Latest / Beyond The Trailhead / Hilltop Packs Creator | Ben McMillen on Beyond the Trailhead Podcast Ep. 21

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Hilltop Packs Creator | Ben McMillen on Beyond the Trailhead Podcast Ep. 21 · Beyond The Trailhead

• speaker-0: All right, everyone, welcome back to Beyond the Trailhead. Again, we have an amazing guest this week, Ben McMillan out with Hilltop Packs out in Pennsylvania. And Ben, thank you so much for being on today. Awesome, and we just wanted to talk a little bit about what you do. I I see you on the trail, well, not you on the trail, but I see the products that you create ⁓ on the trail. I see a lot of people shout you out all the time, but you guys create. speaker-1: I appreciate you having me. speaker-0: quite a few things. So without further ado, and let's just get right into it, go ahead and just tell everybody what your company does and who you are and a little bit of history behind you guys. speaker-1: Yeah, what we do today is pretty much the same run same mission that we had from day one, which was custom printing one-off items for customers who want to have a little more individuality, who want to just do something a little bit different. I myself have always rode motorcycles or bicycles or just any you can customize and kind of make it your own. Then when you got into backpacking gear, you just had to buy what the store had or what the company had to customize. So when I got into hiking, full backstory also in a print shop next to our photography studio. So I started custom printing the fabrics. I was just doing it for myself and had a lot of fun just kind of making a gear and custom printing on some of the fabrics. And it wasn't until started posting those pictures online, like Instagram on Reddit. And then people were like, how are you doing that? Would you do it for me? And this was 2019. And I kept saying, no, we had a very successful studio. My wife works there. I worked there. had 15 photographers. And like, I did not need. another job. Just didn't, I just didn't need it. But I had two daughters. had one of us at Penn State, which college is expensive. My mother was in high school, getting ready to finish up. And I was like, maybe I can teach them how to start a business. I've been self-employed my whole life. I can kind of teach them how this goes. They've always asked questions. And I was like, we can build a little business in the basement. You guys run it. I'll buy the machines. I'll design the gear. I'll show you, I'll bring some of pernay equipment home and we'll do up right here. And if they would have said no, there would have been no Hilltop Packs. Cause again, zero desire to start another company. Um, but then when COVID hit, effectively shut down our studio. Your photographer as well, you know, there's a whole lot of work, especially in Pennsylvania. I really locked down our studio for pretty much a year and a half. So I just had all this free time. And since I was, you know, 1990, I've been doing my own marketing and branding through all the businesses we ever had. And so I just got to work. had this free time and we weren't hurting that bad financially yet. Um, we just had free time. So I dug into the Hilltop Packs business and just expanded our our reach and just tried to make more videos, more photos, created more products. And then it just exploded through 2020. And that really kind of led us to just so much growth up until where you see us now. This is our third location and we'll probably be here for quite a long time, but really focused on that one off item. Of course we'll do bulk orders. We'll do wholesale orders for the companies. We do a lot of stock stuff, but what we're known for and what we're really proud of is how well we're able to take one item. Even the smallest thing. and efficiently make that customized for the customer and get it back out to them and still make a profit, still stay in business. It allows them to be a little bit different on trail. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ wow. I mean, my biggest question when I see a Hilltops pack custom printed thing is, and they're durable. So being somebody who's printed stuff in the past, like, I guess my first question is, when you started doing that, how did you, I guess through the print shop, you would know how to print something durable on something that you're going to take out side in the elements. So how does it, like, did you go into all these different iterations? Do you have some problems when you were doing it, how did it all begin? speaker-1: lot of problems up front, I knew what I was doing. So we had done a lot of really unique printing, ⁓ different substrates and sublimation printing. We did different types of inkjet printing. We did a lot of different things. And so when it came to the fabrics we gonna start using, I knew that I could print those fabrics in a certain way that they would not scratch off, won't fade. It's only gonna deteriorate whenever the fabric starts to deteriorate. So I had lot of experience with printing on some pretty unique things. So I knew this would not be that difficult. But however, getting a good print on something like Dyneema. or XPAC or D50T like all those things take a lot of trial and error and you burn through a lot of expensive daima trying to get it down in because it is not as simple as putting a piece of paper in your printer and hitting print. It's just not going to work out that way to get it really down in to get the colors look great to get to make it bright without. There's a lot of problems with trying to just test it and there's no book that you can just like look up. How do I do this? There's no book out there that's going to explain it to you. So a lot of trial and error, but I had a You know, already had a perfect storm of knowledge in this big fat head of mine. ⁓ when we started, had printing knowledge, ⁓ photography knowledge. had a lot of graphic design knowledge. And so just a lot of things work really well. And I've been sewing since high school. So all this stuff kind of came together thinking I was helping my daughters get to college and here I am working full time, ⁓ in my own shop now. So yeah, pretty wild stuff, but it's, it was a learning curve and a lot of it is self taught. speaker-0: Yeah. So I guess you make more than just, ⁓ so I always see like the Diddy bags and stuff like that, but I know, ⁓ you guys make packs and stuff like that. just run, run me through, just pretend I'm an idiot, which a lot of people think I'm an idiot. Should be easy. Nope. Yeah. Just run me through the different products that you guys all specialize in. speaker-1: I just met you, I'm sorry. Yeah, so we actually try to release at least one new product every month and whether it's a quiet release or a refresh or we make a big announcement about it. like last year, we released 30 new products last year. This year, we released I think four or five new products already this year. And once we get going, we end up doing a lot more. And sometimes just a refresh of an old product or maybe redesign the way it mounts or change the size. Like our cell phone pouch since we've started six years ago, almost seven, we had to keep changing the size because phones keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So that's