Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / The Mistake That Nearly Killed Our Military Contract: Tom Kubiniec on Aiding US Military Weapons

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The Mistake That Nearly Killed Our Military Contract: Tom Kubiniec on Aiding US Military Weapons · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  this is controversial maybe. I'm not sure you can teach entrepreneurship.
• 0:04
  the biggest difference between an entrepreneur and what I'd call
• 0:07
  a want-repreneur which is somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur,
• 0:10
  but they aren't. The biggest difference is risk tolerance.
• 0:13
  You know, it's Friday, you don't have a lot of money in your bank,
• 0:17
  payroll comes out on Tuesday, and you don't have enough money to cover your payroll,
• 0:22
  The entrepreneur sleeps well that weekend,
• 0:24
  knowing that Monday morning is your biggest mail day,
• 0:27
  you're gonna get enough checks to cover your payroll.
• 0:29
  The want-repreneur is up all night.
• 0:31
  He can't sleep. He's nervous or there's nervous,
• 0:33
  they're stressed, they're like,
• 0:35
  holy crap, we're gonna all these money problems.
• 0:36
  And the stress can consume you.
• 0:45
  All right, Tom Kubiniec Welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:49
  Well thank you very much. It's ~ pleasure to be here.
• 0:52
  I'm really looking forward to the conversation.
• 0:54
  Yes, sir. I I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while.
• 0:58
  ~ so Tom, you are the founder of Secure It Tactical Storage,
• 1:03
  which is one of the leading military weapon storage companies in the world.
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  And you've grown that company incredibly over the last many years,
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  but you've got a
• 1:14
  Quite a fascinating way that you even got into this industry and especially
• 1:18
  how you started the company. So just to set
• 1:20
  Yeah.
• 1:20
  the stage for our listeners, could you ~ talk about that story and and
• 1:23
  how it came to be?
• 1:23
  Yeah, I'll give
• 1:24
  you the the reader's digest lightning round.
• 1:27
  So I graduated high school. I was a guitar player.
• 1:30
  I was playing practicing six, seven hours a day.
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  My goal was to be a rock guitarist.
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  Played in bands for about 10, 12 years,
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  achieved a pretty decent level of success in 1984.
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  Guitar Player Magazine heard one of my demos and did an article on me
• 1:46
  as what they said the best unknown rock guitarist.
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  I was, you know, living outside of Buffalo.
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  kind of a local guy playing and b after that article I packed up moved
• 1:56
  to Los Angeles with plans on being a ~ me being a rock star.
• 2:01
  That was the that was the big dream.
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  It's and got out to California,
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  played with a lot of cool people,
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  did a lot of neat things. I developed tendonitis shortly after arriving
• 2:10
  and at a point when I thought my career was gonna just take off,
• 2:13
  all of a sudden I couldn't play anymore.
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  It was gone. And you know, what was a week turned into a month,
• 2:18
  turned into three months, and all of a sudden I'm just like,
• 2:20
  this is not happening.
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  So I took a job telemarketing typewriter ribbons and liftoff tapes for
• 2:27
  way back in the day. And just because they would hire anybody.
• 2:32
  I was horrible at sales, but I worked hard,
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  so they moved me to a non-sales position.
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  I saw the money being made in commission sales,
• 2:39
  so I quit that job and took a straight commission job selling computer supplies.
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  Two years into that job, I quit and started a telemarketing business
• 2:48
  in my apartment with a couple of partners.
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  You know, we had no idea what we were doing.
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  We just figured we'll figure this out.
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  And you know, four years later we had 17 sales reps and a nice little business.
• 3:00
  I sold to my partners, went off on my own with green line data doing the same thing,
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  got into the internet in the 90s,
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  started writing websites. I taught myself HTML.
• 3:08
  We got into tape storage. ~ younger listeners won't know this,
• 3:12
  but back in the day, people backed up their computers on backup tapes.
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  Large businesses would have thousands of backup tapes,
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  which all had to be stored and organized so they could access archival data.
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  We had taperack.com was a very popular website.
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  We were one of the largest sellers of racking systems.
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  The HIPAA laws came out for hospitals and medical records.
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  We had all of a sudden one day all personal data had to be locked
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  in hospitals and schools. So we started secure laptop storage dot com,
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  several websites.
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  And we started selling laptop storage into these institutions.
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  And 2001, I got a phone call from a gentleman.
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  He said, Can you store an MP5?
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  I'm like, sure. What's an MP5?
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  And I thought it was some little MacBook or some computer hard drive.
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  He said, It's a little submachine gun.
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  I started laughing and I said,
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  Who are you? He was with the FBI.
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  We talked for a little while. I said,
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  Give me a couple of weeks. I started doing research,
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  and I knew nothing about this.
