9-Figure CEO of Ammunition Depot, Dan Wolgin, Talks about Business, Life, Manhood

Joel Gandara 00:00:00  One. All right. I got my friend Dan Walden with me. He's the CEO and one of the owners at ammunition depot.com. He's a father. He's a husband. He's a friend of mine. He's a great guy. One of the smartest guys I know. He really knows how to take complex thoughts and simplify them. We get together every few months and talk business, and I'm always impressed by the way you break things down.

Daniel Wolgin 00:00:26  Very kind.

Joel Gandara 00:00:27  And, And I'm honored because one time we were driving you and I. And this is when we first started getting to know each other. And we drove to Kissimmee, where you have a distribution center where your business sells out of. And, and after we talked for a while, you looked over, you were driving, and you said to me, you're different. You think things really differently, and maybe some people would be offended by that. For me, it was an honor because ever since I was little, I stood out and then I found a strength in that.

Joel Gandara 00:00:56  So the fact that you pointed that out to me. Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 00:00:58  Well, the fact that we're here, I think shows that you think different.

Joel Gandara 00:01:01  Yeah, yeah. All right. So. And I don't know what you thought you were going to accomplish when you were a little kid, but you're working your way to get to $1 billion in sales in your business.

Daniel Wolgin 00:01:14  What's the goal?

Joel Gandara 00:01:15  Yeah. So what did you even imagine those words would be said about you and your business?

Daniel Wolgin 00:01:20  You know, it's a funny thing to think about, I remember. I guess I wasn't quite a kid. I was probably in my, in my mid to late teens, and my grandfather and his generation in my family were pretty successful, real estate developers mostly. And I was thinking about one of his brothers, and it had come up that he had a goal. he had recently passed, I believe, at this time. And it had come up that he had a goal for his life of what he wanted to achieve, surely many goals, but in particular monetary goal.

Daniel Wolgin 00:01:53  And I was never told what the goal was, nor was I told if he hit it, I bet that he did. And my guess is that goal was a nine figure goal. and at that time, for the first time, I really thought about, do I have a goal? And I thought, yeah, I'd like to be billionaire. So am I going to make it? I don't know, but I'm going to try.

Joel Gandara 00:02:14  So that at such an early age that got into your psyche, it.

Daniel Wolgin 00:02:18  Did. But at that point the focus was on the money. And it wasn't until later in my life that I kind of realized the the money's a tool. So why why do I want that? What am I going to do with that? What's it going to mean to me, the people that I love and care about around me. And you know, what kind of impact can I have on the world as a result? So that's become more important to me now.

Joel Gandara 00:02:39  Absolutely. And that happens with our friends who've made money.

Joel Gandara 00:02:42  The shifts. Yeah. It starts shifting. What does the money even mean now? You start, okay. The money's no longer an issue. So then you start focusing on other things. So what does it mean for you? You have X amount of money. You have security. You have a good business. You have potentially other projects and investments. Money's not a factor now. What?

Daniel Wolgin 00:02:59  Yeah. I mean, for me, in my personal life, it means freedom. Really. And so part of that is just the entrepreneurship journey. but when you're an entrepreneur in the beginning and you're not making any money, you're really not free. You're a slave to yourself.

Joel Gandara 00:03:14  And you're your slave.

Daniel Wolgin 00:03:15  Business. Yeah, exactly. You're working 10 to 20 hours a day, sometimes six, seven days a week. but once you start to achieve some success, it really frees you up to structure your time however you want. And it's not like when you're out of the. You never stop working as an entrepreneur because you're always thinking about something.

Daniel Wolgin 00:03:39  Exactly. So I'm at a baseball game. I'm at the baseball game. I'm there, right? It's 3:00 on a weekday or whatever. I can do that. The flip side is you're always in the back of your mind. You know, some amount of your compute, some percentage of it is always allocated towards that long term problem. You're working on some long term strategy or, you know, whatever weird thing might have happened that day that you're still trying to process. so the the structure of my life with entrepreneurship and then achieving some level of success has really freed me up to have that kind of flexibility in my life, to be there for my family and to do the things that I want in the long term, because I'm nowhere near my goal at this point. In the long term, if I'm able to achieve my goals, it really allows you to have an impact then on the world. Give back in the ways that that you think are important. Because the reality is, our, our entire culture is a construct and it's constructed by us.

Daniel Wolgin 00:04:35  And so as a collective, as a collective. Right. And so each individual person gets to leave some impact on that. And the, the the broader you can communicate your vision, the more impact you can have on individuals lives. Teach those values, whether that's through, you know, educational impacts or by by giving, you know, habitat for humanity, for example, I think a wonderful organization. I used to volunteer when I was a kid. in that my understanding of what it is they're trying to do is let's get people involved, not just their money, their hands. Let's go out there, pick up a hammer, let's build a house, and then let's provide that house to a deserving family in need. And what is that going to do for them? That's going to give them the stability that they need to then be able to go get a job for the kids to be able to do their homework because they have somewhere to be. They have that safety and security. So now those kids can be educated.

Joel Gandara 00:05:24  Less likely to become, criminals. Yeah, they have a home or even just less likely.

Daniel Wolgin 00:05:29  To not achieve because they never were given the knowledge that they needed the understanding of the way that the world works. And, you know, are you going to need high level algebra every day of your life? No. But some of those concepts about how to think and how to interact with the world really are, would allow you to become very successful in things that are seemingly totally unrelated. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 00:05:49  And you need my own.

Daniel Wolgin 00:05:49  Story very much, in that way. Not not that I luckily came from a wealthy enough family kind of middle class family. Never had to worry about that. But my training is entirely different than how. So what I end up doing? well, I, I wanted to be a scientist from the time I was like a mid, middle aged little kid, you know, late single digits, pre-teens, that kind of thing. And, I went down that track. I took kind of math and science classes throughout middle school.

Daniel Wolgin 00:06:22  High school ended up going to, a school for chemical and biomolecular engineering. Went as fast and hard as I could. Graduated in three years with a degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering, and went and got a job in sales at a glove company in California. I realized kind of halfway through my college journey that this isn't what I wanted to do. and in hindsight now especially, it was really obvious early in my life that this was never going to be my path. However, the education as an engineer, the way to think that I was taught, the way to learn, that I was taught, and the way that I approach problems because of that education as an engineer has been invaluable to me in my business life. Whereas if I had went and gotten a business degree or an entrepreneurship degree and, you know, maybe an MBA, I could have I would have had a totally different perspective and wouldn't approach these things in the same way. And you're always going to learn on the job by doing whatever you're doing.

Daniel Wolgin 00:07:24  You're going to learn it while you're doing it. you know, the reality is, I think we've talked about this before. As entrepreneurs, we have no idea what we're doing. Right. Can I curse.

Joel Gandara 00:07:34  On this thing? Oh, you could do it. Okay, good. We have no fucking.

Daniel Wolgin 00:07:37  Idea what we're doing. We're making this shit up every day. We're making it up, figuring it out. You know, there's other ways to say that, right? We're guessing educated guesses. Hopefully, we figure out a plan of attack. We try stuff. We see what works. Something doesn't work, we try something else. And so you're. I learned the business by doing the business. Yeah, right.

Joel Gandara 00:07:58  Is there something you wish you would have studied a little bit more when you were younger? Would it were would it have prepared you better,

Daniel Wolgin 00:08:04  I don't know if it would have prepared me better for what I'm doing now, but looking back, I wish I would have spent more time in kind of computer science any time.

Daniel Wolgin 00:08:12  Really. I wish that while I don't think it's probably something kids need to learn anymore, I wish I had learned how to code. That was really important for the past 20 years. Probably won't be that important for the next 20 years. and so, you know, just like we're talking about, I try and learn from that mistake. So what does that mean? Well, now I see this huge opportunity in AI. I don't want to be, I wonder, so when the internet started booming, 1995, I was ten, so I couldn't really get in on that. But I wonder if I was 35 in 1995, would I have or what? I just said, oh, this is cool, I can buy stuff online. Like I can't wait to see what people do with this. This is awesome. Even if I thought it was going to change the world, would I do anything? Yeah. And so now I see we're at the very beginning, I believe, and I'm no great expert, but I believe that AI is going to be as impactful on our society, on our world, on value creation, on distribution of wealth as the internet has been, or more so.

Daniel Wolgin 00:09:08  And it will probably happen faster just because adoption curves are speeding up. You think about how fast VHS got adopted CDs, you know, then DVDs, cell phones, the internet, it keeps kind of speeding up where adoption is happening faster and faster and faster. So probably ten years from now will look like the change from 1995 to 2015, where I don't really know all the dates in between there, but by by 2015 we had iPhones. You had, you know, the internet in your pocket as you're walking around every day. In 1995, if I wanted to, if we're at a bar and I have a question, what was the name of that actor in that movie?

Joel Gandara 00:09:46  We're going to have to agree to disagree.

Daniel Wolgin 00:09:48  Yep. Or you're like asking friends that one. I don't even know how you would have looked it up, right? But question about some fact. You're like, oh, let me go look at the bookshelf. Do we have the W's? Yeah, we got the W.

Daniel Wolgin 00:09:59  It's like.

Joel Gandara 00:10:00  You gotta hope your parents stayed committed enough to buy the.