what I mean. It could just be a complete redesign. Yeah, but we have we make backpacks, dry bags, stuff sacks, fanny packs. And there's a million other little things in there like, you know, stuff sack for your tent poles, stuff sack for even for your fork and for your spork. And we make a lot of small stuff. The big items would be the food bags. Everybody knows our food bags. A lot of people have them. Backpacks, you we do. We're not nearly high volume as much as some other companies make backpacks, but that's by intention. You know, that's there's not as much profit in a big backpack and we're a small company using us labor. You know, we're not sending these backpacks to Mexico or China. may be making them right here. So we kind of throttle back our, our backpacks to a point. when we sell so many, we kind of stop it on the website, get caught up and then we put more on the website and we get caught up. it's just a vicious cycle of how much can really handle with the crew we have and still stay in business and still offer backpacks. but it is not the most profitable thing for us. Now, if we only made backpacks, I could probably streamline the whole crew to really crank out a lot of backpacks. So maybe we'll get there one day. it's it's backpacks have never really been our main focus. It's really been the things people see like the food bags and dry bags and stuff sacks. And it's small stuff that the average customer can afford to go ahead and spend in a 30, 40 bucks for a small custom printed thing. they can take it on a trail, little piece of inspiration. So I love our backpacks. We all use them. And I would love to sell more at some point, but. The main focus is the smaller stuff. We also have our Apex giant brand as well that does like the metal stuff, the dog bone, a lot of metal, the titanium aluminum type stuff. Probably over a hundred products we make between those two brands. speaker-0: So do you feel like, you know, releasing a lot of process? I know some people will say, hey, I'm going to keep it simple. I'm going to have, you know, 10 products or so. It's hard. know as a creative person, one is a photographer, you know, when you're a creative person or you have ideas, you just can't stop pumping them out. Right. speaker-1: That's the problem. That's it. kind of it. speaker-0: I'm sure then it kind of holds you back a little bit because you're like, you put out these products and now you can get overwhelmed or you might have to, overwhelm your staff. Or do you find anything wrong with that as opposed to, I mean, it's a great thing. think personally that you come out with stuff because it makes people come back to you and see what's coming on new instead of, they just do the same thing over and over. speaker-1: There are a lot of design considerations you have to keep in mind because it isn't me. You're a creative person, you're a business owner. You kind of get it. Like we're used to that. How volatile your life can be from this for minutes and minutes from trying to change gears and changing priorities. Like I live in a space. I doesn't bother me at all. But if I had to change the way they make things in the sewing shop every day, they lose their mind. So whenever I design something, I try to either incorporate a few parts of something we already make, or at least incorporate how we make something. and how that can apply to this new thing. So a lot of the processes are exactly the same. There's a lot of things that we completely go outside the box and start something new. But for the most part, I am keeping that in mind so that the whole crew doesn't just walk in every day like, ⁓ what's he doing today? So we try to keep it similar and it just keeps growing on top of itself. And I say that's something we really do consider because that's how you lose money. If your staff can't stay efficient and stay on point and ⁓ stay focused on the job, then you're going to lose money pretty quickly. speaker-0: It's like when I always watch, ⁓ I refer to Shark Tank every episode. You know, like the sharks, they always sit there and then that one business has got, they've got like a million SKUs and they're like, just focus on that. That is the winner, you know? So, but you've got that good flow in. Like you said, you're not trying to overwhelm, you're not coming up with something that's like, ⁓ now you got to sew completely differently. Everybody's got to learn a completely new technique. And because you do those one-offs, you know, it's, I think it's easier. speaker-1: Love, Yeah, from a business standpoint. There's not a of businesses that survive off of one item for very long. And so I know that and we're in a space where there's a lot of stuff. We're backpackers, and Tim, we backpack quite a bit. And every time we're out there, we think of something new. And, if you just focus on one product, that products that come out the gate usually do really well and it's going to fade off. And from a business standpoint, you have to have fresh things going in and out. From a customer standpoint, if you only have one product, you go to the website, have a five year warranty on a food bag, you buy the food bag. I don't see for five years. ⁓ I'm not trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer and make them poor, but I'm trying to squeeze as much money out of them that we can stay in business. Does that make sense? So from a business standpoint, it makes sense to keep growing like that. And we're in a space that we can easily do that. I get to do most of the designs. Tim does them as well. But yeah, the whole idea of just one product, you have to focus on what works and pay attention to what sells for sure. So say we have a hundred SKUs and, the five are really our top sellers. Well, that's what you're seeing in all the ads. That's what you're seeing in almost every email. That's what you're gonna see on the front page. But once you get to that and then you add that to the cart, maybe something else will pop up you didn't think about. From a business standpoint, if you're not trying to grow your average order value, even just a little bit, you're doing it wrong. If you sell a $50 item and you just sell the $50 item and you have nothing else to kind of go in the cart with it, you're missing out from a business standpoint. I know it's not. This is mostly business for talking about, but from standpoint, you have to grow your average order value. At least maximize it. you're not grow it, definitely maximize it. speaker-0: Yeah. And I think when you have a, when you have products that are actually beneficial to people, you're not just tossing people a new thing that they're just going to buy. They're never going to use, you know, you, cause I, I've gone over your website many times and I look and I'm like, I could literally own everything in your, on your website and go out and use it as opposed to, you know, sometimes you buy something from a website and then there's some completely random thing they want you to buy them. Like, ⁓ like exit out because you're like, I'm never going to. Right. ever use that product. speaker-1: ⁓ there's some things we've came out with and just didn't work out and like, maybe wasn't designed right where it didn't sell very well. We'll take it off the website. Cause it just got caught up to site. Perfect example. I love