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  I'd never owned a gun at that point.
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  And
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  I started doing some research.
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  This is before Google's using probably Yahoo,
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  and was finding these references and articles about the military
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  was struggling as they transitioned from the sixteen,
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  which is a traditional battle rifle,
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  to the M4, which is really a weapon system with a lot of attachments,
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  a lot of different parts. And I just thought it was fascinating.
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  You know, the Gulf Wars were going on.
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  I figured this is something that we could do to really kind of give back
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  to the military. I'd never been in the military,
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  but I know these guys were risking their lives for
• 4:41
  For America. So we jumped into it,
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  knowing nothing about it. It was a steep learning curve and ~ just started selling
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  weapon racks into the military.
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  It was very slow at the beginning.
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  I had the telemarketing business still running,
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  but we slowly figured it out. in 2008,
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  there was a solicitation put out by U.S.
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  Army Special Forces Command. They wanted to hire a company to survey
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  all their armories and draft a report for command as to why they were failing.
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  Again, we're we're total novices at this.
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  We've been doing it for a while,
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  but we're really on the outside.
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  We're really, we're not gun people.
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  We really don't know the space.
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  And we got a meeting with a colonel at Fort Bragg.
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  ~ Gary Meyer was my head sales guy.
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  He and I, at that point, we're a three-person secure,
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  it's a three-person company. Underneath Green Line Data was my data storage company.
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  Got down to Bragg, we're walking down the hallway.
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  To this guy's office, and there's all this memorabilia,
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  all this stuff on the walls. As I approach the door,
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  it just kind of hits me. And I walked into his office and I just said,
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  You know, Good morning, sir. My name's Tom Kubanick.
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  I'm considered the leading authority in small arm storage and armory design.
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  I really believe we're the company to do this for you.
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  I think we're the only company that can do this for you.
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  And we sat, we talked for about 15 minutes,
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  left, went back out in the parking lot.
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  Gary's looking at me, shaking his head,
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  and he's like, What the hell was that?
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  I'm going, I look at him, and he goes,
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  leading authority. I started laughing.
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  I said, Gary, you know what? There is no authority in this.
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  Nobody knows how to do this. It's never been done before.
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  We claimed it. We gotta back it up.
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  Let's win this contract and let's back it up.
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  Well we did win that contract and I spent eighteen months on the road.
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  I went to every single special forces armory.
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  I spent a day with each armor documenting workflow,
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  looking at the struggles, challenges,
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  a lot of photographs, prepared
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  A pretty sizable report for command,
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  which he did a presentation on.
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  And it was during that time that I designed and patented the secure tactical weapon
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  storage platform, which was a culmination of everything I had learned.
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  But over that 18 months, I became the leading authority in small arm storage,
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  armory design. You know, nobody had ever been in these spaces,
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  nobody had the access that we had.
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  So it was just a wealth of knowledge.
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  We launched our system.
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  And three years later, we were a primary supplier to the US military.
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  So it just took off. Now, sequestration,
• 7:08
  the forced military cutbacks around 2013 kicked in.
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  And it just about put us out of business.
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  We went seven months without getting a single order,
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  you know, making payroll, paying rent,
• 7:19
  you know, hoping this is going to turn around.
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  I did end up laying off a good chunk of the staff and we took us back
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  to a very small company. It was at that time we determined to
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  go into consumer products because
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  No matter how good we were in the military,
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  if Congress turns off the money,
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  we're dead in the water. Consumer products was a slow launch.
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  We started in 2014. We really got serious in 2016,
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  and then we made Inc. magazine's fastest growing companies in America
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  in 2018 and 2020. It just took off.
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  As of today, retail sales is about 86,
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  87% of our business.
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  We're looking at some massive military contracts right now.
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  So the military may be our prime business two years from now.
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  there's a lot of action happening on that front that we're aggressively working on.
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  Okay. Wow. All right. So I appreciate
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  Yeah.
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  the whole story there. A whole lot to dig into.
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  ~ let's just start way back when.
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  So even when you start your your telemarketing business,
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  you said, look, we had no idea what we're doing,
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  ~ but we're we're doing it, right?
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  we'll figure this out. So classic entrepreneur attitude,
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  like where where did that come from?
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  Has that always been your your approach to things?
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  I think so. You know, from the time I was very young,
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  ~ when I was a little kid, eight,
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  nine years old, I was out shoveling driveways to make pocket money,
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  mowing lawns. I started a little lawn mowing business in high school,
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  ~ working with realty companies to as they were as executives were moving
• 8:48
  and they had houses to sell, I was the guy who would take care of mowing the lawns.
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  I was a lot cheaper than the big professional organizations.
