly concluded it must matter what’s making you wake up, what’s keeping you from sleeping and so you turn it on, you got 4 different settings and I turn it on to number 2 because I can’t even feel it in my hand, but I can put it up on the side of my face and I can feel it and I put it on the number 2 setting and it’ll only run about 20 minutes, then it turns itself off. It’s got a little cord you put around your wrist so you don’t lose it in a bed so I turned it on and I couldn’t tell it was doing anything and then it, 20 minutes later, it quit working. I said, well, that thing don’t work, next thing, I woke up 04:00 in the morning and since that time –
Ramsey Russell: So it puts you, you held something that you really can’t even feel the vibration and it puts you to sleep.
Where the Best Mojo Product Ideas Come From
And so it kind of carried over, so I wake up and I said, that’s a great idea because most of the best ideas are right in front of your face and you can’t see them, some of the things that we come up with, I don’t know why we didn’t come up with that 10 years ago.
Terry Denmon: It calms your mind. I’m not sleeping because my mind won’t shut down and it’s just always thinking. In fact our buddy Skip Knowles, Wildfowl magazine he asked me one time, said, where you come up with product ideas at? Mojos had some weird product ideas, a lot of them didn’t make it to the – a lot of them didn’t survive in the market and I said, I don’t know, they come to me in the night. Well, that’s pretty much proof positive your mind’s working during the night, if that happens to you. In fact, before I was in the Mojo business, when I had an engineering company, as you know, I’d wake up in the night with some great idea and I would send it in to my employees.
Ramsey Russell: I bet they like getting teched at 02:00 in the morning.
Terry Denmon: Well, they started making so much fun of me that I learned, I should have learned this to begin with, I learned send it to yourself.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Terry Denmon: And then 07:00 in the morning, send it to your employees.
Ramsey Russell: You’ll remember it.
Terry Denmon: Yeah. But so that kind of carried over into Mojo and now I’ve sold my engineering firm. I’m full time at Mojo now. And so it kind of carried over, so I wake up and I said, that’s a great idea because most of the best ideas are right in front of your face and you can’t see them, some of the things that we come up with, I don’t know why we didn’t come up with that 10 years ago. I mean, she’s right in front of you, right in front of your face. Well, something, your brain’s working at night and I hope there’s no medical people out there that really know how brains work, because I hadn’t got a clue, I’ll tell you right now. But your brain’s working at night, it’s working in a different manner somehow than it’s working during the daytime to start with, you don’t have confusion factors.
Ramsey Russell: I think it’s less, you got less distractions. I know as I’m laying down to go to sleep a lot of times and I mean, if you own a business, I guess if you’re just human, you lay down at night and you start to think about your day, think about stuff you got to do. But it’s different because the phones ain’t ringing, the text ain’t going, your wife ain’t yelling at you, the dogs ain’t in the backyard barking, there ain’t ducks coming in, I mean, you’re just, you’re in a different frame of mind. And I will not be texting people at 02:00 although I used to, all the folks that were around 10 years ago when I was building get ducks and everything else, my attorney, my accountant, my web folks, they turn off their phone or block my number in the middle of the night, cause they allowed to get text at 01:00, 02:00, 03:00, 04:00 and I turn my phone off at night, so it don’t bother me, but I think it’s cause you’re relaxed and you don’t have them distractions. And it’s just you and yourself in your mind thinking things through sometimes.
Terry Denmon: I’ve used to write articles for a magazine and they kind of wanted unusual stuff and I wrote some about I call bears and up close and things like that. So I wrote an article that says, I like bears, but not like this, because I told about the different difficulties we’ve had, I got up on a log with a wounded bear one time, I was hunting for the wounded bird, I got on the same log he was on things like that. But then one day I was thinking about, something to write about, so I wrote this article that said, if you want to be a better hunter, KISS, Keep it simple, stupid. And so I went on to explain that us humans, we do all those things you talking about you get home, it’s not so bad today because got multiple TVs. But you remember back when you had one TV big fight for the remote control from the kids and everything, they want to watch something totally stupid that you didn’t want to watch, so it was a fight it was all about dinner and what you was going to do and all the different things and animals don’t have that, animals got to think about their whole life is reproduction, survival food, bedding, about 3 or 4 things so they can concentrate on them. And so we go out and basically we overthink hunting, that’s what we do. And I went on to say the greatest hunters I’ve ever seen were in those natives in the Yukon, those trackers in Africa put people like that they are the simplest people in the world, but they can follow an animal all the way across the continent, they can find them, they understand animals and we don’t because we overthink it and I’m probably worse than and most people our buddy Steve Biggers.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Terry Denmon: Rocket Creek Retrievers. One time I showed up last year, full, actually, I showed up and he tells me which room I’m going to stay in and I go in there and on the pillow, there’s an old metal sign that says, hold on while I overthink this.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Terry Denmon: I have it on a shelf in my office today.
Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of truth to that. But it reminded me talking about at night, how your thought changes is, I was in college and I am not a numbers guy. You and I are polar opposites, I’m more on that creative and writing type side, you’re more on that rational mind of the side and man, I struggled with quantitative, empirical type stuff in college, really, truly struggled and statistics, if you’re going to go and get a master’s and do some stuff I was doing, it’s extremely important and you can’t just memorize the formulas. You got to understand what they’re talking about and going into finals, there was this one equation, I just couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t understand what it was doing. And I studied and studied and one night at about 03:00 before I was going into finals, I woke myself up at 03:00 I had been thinking about it and somehow in my sleep, I had walked through that formula and I woke up and now I understood it, I had walked myself, I couldn’t do it consciously, but unconsciously, I ended up walking myself through that formula to where, boom, I understood it. I understand it to this day.
Terry Denmon: You’re exactly correct. There’s a saying in mathematics that you can’t memorize mathematics. So if you don’t understand it, you’re not going to pass the test so you have to understand and you might memorize some numbers and things like that, but you can’t and I mean, most technical stuff is that way. So you have to have a God given ability to understand that.
Ramsey Russell: Are you talking about coming up where you come up with these great ideas and continue to innovate and continue to develop as an outdoor company, Terry, Mojo has got an incredible stretch of product line and you think all that stuff up on your own at night, you just – Do people ever suggest to you, hey, I need something or are you out there duck hunting, go, I need something?
Terry Denmon: All of the above. We get lots of calls, guy called me on the way over here yesterday and he’s got the greatest invention in the world that he wants to sell us or license to us or something like that. Most people, if you a hunter, you would like to be in the outdoor business, you’d like to work in it, be part of it, come to things like this, not as a guest or an attendee, but as an exhibitor. You want to be part of the industry and I get it, I mean, I get it, I’ve been hunting since I was 6 years old, I get it. But you can’t hardly take one product and make it in this business and that’s what they find out.
Ramsey Russell: Why, you told me that 15 years ago and I see it now, but why can’t you have a line of Mojos, the teal, the gadwall, the pintail, the world famous Spoonzilla, the Mojo mallard and make a go at it?
Terry Denmon: You probably could with that many, but most people got a product, one product
Ramsey Russell: A product, a pull string, a magic machine.
Terry Denmon: There’s probably a number of different obstacles to doing that and I could think of them probably, if I thought of them. I certainly been through it plenty of times. But the main obstacle is the products in the United States are sold by the big box stores, like on ours, 10 customers, we have probably a 1000 different customers all the world, 10 customers sell 70% of it and they don’t want to deal with a one product vendor. In fact, they’ve told us before, look, if you’ll make this product, we’ll buy it.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Terry Denmon: And we don’t do that, we don’t knock off other people’s products, but what most people do.