Daniel Wolgin 00:10:02  Encyclopedia. No, we got the 1987 version. We need the 1989. That's right. Or you go to the library and learn how to use the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System and all this stuff. So and today it's like, you know, my son says, hey, dad, search it up instead. I don't even say Google it anymore.

Joel Gandara 00:10:17  Yeah, search it up.

Daniel Wolgin 00:10:17  It's instant. Okay. Let's find out.

Joel Gandara 00:10:19  Yeah. That's amazing. So let's switch gears for a minute. yeah. I think this is awesome. When and you know, you're not deciding what happens in society even though you're in a, in a business that has a lot to do with society. It's popular because it's controversial. But when Covid hit, I think it was so cool that how many days in a Covid and the reaction to Covid. Did your wife retire?

Daniel Wolgin 00:10:47  Ha ha. It's not as fast as you'd think. So.

Daniel Wolgin 00:10:51  I had been telling my wife for a couple of years. Like, you know, we're doing well enough if if you don't don't want to work, you don't have to. But she loved what she was doing. She loved teaching. and she wasn't. She wasn't ready to give that up and step away. what really happened in Covid was my wife was teaching at a school, a private school, and my son had gotten into a public choice school, which is just a lottery. So we won the lottery at the beginning of that year, and we had to decide, do we go to that school or do we continue at the private school where, you know, his mom's teaching very similar educational styles, etc.? And so we said, well, hey, we won the lottery, let's go. And if we don't like it, we can always go back to the private school. Now, things changed a lot in South Florida because of Covid, so it's probably not true anymore. There's waiting lists everywhere.

Daniel Wolgin 00:11:41  It's very hard to get in.

Joel Gandara 00:11:42  Everybody moved.

Daniel Wolgin 00:11:42  Here. However, at the time it would have been true. And so my wife was teaching at one school and my son was going to another school. As Covid hit and so Covid hit, we all went home. Now my wife was the director of instrumental ensembles. But, you know, for for the less initiated, she was a band director. She she taught instruments and how to play music and stuff to, to middle school and high school kids. She had to do that on the computer, online. She was doing that online. you know, when my son was going to, I think at that time, kindergarten online. And so we got into the summer and she starts wondering what happened. I'm super busy businesses, you know, taking off. What happens if I have to go back and teach in person? But the kids are still home and and taking, you know, classes virtually. And I said, that'll never happen. You know, the, the private schools, they'd have so much liability if they did that.

Daniel Wolgin 00:12:35  And something happened because the public schools and of course, as often happens, you know, particularly in that relationship, I was totally wrong. that's exactly what happened. But she had had the foresight decide. You know what? I think this is the time, you know, I'm going to step away and. And I'm going to retire. I don't know that she likes to call it retire. I love saying that she's retired, but, yeah, she probably works harder now than she did when she was in school, but.

Joel Gandara 00:12:55  But what has it meant for your family having.

Daniel Wolgin 00:12:58  Oh, I mean, it's transformational for the family. So I think first of all, it allowed us to have a third child. I don't think that we would have done that if she was still working. And that had been the vision that she's going to continue working. because it is incredibly difficult to dedicate to your family the amount of time that you would want to, you know, if you really want to have a big hand in raising them and not just because they would, they're going to be raised by somebody.

Daniel Wolgin 00:13:23  So, you know, if we're not intentional about it, then they're friends. They're the neighbors. You know, the people in your community, they're school teachers. They're going to raise them. They're going to instill their values into them.

Joel Gandara 00:13:34  So you decide in that situation if you're going to play a bigger role.

Daniel Wolgin 00:13:37  Yeah. And so in doing that, it allows me to keep doing what I need to do at the business to keep growing, achieve my goals, and she really empowers me to be able to achieve my goals in both those places where I know that what I want to happen at home with my family is going to happen, because she's there taking care of that, and I help her in every way that I can, and I can go and try to make happen in my professional life what I want to make happen there and I can also frees me up, dedicate time to myself, in, in continuing kind of education. So we're part of a group called Entrepreneurs Organization. It's one of many groups out there where you have access to all of these kind of educational opportunities, whether that be speakers or just other business owners, how we met who have a different perspective and, you know, an equally valid perspective.

Daniel Wolgin 00:14:24  And many, many successful people who can share their perspective and kind of teach you how to be a better person and a better business person, a better father. You know, all those things. but yeah, again, freedom. Yeah. Right.

Joel Gandara 00:14:37  Well, it helped that along the way, as you were trying to maybe drop seeds to your wife, hey, maybe one day you don't always need to work if you don't want to. I'm sure you're reminded her occasionally, couple of times, but it helped when you're hitting seven figures in sales a day sometimes, right?

Daniel Wolgin 00:14:51  yeah. I mean, it definitely helped. So I had been saying for a while, you don't need to once kind of what we had prepared for manifested itself. We didn't expect the global pandemic to come, but our business was always built getting ready for some spectacular increase in demand. Once that really manifested itself in that way, and we were able to kind of optimize and take advantage of it and really do very, very well financially, it definitely changed the game.

Daniel Wolgin 00:15:20  Yeah. You know.

Joel Gandara 00:15:21  I was in a similar position many years ago. I was trying to get Jessica, my wife, to consider not working as a registered nurse anymore. She had done it since she was in her, I know, 19, 20 years old. And it wasn't until she was 30, right when she turned 30 that she retired as a nurse after ten years. But it wasn't me. I kept trying, I kept saying, look, we're doing really well. It was my accountant. When my accountant told my wife and said, look, whatever you're making 50 grand or whatever it was back then as a nurse, it's all going to taxes. You know, you're at a high tax rate at the highest. So what are you doing and.

Daniel Wolgin 00:15:54  The help you need. Yeah. To take care of the kids or.

Joel Gandara 00:15:57  And nobody does it better than our wives. Yeah. For our own kids. It's absolutely.

Daniel Wolgin 00:16:00  True. And I suspect if we were to talk to her, there's more to it, because particularly those professions, you know, nursing and teaching, it's a calling.

Daniel Wolgin 00:16:11  Yeah. You know, people don't go into those professions for the money, right?

Joel Gandara 00:16:14  Right.

Daniel Wolgin 00:16:14  They care. They want to help. They want to help educate. They want to help heal. And so to step away from that can be really difficult. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 00:16:20  Exactly. So and then also my wife happens to be the type that thinks, well this could all go away tomorrow and we're going to lose it all.

Daniel Wolgin 00:16:28  When's the other shoe going to drop.

Joel Gandara 00:16:29  Yeah, something's going to happen. And and so finally. But my accountant finally convinced her. And I remind my accountant, who I've had for decades now. Thank you. Because you gave me my wife and because of her, similar to you. We had our third child, but then we went ahead and had our fourth. That would not have happened if my wife's busy working 40 hours a week overnight in a hospital shift. And I'm building a business, you know. So we were in a in.

Daniel Wolgin 00:16:49  A can't imagine taking care of another crying, crying baby.

Joel Gandara 00:16:52  I did a lot of that with the first two because she was working in a hospital. I had two kids in diapers and she would do the overnights on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So that left me. When she got home at 8 a.m., I'd have to get out of the house on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday so she could sleep here.

Daniel Wolgin 00:17:08  I'm trying with all the kids.

Joel Gandara 00:17:09  With two kids, I have two, but they're both in diapers. Two little boys and diapers. That's tough. A guy who's not.

Daniel Wolgin 00:17:13  Good with the diapers off. It's fine. Yeah. No, we're out of the house.

Joel Gandara 00:17:17  I had to go take them everywhere. All right?

Daniel Wolgin 00:17:19  We got lucky. Just lucky on spacing that we never had more than one in diapers at a time. Yeah, so. And, I mean, maybe the next one pushed it along a little bit. but we didn't have more than one diapers and we didn't have more than one in a crib at the same time. And so actually kind of interestingly, and I think it's good to kind of show it.

Daniel Wolgin 00:17:39  Right. Just because I'm successful doesn't mean I'm, wasting money. Right? We got a crib from a friend of mine who had one child and was done with the crib and wanted it out of his house. I know that feeling. Yeah. and he gave us the crib. I've used that crib for every child. Wow. So that crib has gotten, like, 12 years of use. It's still in good shape. I'm going to give it to somebody else. That's great. And who knows how long this crib, right, can can keep going. Maybe it'll come.

Joel Gandara 00:18:06  Back to your kids for your grandkids one day. Yeah, that's the opposite of consumerism. Yeah, I'm the same way. I love using things especially like that. It's meaningful, you know that. You get it from well built and. Yeah, that's nice. So all right, we talked about kids. Let's talk about you as a kid. Your upbringing. Sure you didn't have a dad around.

Daniel Wolgin 00:18:24  Did you? I didn't well, I mean, I did in the very beginning.

Daniel Wolgin 00:18:28  I think if I remember correctly, my dad probably left when I was around ten. I think he, like, left for a couple of months, came back for a couple of months, and then, you know, left. finally at at some point there around the time I know was before and it was well before my bar mitzvah, which happens at 13 in the in the Jewish faith. so it was somewhere around that time. But even before that, he he wasn't the best dad. He was kind of, my memory of him is kind of an angry guy. short. Not a lot of patience. In fact, I have a I'm not sure which camera we're looking at or if you can see it. I got a chip tooth in here. Still somewhere. my dad teach me to play baseball and, you know, normal kid. And I'm like, yeah, don't be afraid of the ball. Don't move. You know, don't move. So he tosses the ball, I don't move.