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  I had a few friends help me and you know,
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  I'm sixteen years old.
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  And every Saturday I'd make $180.
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  I'd pay my guys each forty bucks and they were very happy to make forty dollars.
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  Back then, forty dollars in a day was a lot of money,
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  and it was kind of a cool little business.
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  And I've just kind of always been that way.
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  I I like to I'm a hands-on guy.
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  All the design work we do is designed with wood,
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  with metal, with welders, with hammers.
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  I do everything in the physical world.
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  Then we send it to people to have CAD drawings and to have
• 9:27
  the technical side of it done.
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  you know, entrepreneurship, this is controversial maybe.
• 9:33
  I'm not sure you can teach entrepreneurship.
• 9:35
  I'm not sure it's a learned skill.
• 9:37
  You know, the biggest difference between an entrepreneur and what
• 9:40
  I'd call a want-repreneur which is somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur,
• 9:44
  but they aren't. The biggest difference is risk tolerance.
• 9:47
  You know, there's a lot of people that
• 9:51
  You know, it's Friday, you don't have a lot of money in your bank,
• 9:55
  payroll comes out on Tuesday, and you don't have enough money to cover your payroll,
• 10:00
  which I mean that's that could kill a company,
• 10:02
  it could put you, you know, get you in legal trouble.
• 10:04
  The entrepreneur sleeps well that weekend,
• 10:07
  knowing that on Mondays, this is back in the days of mail bringing checks in,
• 10:11
  knowing that Monday morning is your biggest mail day,
• 10:14
  you're gonna get enough checks to cover your payroll.
• 10:16
  And the entrepreneur trusts the system and
• 10:20
  Just moves through it and just does it.
• 10:22
  The want-repreneur is up all night.
• 10:25
  He can't sleep. He's nervous or there's nervous,
• 10:27
  they're stressed, they're like,
• 10:28
  holy crap, we're gonna all these money problems.
• 10:30
  And the stress can consume you.
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  I think the true entrepreneur doesn't it just doesn't affect you.
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  there's a certain level of I don't care.
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  You know, thing things may go south,
• 10:42
  but it's just a problem to solve.
• 10:44
  It's not the end of the world.
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  but that's just kind of how we
• 10:47
  How we did this, and I've made incredible mistakes throughout my career.
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  And I encourage everybody in this organization,
• 10:54
  one of our big monikers is fail fast.
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  Try it, fail fast if it doesn't work.
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  You know, it's I always give the analogy for you know in business success.
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  You're driving to someplace you haven't been to before,
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  you've got directions, you're driving down this road,
• 11:10
  and all of a sudden there's a fork in the road that's not in your directions.
• 11:13
  You have three options. You can go left,
• 11:15
  you can go right, or you can stop and figure it out.
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  The guy that stops and figures it out is going to be last.
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  He's he's he's he's dead in the water.
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  One guy's gonna go left, maybe that's the right direction.
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  He's gonna be there first, he's gonna be doing great.
• 11:29
  The guy that goes right is gonna realize,
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  hey, we're going the wrong way,
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  and they're gonna course correct and get to their destination.
• 11:35
  The person who stops and and sits and thinks and goes through everything,
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  it's gonna kill you.
• 11:42
  always be moving, never be afraid of failure,
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  but when you fail, you simply course correct.
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  you know, it's every great success successful business is nothing more than
• 11:52
  a string of failures that you learn from and just keep driving.
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  Mm. Okay. Now love those perspectives you have ~ on entrepreneurship.
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  you get into the the military storage space totally by a fluke.
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  S someone calls you and asks you to store
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  Yeah. Yeah.
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  a submachine gun out of the blue.
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  And I think you told me off off camera,
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  like you just thought it was cool,
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  right? Like the the computer stuff was kind of boring and you said,
• 12:53
  Wow, guns are you know, ~ that that sounds interesting.
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  So you kind of went with it.
• 12:57
  slow build, and then you there was like an RFP basically put out by the military.
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  You get this meeting at Fort Bragg and you're walking in there with the sales rep,
• 13:06
  and like you described it as something just hit you and told
• 13:09
  Yeah.
• 13:10
  you to say that, right? And so what when
• 13:12
  Yeah.
• 13:12
  you say that line, which like now granted you did back it up thereafter,
• 13:16
  but at the time, right, it's easy to say like that's that's bullshit,
• 13:20
  right? You're not the leading
• 13:21
  Right.
• 13:21
  authority, right?
• 13:22
  Like at the
• 13:22
  Right.
• 13:23
  time when you you had I mean you had the balls to do that in the moment with
• 13:27
  a colonel that telling him
• 13:28
  Right.
• 13:28
  you're the the leading authority on military storage when you had
• 13:31
  no idea what you're doing. How how did that go over in the meeting?