Ramsey Russell: I see these guys, it shows there are a lot of really good ideas out there. There’s a lot – especially in the world of waterfowling. There are things that’ll jiggle and move and pull and fly and make motion and do all this different stuff and it seem like every show I go to, somebody on a farm in Arkansas or Iowa or somewhere has come up with this idea, I look at it and go, that’s a great idea, but it doesn’t mean that when you start looking at their price point, because they’re making it in their shop to make it in America, they’re hiring American labor. The price is exorbitant and they got this one thing, all their eggs are in that one basket and I’ve learned and I guess I’m telling anybody listening, if you come up with that great idea, I would recommend calling Mojo, because if nothing else, you all might could incorporate it in and get distribution out there to part of you all’s product line. In fact, we’ve had some talks about some stuff. Like, I’ve introduced you to some of them ideas before.
Terry Denmon: Yeah, we get a lot of them. We get them really often.
Ramsey Russell: Do you like getting them?
Terry Denmon: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Mojo Embraces Innovation
There’s a huge difference between a really good product and one that will achieve commercial success and some of the very best products that I consider that we’ve ever developed are laying back there in that back warehouse at Mojo. They didn’t turn out to be a commercially successful product.
Terry Denmon: Yeah, I love it. And I tell each one of them, they call and they sometimes they’ll be kind of fishing to see if we have an interest in it and I tell my people the same thing, I said, look, somebody got an idea they want talk to us about, do not tell them no, tell them yes, because everybody’s got good ideas. We’re not the only people in the world got good idea, a lot of intelligence out there. Now, I don’t know, this is kind of hard to say, I know, because I’ve tried to say it a bunch of times, but being a really good product is good, but it doesn’t guarantee success, there’s a huge difference between a really good product and one that will achieve commercial success and some of the very best products that I consider that we’ve ever developed are laying back there in that back warehouse at Mojo. They didn’t turn out to be a commercially successful product.
Ramsey Russell: What are some of the reasons why there’s a great idea and I’ve seen a bunch of them and you have, too. What’s the difference in a great idea that really freaking works to bring those ducks in or do something like that? That’s a great idea but won’t meet reach commercial success. What are some of the barriers on reaching commercial success?
Terry Denmon: Well, the most obvious one is the fact that it’s put onto the market by somebody not capable, don’t have the capability of putting it on the market. They obviously very intelligent, they couldn’t come up with a new idea, but they put it out there and it doesn’t succeed. And then they’ll bring it to somebody like Mojo where they’ve already basically killed a product and so it’s hard to resurrect a product that didn’t succeed at one time. But basically, the most significant challenge, I said that was the most obvious, the most significant challenge is the best product out there is a brand new idea and you have to educate the hunters because you just throw an idea out there that they’ve never had, they don’t know if it works and they got to go buy one just to see if the product is sound from a functional point of view and you have to have the ability to do that. And so we’ll develop products, I’m working on one right now that I got from you and I’m working on another one come from somebody else and I told my people, I said, look, now you’re not going to hit sales the first year, it’s going to take an educational program. But we have TV, we have strong social media.
Ramsey Russell: You all got the platform to educate.
Terry Denmon: Got the platform to educate them. But you have to have enough patience and you have to be able to spend the money without a return for a year or so until you can educate the hunters and sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t so, but I think if you have the very best idea, it’s a new thought to people. Remember when you first saw the spinning wing decoy?
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Terry Denmon: You see, that thing won’t work.
Becoming a Believer of Spinning Wing Decoys
Ramsey Russell: I think one’s a Duck Show when Murry Crowe, the guy talked to a while ago, when he called me the very first time to ask me to help him develop one of these. Jeff Simmons, someone’s sporting good bastard Bonzanna had given him one of the California models and asked him if he could build them, because once it caught on demand exceeded supply and Murry can build anything. So he said, I’ll build you some. Well, it had pulleys and stuff in there and he didn’t know how to do that. Me, being his engineer buddy, called me, could see if I could do the pulley sizing for him and I wouldn’t ever get on to the pulleys. I kept asking him, say, Murry, tell me again what this is. Now, Murry didn’t duck hunt. Now his family, his brother was one of my original duck hunting friends, his family was duck hunters, but Murry was a deer hunter, he didn’t care anything about duck hunting and in fact, we owned a farm together, a good duck farm together, I own it today, you’ve been there and he wouldn’t even go duck hunting down there and he finally got aggravated and said, I don’t know anything about it. But he’s talking about wings, white on one side, you never had this thought before. Now, okay, you got wings turning, blades turning white on one side, dark on the other. If you wanted to design something to scare a duck off, that be where I’d start.
Ramsey Russell: Cause you got to be steel, right?
Terry Denmon: Yeah. And so I didn’t I didn’t even believe it, but I went up there and I helped him get this thing built, okay. And when he finally got it built, I got one of them. I saw he wouldn’t let me have it one because they had a long list of people that’s already pre ordered them, okay. And there’s some funny parts of that story, too, so I take it down to my farm in the middle of the week and the only 2 people hunting on this farm is me and another engineer buddy of mine. And you’ve been to my duck field back where we hunt the ducks is probably 2 or 3 miles off the closest paved road around there. So there’s nobody around the point of that, there’s nobody around, I put it out just as it’s getting kind of gray, not shooting time yet I put it out and I can remember turn around, looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody’s looking at me because I’m embarrassed to put it out and couldn’t have been nobody looking at me, okay. And then I start slowly kind of wading back to the blind, because it’s several minutes before shooting time and I hear, I turn around, I bet 40 or 50 miles away and right on top of the –
Ramsey Russell: You still out in decoys?
Terry Denmon: I’m still out in the decoys, yeah. And anyways, wait a minute, I think there might be something of this and then it got real popular. And then we went to Oshkosh to that big DU thing, they had an Oshkosh one year and those devices had not made it there in significant numbers. And people would come by and laugh, I mean, laugh, I’m going to laugh and say, does that thing fly? Yeah, it’ll fly, it’s not intuitive that that works.
Ramsey Russell: I was in Washington state, which does not have the allow electronic decoy to this day, so that’s ironic and I was hunting with a friend of mine on public land, he’s from Mississippi and he was just one of them tinker creative types, he’s a preacher at that but I had never seen a spinning wing decoy, but had heard about it. And I started to describe it to him, he said, well, I can make one of those. I said, really? I think I understand what you’re saying. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was saying, I’m just describing this decoy like what you described and he called me up a few months later, said, come out here and shop and take a look at what I got. And he had taken a flambeau decoy and put a race car motor and I don’t mean like a kid’s little run around you, dan track. I’m talking about one of these highfalutin, high sport radio controlled car that’ll probably fly about 70 miles an hour around the track, he’s taking that motor. And when you pull the trigger on this complicated device he had, I guarantee those wings were turning 1000 miles an hour. It’s like, holy man, if one flew off, it’s going to kill you or decapitate you and I took it out on public land in Mississippi with Mr. Ian Munn and another professor of his and turned it on, we was hunting flooded timber on Knox B refuge and they started laughing, they go, you need to turn that off, I said, well, I don’t know, man, they say this thing works. No, you need to turn that off, they are absolutely giving me grief and sure enough, before the mallards started flying, one of them wings flew off, it flew 30 miles a night in the air and disappeared and sunk, we never hadn’t seen it yet and the first flock of mallard that came over, that one winged Mojo, it’s like he was waving a man with one arm saying, you all come here because they freaking came in, within the third volley, them 2 boys are measuring and trying to figure out how to make one themselves. They work, that’s what I’m trying to say, you could, at that time, you couldn’t buy one anywhere, but they worked and I’ve been a believer in the spinning wing decoy ever since.
