“Building a successful business is a lot like making a great gumbo.”
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at us. We made it through some really tough times. We were a lot like … roadkill. Most people just saw a dead, stinky animal that had the bad luck to run out in front of the wrong vehicle. But when we saw roadkill, we saw something that could catch a sackful of crawfish. We saw potential in the most unlikely places!” Never satisfied with the duck calls that were on the market, Phil began to experiment with making a call that would produce the exact sound of a duck. By 1972, the same year Willie was born, Phil finally created the duck call of his dreams. As the story goes, one of his hunting buddies heard the long-hailing sound and told Robertson that he wasn’t just calling the ducks, but “commanding” them, and so Duck Commander was born. Soon after, Phil received a patent for his call and the Duck Commander Company was incorporated in 1973. The business was a true home-grown operation that started in a dilapidated shed where Phil made duck calls from Louisiana cedar trees. In the early days, Phil traveled store to store to sell his products, while the Robertson home became his “factory” from where the calls were assembled, packaged, and shipped. The Robertson family — Phil, Miss Kay and their boys Alan, Jase, Willie and Jep — assisted in the packaging and shipments of the calls, while helping Phil with his commercial fishing business. They would run the nets and take the fish to the
market — all to help keep food on the table while Duck Commander was getting off the ground. Willie says he honed his skills as a salesman by selling the freshly caught fish at the market with his mom as a young boy. Even then, the Robertsons’ “Little Tycoon,” always worked to negotiate the best price. “I learned pretty quickly that the faster you sold the fish, the faster you got to go home,” Robertson wrote in The Duck Commander Family. “I learned how to be a good salesman by selling those fish on the side of the road when I was a kid. When it’s hot, fish spoil quickly, so there was no time to waste. Once I saw that Mom was more likely to spend some of that cash we made on something that I wanted at the store if I did a good job that day, that was just the motivation I needed to work on my craft. “As I got older and wanted to buy more things,” he continued. “I realized selling stuff was my ticket.” In those early days, the Robertsons didn’t have much in the way of material wealth, and the kids were often on free and reduced lunches at school. At home, they cut and folded boxes to package duck calls, often late into the night. They took orders over the phone, often writing them down on napkins or paper plates, and whatever else they could find. In the first year, the business sold about $8,000; by the fourth year, that ballooned to $35,000. Eventually, Duck Commander was selling $25,000 worth of duck calls to Walmart, one store at a time. Sources say that once an executive from Walmart learned of this, he called and told Phil that he needed to go through him directly to sell the merchandise in their stores. Luckily, and with Walmart’s blessing, the >
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