• 13:35
  Fine. It just it just it was a line in passing.
• 13:38
  It registered with him. But it wasn't a big it wasn't a big thing.
• 13:42
  Again, and you you you make a statement like that from is from
• 13:46
  a perspective of total confidence.
• 13:48
  It wasn't this like, hey, I'm this it was just good morning,
• 13:50
  sir, I'm the leading leading authority.
• 13:52
  Just it was very nonchalant, just let it float out there and we sat down and talked.
• 13:56
  it was winning that contract l made me the leading authority,
• 13:59
  but I don't know how important that sentence was in winning that contract.
• 14:04
  I I'll never know, but
• 14:06
  When you've got nothing to lose,
• 14:07
  swing for the fences. You know,
• 14:10
  at that point, Green Line Data was my data storage company and it was doing well.
• 14:15
  Secure it was a new idea. I had nothing to lose.
• 14:18
  He could have thrown me out. He could have said,
• 14:20
  This is total BS. You know, I know who the leading authority is.
• 14:23
  It's not you. I mean, that could have happened,
• 14:24
  but you know what? So we would have walked out of there and said,
• 14:27
  All right, let's try something else.
• 14:29
  You gotta have this idea that you've got nothing to lose.
• 14:32
  And you you gotta be careful with the money aspect of you in business,
• 14:36
  so many people focus on money.
• 14:38
  I always view it as money is a byproduct of success.
• 14:41
  Money's not the goal here. The goal is winning.
• 14:44
  The goal is w is winning the next contract.
• 14:46
  The goal is winning the next customer,
• 14:48
  solving the next problem. If you solve enough problems,
• 14:51
  you win enough orders, the money's gonna be there.
• 14:54
  But I've you know, to a fault,
• 14:56
  I've never really
• 14:58
  focused on the on money as a goal.
• 15:00
  And there's times when we've made big mistakes,
• 15:03
  it's cost us a lot, but you learn a lot in at those times as well
• 15:08
  and just keep moving forward.
• 15:10
  All right, and so what was the process like of actually winning that
• 15:13
  pro that contract, right? Because they put out a big big RFP,
• 15:18
  right? A lot of people vied for that.
• 15:19
  Like how how long was the process before you were actually a
• 15:22
  it was probably
• 15:22
  probably a couple, probably three months,
• 15:24
  two to three months. And it was we had a very simple proposal,
• 15:27
  and again, we had no experience at that.
• 15:30
  We're up against, you know, L3,
• 15:32
  heresies, big defense contractors.
• 15:34
  They probably put millions of dollars into this thing.
• 15:37
  And our I think our bid was three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars
• 15:41
  to cover all the travel, all the time,
• 15:43
  all the stuff. It was so I'm sure we were probably the low bid.
• 15:46
  What was interesting is the guys in the contracting office kept sending
• 15:50
  our proposal back.
• 15:51
  with questions. They basically helped us get our proposal into
• 15:56
  a condition that meets the standards for what they were looking for.
• 16:00
  Because we'd never done this before.
• 16:01
  And it's possible that bold statement got the colonel to say,
• 16:05
  Hey, I really like these guys.
• 16:07
  Cause the contracting guys all knew we're a new company.
• 16:10
  We're we're we're novices in this space.
• 16:13
  Cause we didn't know how to write a proper military,
• 16:16
  you know, proposal or, you know,
• 16:18
  in this type of situation. We just
• 16:21
  Sat down, put together as best we could,
• 16:22
  and said, let's send it. And there was a lot of boilerplate detail that they
• 16:28
  required. And the contracting office helped us polish this thing up and get
• 16:33
  it to a point where they accepted it,
• 16:34
  and we won the contract.
• 16:37
  Okay. And that really jump started,
• 16:39
  secure it, as far as ~ you know,
• 16:43
  the growth of the company, right?
• 16:44
  Well,
• 16:44
  f during the contract, you know,
• 16:47
  when when we're in these armories,
• 16:49
  I recognized that complexity was killing the space.
• 16:53
  You know, they they were using a modular weapon storage system that could adapt
• 16:57
  to any gun. The problem is it had seventy-five different components.
• 17:01
  It was just it was a complex system that required the military
• 17:04
  of something changed to buy new brackets.
• 17:06
  Well it's very difficult for the military to buy things.
• 17:09
  There's a it's a whole big process.
• 17:11
  When you want to buy $30 worth of stuff,
• 17:13
  it's hard to do. So we came up,
• 17:15
  and this was just me sitting back in the warehouse.
• 17:18
  I was using wood at the time because it was easy to manipulate.