Terry Denmon: Well, back to the point that we started on, combined with this point, another point about educating hunters that product, had it not worked as good as it did, say it worked half as good as it did, still of great benefit, it would have been a hard product to educate the hunter to, because intuitively you look at it and you say, no that that’s run ducks off. If you want ducks is eating the grass in your yard, you’ll get rid of them, put that thing out there, it’ll run them off. But it worked so well that once it got going out there, word of mouth just took it over.
Ramsey Russell: It really did. But even that alone would not have been enough today, if you had come up with that idea today, would it be enough to attract those 10 big box customers you got? Cabela’s bass pro, whomever, would they say, okay, we’ll enter into a successful business model with you with that one product.
Terry Denmon: A company like Mojo, if it had existed then that had great connections with the buyers and all that stuff could probably do it. A stranger get a meeting with their buyers and go up there and got no proof that it works or something like that, I can’t imagine that they would pick it up, because if you had a big box business, by simple definition, you got to sell a lot. That’s what made you a big box business, they can’t afford to carry products that sell marginally, back when all the sales was going through catalogs, which had not been that many years ago, they could quote you how much revenue they had to generate per square inch of catalog. In fact, we had a product one time and it was a great product and it was a concealment product and it was brought to us by some other TV people and they didn’t pick it up because they said it did too much and they couldn’t afford the space to describe all the different things that it did so it died. There’s another case of a great product that died.
Ramsey Russell: It’s a great product, but they couldn’t put it in their catalog because it wouldn’t bring the yield per square inch that a catalog demands.
Terry Denmon: Well, it would have if you could have described all the different things it did, but it took too much catalog space to describe all the different things that it did, it is crazy.
The Importance of What a Customer Will Pay
…you’ve got to make it to where you make a little bit of money and they make a little bit of money and it sells at $39.99 or it’ll never see the light of day, profitable.
Ramsey Russell: But you said something to me one time that some of the best ideas die because of like the cost. The consumer is only going, he’ll pay something for a great idea, but only up to a certain penny.
Terry Denmon: Probably the hardest lesson we learned. We started Mojo, none of us had ever been in a business like this, the closest one would have been Jeff Simmons, he was our third man in that because he owns a big retail store. Me and Murry we’ve been in, he’s a farmer and a tinkerer and I’m an engineer with an engineering company and so one of the hardest lessons we learned was what we – in the end, ended up calling a magic price and that’s the price that a consumer will pay and somehow couldn’t even begin to explain this to you, somehow it’s subconsciously in their head how much they willing to pay for that product and a lot of good products, you can get them on the –
Ramsey Russell: They’ll pay $39.99, but they ain’t paying $42.
Terry Denmon: We came out with the best concealment. This is not the same product I was talking about while ago, best concealment stuff in the world, when we had that blind Ghillie. Do you remember that?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I do.
Terry Denmon: We made that out of polypropylene, rope fibers. You couldn’t tear it up.
Ramsey Russell: I think your cameraman still uses it.
Terry Denmon: He does. We still got a little bit, we use it and it would not sell. And there was people out there that had this artificial stuff, actual bark stripped off and everything and it lasted about a year and this stuff would last, I guess, your lifetime, it didn’t deteriorate or whatever. And so we had a big box store, said, that’s some good stuff, why don’t sell? And so he told me, the buyer told me, so tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to start lowering the price and see what happens so he started lowering the price and of course, he’s putting it on the Internet and different things like that and it hit up, got to a point, zoom, off it started selling. He said, to use his term, is flying off the shelf. So he let it fly off the shelf for a week or 2 in duck season, now. Then he started raising the price back up and it got back up after 2, quit selling. So it’s in their brain, so when we first started, we learned to go to these big box buyers that had the most experience something like that and we’d say, okay, what’s the magic price on this? And they said, $79.99 and if we can’t get it to $79.99, we prove to ourselves.
Ramsey Russell: So you showed me a product one time you all were coming out with and I said, put me down for number one, I want to prototype and it’s that automatic thing. And I called you up and said, hey, you got it, said, no, we ain’t going to sell it cause they told us that we had to hit this point if we couldn’t sell it, they got to sell it for this much to include their profit and that’s less than what we can even get it manufactured for.
Terry Denmon: Don’t forget that, Ramsey, because I about got it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, okay. I’m remembering it some.
Terry Denmon: About got it. But there’s 2 points there, we just got through discussing price and it’s subconsciously in their mind. And me and Murry both said, man, this thing’s so good, I know they’ll pay more, but we had a buyer said, okay, I’ll tell you what do, I’ll put it on my – I won’t put it in my catalog, I’ll put it on my Internet and then the store like that. But I’ll tell you right now, I’m not going to sell and they were always right 100% of the time and we were always wrong 100% of the time. If you couldn’t get it, that price, probably you might cheat that –
Ramsey Russell: Those big box buyers are, they’ve got models based on millions upon millions upon millions of market surveys and sales and metrics and they can just do their little thing on the computer and it’ll tell them $39.99 and you’ve got to make it to where you make a little bit of money and they make a little bit of money and it sells at $39.99 or it’ll never see the light of day, profitable.
User-Friendly Decoys
Terry Denmon: That’s right. And the second point is the one we talked about before that and it’s the education, if it’s a new concept and it’s not intuitive, it’s not, you say, oh, yeah, I wish I thought of that. In fact, that’s how we decide whether product will be good, if you look at somebody’s product and say, man, I wish I’d have thought of that. That’s going to be a good product because subconsciously your brain tells you, yes, you want this product here.
Ramsey Russell: Have you ever seen a product that’ll sell for more than it was expected to sell for? It’s so good and I’m bringing up spinning wing decoys again, I was out in California where that thing was invented one time. I was looking at some of those original goal posts, I was hunting with guys that had 40 year old goal post and he described to me that back in the day, back when this thing blew up, if you didn’t have one, you didn’t kill duck and he said, all the little bitty metal working shops around the Sac Valley quit. Their regular bid, has went into full scale making these things and will sell them on the side of roads, like what, you stopped by bowl peanuts in Mississippi and said he paid $600, which was a lot of money back in the early 90s. Paid $600 for his, he said, because if I didn’t have it, I didn’t get to kill ducks and so he said really and truly, they could have charged me anything and I’d have paid it. But times have changed since those days. Hadn’t they?
Terry Denmon: Yeah. And another factor that you and I would know about this is user friendly. That product that we had that you wanted, the first prototype of it was extremely effective, but it was not user friendly. And it take you about 10 or 15 minutes before, if you hunt before daily, if you hunt at first lights and it’ll take you about 10 or 15 minutes to set this thing up and if for new hunters out there inexperienced hunters out there that’s listening to your podcast now one of the greatest points you could make to them to help them with their success is that if you can find something that will help you that day, ducks are different every day, so what worked for you yesterday may or may not work for you tomorrow and Mike Morgan and I always had a saying. We’d say on TV all the time, say if what you’re doing not working, get out and try something else.
Ramsey Russell: Try something different.