back winter backpacking. That's I love doing it. And so, but I'm a tent sleeper. I sleep on the ground and my hand is always outside of my sleeping bag or my quilt. And so I designed this sleeping glove, which Tim made fun of me for doing it. And I just made it for myself and there's no, it's no thumb hole. It's just a big mitten. can put a heating pad inside there. And I sleep with that outside and he's like, you should put that on a website. And I was like, I think I'll do that. And then we sold like seven. And that was like two months ago. And I even made the video for it. was like, this is the one product you don't need, but I use it. And I was like, and then we had a meeting. It's like, we're to be surprised. It's going to sell like crazy. Yeah, it didn't. speaker-0: Yeah. Well, April Fool's is coming out, is coming up soon. So you could literally like say, hey, we're bringing it back. You know, this time bigger and better than ever. speaker-1: I used it Saturday. It's still a good product. It just doesn't have the mass appeal to stay on the website. It's just going to get watered up and it was, very confusing. There's no thumb hole or anything. speaker-0: That was actually my question was I was about to ask you like, did you have any products that you're like, man, this is still a good idea, but you had to take it off because it just didn't sell. Do you have any others that you're kind of like, man, maybe we should actually bring that back over time that you've seen? speaker-1: Yeah. So a few things. So a chest rig, uh, just like a pouch for your chest, which we used to make, that's actually one the first things that were made. We took it off the site because I wanted to redo it and I'm still redoing it. We still keep tweaking it. And then our, our side pouches, like our side pockets for our hip, um, hip belt pockets for our backpacks. Yeah. Uh, we keep redesigning as we haven't released one. It's not even on the website right now for it's probably been three years. And just cause we keep going back and redesigning, I don't want to just keep making the same thing everyone else makes. I'm like, well, if I can't make it a little bit better or unique to us, I'm not, there's no sense making it. Yeah. ⁓ so we have not reintroduced our side pockets in a while. just keep recommending other people to go to other companies. You know, I hate to do that, but like, have some design ideas and we're working on tweaking it and we, and we use them, but just not ready to release. yeah, we're not just throwing stuff out there all willy nilly and, know, ⁓ we're, trying to be intentional with what we release with it. Yeah. Still make money. speaker-0: mean, that's a good point that you kind of made is I'm glad that you are willing to, I love people that are willing to like, hey, say we don't make this right now, go to this person as opposed to like, we don't make this right now, sorry, I can't help you. speaker-1: Absolutely. And one example of that is we do obviously a lot of printing our food bags and probably the most popular pet is a dog. It really puts their dog on the food bag. We print a ton of those. Every time I post one on Instagram or whatever, get an email like, do you also make dog backpacks? And we don't, and I probably never will. I don't have a dog to try it out on and Tim doesn't want to walk around with a dog pack on. But a friend of mine, Red Paul Packs makes them. So I always send them to them. And yeah, have no problem doing that. And whether they do in return. Don't know, it doesn't really matter. To me, if I can make that customer's experience with us a little bit better, even if we don't make a dime, they're gonna remember that. experience, and it's all about their experience with us. And I'm not just trying to sell a product, I'm trying to sell an experience, trying to sell the story. And if that story is, I'm willing to help you no matter what, that's a good story in my mind. speaker-0: That's great. mean, going back to the wedding industry side of things too, I think it's the same thing, right? think, and I worked at Apple for years. It was the experience. Like anybody can photograph your wedding. Anybody can sell you a computer or stuff like that. It's giving you that great experience that you go, man, this is, I mean, we just got a new Tesla and I never wanted to buy an electric car until my minivan broke down and they had such a great deal. And then The experience was so much different than a car dealership that I was like, oh, this is actually fun. And I was like, okay, the experience is great. So then I went and I do, I went and got another one. My mother-in-law wanted one. So was like, Hey, this is a great experience. Your car is due. It's a great deal. Get it. So. speaker-1: Yeah. We think about that a lot, like every step of the way, even through our website, there's like a lot of little Easter eggs and not everybody's going to catch everyone or even maybe some people don't see them at all. And I I just want it to be unique and different and it can only happen at Hilltop packs. A lot to someone else can duplicate it. ⁓ but my, think about that customer experience all the time, even if it's a ticket, if it comes through and these guys all feel the same way, Tim's the same way, Jen, who runs customer services, the same, like they will go above and beyond. you know, their, first reaction is. is not to sell. The reaction is to solve the problem. And if we can solve it, then that's great. But we want to be the person that solves it, obviously. But I want the customer experience to come first and profit will come later. speaker-0: Yeah. So ⁓ I guess backtracking a little bit, I know we talked about your products and stuff and you said that you and Tim hike a lot. So what I guess would be your background in hiking and stuff like that? Have you done any large through hikes? Are you kind of a weekend kind of guy? ⁓ speaker-1: I'm a definite weekend guy. I did a little bit of backpacking around a high school, but I wouldn't even call it backpacking. was camping a little bit away from the car. we actually, where we lived, we had a lot of property around us and all the neighborhood kids, we would get together. We would go camping, maybe like just a half mile in the woods. And we made these wooden frames and tied them to our backs. It was very, very crude, but it was, I wouldn't call it backpacking. So I did that through high school and a little bit after just camping with friends and having fun. But then I always, I always hiked. never really got into backpacking until 2016, but I've been hiking and what photography is, know, like you love getting out there. I'm not really a landscape photographer, but I love doing it. I was just hiking all the time and I was carrying my camera out there. And then I went to Dolly Saud's West Virginia one time and I saw these hikers going in with all this gear. And I was like, they're staying out here. I never even thought that was an option. I didn't really think about it. I knew like Appalachian trail stuff and I hear about that, but I didn't realize so close to home, we had options where we could go out there and stay. And so I home and immediately started researching, know, ultra light or I'm sort of hiking gear, which led me into ultra light gear. And then I found Z packs. I bought like everything