Daniel Wolgin 00:19:16  It's source, of course, right over my glove, right into my teeth. Oh. you know, those are the kind of memories, you know, I have of my dad's that weren't great. but it, it it drove me to want to be a great dad. So as much as I look back and there's these things in my life that were really difficult that I would never want for my kids. I can't exactly say I'm happy that I had to go through that, but I'm happy with who I am. You made the.

Joel Gandara 00:19:46  Best of it. I don't know.

Daniel Wolgin 00:19:47  If I'd be who I am, you know, if not for the experiences that I've had.

Joel Gandara 00:19:52  So if somebody had, somebody had a bad dad. What would you recommend to them if they've used that as a crutch. I cannot perform at this level. I can't do the things I want to do because I had a bad dad, you know.

Daniel Wolgin 00:20:02  That. I got to tell you, one of the things that really bugs me is we're getting older.

Daniel Wolgin 00:20:08  And so, you know, we have more friends that are in their 40s or 50 or even 60s. When I hear somebody at that age talking about how their childhood is holding them back, at some point you got to take responsibility. You know, so one of the things I believe in very greatly is just personal responsibility. And for me, that extends well beyond taking responsibility to being self-sufficient. It's a really important value of mine that people should be able to do the stuff around them in their life. And so it's little stuff, big stuff. You shouldn't. You don't have to do it all the time. It's got to know how to do it. You should you should know how to hunt. You should know how to cook. You should know how to clean. You should know how to change a diaper. That's one. By the way, husbands, you should do that all the time. it really should be a partnership, in my opinion, in the home.

Joel Gandara 00:20:58  Especially if the wife's love language is acts of service.

Joel Gandara 00:21:01  Yeah, and you should be changing a lot of diapers.

Daniel Wolgin 00:21:03  You saw the show. It's my love language. Oh, look at that. It's not, it's not. I don't think my my wife's love language. We it's been a while since we took that quiz and. Yeah. but it's important to note, so, you know, change light bulb. Sure. But, like, fix stuff around the house. Now, I've gotten to the point where I probably shouldn't be fixing stuff around the house, and I still probably do more than I should. Yeah, but it's important to me that I know how, and it's important to me to pass that information along to my kids so that if they want to call triple A to change the tire, fine, go for it. But you should know how. Yeah, you should know how.

Joel Gandara 00:21:37  It's a great way to approach that.

Daniel Wolgin 00:21:39  So it's a big pet peeve of mine. People are like, oh, you know, my my cousin, my parents weren't there when I was a kid.

Daniel Wolgin 00:21:45  And so that's why I can't achieve this thing that I want to achieve in my life. At this point, it's like,

Joel Gandara 00:21:49  I can't be a good father because my father wasn't. Yeah, I never learned.

Daniel Wolgin 00:21:52  I never learned how to be a good father. Well, so.

Joel Gandara 00:21:55  Once I think we're now. Yeah, I think we are not. Here's my theory on this.

Daniel Wolgin 00:21:59  We are. My mom taught me how to be a good dad. She'd be both parents. Yeah, and she did an admirable job.

Joel Gandara 00:22:04  And you learn from both from that side. So if you don't know why, you're let's say you're you're 21 years old and you're not getting ahead and things and you really had a bad upbringing. Let's say at that point it's not your fault. But I think the day we come to the realization of, oh, it's because possibly because I didn't have guidance, that's the day it's on you. Yep.

Daniel Wolgin 00:22:23  From that point forward. Oh, see? I'm doing it. Yeah. Don't take the table from that point forward.

Daniel Wolgin 00:22:27  It's on you. On you. Now, that doesn't mean it's going to change overnight. It's not like, well, if you realize that and it's been a year and you're not a millionaire, you're a failure. No. Come on. Did you guys start? It's it just starts with recognizing that and then figuring out how in your in your sphere you can make incremental improvements. You you're you're almost never going to make huge changes, improvements overnight, especially not in your self the way that you think, the way that you act. But tiny little changes really add up over time. And then you look back and you're like, oh my God, look at that ten year old version of myself. I'm nothing like that guy.

Joel Gandara 00:23:02  Yeah, that's why I like journaling. Because you write stuff down. This is amazing. You don't have to spend hours a week, but if you spend 20 minutes a month and journal a couple of little thoughts. I do it because one of the gifts I want to give my kids is my journals.

Joel Gandara 00:23:15  And they can see at this date and I mention them every time. So I say, you know, at this time Ryan's 12 years old, and then imagine him reading that at 35 and he's going, wow, that's what I was doing when I was 12. How cool those.

Daniel Wolgin 00:23:26  Memories. You don't you don't keep. You don't remember everything. You can't.

Joel Gandara 00:23:29  And you don't remember it from your dad's perspective. Because now something you thought you could think of negatively from a parent, you go, oh, I see why they were doing that. They were trying to protect me. So that's, it's a it's a nice gift that I like. I forgot what to say about that. But anyway, so let's go back to your business. sure. How? That you didn't found this company? I did not, and you weren't set up to start it or or come in as the CEO? Nope. So I think your story is interesting how you just. There was an opportunity, you jumped on it, and now you're the CEO and a large shareholder of the company.

Joel Gandara 00:24:03  How did this whole thing even happen?

Daniel Wolgin 00:24:05  Started with failure. So I had I had tried to launch a business with a partner and it was kind of a winding road, trying to raise capital for a fund. And one of the people trying to raise capital from offered me a job, and we weren't doing so hot. And so I decided to take the job. They got bought three weeks later, they shut down the division that they hired me to run. Ended up with an opportunity again with that, that friend that I had launched the business with and somebody else, and we raised the fund and then the rating agencies changed their rating criteria, which kind of blew up the plan for the fund. So we had to win that down. Right. So lots of of kind of failure over the course of a, of a period of a year or two. And I'm trying to figure out what to do next. Do I want to stay in finance? Do I want to go back kind of into entrepreneurship? I'd been an entrepreneur as a kid and, just reaching out to my network to kind of see what opportunities are out there.

Daniel Wolgin 00:24:59  And at this point, I'm living in South Florida and I'm considering do I do I move back to Philadelphia? Do I move to New York? Is now the time finally to move to San Francisco and be a tech pro and learn how to code or get involved with, you know, with some company or whatever. And, I really liked living here. I had a house. I was married at that at that time and wanted to make a family here. I love South Florida. I hope that I live here, at least for some portion of the year, for the rest of my life. and I reached out to one of my former CEOs and he said, oh, you should talk to your cousin. and what are you talking about? Yeah. You know, I started a business. They're doing well, but they need help. Okay. so this person is actually my was my cousin in law, or I think at the time, actually, my ex cousin in law and the the friendliest divorce have ever seen in my life, like books should be written about.

Daniel Wolgin 00:25:52  If you're going to have to get divorce, this is how you do it. But that's another podcast. anyway, I reached out to to him and him and his partner, and we, we kind of talked about the opportunity. And remember, I have this degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering. And, they had just come through a period where, shortly after Obama's second election, things went crazy in this market, and they basically ran out of ammo.

Joel Gandara 00:26:16  In the ammunition.

Daniel Wolgin 00:26:17  Yeah. And the ammunition market. And they were one of the last, Retailers left with ammunition on the shelves because of the structure of the company, which we can get into if you want. And they'd run out ammo. And they were looking at they were stockpiling it.

Joel Gandara 00:26:29  They were.

Daniel Wolgin 00:26:29  Stockpiling it. The company was actually founded as a hedge fund, investing in ammunition as an alternative commodity. And talk all about the technicals there. but in trying to figure out how to hedge that risk, the the piece of ammunition you couldn't get at the time, ammunition essentially four pieces the case, the projectile, the primer and the smokeless powder, the gun, gunpowder.

Daniel Wolgin 00:26:52  But that's a different thing. Smokeless powder modern. The smokeless powder was the thing that you couldn't get. And so they said, oh, I can't get smokeless powder. This guy is a degree in chemical biomolecular.

Joel Gandara 00:27:02  Engineering because of legislation. Or there was just not just a.

Daniel Wolgin 00:27:05  Shortage in the market. Yeah. Where does it come from? there are some manufacturers in the United States. There's a lot of manufacturers outside of the United States, and a lot of the precursor chemicals that are used for that, or used a lot of other industrial processes. So the reasons can be myriad. We're in another smokeless powder shortage right now. It has extended for a long time. This time, it's been caused by the amount of artillery being used in Ukraine, Russia, war, and the amount then that a production that's being dedicated towards that. A couple of other things. There were some disruptions in in supply and you know, whatever is a obviously with big markets lot of reasons that impact. But so.

Joel Gandara 00:27:41  They bring you in because this is they brought me.

Daniel Wolgin 00:27:42  And they said, hey, can you write a feasibility study for us on manufacturing smokeless powder? And I said, well, I don't know anything about it, but sure, give me three weeks. And we agreed to some, some fee, some small fee. And I went off to study this thing that I knew nothing about and figure out how one would set up a company to manufacture it and whether or not it's feasible. And I finished that project. Then I presented it to them, and I told them, you don't want to do this. First of all, you could maybe bootstrap it for 10 million, but it's probably more like a $50 million job. I don't know if you could get EPA approval to set up a new one of these right now. And if you mess up, you're going to leave a smoking crater in the ground. So like, you don't want to do this, but what if I came on and started wholesale Group for you? So we started talking about wait a minute.