Terry Denmon: If you can’t figure out what you ought to try, just get out and try something, if it don’t work, try something else, but so many hunters that I hunt will not do that. They go out there and they put a spray it out, I’m talking about duck hunting now, they go out there and put a spread out and a spread they’ve had success with in the past and the ducks won’t work the spread and they just sit there and them ducks do the same thing. If you start seeing ducks do the same thing, every time some ducks come around your spread and you don’t land them you don’t decoy them in. You need to get out and change something.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Terry Denmon: And I wrote, skip an article about that one time and my last paragraph says and some days they just not going to let you kill them. I don’t care what you –
Ramsey Russell: That’s a fact. The reason this topic is so interesting to me, Terry, is duck hunters and I’m saying us exclusively, not turkey hunters who were great and deer hunters and sheep hunters, but duck hunters, every one of them sits out there and hunts, waiting on ducks, seeing them ducks doing something different and we’re always thinking, how can I hide better? How can I do this better? How can I get one movement? What can I do? What can I do in this situation? And you see all these freaking ideas come down the pipe, I mean, we’ve got to be the most thoughtful group of hunters out there in terms of trying to invent something to increase our marginal success on ducks and I see, walking around these shows, I see some amazing ideas that I know ain’t going to get off the ground, because for some, a lot of reasons we’re talking about and everybody listen this podcast has thought of a great idea. They have thought of a good way to kill ducks or hide or do something that might make a great product, but it never is until somebody, they follow somebody’s rules for success.
The Modern Hunting Market
So you got to be able to educate the hunter yourself, but there are ways to sell it. There are brands out there that live on a lesser margin than we do.
Terry Denmon: The market is just so complicated and I think complicated is probably the wrong word, Ramsey. I think that the market set up where the big box stores sell everything. Big box stores can’t carry your product, if it’s not going to sell a lot, they’re not in the educational business. So you got to be able to educate the hunter yourself, but there are ways to sell it. There are brands out there that live on a lesser margin than we do. The big box stores margin, I mean, by the number of units you’re going to sell per year the big box board stores kind of set that for us, when we take a product to them, they going to make an estimate of how many they going to sell and if it don’t fit their scheme, they don’t do it, don’t matter how good it is, you might, if they cared that product for about 3 years, until the product educated the hunter, word of mouth educated the hunter, then the product would probably turn out to be successful. But they’re not in the business of doing that, they’re not going to lose money for 2 years. So they can make money on the third year, they got to make money the very first year, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in business, they wouldn’t be a big box store. So that’s a huge challenge to developing new products in the hunting industry, probably all industries, I don’t know, so maybe not the really big stuff like Apple, Chevrolet, they can bring out something radically new and people’s going to buy it because their brand been around so long, is so strong. But that doesn’t happen in the hunting world. Maybe in guns, but not outside of guns.
Ramsey Russell: Terry, you and I are blessed to work in the outdoor space and by relation, do a lot of hunting and fishing. And a lot of folks want to be in the outdoor industry, so they can do a lot more hunting and fishing. I remember going into Forestry and Wildlife, Mississippi State University and to a person, boy, girl, young, old, everybody in the Forestry and Wildlife program at Mississippi State had hunted or fished and from their hook and bullet experiences wanted to have a career in nature so they could be outside and the first thing those professors would tell you all the way through colleges, if you love to hunt and fish, you’re in the wrong field and I didn’t believe them, but it was true. I mean, if you’re going to be a forester, if you’re going to be a wildlife biologist, you probably ain’t going to hunt fish as much as you think you are. The outdoor space is a little bit different, this outdoor industry is just a little bit different, I’m going to lead off like this, how is what you do now with Mojo, how is it similar and different from building an engineering business, for example, you’ve been in 2 big industries. What are the similarities and differences in it?
Terry Denmon: Well, the similarity is obvious. It’s all about relationships, it’s about people trusting you. You go to a buyer, are we brand new? We go to buyer, he don’t know who we legitimately. They don’t know if we’re going to pay our bills, we don’t know if we tell him the truth, we don’t know any of that type stuff so it’s relation, all those business are relationship type business. If you would have asked me when I first started in the Mojo business, I would have told you that the engineering business is much more of a relationship business because if you go and go hire an engineering firm, which is what we were, we did project engineering take the whole project from beginning to end. You’re not going to hire somebody that you don’t have total faith in you’re not going to experiment with somebody and I would have told you that the outdoor business was not that way, but it is and it brought me to the conclusion that I can’t hardly imagine a business, that it’s not a relationship business.
Ramsey Russell: All businesses are people businesses.
Terry Denmon: It’s all about the people.
Ramsey Russell: It reminds me of a story and I’m going to back up just a step further. You’ve told us how you got into Mojo, talk about getting into engineer, because I did not know until we were working together, driving around in Wyoming that you started in federal government, I did not know that. I don’t know how I didn’t know that after knowing you almost 20 years. But you just kind of like myself leaving federal government to go do something different. You kind of had a moment like that and started totally different, talk about getting started in what became an immensely successful engineering business. But you started coming out of college working for what, US Department of Agriculture or somebody?
Terry Denmon: No, I worked for Corps of engineers.
Ramsey Russell: Corps of engineers.
Terry Denmon: Well, let’s back up to high school.
Ramsey Russell: High school.
Terry Denmon: I can remember high school. Not senior, probably not junior or maybe before that and of course, we’d all talk to one another and say, what are you going to do when we get out of high school? I can remember telling one of my friends, I said, I don’t know, but I can tell you one thing, I’m going to get off his hand labor farm and I was the hand labor.
Ramsey Russell: What kind of labor were you doing in high school?
Terry Denmon: We were farming. We grew cotton, a little bit of corn, a lot of sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes was extensively hand labor back then, it’s got somewhat mechanized now. But back then it was just about total hand labor, so, in fact, the county agent where we were in the number one parish for growing and we have parishes, Louisiana, not counties, number one parish for growing sweet potatoes, the county agent told me when I was a junior in high school. No, I would have been a, yeah, I’ve been a junior in high school going into the year between junior and senior. He said that I was the 3rd largest wheat potato farmer in that parish, because I grew 16 acres and the average farmers growing 2 or 3 acres. And anyway, so I’ve always been a hard worker, always been hyper all the energy, go do something. So somehow and I can’t answer this because I’ve been asked many times, I don’t know how I decided I was going to go to engineering school, but I was good at math and things like that and I go to a very small high school, we start first grade in that building, we finished the 12th grade in that same building not very many of us. And it was an agricultural area and so you had an option of either taking an elective, whatever you wanted, that they would help you teach there or taking agriculture. And I was big in agriculture, so I didn’t take the elective. And then I found out I didn’t have enough math to get into engineering school and I couldn’t take the elective because I was tied up in the AG in high school. So I told those professors, not professors, told those teachers, I said, look, if you can give me some books, I’ll just teach myself math. So I taught myself, with their help, I taught myself enough math. I taught myself trigonometry, geometry, I don’t remember about 3 or 4 different courses. And I got into engineering school and it was a struggle to begin with because most of them boys come from big school and some of them had calculus and here I am except for being self taught, I didn’t even have trigonometry so it was chore to begin with, but I did end up graduating in the top 25% of my class and so I don’t know why I elected to go to the government, except I always want to go out west. I mean, I’ve been spending a whole life reading Jack O’Connor and all those people, I want to go out west, so I actually went to work for a sister organization of the Corps of Engineers called the Bureau of Reclamation, it really was a top damn designers and building reservoirs and stuff like that in the United States. So I worked for them and I thought I was going to get sent to Wyoming and I ended up getting sent to North Dakota, which I wasn’t real happy with then, but actually I love my time in North Dakota. So I worked there a few years and I decided, well, I’d rather go back home. So the Corps of Engineers was trying to hire me when I went up there and so the guy told me, if you ever want to come back, you call me. So I called him, in 5 minutes I got a job in Vicksburg, Mississippi which is about 70 miles from my home. I was on Louisiana side, but I was in the Mississippi Delta so I transferred down there but I always knew that I was going to work for me. I always knew that from beginning.