Z packs had. I the backpack, bought the food bag, bought everything. And then I begged all my friends to go with me and nobody would go. And for a year I just planned. And then I said, you know what? No one's going go with me. I'm just going to go. I went to Dolly Sods in West Virginia and I parked my car and my goal was to just And at first I'm scared of dark or I was thinking I was going to scare the dark. I drew someone hike 10 miles and I'm just going to sit down and wait for it to get dark. And then I'm just stuck. can't I can't go back. Yeah. And that's what I did. I hiked out there like eight or nine miles set up camp and I just sat down and wait for it to get dark. Expecting to be terrified. And I wasn't. It was awesome. I freaking loved it. Yeah. And then I just went like every chance I had a little by little. You know, I always had a sewing room in my house, always made a lot of my own gear. Back in the day, I used to DJ and also photography. So I made a lot of cases and carrying equipment and covers. And so I was like, I can make some of this stuff. And I'd start making it around 2000, about the same time, 2016, 2017, 2018. But I really start printing until 2019. And like I said, we already owned a print shop. was just like, let's try this. And it worked. And then it was like, that's how the business really started. But I know I don't have... big elaborate experience with through hiking and nothing like that. My longest day, I think it's maybe only five days, but I used to go a lot more than I go now. Now I go maybe five, six times a year. Trying to go more with since Tim's here now, Tim used to work remotely. Um, this year I'm on track to do, we'll do way more than that. But usually if people come from out of town, I'll get doing overnight later with them if they want to. We just did that on Saturday with a guy that came in from Alabama. Um, through hike is kind of a, um, It's a dream. don't know that we have several businesses we own. We own Hilltop Packs. We own Apex Giant. We own a coffee roastery. We also own a coffee shop up the street. We still own a very active photography studio. ⁓ But I have good people in place to run all those businesses. Even Hilltop Packs, have a general manager. So I can get away. ⁓ But for a thru-hike, man, I don't know. speaker-0: Yeah, that's like a lofty goal for myself too, is maybe when my kids are all gone and maybe, but yeah, I'm more like 100, 150 miles max is mine. Even that's kind of pushing it, know, because you're gone for quite a bit when you run a business and everything. So, that's great. So I guess I want to kind of roll over into kind of what maybe a, an ⁓ crap moment would be when you were building your brand. And I'm sure it could be. Some of the crazy one-offs that you had to do before you figured it out or you might've thought of something already, but you know, what is that ⁓ crap moment for you guys? speaker-1: I think our biggest decision, our biggest like, oh crap, we have to make a decision here was pretty early on, I think around 2021, we were still in our shop uptown on high street, it's much smaller shop, small team of just like four people. And there were, we got word there was going to be a dynamic shortage and we knew, rips up on the roll Dutch work year. Everybody was telling us, Hey, you know, here's all we have. We're not getting any more for like a year. You know, I'm coming off of COVID, which used up a lot of my money because I didn't have a paycheck for a while. so me and my brother, brother works remotely now, but he used to work in the shop. So we all sat down and like, Hey, we could be out of business because we all, were only using Dyneema back then. weren't doing anything else, Dyneema and some XPAC. And if we can't get Dyneema, we're effectively out of business. And here's how much we have access to across all these companies. Plus one that's in Germany. I haven't calculated out there was going to be like $98,000 to buy all the Dyneema I could find. Wow. And I went in and I basically cashed out all my save my savings and I did cash out some investments. And I was like, wow, we're all in here. we, because we had been growing the business at this point really fast. And I had already taken out a lot of money out of savings, a lot of money out of investments. So like at this point that literally drained almost everything else we had left to grow this company, to keep this business going. So it was a big risk. We had a meeting. And I know it was my money, but I made everybody kind of make this decision. Like we could do this and we could still fail. ⁓ we could do this and put, spend all this money. ⁓ but if it works, no one else is going to have Dyneema for a while. We'll have it. And, and that was the best decision we ever made. We bought all the Dyneema from, I think Dutch and from Ripsaw by the Roll and from this place in Germany. And then we got around and we have pictures of it. It was massive rolls and rolls and rolls. And then we had this tiny little cutting room and the room was just flooded with, Dyneema. Yeah. And that, that probably accelerated us because a of other small companies didn't have access to Dyneema anymore. hate to say that we kind of sucked everything dry out of the industry, but big players still had a ZPACs and other Dyneema, but like the guys that had to rely on other businesses to get the Dyneema like us, we've pretty much shut them out by buying every kind of a cold move, but it was, it had to be done for us to keep moving and it worked. And I think that's one of reasons we grew so much that one year is we got some other business from companies that didn't have it. speaker-0: That's wild. I don't know if I can take a risk like that. speaker-1: It was a, we had so much growth at that point though. We, all the trend lines was showing us that we're going to keep growing. And this isn't my first business and I just, all the signs were there that we could do this. And so it didn't feel like that big of risk to me. My wife wanted to murder me, but we didn't lose our house. we're good. speaker-0: Okay, so going into that, then what's one thing about running an outdoor business that, you know, ended up being hard that you didn't think was going to be hard? speaker-1: Backpacking. I really thought it would backpack more. So we've got so busy so fast You know, I really got into making gear because I really enjoyed backpacking and yeah the one thing that I really loved doing Was probably hurt the most by the business so I don't get the backpack quite as much as I want You know in the past being a wedding photographer, I would go backpacking during the week And I because I worked every weekend Well now I worked every weekend and I work all during the week here in the shop so I'm trying to take more time to to go backpacking now and again, especially since Tim's been here for a year now, we're going out more together. We can go during the week. It's not that big of a deal. can cut off free rooms and overnighter. But the one thing I was not expecting was how much my hobby would be hurt by my business. speaker-0: Yeah, that's great. So, well, I guess what would you say to somebody who's, you know, coming in the outdoor industry that's like, hey, I love backpacking. I love the outdoors. I'm going to, and I have this great idea for this product. The