Joel Gandara 00:28:30  What did that have to do? You just jumped into it.

Daniel Wolgin 00:28:33  It had nothing to do with it. But obviously, in talking to them for the past couple of weeks to get information about this, I recognized from those conversations, and I'm sure that they had dropped a hint once or twice that there's this opportunity to sell into the wholesale market, and they're not really doing it now, and they've considered launching a group or whatever, but they don't have one. And one of the one of the owners had a friend that they had kind of maybe earmarked to do this. And so they were maybe in conversations with them. But I guess that didn't work out. And eventually they said, sure. And so I joined no salary, 100% commission. And we're in still a supply shortage. So I'm kind of fighting them for supply. I mean, I could have sold a lot of ammo. If I had it, the company could have sold a lot. I mean, tens of millions of dollars. You could have sold.

Joel Gandara 00:29:21  It at wholesale wholesale. They were direct consumer, direct.

Daniel Wolgin 00:29:24  Consumer, get more margin. So, you know, how much do they want to peel away to allow me to build a wholesale group. You know, I get it. And so I joined and this was, I think July or August of 2013. And we're in an executive suites. We're in a small room, not not a whole lot bigger than this room, maybe four squared. This room off would be that space, on the sixth floor of this building that we're in, which was the top floor. They were kind of using it as storage, and they had some old, cubicle dividers. And so I said, hey, can I can I borrow those? Yeah, sure. Fine. You take them off myself. I'm in there at night, setting up the room, just squeezing these things together. I bought some desks secondhand for, you know, 100 bucks. I had four desks and my desk in the corner in this tiny little room to bring in wholesale sales guys to dial for dollars.

Daniel Wolgin 00:30:12  Just get on the phone. I grabbed a list of every licensed firearm dealer in the country and said, it seems like a good place to start. Dial dial, dial. We were using, I think, Salesforce's CRM, and I just sat him up, showed him what to do. Send him off to the races. Here's price sheet. Go.

Joel Gandara 00:30:27  And how'd that go? How quickly did you see something there?

Daniel Wolgin 00:30:29  It went pretty well. our first full calendar year in business. I think we did $4 million in sales out of that group.

Joel Gandara 00:30:36  What kind of margins do you get on that in that time?

Daniel Wolgin 00:30:38  At that time, there were probably better. There's it varies. Sometimes it's as high as 45%, sometimes it's 1,012%, which is tough. It's tough to make a business on 12% margins, I'll tell you. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 00:30:51  And that but that gross profit, probably similar to the net profit you had very low overhead there. Right?

Daniel Wolgin 00:30:57  At the time we were using third party fulfillment. So that's a little bit more expensive than doing it yourself.

Daniel Wolgin 00:31:02  And, you know, you've got the overhead of the business. You know, I at the time wasn't so focused on the bottom line because I didn't really have visibility into the entire business. But no, I mean, there's some pretty significant fixed costs and personnel costs.

Joel Gandara 00:31:16  But in.

Daniel Wolgin 00:31:16  Your division.

Joel Gandara 00:31:17  That just doing. Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 00:31:18  Departmental personnel. Sure. You know, I was paying some commissions. So, you know, it was pretty easy to see after that. We're probably netting if you want to say gross profit after labor, 8%, something like that.

Joel Gandara 00:31:30  So what happens. You're a year into it. It's going pretty well.

Daniel Wolgin 00:31:33  So I have always approached I'm a bad employee that that's what happened. But I'm a different kind of bad employee. And so the way that I'm a bad employee is whether it's my business or not, I'm going to act like it's my business. And so if I see something that doesn't seem right, I'm going to speak up and I'm going to tell you what I think you should do.

Daniel Wolgin 00:31:55  And if you give me the rope, I'm going to go do it. and so I just approached all aspects of the business, whether they were part of the wholesale group or not, as if it was my business and tried to help anywhere that I thought that I could add value. And so over time, I started helping with more and more and more of the business. And I can't say exactly when I started being part of the management team with the two owners there, but it happened relatively quickly. I give them a lot of credit in recognizing in young me the ability to grow and add value.

Joel Gandara 00:32:27  you were in your 20s? I was in my 20s.

Daniel Wolgin 00:32:29  Yeah, I was 28. Maybe. and they they bonus me some equity, little bits here and there. And then later we were able to, you know, much later in the process, we're really managing the business together, able to, you know, work out some deals for significant amounts of equity and purchase some equity and those kinds of things.

Daniel Wolgin 00:32:51  to to the point now where I'm an owner, relatively equal footing with the with the other kind of ownership group from a control perspective and that kind of stuff. But I just acted like it was mine. You know, I bring value. Bring value first, get comped for it later.

Joel Gandara 00:33:04  You think young people today see it that way?

Daniel Wolgin 00:33:09  I don't know that young people saw it that way when I was when I was doing it. I'm sure there are some that do, and I wish that there were more. I think that particularly when you're young and you don't have the life experience to see what's important and understand, and maybe you've been taught to have that victim mentality that you're really worried about getting what's yours. And I better make sure that I negotiate up front, you know, that extra thousand dollars in salary, I better push for that. I better push for that. my philosophy had always been the opposite. let me work for it and then let me go and say, hey, look, let me let's talk about what I did, and now let's talk about going forward.

Daniel Wolgin 00:33:50  So, like, I left college, I went out to LA and I worked at this glove company. I was only there for 11 months, and the reason I was only there for 11 months is because of the amazing CEO at that company. I know that sounds weird, but he had told us about how when he was working at a company that he was introduced to Dale Carnegie. And there's a whole kind of educational program there or whatever. And he paid for us all, all our sales guys to go do that, to go do the Dale Carnegie kind of learning experience. And it taught about how to sell better, but it also taught about entrepreneurship. And I realized finally, like math, this is that's my path for sure. I need to go that path. And I started looking at doing some stuff out there in LA, and I started talking to my family for funding, really. And my great uncle, the one I was talking about before, said, there's somebody I want you to talk to.

Daniel Wolgin 00:34:41  he actually it was a really funny. I'm sure I'll get it wrong, but basically I was talking about opening up a retail shop, which is funny because now I'm back in retail. But he said every retailer wants to be the wholesaler, and every wholesaler wants to be the distributor, and every distributor wants to be the manufacturer, and every manufacturer wants to be the bank. Bank? Be the bank. Yeah. So, okay, you know, what do I know? Okay. What does that mean? Is I want you to talk to somebody. So he introduced me to a business owner or CEO down here who I did eventually go into work for. And when I talked to that CEO early on, he said, you sound like a really smart guy. I want you to be a part of, you know, my business come out interview. I interviewed a whole bunch of different, departments, and they kind of made a place for me. But he said, I won't ask you to take a pay cut.

Daniel Wolgin 00:35:26  And then when they finally gave me an offer, it was a 25% pay cut. I didn't negotiate.

Joel Gandara 00:35:32  You took it, I took it.

Daniel Wolgin 00:35:33  I saw the opportunity there to move. First of all, my grandparents were down here. And so it gave me the opportunity to move to South Florida, to be close to my grandparents, who are older at that point. They're both deceased now. and that was important to me. I was really happy about that. but also, it was a great opportunity to to continue to learn to further the improvement of myself through learning. And that early part of your career. Almost. Don't worry. First of all, 20 years later, you're not going to notice the difference of $10,000 in salary, you know, 20 years ago, or even 30 or 40 or $50,000 in salary. So go wherever you think you're going to be able to learn and worry more about learning and exposing yourself to as much as you can. Then you do with how much you get paid and how many vacations you can take, or whether you can buy that thing that you want or whatever you can.

Daniel Wolgin 00:36:24  You'll do that later, I promise. If you if you take that goal and you have that mindset, you're going to be able to buy all the stuff that you want to buy later in your life. And so, you know, luckily again, I'm blessed. I've been so lucky in my life. So like, I got plucked out of this opportunity to that opportunity. It wasn't cause of any great thing that I did, except for maybe being ready, being ready to take advantage of that luck.

Joel Gandara 00:36:46  And you were willing to take a risk in a way.

Daniel Wolgin 00:36:49  Well, and it wasn't. So to continue on, the story was trying to tell it wasn't. But maybe a year until I was making, you know, twice as much as I had made before. And if I had said, no, you know, you you told me I wouldn't have to take a pay cut. And, you know, now you're asking me to take a pay cut or whatever. That whole opportunity might have disappeared.

Daniel Wolgin 00:37:08  My whole life could be different.

Joel Gandara 00:37:09  I think people miss opportunities all the time. And you mentioned. And because I asked about young people and you said it, it's because they don't have the life experience. I try to preach this to whoever young, whatever young person, listen to me, starting with my kids, about think of long term.

Daniel Wolgin 00:37:26  Sometimes it's so hard to do when your whole life has been, you know, my oldest, my oldest, nine years, his whole life's been nine years. You know, a week seems like an eternity. That's right. You know.

Joel Gandara 00:37:35  It's hard to get him to see it that way. But, man, when we can build relationships, when we can not think of just what we're doing today, but just look a little farther and trust, hopefully we can get them to trust us, our own kids. If not, you, come talk to my kids. I'll talk to yours when he's ready.

Daniel Wolgin 00:37:49  Yeah. They don't listen to us from like 13 to 23.