Ramsey Russell: You knew that.
Terry Denmon: I knew that because in the farming, you are working for yourself so I knew that was going to work for me, I’ve always been aggressive like that. So I decided, I bought some land over in Vicksburg and I was going to build me a house on it and I said, no if I build this house, I’m stuck here. And so I’m not going to build a house and so I said, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to move back to Monroe, Louisiana, that was not my home, I lived in a little rural farming community about 50 miles out of Monroe, but that was our trade center so if you was going to start that kind of business that’s where you would have to go, you couldn’t start in that thing. So I quit my job, my wife, she worked for the Corps of engineers, too. She quit her job and we moved to Monroe and set up an engineering company and I don’t have a client or a prospect of a client. And my dad thought I was the dumbest person on earth and he wasn’t too far away –
Ramsey Russell: Gave up a great government job, going business for yourself, ain’t got a single client.
Terry Denmon: There wasn’t many jobs with all those benefits back then, insurance and all that stuff that didn’t exist in anything but the biggest companies. And so but I told my dad, said, no, I’m going to do it, I’ll be all right and he said, what are you going to do if you don’t make it? I said, they told me if I didn’t make it, come on back. So I’ll go back and get that same job. So my wife got a job working for the government in Monroe, not the Corps of Engineers, I forgot what agency it was. And so we didn’t have no money but I would survey, I’m an engineer and a surveyor, I would survey on the weekend and you’d make enough cash to survive and that’s all we were doing was surviving. But I only knew one thing, they wouldn’t go outwork me, they might beat me this way or that way, but they could never outwork me, so I just worked and I kind of hate to say this about myself, but I’ve always been an honest person, I grew up in a very honest environment where everybody was honest. If he told you something, you could count on it, if you broke down on the side of the road, they stopped and hip the first person they come by was the first one who was going to stop you and hip you. And so I think that that environment that I grew up in that rural environment with all those solid people, I think that helped me a whole lot and I struggled for a couple of years. And one of the first things that I noticed is I started working for the government, I just knew government, because I’ve been working in the government.
Ramsey Russell: Doing like government contracts.
Terry Denmon: Yeah. Design and government projects working for cities and towns and the state and things like that the federal government and that’s the ones I work for, a lot of engineering companies, especially smaller ones, don’t want to do that because it’s kind of paperwork intensive. You work for the federal government it’s pretty paperwork intensive and a lot of my engineers in later years would complain about that say look guys, quit complaining, they paying us to do this. Some of these people that you’d be have to be competing against, you’re not competing against them, just like you, they don’t want to do the paperwork.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Terry Denmon: What do you care? We get paid for engineering’s paperwork anyway. And so I just worked hard and worked hard. And as I started to say a while ago, one of the things I noticed when working for these government agencies, which would be in Louisiana, we have police juries, that’s our county. That’s our county government. And those people get elected independently or city council person or people like that, a lot of these really crusty old guys would be on there and I was young and not only I was 20 something years old when I was doing this and not only was I young, I looked younger than I was. And that was a problem for me, people were kind of hesitant to hire an engineer looked like he just got out of high school yesterday. But I noticed that the people that I got along with the most were the crusty old guys. I kind of figured that out because I tell them the truth if you made a mistake usually make a mistake, everybody starts finger pointing at somebody else, okay, we made a mistake, we screwed that up, we’re going to fix it for you, brother. And so it’s like selling product, word of mouth goes around all these county people know other county people, all these city people know other city people, these state people know other state people. And so I just I suffered for several years and my family suffered for several years, but then it caught on.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And that the rest is history.
Terry Denmon: And the rest is history.
Building a Brand with Integrity
But we don’t do that, we’re going to stay true to Mojo and make the best product we can.
Ramsey Russell: They weren’t going to outwork you and you decided to build a brand just based on all you knew from growing up on the farm out in sweet potato country was be a man of integrity, build a brand on integrity. A lot of people think brand is like the logo or the look or the feel of a company, it’s not, it’s really that company’s track record for doing what they say. That’s what your brand is that track record for delivering what you say you’re going to deliver and it doesn’t matter if you’re an engineering or Mojo or any business in the world. It is who you are, that’s your brand.
Terry Denmon: Absolutely. Your 100% right.
Ramsey Russell: You can look slick and talk slick and walk fast and whatever – By God, its what people are saying about you on how you responded to good and bad and ugly situations.
Terry Denmon: The Mojo brand and it’s an easy word to remember, that helps your brand a lot. We are under intense pressure to make cheaper products because price sales.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right, we talk about that.
Terry Denmon: And even the buyers want us to make up cheaper version because they can sell it. And I have to fight my guys off especially the guy that manages Mojo farmer, he’s the one that has the relationships with the buyers for the most part but I said, no, we’re not going to be a Me-Too company now, we’re not going to be a cheap company, we’re going to always be Mojo. And as long as I own it and we could sell a lot more, you could double size this company just by making a going down there and make a same thing everybody else makes, it sells in big numbers. But we don’t do that, we’re going to stay true to Mojo and make the best product we can. Now, we still limit it, people say, why don’t you make a duct that will operate in salt water? You can do it, it’d probably be a $400 duct and ain’t nobody going to buy it, so they want it, but they won’t buy it in the end. So it’s terrible pressure to lower the quality of your product line in order to meet price point.
The Misconception About “Made in China”
So you have to go back to China and China gets kind of a bum rap because made in China’s junk. But what I understand is China makes iPhones, they make some of the most incredible technology on God’s earth. But if you tell them, hey, look, I need this $100 to shift to $50, they say, we can do that. It’s going to be cheap, it’s going to break, it’s made in China.
Ramsey Russell: Right. Well, we kind of sort of talked about that the consumer’s got an idea or a feeling or an almost an innate preconceived notion of what he’s willing to pay for something at any given time. And we go back, some of the life lessons I’ve learned from is how you all come up with this idea, you’d go to the big box, big box run a model say, well, here’s what we can pay you for it and you say, well, I think it cost us more than that to make it and if it ain’t selling, it ain’t worth making. So you have to go back to China and China gets kind of a bum rap because made in China’s junk. But what I understand is China makes iPhones, they make some of the most incredible technology on God’s earth. But if you tell them, hey, look, I need this $100 to shift to $50, they say, we can do that. It’s going to be cheap, it’s going to break, it’s made in China. But that’s what it’s almost like the consumer’s preconceived notion is driving that whole system. China can make the best state of the art made in saltwater if you’re willing to pay for it. But you ain’t willing to pay for it. When are we back? We back something cheaper. That’s just how the world works.
Terry Denmon: That’s it in a nutshell and you touched on one point there, China started off, they had extremely cheap labor and they made cheap products and but they really don’t have cheap labor in China anymore. They’ve developed a good middle class in China. I saw the other day where China had as many as, if not more billionaires than the United States had.
Ramsey Russell: Golly, I believe it.
Terry Denmon: Yeah. Because I met – and I always thought of China as some 3rd world type country, infrastructure wise and stuff like that. And but they send us pictures all the time up there where they work in, but looked like Downtown New York City, Downtown Los Angeles, high rises and beautiful highways and they built dams and reservoirs, they spent a lot of money on there. So we have more by accident than anything else we have worked our way around over the years to where we are. We have a really good situation in China. We have a lady over there that we deal with –
Ramsey Russell: I met her the other day.