next thing you know, they're like, they create it, you know, how can you tell, what can you tell them to kind of maybe help them stay in the lane of being able to stay in the outdoors at the same time? speaker-1: ⁓ I don't know that you can if you really with any business if you're gonna grow it there's a time to grow and there's a time to be aggressive and there's a time to dig in and put everything else aside and you're gonna have sacrifices in your life it could be family could be friends it could be your hobbies yeah but if you're doing for the right reasons it's all worth it like it really is if you really enjoy being self-employed it is totally worth it because you still have the flexibility to make it happen you may not make it happen it may not work out but you have the flexibility to know that it's there If I'm going to take an hour long lunch, I can go do that. If I want to take a day off and go spend it with my kid, I can do that. Do I get to do that that often? Not, not really, but the flexibility is there. again, for the right person, it's all worth it. So you really can't plan. If you, if you're just starting out and you're trying to plan your time off already, you're going to It's not going to happen. speaker-0: No, that's good. I think people have to understand that there's a grind that you have to do that eventually you'll be able to make past that you'll be like, you'll look back and go, man, I didn't sleep at all for whatever. I remember there's a year and a half where I slept for maybe two or three hours a night for like a year, year and a half. And then I finally got over the hump of like, man, now we're doing great. And now I'm getting rest again. speaker-1: A lot of that is fueled by excitement. it's not really a drag or a downer like, know, that, that early period where you're just grinding and hustling. It's not a negative. It's, I look back on that very fondly where we really had to grind and really had to hustle. And, know, where our shop used to be, well, obviously used to be in the basement. After that was up the shop uptown, we had our sewing shop on the third floor. had a print shop on in the basement. So we had to print it on like three flights of stairs 20,000 times a day. Yeah, there's little things like that. We knew we would grow out of that, but we had to just grind through it. We knew that it was temporary. All of us were still excited and it was going to be a period of just grinded, but it's exciting. You know, the no sleep thing, a lot of that is fueled by your brain is running 500 miles an hour. You can't wait to work again tomorrow. That will wear off at some point and you'll reach, hopefully reach a point where you can slow down and put some kind of a schedule together and then enjoy your life a little bit, but that's not for a while. speaker-0: And if that helps out people to think, or it makes me think anyways, like yeah, if you're not doing it and you're not excited about it, maybe you need to check yourself to see if you need to be doing it, or sometimes you are, you do get that lull where you're excited, you're gonna do a lull, that doesn't necessarily mean you should quit it though, right? You gotta have to come out of that sometimes, so. speaker-1: Yeah, if something isn't either working or it's not exciting anymore, you may have to pivot or change direction. Doesn't mean you have to shut the business down, but it can be a different product or a different idea or a different service. I talk to business owners all the time. I'm involved in a lot of different boards in our community. And so I tend to talk to a lot of small young business owners. And when people come in and want to talk to me, I can tell right away if their heads in the right space, if they're talking about the product, we're talking about the customer experience, we're talking about how excited they are for... what this could potentially change in their industry. Those are the right things to be thinking about. If they come in talking about, want more money, I want more freedom, I more family, I want more vacations. I'm like that person ain't going nowhere. That is not the mindset of a business owner. Just not. You don't have to be a business owner that just only works and then ignores your family. It's not quite what I mean, but man, there's a lot of sacrifices and you have to have people around you that you're going to understand for a while. This is going to be really difficult and really tough. And luckily I have that. I have a great team around me, my family, my wife, my kids are all very understanding. Or maybe they lied to me, I don't know, but they have all made sacrifices for me. Yeah, so I couldn't be here without them. speaker-0: Yeah, no, that's great. I mean, that's we just came back from a family trip that we told the kids were like, hey, for two months, we got to work real hard. But then we're going to go on this great trip. You're still going to see me those two months. But mommy and daddy are going to have to work a little bit more. But we're going to have this amazing trip together. And then we had the most amazing trip as a family. Not like I neglected them for two months just so I can have a week with them. But speaker-1: How old are your kids? speaker-0: So my oldest is 18 and then my middle daughter, she's 15 and my youngest is 13. speaker-1: So they grew up through, they saw, they see the work that you're doing. And once they get to certain point, don't care what parents are doing anymore, but I mean, they're probably at the age where they can at least recognize what hard work does and how, and what it means. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And my oldest daughter now, she's working for, she's doing social media for a company that's in the outdoor industry. it's funny because I want to pick her brain sometimes on like, oh, what exactly are you guys talking about? Because I'm so interested in the social media side of things. But she's like, just leave me alone, daddy. And I'm like, but I know so much about outdoors and I want to know what you're doing. But she comes to me every once in a while. speaker-1: I get I want to steal that information too. speaker-0: Yeah. All right. So going into maybe from family to your team, how do you keep your team? Like is your team, do you have a lot of them are in the outdoors, some of them in the outdoors? How do you keep them connected to like the original vision of the company? speaker-1: So really none of them, except just me and Tim are really the only ones. Everybody here has done day hikes with us and that's the issue. None of them have done backpacking overnight. Some of them have expressed some interest and well, I take them back. My brother's gone, but he works from home now. I really pick people out based on, that sounds crazy, but like their personality, they, they, or are they going to care about the team around them or they're going care about the company? I don't always need. like the best worker or the best sewer or the best this and that. Like I want people to care about each other. I want this team to stay together. We have a lot of moving parts here and if we're not all watching each other's backs and with good intention, I'm not saying you have to watch someone else's back and point the finger at them when something is wrong. ⁓ So like