Daniel Wolgin 00:37:52  They're not going to listen to your parents. No, but they'll listen to your parents friends, maybe. Yes.

Joel Gandara 00:37:55  That has happened for me. Yeah. I've had a friend of ours, Noah, talk to my oldest a couple of times, and that's been helpful because then he'll come back and say, he's so smart, and it doesn't matter that I said the same weight. I said the same. Yeah, no. It's irrelevant.

Daniel Wolgin 00:38:09  It really does come to the ability to delay gratification, to know that there's something that you want and be willing to wait and work for it. There's a flipside to that, which is you don't want to delay gratification forever. Yeah. You know, if if you die with a pile of money, you probably could have done better. So there's a balance there. Yeah. but certainly earlier in life and probably up through your 30s, your focus should be heavily on delaying gratification, setting yourself up for the kind of life that you want, thinking about what kind of life do I want? Because who knows? Like you don't know at 1020, I'm not even sure now what kind of life I want.

Daniel Wolgin 00:38:51  That's right. But I have an idea that I'm sure will change as I continue to age and learn new things. And my kids teach me new things, and I see new perspectives and and all those things, new things get invented around me.

Joel Gandara 00:39:01  And we do the groundwork initially to get us in that position where as we learn and get to a new position, we could say, well, now I'm ready to do that. I've built the wealth of passive income, whatever was needed.

Daniel Wolgin 00:39:11  If we can try to take a step back and pay attention, be introspective, be vulnerable. Those those skills are really important skills to be able to do that if you're not so vulnerable. I guess people hear that a lot. What does it really mean? Really? It means not being afraid to be embarrassed. You don't really have to be embarrassed about those things. But traditionally, you know, talk about things, admit things that you might feel embarrassed about and not being afraid to be wrong. It's okay to be wrong.

Daniel Wolgin 00:39:40  And so if you're not willing to be wrong, then you can't ever change that image of a life that you set at 19, right? Because, well, if I change it, it means I was wrong.

Joel Gandara 00:39:52  That's right. How many people probably in their 40s, 50s and they're still living, that 19 year old still.

Daniel Wolgin 00:39:57  Chasing, you know, whatever their dad told them or their mom told them was the life that they should get. I tell my kids, kind of jokingly, but not really. The only laws you can't break are the laws of physics. That's it. Now there's other laws you don't want to break. You've got moral laws which you you don't want to break because it's important to be a good person, a good moral person. You got the laws of your, you know, your country, your community. You don't want to break because, well, it's kind of hard to have a good life if you're stuck in jail or whatever. Right? So there's constructs you need to work in, but the only laws you can't break are the laws of physics.

Joel Gandara 00:40:29  That's right. There's there's a free will. Yeah. For all the others. You can do.

Daniel Wolgin 00:40:33  Anything so you don't. Nothing has to be the way it is. We were making it all up as we go along. And we always have been. Which means anything can be changed.

Joel Gandara 00:40:43  So do you, as an entrepreneur who has to bend the rules within ethics? and we're bending we're breaking rules all the time. Societal rules by doing our own thing. What do you teach your kids? Do you ever say like, well, you know, I know it says don't walk right now on the sign, but there's not a single car. There hasn't been a car here for ten minutes. We can go ahead and cross the street.

Daniel Wolgin 00:41:01  I think it starts with core values. So, like you mentioned, you know, within the bounds of ethics. What does that really mean? Table stakes, core value. To be a good human in my opinion is integrity. And so if you have integrity then you can approach bending the rules from a place where you're, you're, you know, not going to do anything you really shouldn't.

Daniel Wolgin 00:41:23  So you know that example? Well, it depends where you are. It's really a safety issue. Right. That's what is the underlying reason for this rule. Let's look at that and see if it's reasonable in this situation. The other night there was a heavy storm. I was driving back to our house. There's a streetlight. The light's not working and so I need to make a left. I'm never getting the signal that I need to make a left. Am I going to sit there all night? Of course not. Right. I'm going to wait until there's a safe moment for me to be able to do. And am I breaking a rule? Yeah, I am, I, I ran a red light, I made a left at a red light. But given the circumstances, that's what made the most sense in in that situation, I'm sure if there was a cop there, they they are not going to pull me over for that either. Right? Because it's very obvious in that situation that's the right thing to do.

Daniel Wolgin 00:42:08  So I try to teach my kids to think bigger than themselves. I think that's the most important thing when you're talking about not toeing the line is be considerate. It's not just you. How is this going to affect the other people around you? If you've got a car barreling down the road and you step out into the street and they need to slam on their brakes, and you know, it's not just am I going to be safe? But also in that situation is am I going to engender safety around me? Right. I like what you.

Joel Gandara 00:42:36  Said about the reason for that rule, the reason for that law. We talk about that.

Daniel Wolgin 00:42:40  Some of them there are no reasons. Yeah. No good reason.

Joel Gandara 00:42:43  Some idiot, some idiot messed it up for the.

Daniel Wolgin 00:42:45  Rest of us. Somebody paid money to somebody to make sure that some rule got passed the way they want benefits.

Joel Gandara 00:42:49  Yeah, it benefits them. Absolutely. What's it like for you? Because your oldest is nine.

Daniel Wolgin 00:42:55  Nine, nine, six and two.

Joel Gandara 00:42:57  Okay. So what? You guys have dinner together all the time?

Daniel Wolgin 00:43:01  We don't. The kids have dinner together, and we're there with them, but we don't yet have dinner together as a family just because of schedules. And so the kids eat at like, 530 or 6, super early for me to eat. But then we start going to bed. The youngest goes right from dinner into into bath and bedtime and then shortly after him, the middle one's going into bedtime and shortly after her, and then you guys going to bed and then we eat. Yeah. So we're usually eating between 8 and 9, which ideally we could all eat at like seven. Yeah. You know, so hopefully we we're able to get there as the kids get older. But then we, we supplement that. It's a failing really. I would love to eat dinner with my family every night. It's an area that we just haven't lived up to, that ideal that we have our own family, but we supplement that with like on the weekend we'll go have meals together, so we'll go have lunch together.

Daniel Wolgin 00:43:48  Whatever. We, we had instituted a tradition which we've been reasonably good at up keeping, which is to have dinner together on on Friday nights on spot and that I make pizza. So like, yeah, we're kind of observing Shabbat, but you know, I'll make a pizza with cheese and meat on. It's like we're not keeping kosher and we're lighting the candles, but we don't observe Shabbat from the perspective of not doing any work, you know, that kind of thing. But it's just a little thing that we can do to build some tradition as a family. And we all like pizza now, at least for a while. My kids didn't like pizza. That was a whole a whole struggle. Yeah, if you can imagine. No, no, no hot dogs, no chicken fingers. It was rough. We've gotten over that now. but we all like pizza, so we'll all sit down and, you know, have pizza together, which is which is nice. So we try to make sure that we have some of that in our life, even though we're not getting it every day, like we would love to and hope that we do when the kids are a little older.

Joel Gandara 00:44:39  Yeah, good it is. I mentioned it because as my kids have gotten older and they're becoming adults and they are adults, some of them, one of them, I miss crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. He was born yesterday, and now he's 19. He's in the army. He's not home. So crushing.

Daniel Wolgin 00:44:54  It.

Joel Gandara 00:44:54  Yeah, he's doing all right. So then I miss looking. You know, I sat in my same spot and my wife was here. My daughter was here, this son was here. This one.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:03  Everyone's got their spot. And there's an empty chair.

Joel Gandara 00:45:05  Yeah. And then now the other one's 17 and three days a week. He's away at college. Not too far, FIU, but he stays there for three days. So man, there's holes in it. And so I'm just sharing.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:15  Seasons of life.

Joel Gandara 00:45:16  Yeah it hurts a little bit I miss it I those were beautiful times. I took it for granted.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:21  And you have to enjoy it while you can.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:23  And it's so hard. We say the the days go slow, but the weeks go fast. Oh yeah, because when you're in it and you know this one's screaming and crying and this one whatever, you know, like it's hard and it's hard to be like, oh, isn't this great?

Joel Gandara 00:45:37  Yeah. No, those moments suck.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:39  Those moments.

Joel Gandara 00:45:39  Suck big.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:40  Time. But, you know, there'll be a last time. There'll be a last time that you have to deal with your kids screaming and crying about nonsense and, and and you know, the good things there will be last time you wash your kids hair, and there'll be a last time that you read them a bedtime story and you don't know it's the last time. Yeah, you don't know until, like, way afterwards, you're like, It's been a while.

Joel Gandara 00:45:58  Yeah. He doesn't.

Daniel Wolgin 00:45:59  Wanted it. Yeah, right. Hey, you want me to read? You know, I'll read it myself. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 00:46:04  So it's important to try to again take some time, step out of it a little bit to try to get that perspective, look at it from the outside and like, let me let me appreciate this moment.

Joel Gandara 00:46:15  Yeah. This is a great reminder you just gave me when my ten year old Austin comes into our room and says, mom, can you come read me a story? sometimes I think, he's taking her away from me. But that was a great reminder because he's not going to ask for that much longer.

Daniel Wolgin 00:46:30  He sure won't.

Joel Gandara 00:46:31  Yeah, those days are going.

Daniel Wolgin 00:46:32  You'll get to do it again when they have kids. Yeah, yeah.