Terry Denmon: That’s right, Tom. And she manages all our stuff, we’re extremely smart. You can tell her something, she catch on to it faster than I can catch on to it and she’s extremely smart. But I had a conversation with her when we first started working for her, I said Tom you all were able to survive on cheap products for years, you had cheap labor, you could make cheap products, but you don’t have cheap labor anymore and we go out to survive on quality, she said, I know that. And so quality in China is probably, well, it’s a lot better than it used to be, still, the workers are the workers.
Ramsey Russell: It can be as high quality as the American market is willing to pay for it.
Terry Denmon: That’s absolutely it.
Ramsey Russell: But Walmart is a major corporation because it’s that price point, more for less.
Terry Denmon: Yeah.
Wanting More for Less = A Loss in Quality
Well, less ain’t necessarily more. It really can’t be.
Ramsey Russell: And we Americans have become conditioned to, we want more for less. Well, less ain’t necessarily more. It really can’t be.
Terry Denmon: The big box stores don’t really care that much about whether it’s real high quality or not, because if it’s a product that has a lot of problems, the person don’t blame the retail store that they bought it from, they blame the brand, okay. Nor does the retail store pay for it, the vendor pays for it, we pay for bad products that go through that, they back charge us for that and they don’t send you a bill. They lop it off your invoice and send you a smaller check.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. Surprise.
Terry Denmon: They ain’t worried about collecting their money. And so China I’m sure they still make a lot of of cheap product there, but you brought up iPhones, how about Smart TVs and all that stuff –
Ramsey Russell: All that stuff.
Terry Denmon: And they can do things over there that we can’t. They got equipment to work with that they can test things more than we could ever even dream of testing them in a company of the Mojo size.
Ramsey Russell: You touched on a touchy subject talking about all the billionaires in China and I mean there’s a lot of folks that believe we need to bring back American manufacturing and back when America was great, we had American manufacturing. But at some point, in time something changed where manufacturing went overseas and now you got a lot of folks that it would be a lot more jobs, it would be a lot more wealth, I believe we were making cars and trucks and everything here in America. But do you think – because you lived back in those days, now, come on, you’ve seen the rise and the fall of the whole manufacturing industry. Do you think we can ever bring manufacturing like this back to America full scale?
Terry Denmon: Well, except in your last 2 words, full scale, you can bring a lot of it back, but you have to have a product that can be built by robots to some extent, it can’t just be labor.
Ramsey Russell: So it still won’t entail American people on the assembly line, it’s going to have to be robotic.
Terry Denmon: No, the people in America are not going to work for $15 an hour, not the quality of people that you need, they can stay at home, make $15 an hour as you and I know so.
Ramsey Russell: I think some of the fast food restaurants, Terry are paying 2025 right now.
Terry Denmon: That’s exactly right. I saw, I didn’t see it, my lady at work for the engineering company saw it in Baton Rouge back during COVID went to McDonald’s to pick up an egg McMuffin in the morning, they got a thing in the windows, they pay in a bonus, signing bonus, like you a professional football player come to work in a McDonald’s store.
Ramsey Russell: So Americans, you just don’t think that the average American is willing to go back to work like they would back in the 40s and 50s to bring full scale manufacturing back, because if you did and you happen to pay more than they had to pay in China, now we’re blowing those margins that the American consumer just ain’t going to pay more.
The Mojo Mallard Machine
… you saw the Mallard Machine, it’s got the motor underwater.
Terry Denmon: That’s exactly true. And we get we get hit all the time about China manufacturing, made in the USA, stuff like that, there’s nothing I’d rather do than make this product in America. But it’s not going to happen, not our product. In China, we have 42 suppliers, 42 different suppliers that are supplying some part of ours that’s coming to an assembly plan. We got several motor people especially specialize in different kind of motors, like this new Mallard Machine, you saw the Mallard Machine, it’s got the motor underwater. We go to a really high end company that makes waterproof motors instead of we have a great motor guy. And we probably have 5 or 6 different people that mold for us, different kinds of moldings and we do 3 basic kind of molds, we do blow mold, that’s typical decoy. We do injection mold, that’s the real, that your recorder there was injected molded. And we do slush molding, which is a Rotomold phase on those elite series that have the flexible bodies and then then we have more than one person that does that because of the part of China that was in. We have factories that are scattered from, say, about the same distance as from where you live to Chicago, because they do something different but we go try to find the best people we can find over there. And as a kind of a summary statement, you could make this in America if the people be willing to pay for it, that’s what me and you been talking about since we started this podcast –
Ramsey Russell: Its catch 22.
Terry Denmon: If they willing to pay for it. But they not willing to pay for it, they want American made at China price.
Ramsey Russell: If we brought it all back to America and people were willing to pay for it, that’s the only way we’d be able to bring it back. But in time, if we brought it all back to America, the average wage would go so high, people would be willing to pay for it. You see what I’m saying? Like I read something one time, Terry, that back in the 50s, General Motors was the largest employer in America and what they were paying their labor was way above average. And now the largest employer in America is Walmart and they’re paying minimum wage and not even 40 hours weeks. Most guys have their scheduling both for 20, 25 hours. So a lot of your Walmart employees are having to work 2 jobs and that’s a losing battle. We got to make more money to pay more money. I think that threshold for what the American consumer would be willing to pay for a product would be more if the average wages in America were more. So it’s almost a catch 22 on trying to bring manufacturing back. If you brought it back, we’d have higher wages left, we’d be willing to pay more. But until that happens, we’re just stuck in a rut.
Terry Denmon: If you could get through that 5 or 10 years it takes to get from where we at today to where you’re described, you could do it. But for most of the history of America, the United States was a one community country. We were just us, okay. And now we live in a global market and people, at the end of the day, it’s price that sells the stuff, okay? And so you can go to any country on the face of the globe and get anything made today. And so when I was starting back in the engineering business, cut and sew products were moving from the midwest to the south because of labor. Then they left here and they went to Mexico and they went to Brazil and now they in China. Now they lot of them going from China to South Vietnam and they just chasing cheap labor. And that’s what sets the price of the cut and sew items that you buy. And so there’s no Santa Claus you’re not going to get good stuff at the cheap price, it just not what happens.
How the American Labor Market Affects Brands Like Mojo
… I mean, the whole idea to climb and chase and earn.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right. Forrest my son Forrest is running a landscape crew, got a landscape company and he is absolutely struggling to find good labor, any labor. And it’s like I asked him one time over a certain employment he got rid of, I said, what is your criteria for hiring somebody? What do you interview? What do you ask them? How do you know? He said, daddy, if they show up, they’re hired. He said, because I know they ain’t going to stay, but if they show up, they’re hired. Are you seeing the same thing in your business, finding good help? What’s the difference in the back when America was great manufacturing, that different generation versus today, in trying to find labor, why can’t we find labor? And what’s the difference in some of the labor you’re hiring versus what you might have hired 20, 30 years ago?
Terry Denmon: Well, there’s a lot of differences and I don’t know if they come immediately to mind, but you want to hire good people, you want them to be law and most of all you want them to stay. You want them to come to work, but then you want them to stay for a long period of time, because once they get to where they know things now people swap jobs around so much, by the time they get to where they productive for you, they change jobs and it’s just tough –
Ramsey Russell: Our expectations for pay and for gratification and for moving ahead are they unrealistic? I think they are.