• 17:21
  And I came up with a with a bracket that would hold every single gun
• 17:25
  in a military armory. So our system we presented was it's a modular weapon rack with
• 17:30
  one moving part, no tools are required.
• 17:32
  An armorer can walk up to a weapon rack with any gun in his hand and adjust
• 17:37
  on the fly and store the gun and walk away.
• 17:39
  And nobody'd ever seen that before.
• 17:41
  That and then the rest of our system,
• 17:43
  you know, we're compatible with a wide variety of products that you could
• 17:47
  buy at Home Depot or any hardware store.
• 17:49
  They call them COTS products, commercial off the shelf.
• 17:52
  Military loves that because when something's proprietary,
• 17:55
  it's expensive. When it's commercial off the shelf,
• 17:58
  they can source things very inexpensively.
• 18:00
  All my competitors are proprietary,
• 18:02
  and we're just like, you know what?
• 18:04
  Let's solve the problem. Let's not let's not make a proprietary system.
• 18:09
  to maximize every possible dollar.
• 18:11
  Let's solve their problem and just let it play out.
• 18:16
  And that's what we did. Our solutions solved a lot of problems
• 18:19
  and the company really took off.
• 19:02
  Okay. Wow. So just just from observing,
• 19:06
  right? You're new in the space.
• 19:07
  ~ and I mean just hearing that it it could have even helped you,
• 19:11
  right? Like a fresh perspective.
• 19:13
  You're not
• 19:14
  ~ absolutely.
• 19:14
  in the industry, right? You
• 19:16
  you look and say, wow, this is we it's complex.
• 19:19
  It's it doesn't if anything changes,
• 19:21
  you gotta buy all new brackets.
• 19:22
  So you created a universal bracket that would store any gun.
• 19:25
  And that was literally like the perfect solution for for that problem.
• 19:31
  It was, you know, there's you you hit a really good point there about when you're
• 19:34
  trying to solve a problem, your first pass at it,
• 19:38
  don't look at what's out there.
• 19:39
  Don't look at what's almost working.
• 19:42
  Cause once you see something like I I had no experience with weapon racks.
• 19:46
  If I had gone out and spent a lot of time with what are the competitors doing,
• 19:49
  what are they getting wrong? That would have influenced my creative side.
• 19:53
  You know, people say, Wow, you're thinking outside the box.
• 19:56
  We didn't even know there was a box.
• 19:58
  You know, we are so far removed from it.
• 20:00
  So it's always when you're trying to solve a problem,
• 20:03
  your first solution, draw it up,
• 20:05
  get it down on paper with minimal input from competitors,
• 20:09
  minimal input from other things out there to see what what comes up with.
• 20:13
  Now if you're struggling, then you start looking at other things.
• 20:15
  What are what are other people doing,
• 20:17
  you know, to to finalize and get your design work done.
• 20:20
  You know, for secure it, creativity is the key to our success.
• 20:23
  I think in lot of businesses, there's so many good people in America.
• 20:26
  your average American works hard,
• 20:28
  thinks well, you know, does things well.
• 20:31
  So many people talk about, you know,
• 20:32
  staffing and finding the right people.
• 20:34
  For me, it's creativity. How do you get people to be creative?
• 20:39
  Because you know, a baby is born purely creative.
• 20:42
  All they have is creativity. They have no
• 20:44
  Filters whatsoever. And as kids grow up,
• 20:47
  you know, they always say kids say the darndest things because they have no filters.
• 20:51
  But then they're slowly learning.
• 20:52
  No, honey, we don't say that. Little kids go to school,
• 20:54
  makes some goofy comment, everybody laughs at him.
• 20:58
  He's like, Well, I won't do that again.
• 20:59
  And as you grow up, you learn to conform,
• 21:02
  You know, you get into school in your middle years,
• 21:04
  and it's all about being part of a group of friends,
• 21:06
  or you're conforming. You get into college,
• 21:08
  you join a frat, you want to be conformed,
• 21:09
  you get in your first businesses.
• 21:11
  learn the culture, be part of the culture.
• 21:13
  And it's all about this conformity drive.
• 21:15
  And I work really hard to to get people out of that.
• 21:18
  I refer to the company as a band of misfits.
• 21:21
  You know, the employees here. We are the secure it band of misfits.
• 21:24
  because everybody, everybody at some level is a misfit.
• 21:28
  You know, none of us, none of us are perfectly aligned with what we're doing.
• 21:31
  But I want people to amplify that,
• 21:34
  to
• 21:34
  reflect on it and to to to live in that world of yeah,
• 21:37
  I'm a misfit, I'm different, and kind of push them to think differently.
• 21:41
  that's the the hardest thing for me is to get people to unleash their creativity
• 21:48
  and drop that fear of looking foolish.
