Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

operations, on nothing more than a family’s dream, hard work, and a shoestring budget. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream opened its first store in a run-down gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978. It was sold for $326 million to a competitor in 2000. Walmart started as a five-and-dime store in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1950 before Sam Walton and his family created the world’s biggest retailer. In 1946, S. Truett Cathy opened a single restaurant, a twenty-four-hour diner outside of Atlanta, which was so small it had only ten stools and four tables. He and his brother named it the Dwarf Grill. Today, Chick-fil-A sells more than $4 billion in chicken sandwiches and other food annually across the country.
    Like those businesses, Duck Commander was nothing morethan a dream when I decided to launch the company. Obviously, I had no idea the business would become what it is today, but I had the courage and determination to believe we could compete with the more established companies in the duck-call industry, some of which had been manufacturing calls since the early twentieth century. My idea of starting Duck Commander began when Al Bolen made his comments about my ability to command ducks on the water. But it was during another hunting trip that my business finally started to come to fruition.
    Baxter Brasher, a fellow member of White’s Ferry Road Church and an executive of Howard Brothers Discount Stores, where Kay worked, asked me to take him duck-hunting. Brasher had noticed a lot of men and boys asking me questions about hunting, fishing, and duck calls before and after church, and he was curious to find out what all the fuss was about. After I showed him how it was done, Brasher was even more impressed. He told me, “You really, really ought to build a duck call.”
    I told him I had a design and a plan to do it but didn’t have the money to make it happen.
    “Well, how much money would you need?” Brasher asked.
    So I asked around and checked on the price of equipment and everything else I would need. I went back to Brasher and told him it would cost about $25,000 for me to get into the duck-call business.
    “Twenty-five thousand?” Brasher asked me as he shuffled some papers on his desk. “Let me see. Here’s what you do: You take this piece of paper—it’s my financial statement—and you take it down to the bank. Walk in there and tell them you want twenty-five thousand dollars. They’re going to say, ‘Do you have any collateral?’ You hand them this piece of paper and say, ‘There is my collateral right there. He’s backing me.’ ”

    I told him I had a design and a plan to do it but didn’t have the money to make it happen.

    I asked Brasher, “How much do you want?”
    “I don’t want anything,” he told me. “The reason I don’t want anything is I know it’ll work. You’ll do well. I don’t want a dime. I want to know I helped someone get started. You just go down there and tell them what you need.”
    So I went down to the bank and walked in, and a clerk asked if she could help me.
    “I need to see Mr. George Campbell, the man who loans the money,” I told her.
    She walked me back to Campbell’s office and he asked, “How can I help you?”
    “I need twenty-five thousand dollars,” I told him. “I’m going into the duck-call business.”
    “Mr. Robertson, what do you have for collateral?” he asked me.
    I laid that piece of paper down on Campbell’s desk just like Brasher told me to do and answered, “There’s my collateral.”
    I never will forget what happened next. Campbell looked at the paper and looked at the name. Then he said, “Brenda, will you get us some coffee?”
    Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought to myself. He went from “who are you,” “what do you want,” and “where’s your collateral” to “let’s have coffee.”
    Duck Commander—and my dream of building my own duck calls—was about to take flight.
    After I had the bank loan, I went into high gear looking for the machinery I would need. By chance, I ran across a classified in the back of a magazine that was advertising a lathe, which is a woodworking machine I needed to build the barrels for my duck calls. I called the seller to inquire about the lathe he was trying to get rid of.
    “How much money do you have to spend on this, Mr. Robertson?” the guy asked me.
    “Well, I only have about twenty-five thousand,” I told him.
    “You’re in luck, Mr. Robertson,” the man