Joel Gandara 00:46:34  And with four kids, we have a theory that maybe we'll get eight grandkids. Not bad. Yeah, we'll get a chance to relive this. And I think 16 or 16 or whatever it is, we'll take whatever it is, but but I think that that's even sweeter, like, as a grandparent, because you're not under those stressful situations. You're not sleepless at night.

Joel Gandara 00:46:52  No, I.

Daniel Wolgin 00:46:52  Had kids for the grandkids. How so? So I'm a planner, right? Things don't always go to plan, but I'm a planner. I've wanted three kids for a while, and we had two, and we got the match set right. And so a lot of people stop at that point. and I had explained to my wife, you know, that I desired to have three kids, but but I was I was very happy with our family, and I kind of I kind of left it with her, but not in like a I'm going to be upset if you don't kind of like, I'm, I'm totally cool either way. But I'd be happy to have three. Well, I wanted three kids because I want that big family and I don't have a big family, so you got to make it if you want it, you don't have it. You got to make it. So you got to make that big family. So if I have three kids, I'm much more likely to have a lot of grandkids.

Daniel Wolgin 00:47:36  So I have three kids and I get two grandkids from each of those every other month. I get to, you know, do a grandkid thing. So I got a month of grandkids stuff, a month of my own stuff, a month of grandkids stuff. It's all for retirement. Yeah. So, you know, maybe we get nine, maybe we get three, maybe we get none. Yeah, that's certainly possible. But, you know, I'm a planner, so kids for the grandkids, that's when the fun. That's when the fun really happens. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 00:48:00  So in 20 years we'll see if this interview aged well based on how many grandkids you get.

Daniel Wolgin 00:48:04  Hopefully my grandkids don't hate me. Yeah I'm sure they won't.

Joel Gandara 00:48:07  All right. So being a man, being a husband, being a father, what do those things mean to you? Because it seems like those are important to you.

Daniel Wolgin 00:48:17  These things they are. Yeah, I think I think a lot of times the the necessity to learn and grow in those areas of your life is ignored.

Daniel Wolgin 00:48:25  And it's because, you know, life's hard. So if you're scraping by to put food on the table, it's hard to think about personal growth. And I you know, I recognize that. And so I feel very blessed to not be in that position where, you know, I'm not scraping to get food on the table. And I can think about those things, you know, where where can I spend some time to be better? but it's important to try to be. And by the way, I think even if you are scraping by you, you probably still have opportunities to be better. And maybe the scraping by part isn't in your control. There's other parts of your life that probably are in your control that you can improve just a tiny bit. first is showing up right? Being a good father, being a good husband, you got to show up. So you got to figure out how to show up, because if you're working, whatever, 100 hours a week, it's really tough to show up.

Daniel Wolgin 00:49:14  so you have to be able to be there. And I figured out how to do that in my life in this particular way. But there's plenty of ways to do that, that aren't, you know, entrepreneurship and owning your own company. So you got to figure out what that means, you know, for you, as far as being a good man, I think there's there's core values that you have. If your core values aren't intentional, you still have them. They just kind of manifested themselves. And so you can take some time to really think about what's important to you, and you'll probably discover some core values. And then over time, you can change them if you're not real happy with them. But you got to live true to your core values. Hopefully they're good ones. You know, if your core values are like thievery and whatever, I don't I don't really know that living true to them can really help. And, but I think that, it's important that there are different kinds of people.

Daniel Wolgin 00:50:01  So, like, I have core values and being a good man means something to me, but I don't think that that definition really applies for everybody. It's it's my definition and it's the definition I hope to impart to my kids. But it's their definition will be different. I'm certain of that. How different? I don't know, but they're their own people and they're going to have their own experiences.

Joel Gandara 00:50:22  And if someone doesn't know how to start to build core values, I'll tell you what I did. I cheated many years ago, our friend.

Daniel Wolgin 00:50:28  Oh, we love cheating.

Joel Gandara 00:50:30  Yeah, I asked them. I said, so you've got core values on your wall. I saw them when I was visiting your operation, and I was at my office at the time these years ago, and I said, can you send me a picture of them? I want to go to school on what you've developed. And I probably copied out of the 5 or 6 that he had. Maybe I copied one, 2 or 3, and then the other ones gave me ideas to reword it for me and change it.

Joel Gandara 00:50:51  But yeah, there's no reason to go. I don't have core values. I don't know what they are. I think personally and in business we should establish them and borrow from somebody. I did the same thing.

Daniel Wolgin 00:50:59  I did the same thing. So they only call it cheating in school. Yeah. Once you're out of school, that's like working smart, not hard. Yeah, absolutely. so in many areas of my life, I've been blessed and and I've been blessed with a really phenomenal friendship. And so I have a friend whose name is Eric, Eric Griffin. Shelly, I call him Griff. Most of his friends call him Griff, and I feel like he's always been a couple of years ahead of me, and so I get to follow him. It's great. And so he was successful in business before I was successful in business. He was intentional about his business before I was. He joined EO and he introduced me to EO. So he joined EO before I did. And so at each of these stages, I'm able to ask him, well, how are you guys doing this? Hey, can I see your core values? How did you come up with those core values? Hey, what's your hiring process like? Can you share that with me? Do you mind if I just, like.

Daniel Wolgin 00:51:43  Copy that. And, you know, every once in a while, there'll be something where he says, you can use this, but don't copy that one word for word. Like we're really proud of that. We worked really hard on that. Like, make your own. You'll make a great one. Make your own. But for the most part, he's been incredibly open in sharing those things with me. And so I did the same thing.

Joel Gandara 00:52:00  So he's giving you spectacular starting points. That took him five years. Exactly. And you're starting where he was. And now you get why.

Daniel Wolgin 00:52:06  Not stand on the shoulders of giants.

Joel Gandara 00:52:09  100% right? I'm not smart enough to develop things on my own.

Daniel Wolgin 00:52:12  Yeah, maybe you are.

Joel Gandara 00:52:13  Maybe, but. But I like to remind myself of that so that I don't get in my head thinking I'm the brain. I'd rather take a good idea that someone has and build. If I could just make it a little better, build on it. Absolutely. we had a call.

Daniel Wolgin 00:52:25  So that's a good way. But if you don't have that books, books, I mean, get online, jump on Amazon, search on Google, ask ChatGPT you know what? You don't even need books anymore. Go ask ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. Hey, you know, I want to develop some core values for myself.

Joel Gandara 00:52:40  Give me the top 20.

Daniel Wolgin 00:52:41  Or even just how should I go about doing that? How do I figure this out? ChatGPT. And it'll tell you a bunch of stuff and point you in a path and wind you up and take you off.

Joel Gandara 00:52:50  Yeah. this week we had a call in our men's group, the Brotherhood, and it was. Let's share. Most of the guys are business owners. Let's share the metrics that we look at, the dashboard that we've developed in our business. And they're all going to be different. This guy's got to build software for people. This guy's got a SaaS. This is, you know, different companies. But it was really interesting because there were all these moments.

Joel Gandara 00:53:11  One guy is presenting on screen saying, these are the dashboards I use is what I look at every day. This is how I know if we're utilizing capital, if we're used all using people, and then someone got in a moment where they go, oh, I'm going to twist that for me. And it's now and then it's that person's turn to share. And the other one and the other one. And those are some very valuable lessons to take it from experience.

Daniel Wolgin 00:53:30  And this uncovers what I think is a really important point for people to kind of think about and realize. And I've talked about this a lot with my business partners and my employees, and it probably applies in other areas to personal relationships. Every business is different, but every business is the same. So there are a lot of ways that your business is exactly the same as every other business out there. The brand new business that's a solopreneur that hasn't done any revenue yet. And, you know, Apple or Nvidia and everywhere in between, there are things about those businesses that are saying there are a lot that are different, but it doesn't matter how different a business is than yours, there's something there for you to learn.

Daniel Wolgin 00:54:10  Yeah, yeah. And so similarly, it doesn't matter how different somebody's life is than yours, there's something in there for you to learn. Yeah, you just have to be.

Joel Gandara 00:54:17  In that community and get close to those people. We do it as forum mates. We're not in the same industry at all, and we get to learn off of each other and each other's take. So tell me, let's go back to the business for a minute. Sure. You're selling other people's products? Mostly. Mostly. Tell me what you're not. Because that part. We get it. You buy at a lower price from a distributor or the brand, and then you sell it.

Daniel Wolgin 00:54:38  If only we're so simple.

Joel Gandara 00:54:39  Yeah, well, a lot of in-between stuff. What's going on with, With your own things? What are you doing? That's your own? Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 00:54:46  So we've developed some brands over the years, and we manufacture those brands both ourselves internally and we white label manufacture. And the reason that we do this is particularly in our industry and especially with ammunition, there come supply shocks, or I should say there come demand shocks.

Daniel Wolgin 00:55:06  That wipes out the inventory.

Joel Gandara 00:55:07  Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 00:55:07  The supply market cannot keep up with it, can't react that fast. The demand is so great that it empties everybody's warehouses. It empties all the distributors, warehouses and empties all the manufacturers warehouses. And they they can't just pump it out like that. It takes time. And they've seen this before, the manufacturers. And so they don't necessarily want to react to every spike in demand with doubling capacity, because then they're not going to need it. Yeah. they're going to some at some date in the future.

Joel Gandara 00:55:37  They paid overtime for it, and now they're going to sit on the shelves for a few.