Terry Denmon: I think they are. A real smart guy, a friend of mine had helped invent a computer chipmunk, lots of big companies. He told me he saw a study one time, he said money won’t retain employees. He said he just puts them on the money chase, they start chasing more and more money. So what retains employees is they feel like they part of the deal, they understand what their job is, they understand what the big picture is and they can see where their job fits into the big picture and I’ve always remembered that it’s hard to accomplish, but I’ve always remembered that. But a lot of our people are like warehouse type people, they’re not particularly skilled or something like that. They don’t care if they come to work or not for the most part, we get some good ones, we get some really good ones. We had some stays a long time but then a lot of them that come up here and work, they work, I won’t work for Mojo as cool as it can be. Well, it don’t matter if you working for Mojo or who work, warehouse workers moving a lot of boxes around and they don’t care if they come to work or not. So we have an attitude problem with at least the lower end of the pay scale employees in America so.
Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s see, I’m sitting there thinking, I hope Forrest don’t get mad at me to saying this, but I don’t already said it, so I’ll say it again. I’ll keep going the storyline, he had an employee that he loved, loved his kid that hadn’t hit 1100 outside yet and he still loved him because the guy was showing up, doing everything and he liked him so well, he gave him a 25% pay increase because he wanted to move him on up. And what he found out, immediately after giving that pay increase, the boy started working 25% less. He was happy where he was, so he started skipping days at work to keep. And I’m like, that don’t make sense, I mean, the whole idea to climb and chase and earn. And here’s what I’m getting at, Terry, is I’ve been at this now for 22 or 23 years and thanks to Ms. Anita, it works. But it’s a somebody that I’ve been talking to they wrote me a text the other day, they said, man talking to you and seeing what you’ve done and everything else, you’ve inspired me and my goal is in one year, to be exactly where you are and I’m like, and all I could say to myself was, it took me 20 years to get here, of getting up every day and taking one step and one step and one step forward and 5 step back because of something and then going again for 20 years. And I’ve inspired this person to be where I am in one year and I don’t see how it’s possible, I don’t see how that’s even realistic. You’ve got to get up and work, you’ve been at this thing for a long time.
Terry Denmon: Long time. How you eat an elephant, Ramsey.
Ramsey Russell: One bite at a time.
Terry Denmon: One bite at a time. That’s the only way you can eat an elephant. You can’t take bigger bites because the animals bigger, so you just got to do that and you got to build solid as you go. If you try to go too fast, you mean you’ve seen tons of –
Ramsey Russell: Can’t do it.
Terry Denmon: Go too fast. They run the company because they’re trying to take on too much at one time so it’s one bite at a time.
Ramsey Russell: You said something one day over my home and you said to me, Terry, you said, a college degree can be a recipe for failure or mediocrity is the word you use. What do you mean by that? I understand it, you and I both been to college, but I know some extremely successful people that have not been to college. Why did you say that? What were you saying when you said that?
Terry Denmon: Yeah, and it’s something that I am saying it to everybody right now, but something I wouldn’t normally sell to say to everybody because I would encourage everybody to go get a college degree if they can.
Ramsey Russell: Me, too.
Terry Denmon: And because it certainly protects your future, but you get a college degree for the most of us. Now, I’m not talking about going getting a medical doctor degree and all that other stuff, you go and go get a middle class job. And then once you get in that middle class job, it’s hard to get out of it again. Not many people that did go do what I did, I had a wife and 2 kids going to quit their job. She quits her job, move to another town, start with –
Ramsey Russell: Same here.
Terry Denmon: Zero income and don’t even know where it’s going to come from. Not many people willing to be that to take that many chances. So they get this job, they comfortable, they go have a good life, they can see all that coming. And so it’s going to keep you from achieving some things that you achieve otherwise because you mentioned it then you’ve seen a lot of people that don’t have a college degree, they willing to swing the bat, they willing to try some things and some of them turn out to be very rich.
Ramsey Russell: I think it goes back to what you said earlier, nobody’s going to outwork me. I want to get somewhere and I’m willing to work to get there, I’m willing to climb and dig and work those sleepless nights and just keep going because it ain’t the top of the mountain, we all got this idea, I want to be at the top of the mountain, I want to be at a certain pay grade. What I’ve learned in 20 years is there ain’t no top of the mountain, just keep climbing. That’s where life happens on the side of mountain, just keep climbing and going, it’s fun. It gives you life purpose.
Terry Denmon: And for me, don’t get too attached to money. I grew up poor, so I never had any money. And I could have done a lot of things that made more money than I made, but I could take Mojo and make more money, I’ll get back to them building all the Me-Too products on the market but don’t get overly attached to money. Now, I bet you there’s not very many people out there listening to me say this, disagreeing with me, but you can get overly attached to Bunny and life’s all about money. And it’s not about money, it’s about, to me, it’s not about money, it’s about accomplishment. But I like to do and I know for a fact that you the same way I like to, when I go home tonight to go to bed, I like to say, man, we did some good today.
Mojo: Delivering a Great Product
I cannot imagine a better spinning wing decoy than new Mojo mallard, it is absolute state of the art.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I know this about you, Terry because I know you and you find a lot of purpose and a lot of satisfaction in delivering a great product. I mean, it’s like and I think it’s embodied with that new Mojo mallard you got. You all turned out Mojo for, I don’t know 20, 30 years and then you took everything that worked and didn’t work and put it into this new Mojo Mallard, which I’m telling you there is not possibly or ever going to be, I cannot imagine a better spinning wing decoy than new Mojo mallard, it is absolute state of the art.
Terry Denmon: Well, it kind of gets back to something that we talked about a while ago, some products are just right in front of your face, now the Mojo mallard and I’m not credited me, I didn’t do the Mojo mallard, my personal partner, Murry Crowe did the Mojo mallard. And he’s that type of person, he’s not going to build something in the middle. Everything he’s build is going to be up in start. And so the decoys that was being made back then had the little bitty motors and blah, blah, blah so he goes, gets a caterpillar cab blower motor big one makes aluminum wings and just does a really heavy duty stuff.
Ramsey Russell: He initially made aluminum wings, you told me recently, because he was in the – He raced and those cars were made out of that sheet aluminum.
Terry Denmon: He built dirt track cars –
Ramsey Russell: Dirt track cars.
Terry Denmon: And they wrapped them old 4 old 40 thousand with some aluminum.
Ramsey Russell: He just had it on hand, so that’s what he used,
Terry Denmon: He had 4 by 8 sheets of that and he took some snips and started cutting wings out with a snip like that and then he built it. He used a double shaft motor, instead of needing pulleys and all that stuff he just hooked the wings directly to the motor, we called that the direct drive system, that’s really what Bronco stood a day. And you couldn’t hardly make that darn thing not run. Well, why didn’t we just keep improving the Mojo mallard every year from 20 years now? But we didn’t. We drifted off in other directions, made good decoys, but not as good as that one was. So I kept thinking, I said we just need to make a modern. Now, that thing was crude, okay, it was a wings attached to a motor with a battery hook to a must be and a switch, that’s about all there was to it and they like they like a lot of these accessory type things. They like the remote controls and the timers and the intermittents and things like that. So why not just make a new Mojo mallard, so I started off working on that. One of the weak links, not the weak link, one of the weak links of the original one was the fact that we had the motor hook to the body. We didn’t have any other way doing it back then.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Terry Denmon: And I solved that when we did the elite series, but then I wanted a different way of doing it. So this new Mojo mallard got a whole new patent pending, a method of assembling the motor inside the body, the idea of that is it makes it run smoother, smoother is faster smoother is quieter, all that makes it, so I’m pretty proud of it.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me about on this episode on this because you got this new product that I used and you sent me a prototype, you made whatever 50, 60 of them prototypes sent around to see what’s going to break, what’s going to stay and what’s going to work. You all have got that new Mallard Machine and it’s a single duck butt with a thrust trolling motor point straight down is how I describe it. But when you put that thing on the water, it looked like a jug out there on the Mississippi river getting hit by a catfish, you’d kind of see it sit and bob a little bit and all of a sudden it go, boom and it would woke up the whole pond just with ripples and water, I think it’s going to be immensely successful. I put one little video clip on Instagram and my email just blew up, won’t know what it was, where they could get it. How’d you all come up with that idea and tell me about it?