everybody here has been here from the beginning. It's a very low turnover rate, which has been great. Our office manager, I'm sorry, our production manager, Amy, who prematurely sees everything. She ran a hospital. I'm sorry, doctor's office before this. Okay. She'd worked for my photography studio for years as a second shooter. And I just knew she was dedicated to that doctor's office. And I said, if I write a place of McMillan photography for you, like in the office, I'm hiring you. And she was like, no, don't want to. Fast forward to this business when it started, I knew I was going to keep growing. I knew I'd eventually would have a manager run the whole shop for me. And so then I didn't hire anybody. I was just being my daughters. And so I started talking to Amy. I said, you got to come work for me when I moved the shop out of the basement one day. She's like, nope, I'm not doing that. And I said, yeah, you are. I'm going to teach you how to sew and you're going be a production manager. Yeah. And like I begged her for three months as we're building out the new shop. And it was like Friday. I said, hey, you're coming to work Monday. And she's like, I'm not. She's like, then she showed up on Monday. Like I knew I didn't even like second guess I was going to convince her to come. And I think up until the last minute, she was still on the fence and that she's been here ever since. And it's been great. she's been the perfect fit. And then I've Um, Amy, I'm sorry, Jen, who runs our customer service also works for our studio. She wants customer service here that we hired her sister and basically hired them, um, originally because they both worked at Bob Evans and they walked really fast and they were hustling at work. I was like, my wife, I said, I'm not going to walk. My wife, former talked to him and said, Hey, let me have a job for you as a second shooter working in our studio. And that led to Hilltop Packs. So just really pay attention on people who interact with their coworkers and how they interact with their work. And just not bitching and complaining and slow and mopey. I hand picked the team. Like we didn't just like put a notice on we're hiring. We go around and we cherry pick and head hunt and find people that are going to then Tim's right next to me over here. He was someone who I'd followed for a while on YouTube. And he just happened to show up here at the shop one day after short communication online. He wanted to take a little tour. And within five minutes of meeting him, I knew I was going to hire him one day to work. for Hilltop remotely creating content. And that led to us offering a job here in the shop. He drove across the country to get here. So really handpicked the right people based on, I've at least in my mind, how would they treat each other? we can teach the rest. speaker-0: That's the primo answer that I think people run out there to grab the first person that they can just get that knows how to do the job. And then they run into so many headaches instead of, there's an old saying, I can't remember, you can teach something to something or whatever. ⁓ once you get that core team in there and you can all work together real well, you can easily teach somebody something. So I mean, that's great. ⁓ speaker-1: The long answer is sorry. Yeah, I can teach you snowing skills. can't teach you personality traits. It's not what happens. speaker-0: I need to send my daughter your way because she's sewing all these shirts and my mother-in-law, she owned a cleaners for years and so she knows how to sew, but she just doesn't have time to teach my daughter how to sew. She's sewing all these college shirts with all these layers and these like Pinteresty kind of sweaters and she's been selling them on Instagram as she makes one, she'll them on and sell it. I'm like, I took home economics years ago and I know how to sew and how to use a sewing machine, but I'm like, We have this like industrial sewing machine in the basement from when she had the cleaners. I'm like, let's teach her how to use that. speaker-1: Yeah, they're not that difficult. ⁓ Especially the older manual ones. It's pretty simple to work on and pretty simple to maintain. I'd started the same way. I took a home economics class in high school. Absolutely fell in love with the idea that I could make something that didn't exist five minutes ago. I mean, I went home. I played football, I played sports. I home told my dad I was taking a sewing class. He's like, what? was like, well, the teacher is hot. The teacher is very He's like, okay, I understand now. And I took the class, came home and said, dad, will you buy this sewing machine? He was very, very confused. He's like, we just came from football practice. So you want to own machine? I was like, yeah, it's like my aunt, think Linda or somebody gave me the sewing machine. And then I bought one when I moved out. I've always had a sewing room ever since. It is a great skill to have and it's not that complicated. It can get complicated, but doesn't need to be. But it is. I recommend anybody give it a shot. speaker-0: That's cool. Well, I guess, can you tell me then for going from sewing to from that kind of stuff, was there something you believe in the outdoor industry that others might not agree with when it comes to creating gear or, you know, it might be controversial, but maybe it's just something that's just irks you a little bit. speaker-1: It's controversial enough. Yeah in Tim hears it every day too. We really try to keep design simple We treat product simple simple as lighter simple is easier to use out in the field More complicated is you know again, we're backpackers out and it was cold things can be cumbersome and more complicated I want to be super simple simple to repair simple that so simple to build But really it's it's also just a weight thing So when people every day we get messages like can you put extra straps on this? Can you do this to that? Can you? and they had these intricate designs. Can you put more pockets on your backpacks? Like you can already go to Walmart and get a five pound backpack with a hundred pockets in it. That's not what we're doing. So not really controversial, but I know it's confusing for customers who see we do custom work and they want something completely elaborate, which is going to be 10 times heavier. And they're going to realize the more pockets you have, the more crap you're going to try to take. It doesn't really work out. But I don't want to tell a new hiker you're doing it wrong. Most hikers that have hiked a little bit kind of start to get it less as more less is better Yeah, and and then once you get going then then you're asking the right questions and so it's not really controversial But it's it's hard to explain to somebody why you don't need what you're acting for it's yeah People walk in the shop and say it to their faces even harder and they're like I want I want this for my whatever I'm like, yeah, you really need that. Let's talk about this for a second. Yeah, so it's harder face, but that's speaker-0: When you those extras on the bag, you maybe use it once and then you realize when you're camping, you're just like, I just want to toss it in the bag. And if you know the pattern that you're going to throw it in the bag, you know exactly where everything is. I think