Daniel Wolgin 00:55:40  Years invested, you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. So so there come these, these areas of supply constraint in the business. It's a cyclical business where it is cyclically supply constrained. And in those supply constrained periods are where the margins get really big because just standard supply demand economics, there's more way more demand than there is supply.

Daniel Wolgin 00:56:05  And so prices go up. We participate in that to an extent. Some of our competitors really go nuts. And I have screenshots from times where I've seen a box of ammo that at the time was selling for like $8 for $100, you know, or before that supply spike selling for $100. Like, it's maybe too much right to go that far, but we participate as well. And a lot of times our costs will go up in those environments. Our retail price will go up as well. Our margins will expand a little bit, but if we can manufacture ourselves, we can supplement our supply in those periods of times with our own manufactured goods. And so we can kind of we can rev up a little bit and turn our own manufactured goods from, you know, two, three, 5% to ten, 15, 20% and control.

Joel Gandara 00:56:53  Your own destiny. Your margins are better on that. So do you ever. Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 00:56:57  Margins are better sometimes. Sometimes like in periods where there isn't increased demand.

Daniel Wolgin 00:57:04  I could buy that ammunition for cheaper than I could make it myself. So it's not purely like a margin recapture play, which we do that too. There are other areas where we have stuff manufactured for us or manufactured ourselves under a brand just for margin recapture. If I can cut out the distributor and the manufacturer and be the manufacturer myself, I pick up some margin. And so instead of 12%, it's 18% or whatever, you know, making these numbers up.

Joel Gandara 00:57:28  Do you sell that as bulk or do you have a brand name on it?

Daniel Wolgin 00:57:31  We've got brands on it, so it depends on what the product is. If we think it's going to benefit from being packaged well, then we'll package it well. If we think that it's really not, we're not going to be able to get a higher dollar value or the customer is going to accept it equally, then we'll package it in bulk.

Joel Gandara 00:57:46  And how much are you willing? Are you and your partners willing to invest capital in times of low demand to really bolster up your, your inventory and fill up that warehouse? Do you do you do that?

Daniel Wolgin 00:58:00  We do.

Daniel Wolgin 00:58:00  We have a financial hedging mentality when it comes to investing in the business. And so we like to test things small. And if they work, we'll get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And so we try to anticipate increases. There's things that drive demand that you can anticipate an election, for example. Right. Or a Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the executive branch. That's likely to increase demand. We can plan for that. We can increase the amount of product that we have in the warehouse in anticipation of that. Sometimes we're wrong and we end up stuck with some higher priced goods or way more than we want. It takes us, you know, a number of months to kind of work out of that. But the beauty, we try not to go too far, but.

Joel Gandara 00:58:46  The beauty, because I hear you say that. But see, I was in the fashion world you take some risk on. Is red going to be in style? You've got a Winchester 9,000,000 millimeter.

Daniel Wolgin 00:58:55  Luger is going to be in style for a long time, and it lasts, you know, for our purposes forever. 100 years or something. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 00:59:02  So, exactly. You could.

Daniel Wolgin 00:59:03  Take a 20 year old box ammo off the shelf and use it, and it would perform just the same.

Joel Gandara 00:59:08  As long as it wasn't.

Daniel Wolgin 00:59:08  Weapons. Yeah, it had to be stored properly, but you wouldn't notice a difference. And so obviously a 20 year timescales absurd for a business. Right. So for our purposes it lasts forever. It has no expiration date. Amazing. So we can work out of it. But the the market moves I mean the supply market my costs really move a lot. It's a commodity good to a certain extent. And so if I load up at the wrong time, my cost might be more than the retail price. And I got to I got to take my medicine at that point, you know, you can't hide and ignore the books and ignore the market and just keep it listed at too high a price.

Daniel Wolgin 00:59:45  And you know, you can't do that. It's a recipe for disaster. And so you got oh man, we were wrong. We got it. We got to take our medicine, take our loss, sell it at market. We don't get to decide the market price. It's a commodity really. So sell it at market.

Joel Gandara 00:59:57  So you guys watching like polls right now for the election coming up.

Daniel Wolgin 01:00:01  You know we don't watch polls anymore. We watch the betting markets really.

Joel Gandara 01:00:06  They yeah because.

Daniel Wolgin 01:00:07  The polls are so influential. And when you call somebody and ask them, hey you're going to vote for Trump. Hey, are you going to vote for Kamala Harris? They might not want to answer truthfully, but when somebody puts dollars down, they're telling you not what they want to happen, but what they think is going to happen. And I do believe in the wisdom of crowds. And so I think I look in particular. This is not a plug, and I haven't put any money onto this platform as a platform called Poly Markets that I've been looking at.

Daniel Wolgin 01:00:36  It's weird. You can bet on everything. It's it's crazy the stuff that people will bet on. Probably a lot of degenerates losing a lot of money on there. But, it, it moves, you know, kind of all the time. And so you can see the fact of a debate, you can see the effect of some bad rally or somebody said something or whatever.

Joel Gandara 01:00:56  Poly markets.

Daniel Wolgin 01:00:57  I think it just gets you closer to the people. Whereas if you're looking at polls or you're listening to the media skewed, it's got to spin, right? I mean, I, I don't want to get into that. And like whatever you believe about the legacy media in our country or whatever, but everybody has an agenda. Oh yeah. And so everybody's got to spin. The more you can remove that agenda, the more real of an answer you're going to get. I can't think of a more real place and less of an agenda than I'm trying to make money. Yeah, by putting my money at risk 100%.

Daniel Wolgin 01:01:23  So yeah, that's what we watch. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 01:01:25  That's interesting. Polly Markets Polly.

Daniel Wolgin 01:01:26  Markets is the one. There is many out there. I don't condone, degenerate gambling. if you're an adult and you have the money to lose, don't bet anything you can't lose. You know, go for it. Have fun. But yeah.

Joel Gandara 01:01:37  Just knowing it's out there, that's pretty interesting. It's cool. So it's funny because you run a very respectable, ammunition business, and we haven't really talked too much about ammo. Or because the guys who like that, they've already heard all the conversations about that. Yeah, it doesn't change that much. We've talked about you as a person, as a man, husband, father, friend. but I would like to know, what do you shoot? What do you what do you carry? What kind of firearm do you like?

Daniel Wolgin 01:02:02  Sure. I'm going to I'm going to be a politician and, answer the question I want you to ask and say the question you asked.

Daniel Wolgin 01:02:11  People ask me sometimes like, what's the best gun for me? And say, well, what do you want to do? Is it for home protection? Is it for fun at the range, or are you going to go hunting? Do you want to go long long range shooting? Whatever. so a lot of people in particular are most concerned when it's to carry or for personal protection. And I say first. No safe, no gun. So get a safe first. But then it's the gun you're most comfortable with. So you got to go to the range. I usually it's my friends asked me I said I probably have everything you're interested in. Let me know. I'll bring them all. We can go to the range. You can try them. The one that's most comfortable in your hand that you're most proficient with in shooting. That's the best one. You know. There is no best one. So me personally, Glocks are Glocks for a reason, so I'm a big fan of those as far as what I carry, because Glocks are a little big and I like the capacity.

Daniel Wolgin 01:02:59  I like the SIG Sauer P 365 they make one made make I'm not sure. Called the SAS micro SAS. they were going to discontinue it then they didn't. SAS is not for British special forces. It's stands for sig anti snag. And so a lot of the things that might stick off out of it are kind of streamlined with the with the frame. I like it because I really like to pocket carry. When I carry, I don't carry all the time, but when I do, I like to pocket carry instead of wearing it. I find I'm too fat to appendix carry. and I don't like small on the back and that kind of stuff. So, I want to make sure that it's not going to snag, you know, as I'm pulling it out of a pocket holster.

Joel Gandara 01:03:40  does it have a pinky extension? Does your pinky.

Daniel Wolgin 01:03:43  So the the there's extended magazines. And that is what I use because my hands are kind of wide in this direction. Not that big but wide. So like, big grips are too big for me, but the distance from my kind of pointer to my pinky is a little bit larger.

Daniel Wolgin 01:03:56  So yeah, it has a little pinky extension, but if I'm wearing clothes that I can't carry that in and I feel like I want to carry, the Ruger LCP, which is actually in 380. It's teeny teeny tiny. It's no fun to shoot. Sorry. Ruger. it's no fun to shoot.

Joel Gandara 01:04:12  It almost comes out of your hand.

Daniel Wolgin 01:04:14  It's very snappy. Is the kind of the term you really feel that recoil. You it has a pinky extension. It's still not long enough to get my pinky on it. And so you're really gripping it with, you know, these two fingers, but it works, right? I look at I look at firearms and carrying the self-defense side. It's insurance. I don't expect to get into a car accident. I don't expect to burn my house down. In fact, I'm nearly certain it's never going to happen. It doesn't mean I'm not paying for insurance, so I'm nearly certain I am never going to have to pull a firearm in self-defense. I don't I don't put myself in situations where that's likely to happen.

Daniel Wolgin 01:04:46  but if I'm more on that end of the spectrum, then it's insurance.

Joel Gandara 01:04:51  Yeah, yeah. As long as you don't go to stupid places, it's stupid times with stupid people. You avoid 99% of what's out there.

Daniel Wolgin 01:04:57  You just avoid the stupid people. You're probably.