• 21:51
  There's a point where everybody,
• 21:53
  when you're alone, you do goofy stuff.
• 21:55
  Some people sing in the shower,
• 21:56
  some people talk to themselves in a drive.
• 21:57
  You're doing things that you only do when you're alone.
• 22:00
  I want that person in the meeting.
• 22:03
  I want that person who's absolutely free to explore ridiculous ideas without
• 22:08
  any fear of you know being embarrassed,
• 22:11
  me and looking stupid. I just I want the stuff out there.
• 22:14
  And we we do a lot of exercises here to try to drive that creativity.
• 22:20
  Wow. Okay. All right. So the company takes off,
• 22:23
  starts growing. A few years into it and that and because you're
• 22:26
  so heavily dependent on military,
• 22:28
  this the sequestration, ~ is that how you say it?
• 22:31
  Bas basically seek
• 22:31
  It's sequestration was the word they used.
• 22:34
  Congress in like two thousand five or six trying to balance a budget said,
• 22:38
  Okay, we're gonna do this, but if we don't have it balanced by two thousand twelve,
• 22:42
  force cutbacks that were so severe,
• 22:45
  Congress was like, These cutbacks are so bad,
• 22:47
  it'll force us to do our job. It was really it was just it was just Congress being
• 22:52
  stupid and being lazy. And they got to the point where all of
• 22:55
  a sudden these cutbacks were happening.
• 22:58
  And nobody did anything and the military was decimated financially.
• 23:01
  And you know, what we do isn't required for fighting a war,
• 23:06
  for defending a nation. What we do makes it easier,
• 23:08
  our solution. So we're one of the first groups,
• 23:11
  first areas that there was just no money.
• 23:14
  It's you know, every project we had was put on hold.
• 23:17
  you said I think you said seven months without an order while you're still making
• 23:20
  Mm. Yeah. Yeah.
• 23:21
  payroll, paying rent, ex et cetera,
• 23:23
  et cetera.
• 23:23
  So that's just literally choking the life out of your business.
• 23:26
  Yeah, that's
• 23:26
  just we just at the point at that time,
• 23:29
  you know, I lived in I got a nice lake house.
• 23:31
  I was I'm a pilot. I had a nice plane and we were flying all over the northeast.
• 23:35
  We had a lot of stuff going on.
• 23:37
  And during sequestration, we ended up laying off our staff.
• 23:40
  I sold my pl I sold everything I had.
• 23:42
  And we were down to the house.
• 23:43
  And my wife and I were talking about selling the house and just getting
• 23:46
  a inexpensive farmhouse to buy us some capital just to keep you know
• 23:50
  to keep things going. And I had my kids were pretty young then.
• 23:53
  We tried to shield them from what was going on.
• 23:55
  the funny side of this that you know I started off when I got into telemarketing.
• 24:01
  I lived in a one room apartment in a bad neighborhood in in Burbank and
• 24:05
  my wife and I got married and we'd we lived in this place for five years
• 24:09
  and we had no money but we had a lot of fun and then I made a lot of money,
• 24:13
  I had fun. Then I lost all of it,
• 24:16
  but I still had a lot of fun. You know,
• 24:19
  it's it's this thing of
• 24:21
  you know, success and failure and all this.
• 24:23
  I've found for me personally, making more money versus less money doesn't affect
• 24:30
  my day-to-day happiness really.
• 24:32
  You know, my best days now are on a tractor,
• 24:35
  mowing up. I've got a big hunting property,
• 24:37
  doing trails, you know, just being outside and know,
• 24:40
  we work hard, we drive hard for success.
• 24:43
  But if things blow up, you know what?
• 24:45
  It happens. you just pick up the pieces.
• 24:48
  Analyze the situation and just move on,
• 24:50
  just keep moving forward.
• 25:19
  Okay. Yeah, no, that's great perspective too,
• 25:22
  from someone that didn't have much,
• 25:23
  then made a lot of money, then lost it all and then bounced back again.
• 25:26
  Like you said, the money doesn't affect your day to day happiness.
• 25:29
  And you learn lessons. I mean,
• 25:31
  in hindsight, I should have recognized what was happening and made cuts much
• 25:37
  faster and preserved capital. If I had to do it all over again,
• 25:41
  I would have done more research.
• 25:43
  I would have said, Okay, this this sequestration thing is not gonna end quickly.
• 25:47
  There's no mechanism to end this.
• 25:49
  We gotta make some serious cut and just cut the company size down quickly.
• 25:53
  Just we could have done a lot of stuff to preserve capital.
• 25:56
  We just were optimistically
• 25:59
  believing that next month'll be better,
• 26:02
  next month'll be better. And it just it just went on for a long time.