when we shoot for certain backpacks ⁓ or certain companies, the first thing they tell me is, hey, I don't want it to look like, one reason they hire me is because I know what I'm doing. I'm not just a photographer who doesn't know backpacking, so I'm not going to have straps laying all over the place. Yeah, exactly. And when they go, they'll send me a picture. Hey, don't make my picture look like this. Because you see certain backpack companies or whatever, the photographer will have straps just hanging all over the place and everything else. And the Nalgene bottle hanging off the edge full of water, banging the person in the leg as they're walking. I'm like, that's not realistic. speaker-1: You some input. speaker-0: looks good for Instagram. And to some degree, you you do have to market for that Instagram crowd, but also function, you know. speaker-1: You'll get a kick out of this. So you're a photographer. I'm a photographer. We have a full studio. have, you know, we used to shoot a lot more commercial stuff before the work of what we do now. But from day one from Hilltop, we decided we're never going to use professional cameras. We're only going to use our cell phones. And the biggest thing in my mind anyway is I want our pictures to be relatable and different than everybody else. If I took professional photos like everybody else, we would look like everybody else. We sat down. We're like, OK, we have one shot to be. I say we sat down. I me and my daughters and my wife. I was like, yeah, I want to be, I want it to look different. I look like it's a small company. I look like it's a small team in a garage in a basement. And so how can we do that? I don't want to feel too professional. We're going to miss out on an opportunity to be a small company. So only use cell phones. And that was initially our plan. And to this day, that's all we do. We have never taken a professional camera. I think we've did one professional video shoot, one professional photo shoot professional camera. Other than that, all cell phones every day, all day, just to be a little bit different. and to be a little more ⁓ not approachable but yes, relatable exactly. So we're taking the same photos anyone else can take. Yes, we're using a light box. We're all that. But again, we're just using and cell phones keep getting better and better. So as our customers cell phones are getting better, we look like we're them. We look like we're a small team. So we always want to look small front, function big in the back. That's kind of the goal. speaker-0: Relatable speaker-1: But I have a lot of friends are like, why are you not like that's hard to from a marketing standpoint, it has worked. You know, we're fast, we're efficient. made the product now. We took the photo now. We posted it now. We don't have to get the cameras out, get the lighting out. We have soft boxes. We have lighting around the shop if we need it. And very crude lighting. Like this is just a lamp. You know, if I want to have certain lighting for certain things, we have lights on every machine for that reason. If we're to do some kind of lighting on a piece of gear on a certain machine, we can do that. But kind of crude. Nothing too over professional. So I don't know if you saw that or not. You're like, why are these pictures suck so bad if he's a photographer? It's because we use our cell phones for everything. Yeah, everything. speaker-0: I think people, people always want to be relatable. The one gentleman I talked with, ⁓ his bags, he started out wanting to make it look professional and then realized that he had to go the relatable route because you can make yourself look like a big business. then people, miss out on all this, ⁓ want, people love that connectivity with the company. You know, I love your social media content and everything else where it's always, it's you instead of, I think even these big companies. speaker-1: This out. speaker-0: you can kind of see them trying to reverse the marketing stuff that they used to do where it was always like, look at me with this. And to some degree you need it depending on what your industry is or what your product is. Like, know, Black Diamond, obviously like you need to have people want to strive to go to Everest, right? But 99.9 % of your people aren't, but they want, they're going to buy it thinking they're going to get that. But then you have to have that relatable side of it. So. speaker-1: Absolutely. Well, like say Hyperlite or a company who doesn't really make a lot of their own gear. They they they're marketing basically a big marketing firm. So that makes sense to do that, to get the gear and do the big professional shoots because that's what you're doing for us. We're making it here. That's part of our story is our people. And if I could put our people in the photos and the videos that that's our story. We're talking about the Black Diamond Poles. I don't know if they make them in their own shop or if they get made somewhere else. So they have to do the big photo shoot. And that works for them and that makes sense. And that's what I would do too. If I was them, 100 % what I would do. For us, the only way we could tell our story, the way I want to tell it is fast, efficient, quick and down and dirty with your phone and use our own people with where the gear is actually being made. And that's our story. So I know I get it at a certain point that may change, but for the foreseeable future, we're going at the same. speaker-0: Yeah. mean, we, ⁓ I think that what you just said is key is you have to get out there quick. It's almost like, it's like with the news, right? The news almost these days just gets it out so quick on all the news channels and it's easier to redact something than it is to do the actual research. And with social stuff, you're like, okay, I got to get this product out before one, before someone else does it. But then two, like you can just get overwhelmed. You know, with you guys having so many skews too, it can be like, okay, if we do a professional shoot, it's gonna take forever to get everything finalized. When we grew our, so we have this white dad, Asian mom stereotypes, social media channel that my wife grew to 105,000 followers right now. And it's awesome. And at first I would always try to professionally shoot the videos. And then we were like, no, we just have to, it has to be relatable and everything. So now we kind of will mix in a little bit of the professional side with the. Like you said, it's just like a little light, but that lighting is just enough to make it look like you just did a little bit more than just whatever. So. speaker-1: Yeah, like right now she's in a webcam right now. Like I use professional DSLR I'm assuming or it's our mirrorless camera maybe. But we've researched again, just fast, efficient, quick. I don't have to think about it. I have these little, there are Insta360 webcams, but the light. We have them, I have at home, I have them on several machines here. So I can do this interview in any room. Like right now we're like in our laser room where everything gets cut. speaker-0: ⁓ I know that camera. speaker-1: And the other side is with the sewing machines. have one over there so I keep changing where I do interviews so it mixes it up a little bit. But again, make it relatable. I use... Your setup looks