Joel Gandara 01:04:58  Good. Yeah, that's a that's a big one that most people should.

Daniel Wolgin 01:05:01  I really like Klay's shooting. It's really fun. It's like golf with shotguns. so there you can spend, I don't know, probably $200,000 on a firearm if you want to. I think it's a lot like golf where, like, if you're not that good, the better. Firearms not going to make you any better, right? I have an over under. Beretta is a well-respected name in that space. Beretta 686 is another like, very well respected model in that space. That's what I use. I've got three of them, so that I can bring friends. Yeah. and then insofar as just like going to the range and shooting, I have two favorites.

Daniel Wolgin 01:05:36  so there's a company called R5 seven that makes an upper that is for a caliber called five seven by 28. And it's a really small caliber. You can fit 50 rounds in a small magazine. And the way that it sits on the firearm and the way that it interacts with the action and the chamber, the brass eject it down through the mag. Well, on the standard air platform. It's just very cool, super fun to shoot. So I really like that one. and the other is the, it's also a Beretta. I'm not a Beretta, shill, but it is also Beretta. It's called the KCS four storm in nine millimeter. it's a carbine. So that means basically just that it's shorter than a full length rifle. But does it qualify.

Joel Gandara 01:06:16  As a pistol?

Daniel Wolgin 01:06:17  You know, it's a rifle. It's just carbine length. It's a shorter rifle and it's super comfortable. Again, super fun to shoot. And this is for putting holes in paper, right? You're talking about like hunting or self-defense.

Daniel Wolgin 01:06:28  And neither of these are good self-defense. They're probably neither of them are good for hunting. so just fun because the reality is most of this market, it's just toys for boys. It's fun. Let's go to the range indoor or outdoor and, you know, put some holes in paper or or put some holes in a soda bottle or whatever. Right. It's just it's fun. Which, by the way, I say like we're very lucky in the industry that shooting is fun because people try it and it's fun.

Joel Gandara 01:06:55  And they consume.

Daniel Wolgin 01:06:56  And so they do it again and they consume. Yeah, right. And so like even people who are like super anti-gun or let's put it another way, they're not comfortable having a firearm in their house. Fine. It's not for everybody. Sure. even those people, if they're open to it and they go with a friend and they go to the range and it's good range, and they have a good friend. And it's fun. It's fun. They're going to have fun.

Daniel Wolgin 01:07:17  They're going to want to do it again even if they never get comfortable carrying or having a firearm. It's definitely not for everybody.

Joel Gandara 01:07:22  I don't think everyone should have a firearm if you're not comfortable with it.

Daniel Wolgin 01:07:25  I don't think everyone should have a sports car either. That's right. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 01:07:27  And if you're not properly trained, you're not. Don't buy one. You don't need to have one. It's not. It's not for you. You're absolutely.

Daniel Wolgin 01:07:32  Right. Don't listen to him, folks. Buy a gun.

Joel Gandara 01:07:35  If what you said is absolutely right. I wanted to get a new everyday carry. And I got a broad amount that I rented, you know, at the range. And then I just went dwindling it down, and it came down to the P 365, which is great for concealing. It's tiny, lower capacity compared to what I ended up with, a Glock 43 x, and also what I decided with was just how I put them through the paper. With the Glock, I was able to keep them tight with the sig.

Joel Gandara 01:08:07  It was in as comfortable, so I was spread out.

Daniel Wolgin 01:08:08  43 x, if I remember correctly. It's got a bigger grip, so it's going to be easier to hold in your hand. Target acquisition. Excuse me. Target acquisition. Probably easier. Yeah. You know, in those kinds of things. And I happen to know Joel pretty well. I know how you carry I won't reveal to all the listeners at home, but the way that you carry, you know, it's much more reasonable to have a larger firearm. Okay, good. Whereas you're you're not going to as easily be able to get that in and out of your pocket. So I guess I spilled the beans. He doesn't pocket carry.

Joel Gandara 01:08:34  a buddy of mine, we went to the range and it was a competition shooting. Put your hands over your head for the buzz. And he was not missing steel. His ding ding ding ding ding. He was doing everything. He was amazing. His name's Ray. And, so I went ahead and saw what he was doing, and I got a red dot put on it.

Joel Gandara 01:08:51  Oh, yeah. So I've only used it a few times.

Daniel Wolgin 01:08:53  I mean, optics are great. Yeah. It's amazing. They're really amazing. And again, for, you know, for fun, you can make an argument about a self-defense situation. You're not using your optic. You need to get the muscle memory. You need to get the sight picture. You're not going to have the clarity of mind unless you're super well trained, right? I'm sure our best, you know, military folks, best law enforcement folks. That's a different story. But for you and me, well.

Joel Gandara 01:09:16  For me, we don't train.

Daniel Wolgin 01:09:16  Enough. We don't train. I don't train enough. No, no. If I ever really had to pull my firearm in self-defense situation, I mean, I keep one in the chamber because I'm not even sure that I'm going to be able to rack the slide at that moment. In that moment. Yeah.

Joel Gandara 01:09:29  Nor do you want to make the noise in your house in the middle of the night.

Joel Gandara 01:09:31  You might want to. Or maybe.

Daniel Wolgin 01:09:32  You do. Maybe that's that's also another, you know, people say a shotgun pump action shotguns. The great thing for for home defense. I said, well, maybe except you got to pump it every time. So yeah, like yes and no. And what you.

Joel Gandara 01:09:43  Need is a speaker in the House that. Yeah, just play the window. Just your.

Daniel Wolgin 01:09:46  Doorbell. Ding dong.

Speaker 3 01:09:47  Yeah.

Daniel Wolgin 01:09:49  But for fun, man, red dots are awesome. It's amazing.

Joel Gandara 01:09:51  Red dots. You know, I just read and I asked my friend who's an FBI Swat member currently, if this is true because I read it online and he said, yeah, that's about right. The average shooting happens, you know, in real life at seven feet. Oh, yeah. So targets don't even matter that much.

Daniel Wolgin 01:10:08  Forget even about the average. Let's talk about a situation you'd be in if you're 20 yards away. You should probably run.

Joel Gandara 01:10:15  Hide, run and hide.

Joel Gandara 01:10:16  Run, hide. That's it.

Daniel Wolgin 01:10:17  Run! Hide!

Joel Gandara 01:10:18  Fight! Yeah. When they run first hide second. Fight when they find you.

Speaker 3 01:10:23  If you need.

Daniel Wolgin 01:10:24  To. Yeah. Now that does not apply in, in my opinion. Inside your house. Right inside your house. I don't really believe in the duty to retreat. and we live in Florida. We live in Florida. We don't have that that duty. At the same time, you want to be reasonable. You know your daughter's boyfriend, not mine. But your daughter's boyfriend comes over in the middle night. You don't want to shoot him, right? So, like, let's be. You got to be discerning. You got to be reasonable about how you're going to engage with potential threats and identify those threats and that kind of thing. But but yeah, in a situation where you're concealed carrying and have to engage, it's my understanding is it's very, very clear.

Joel Gandara 01:10:57  Your car is blocked in and someone's breaking your window and about to shoot you.

Joel Gandara 01:11:01  It's like two feet. Yeah. That's probably what realistically something.

Daniel Wolgin 01:11:05  Yeah. I mean, I'm far from an expert in the kinds of situations that end up in needing people to pull their firearm. Because recognize that even if you go and do the data, you'll do the study on the data of of shooting incidents, self-defense, shooting incidents. That's only the ones where somebody had to shoot. That ignores all the ones where somebody pulled their firearm and said, hey, I got a firearm. I'm prepared to defend myself. You need to de-escalate the situation. They probably didn't say it like that is probably more personable. but then they did the situation de-escalated nobody got shot. That's the the ideal outcome is you don't get yourself a situation, but if you're in the situation, that's the ideal outcome. Better for nobody to get shot. You don't hear about those. Right. And so from that perspective, like the effectiveness of personal protection, of concealed carry or of gun ownership in preventing harm is underreported because you don't we call him the good guy with a gun, the good guy with a gun, stories.

Daniel Wolgin 01:11:59  You don't hear about them as much as you hear about the somebody's got shot story.

Joel Gandara 01:12:03  Yeah, I posted this on social media the other day and I got some, you know, you get the good, the bad. I read some of the comments and, I don't know if this statistic is true, but I put a picture of my new you or US flag flying in front of my house, and I said, I heard that there's less incidence of breaking into houses with US flags in front.

Daniel Wolgin 01:12:21  Look, if you don't want to have a firearm in your home, go get an NRA lifetime member sticker and just put that on your back door. Right. Look, I don't know. Obviously, if you're committing crimes, you're not the smartest person around. But if I got two houses and I'm like, well, that guy definitely has guns and this guy definitely doesn't have guns, I know which one I guess I would choose, although I would never be doing that. I don't really know. Right.

Daniel Wolgin 01:12:48  But yeah, right. So yeah, just put an NRA lifetime member sticker up on the wall.

Speaker 3 01:12:51  Do it. And let's confuse the bad guys.

Joel Gandara 01:12:53  Absolutely. All right Dan, thank you so much for being here, man. You're you're a really good friend of mine. Definitely one of my top friends. I love learning from you and I'm glad that I got to share. Have you come and share this to me?

Daniel Wolgin 01:13:04  I feel the same way. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Joel. Thanks, man.