Terry Denmon: When we were fairly young in the Mojo business, we bought a company from Arkansas that had invented the first Mojo Mallard Machine. And I was at a DU banquet at the civic center in Monroe, Louisiana, before I was in Mojo and I walked out, it’s got a big hall that goes all the way around and I walked out the hall and there was one of these things in a cow tub and nobody was tending to it. It just said, step on the button, I stepped on that button, 08:00 next morning I called that guy, had him sent one to me and –
Ramsey Russell: They were amazing.
Terry Denmon: I kept it in front of my favorite blind on our farm and I throw it up on the top of a button wheel bush just to get it out of the water and then you’d put it there, but it was a trolling motor upside down, prop upside down and it had arms out there and it was floated in the water by first 4, then 3 decoys and when you bump that prop of course it’s pulling it down, it would pull it down make those decoys dip and make ripples everywhere. And I don’t liked it, you had to be cautious with it, you could overdo it with that one, I love that product. But we lost our motor manufacturer one time in China and it took an improved trolling motor, motor to make that thing because of the way it worked. And so me and Chuck, Mojo Chuck Smart manages Mojo for him, and me and him always said, well, we need to make one that you can just punch the button and throw in the water, because that thing took for 5 minutes to set up, 10 minutes to set up. So it wasn’t that many people do it I even had a guide tell me that hunted flooded timber all the time said I think I killed waters, but it’s just kind of a pain to deal with.
Ramsey Russell: I can’t stand it. So I can’t stand taking the time to set too much stuff up.
Terry Denmon: That’s what we covered while ago they won’t take – People won’t take another 10 minutes to be successful. They willing to be unsuccessful instead of spending the 10 minutes, it’s illogical to do that so let’s find one. So we worked on, we weren’t working on that thing for 4 or 5 years, but in the end, we designed a float, like a buoy. A buoy, like out in the river in a lake and stuff like that because buoys are self riding, if you run over them, they send them to back up again, okay, so that’s what makes that thing do that. We make the prop, make it Bob over, Bob around and then we kill it and it’s got on and off cycles in there for is so low as a half a second.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Terry Denmon: And it’s got some as much as a couple of seconds.
Ramsey Russell: It’s got a remote, I can turn it on, turn it off. I don’t know why you turn it off, but I can.
Terry Denmon: Well, the only reason we got the remote on it is not to turn it off. Even though people do that, they say, they claim, well, if ducks ain’t flying, I’m going to save my motor, the devil with that as much as it costs to save my battery. I’m sorry. The devil with that as much as it costs to go duck hunting buy you a spare battery.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Terry Denmon: Or something like that because something that will attract a duck, we never turn it off when we duck hunting, unless the ducks are really shy that day and you need to turn it off right on short fouling or something like that. Other than that, if it attract a duck, keep running it, don’t turn it off but I use the remote control, because if you put it on remote control, it’s not running until you turn it on. So I’m out there in the water before daylight, in the dark, I turn it in that cycle, I put it out there, when I get in the blind I got the remote hook to my call lanyard, I turn it on, I leave it on.
Ramsey Russell: Our buddy BC Rogers called you up and said he wanted a half dozen of them and I don’t think you need that many. No, I like the real traditional decoy spread, a clump there, a clump there, a big old pocket in the middle. Ducks like it, it’s just tried and true, put a decoy in each clump, I’m done. Or put one of them in the clump that’s up windside, where they’ll drift to it, boom, it’s over, that’s all I need.
Terry Denmon: Not many people use this decoy spread that you kind of talk about there, but I remember when you and I was in Argentina. You remember that?
Ramsey Russell: I do.
Terry Denmon: And they say, I’ve seen a little bit of this, but I hadn’t seen it near as much of as the old guys told me that puddle ducks don’t like to fly over other puddle ducks, I have seen that. But it’s not just definite, they won’t fly over, not like you got a wall up there or nothing like that. But we got a good friend in Argentina that Ramsey and I have hunted with a lot and he’s kind of overbearing, if that would be a reasonable word. So he had to go to town one afternoon, he couldn’t go home, he said, I won’t go out and set you all up and then I got to go to town so he goes out there and we tried to get him to set it up with our decoy spread, hunting rosy-bills and he won’t do it. So then he finally gets in his truck and leaves and me and Ramsey gets out and rearranges these decoys have a group on the right, a round group on the right, a round group on the left and all rest of its open and they can get in there any direction they want to and if I say so myself, we want them rosy-bills out that day.
Ramsey Russell: We wore them out. As soon as he left, we went out and made our spread and that was all she wrote.
Terry Denmon: And if you listen to this podcast, let me tell you something about Ramsey Russell. He preached for 15 minutes about shoot your lane.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, come on now, Terry.
Terry Denmon: And there’s 3 of us in this blind and Ramsey’s on the right hand, so his first shot would be far left, even past me and then he was shooting. So finally I said, Ramsey, what happened to shooting your lane? And he says and I quote, my lane goes where I go.
Ramsey Russell: Well, you’ve ridden with me for 3 days in Wyoming. You see how I drive now?
Terry Denmon: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: I don’t drive no different than our shoot.
Terry Denmon: No, that’s about the same way.
Ramsey Russell: Terry, it’s always good to see. I always love having you on and I’ve wanted to have this conversation for a long time. It’s just you didn’t just wave a magic wand and make Mojo, it took a long time and you followed the same model building Mojo that you followed leaving the federal government building the engineering company.
Terry Denmon: Basically true. Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And so many people listening, I know because I hear it all the time, so many people want to be in the outdoor space and I say and we talked about this the other day at your office when I stopped by just to drop something off. If you got a good idea do something with it, because we don’t got all the answers, we don’t got all the best ideas, there’s a lot of good ideas out there. But I tell anybody listening, if you want to be an outdoor world, don’t come up with that unique idea and bring it to market, make it happen. But there’s a lot be said by reaching out to a company like Mojo. I mean, there’s a lot of folks that will reach – A lot of you all’s products in play have been people that come up with a great idea knew they couldn’t take it to market, do anything. They called you up and cut a deal.
Terry Denmon: Yeah. And a lot of people don’t understand why I do this, but people called me like that I said I’ll help you do that, buddy, if you want to go in business, they talk about going to business being a competitor of ours. I said, I’ll help you go into business if that’s what you want to do, I understand it. I wanted to go in this business people helped me go into it, even though that wasn’t a plan of mine, it just happened I just happen to be standing in the right place at the right time. But if they want to go into business, if they committed enough to pay the price, they probably make it. If they don’t make it with a first product, come up with another one. But you got to keep be committed –
Ramsey Russell: Just keep on going.
Terry Denmon: You got to really want to be in the business. They’re not going to hand it to you.
Ramsey Russell: I think that everybody, every company that’s in this industry, the outdoor industry or basically, I’d say any industry, automotive or engineering or any industry in the world, they have brought something of value to the American market and that’s why they’re successful in business. If you got an idea, bring it to market, that’s the best way to be big in the outdoor industry is not to come to work for somebody, but to bring something of value. There’s a lot of good ideas out there.
Terry Denmon: Yeah, and be committed to it. Sam Walton said one time, he said, believe in your product more than anybody else believes in it.
Ramsey Russell: I’m going to end on that note. Terry thank you very much. Folks thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.