• 26:06
  Okay. All right. And then that forced you to pivot into the consumer market where
• 26:10
  Yeah.
• 26:11
  you really grew the company thereafter.
• 26:13
  So talk about that process too,
• 26:15
  where you're you basically taking the solution that was solely dedicated
• 26:19
  to the military and then bringing it to the consumer market.
• 26:22
  What what was that process like?
• 26:23
  the the technology side was very simply repackaging it in something that
• 26:28
  was more consumer friendly. Our military weapon racks are really big.
• 26:31
  They're really not designed for homes.
• 26:33
  But why we decided to do it was because our backs were against the wall.
• 26:38
  We had no future, no immediate future with the military.
• 26:41
  There was nothing happening. There was nothing there.
• 26:43
  And it's something I've thought a lot about over the years,
• 26:48
  but
• 26:49
  Don't deny someone their struggle.
• 26:51
  If if during sequestration the government had come in and said,
• 26:54
  hey, look, Tom, we know that this is really hard because of these problems,
• 26:58
  we've got a grant program that's going to get you enough money to keep your business
• 27:01
  going, keep your people employed so we can all get through that.
• 27:04
  If there had been something like that in place,
• 27:07
  would I ever have thought of going into consumer products?
• 27:09
  Probably not. And why hadn't I gone into consumer products 10 years earlier?
• 27:15
  I never thought about it.
• 27:16
  I just I never did I just we're a defense contractor.
• 27:19
  You know, the military market at the time was a 17 to 27 million dollar
• 27:23
  a year market. The consumer market is just shy of a billion dollars.
• 27:27
  I'd never done any research, I never thought about it.
• 27:29
  Once I started digging into it,
• 27:30
  I'm like, holy cow, we're in the wrong business.
• 27:33
  The consumer gun safe business is massive compared to the military.
• 27:38
  My back was against the wall and like this isn't working.
• 27:42
  What else could we do? Well, consumer products.
• 27:46
  All right, let's let's let's pursue this.
• 27:48
  And that's that's kind of just how it started.
• 27:50
  And it started pretty small. We were again new into that space Interesting quick
• 27:54
  story. We launched our first six-gun modular weapon rack for
• 27:58
  for the consumer market. It didn't go well.
• 28:00
  We priced it very aggressively.
• 28:02
  I worked with a guy at an ad agency who specialized in outdoor sports industry,
• 28:06
  and he came to me and said, Tom,
• 28:08
  I need you to raise your price dramatically on this product.
• 28:11
  I'm like, Walt, what are you crazy?
• 28:13
  We're not selling it now. He goes,
• 28:14
  No, Tom. He goes, people are you're competing in the bottom end
• 28:18
  of this market against cheap safes.
• 28:19
  I need you to raise your price.
• 28:21
  I want a chasm between you and your competitors.
• 28:24
  I want people to see your product,
• 28:26
  look at it and say, Holy crap,
• 28:27
  why is that so expensive? The minute they ask why.
• 28:31
  We've got 'cause now they're gonna do some research to figure out
• 28:34
  why it's so expensive. I mean,
• 28:35
  it wasn't priced ridiculously,
• 28:37
  but we raised the prices up and sales took off because of perceived value.
• 28:43
  It was the same product. Our margins were great.
• 28:46
  Now our costs have gone up. We've actually kept our pricing fairly similar
• 28:50
  ~ because our margins back then were so high.
• 28:53
  idea that you have to be the cheapest is a killer.
• 28:56
  It's just a killer. You know, it's you
• 28:57
  Mm.
• 28:58
  Apple computers are are not the cheapest.
• 29:00
  They're they're much more expensive.
• 29:02
  But people love them I use Mac because I like it.
• 29:05
  But anybody who's got the idea that we have to be cheaper than our competitors,
• 29:10
  they're wrong. Unless you're in a straight commodity business,
• 29:13
  you don't. ~ people buy Mercedes over Toyotas every single day.
• 29:20
  They both do the same thing, but one costs forty percent more.
• 29:23
  that's kinda where we're where we're looking and living.
• 29:26
  There are some people who can't afford what I do.
• 29:28
  That's okay. You know, they can aspire to it and eventually work their way up to it.
• 29:33
  love that. And that I think that's the that's one of the best quotes I've ever heard
• 29:37
  is don't deny someone their struggle.
• 29:40
  I r love that quote as well. I see that all over this country where
• 29:44
  the government comes in to help and they have good intentions,
• 29:48
  but giving somebody something they didn't earn diminishes them at some level.
• 29:54
  And I don't like any program where you're giving people money they didn't earn.
• 29:59
  Have them do something. It can be tiny,
• 30:01
  it can be simple, but just
• 30:03
  give them the dignity of knowing they're earning what they're getting.
• 30:06
  And I think I think people do a lot better.
• 30:09
  And it's at times of struggle that we get creative.
• 30:12
  We dig in. As as a species, humans,
• 30:14
  we solve problems. And the more your back is against a wall,
• 30:18
  the more aggressive you're gonna be with this level of creativity,
• 30:21
  of figuring your your way out of it.
• 30:23
  so the the consumer business you continue to grow that and now as you mentioned,
• 30:28
  the military business too is is really picking back up where you're
• 30:32
  ~ potentially looking at some big contracts there.
• 30:34
  So it's really come full circle for you.
• 30:37
  It really has. The military may be bigger than retail in three years.
• 30:40
  really we're looking at standardizing the whole US military on our system.
• 30:45
  And it's probably an eight hundred million dollar contract.
• 30:48
  And that's what we're working towards right now.
• 30:51
  I mean we're a small company, that would change the scope
• 30:53
  of this company dramatically.
• 30:54
  And so Tom, would you look at the whole,
• 30:56
  like the whole journey, right?
• 30:58
  From just kind of natural entrepreneur,
• 31:01
  humble beginnings, numerous different businesses,
• 31:03
  just always kind of figuring it out,
• 31:05
  stumbling into the the military storage business,
• 31:08
  and then the ups and downs you've had there,
• 31:11
  and really this this incredible company that you've built,
• 31:14
  and now be in position to win a mammoth contract potentially,
• 31:17
  and that would, like you said,
• 31:18
  would change the scope of your business.
• 31:20
  Looking back at your whole journey,
• 31:21
  what's been the best part of it for you?
• 31:23
  People, you know, telemarketers are a unusual class of people.
• 31:29
  I was out in LA with that business.
• 31:31
  There's a lot of it where people were trying to be actors,
• 31:33
  trying to be musicians. You had a lot of drug addicts,
• 31:35
  you had a lot of people that just wanted to make easy you know,
• 31:37
  quick money, but it was a just a cast of colorful characters.
• 31:42
  And now coming into secure it,
• 31:44
  we operated at a much higher
• 31:46
  higher level of employee, but for me it always comes down to the people.
• 31:49
  And you know, my core focus as a leader of this company is company culture
• 31:55
  not happiness, but I want everybody to feel a level of respect because they work
• 32:01
  here. I want everybody to feel this level of pride that they don't just have
• 32:05
  a good job. They're working to secure it.
• 32:07
  They they they've got a job where they make a difference every day,
• 32:11
  where they can
• 32:12
  influence parts of the world and they can do things that really improve
• 32:17
  the lives of others. Our core,
• 32:18
  you look at you know core focuses and all stuff for companies,
• 32:22
  we have one very simple core focus.
• 32:24
  Improve the lives of others. That's that's what our systems do.
• 32:27
  They make your life easier. any company with core with core values
• 32:31
  in a small business, they are the values of the owner or of the CEO.
• 32:36
  You can sit with a group of people and come up with core values.
• 32:38
  Most of it is just, crap on paper.
• 32:40
  The values of the CEO or the owner are the values of the company.
• 32:45
  And my very simple code that I live by is whenever I interact with somebody,
• 32:51
  they should walk away somehow benefiting from that interaction.
• 32:55
  It could simply be a smile, and a little casual to something more game changing,
• 32:59
  but
• 32:59
  That's kind of the way I look at life,
• 33:01
  that that we're all here to help each other.
• 33:03
  I was Zig Ziglar said, You get what you want out of life by helping others
• 33:07
  get what they want. I read that when I was first getting into sales
• 33:10
  and it just really sunk in. And that's just how I try to operate every day.
• 34:03
  Love that. Okay. and Tom, if people out there ~ want to learn more about your your
• 34:08
  business or reach out to you for any other reason,
• 34:11
  what's the best way people can find you online?
• 34:13
  They can just Google Secure It.
• 34:14
  We're all over the internet. Secure it Gun Storage is our retail site.
• 34:18
  Secure It Tactical is a military.
• 34:19
  ~ my name's pretty unusual. If you Google me,
• 34:23
  I'm all over the place because there's there's only one Kubiniec family
• 34:26
  in the world, and they're not that big.
• 34:27
  So it's really easy to find. And if people have questions,
• 34:30
  reach out. I love to I love to interact with people.
• 34:33
  You know, people always think as CEOs are too busy,
• 34:36
  but I like to take the time. I talk to a lot of young entrepreneurs,
• 34:40
  any anybody who's
• 34:41
  Looking for help, I'll jump into a conversation.
• 34:45
  Okay. All right. We'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 34:48
  All right, Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to be here
• 34:51
  and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 34:54
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 34:56
  All right, thanks a lot.