awesome. you're... Yeah, so if I did that, I'm like, that's a little... It's a sewing shop. And so I'd perfectly... I want the video to look good, as good as possible. But the lighting is everything. If I turned the lighting off, you know, it would look like that. speaker-0: Thank No, yeah, I set this whole setup too because I needed, ⁓ I've worked with a lot of companies, but then I also wanted to make it look professional enough that people would a little bit take me seriously at first too. And then we're good. We're, eventually, we, I've started recording a couple on here, but it's like doing some gear reviews, but just very basic gear reviews, nothing crazy, but just to, to let it make it pop a little bit for, for YouTube and stuff like that. And I have some fake grass on the ground as well. So I can do like tent reviews in here instead of just going outside or I can do sleeping bags and stuff like that too. So there's a lot around the corner. It's trying to get it. I realized what we were talking about getting it out and getting it fast as opposed to it's better to get it done than perfect. Kind of mantra is I'm just going to record it as is. And when I first started doing it, I was like trying to shoot all this B roll and everything else realizing, you know what? I just need to get that out there because people just want to hear about certain products that they never get to see reviews for or hear a review from someone other than the company putting out a video for it. So that's cool. No, I'm learning so much again. I learned so much from everybody when we can talk to them. And you're like a big cacophony of knowledge. So I guess switching gears a little bit then what's... ⁓ What would be a place for your gear that you've seen? So you've had it for a while. know that you some unique things. What's one place that you've seen your product over the years that's in the most unique place you've ever seen it before or heard about it being? speaker-1: there's a whole, whole scene of like moto camping that I know our gears being used. I've kind of find a way to kind of break into more like side industries or side hobbies besides just actually backpacking. ⁓ so anytime I hear someone using it, whether it's for kayaking or moto camping, you know, I get excited. I wish I could kind of maybe focus on some of those channels as well, but it's difficult. ⁓ you know, like our, our Instagram is backpacking. It's all, it'd be hard to kind of mix that up, but. ⁓ yeah, but people stop in all the time that use our gear in different ways. ⁓ you know, guy, this backpack here locally as a friend of mine uses it for a laptop bag. Not very ideal. You could buy a better laptop bag at Walmart, but, ⁓ yeah, ⁓ that's probably about it. Just different industries and different hobbies that I wasn't quite thinking about that I would hope to keep, I'm going to keep growing like bike packing and moto camping and things like that, or something excited about that. Haven't figured out how to grow in that way yet. speaker-0: Yeah. Do you have a, this is kind of, guess, a funny thing. I'm just thinking like, do you have a limit on what you can print on the bag? You're like, hey, sorry, we don't. I'm sure you've probably gotten stuff in before. speaker-1: print that. see, Tim will laugh here at this one. So we see a lot of man butts. There's a lot of naked butts on there. Seeing some full frontal stuff. Our whole rule is we're not the police as long as it's not like harmful or it gets very aggressive. we, I remember in the past, I think before Tim came there, we had a one we just, we declined to do it was like really aggressive. And I love guns. I'm a gun owner, but it really aggressive guns and it's the government stuff like I was like, this is a little too I don't want nothing to do with that. And we just canceled the order. Something I messaged. Yeah, it's a little too much. Political stuff gets a little weird. You know, I have my point of view. I'm trying to squash someone else's. But put my my label on either side of the fence doesn't feel great. We do it. But there's times we take take our label off. Yeah. So if you put something on for your team, political team. If we don't really think it sounds kind of weird, we'll take our label off, just send it to you. But really the naked butts, we see more of that the way you probably should. Poor Tim doesn't sleep at night. speaker-0: He just dreams of naked butts all speaker-1: Naked butts, Naked butts. And before him, Christian worked for us since the very beginning for five years. Yeah. And yeah, he had that poor guy, saw all kind of stuff. yeah, there was a... That's great. He had like a whole bag of a guy, the whole full frontal, like just different poses. There's a lot of man genitalia. We printed that one and got it through. Yeah. We put our label on every little place, but we didn't. So yeah, it's... ⁓ speaker-0: It'd be funny if it went through customs and the customs is like, what is this? speaker-1: This is the strangest part ever. speaker-0: All right, so guess going next question, I got two more questions and I'm gonna go into kind of our lightning round of just kind of 10 quick questions to kind of get to know you a little bit more. What does success look like for you now and has it changed since the beginning? speaker-1: So, you know, again, we grew really fast and came out the gate swinging and I've, I've, I've been self-employed my entire life. I've always enjoyed hiring people and hiring people in our community and keep people working. So the way I gauge success is how many employees do I have in my mind that makes me happy. It's not really a dollar amount. Uh, there's plenty of times as a business owner, as you know, things get tight, things get difficult. There's a lot of times our employees make more money than I do. Um, but I'm pretty well diversified across a few businesses. So I'm not stressed about that, but my. Measure for success is can I keep people working? Can we make another position at some point? Can we work towards another growth in this particular part of the business where we can hire someone else? And that's what makes me happy. It does. And we're a very small community of like 3000 people. Our county has maybe 30,000 over the whole county. ⁓ We have a small coffee shop with 14 employees here at Hilltop. At one point we had, I think 13 people total. Right now we've scaled back a little bit. Only five working in the shop right now with three remote. Um, just last year was not the best year for us as far as like our business is still really good. Sales are still really good, but our profit margins got squeezed really hard and our international sales pretty much went to crap and our wholesale business kind of went down. A lot of businesses either went out of business or scale back what they're buying. our direct to customer in the U S is the same. They were great. Yeah. It's all those other areas. Like the international stuff down 80 % our wholesale down 50%. So last year was just brutal in that way. So we had to downsize our staff, make some changes. And that part was difficult when my gauge for success is hiring people, laying people off. I'd let him go home and I would cry. call my dad and I'd be like, I don't want to freaking go to work tomorrow until he's passed. had to let him go. ⁓ so that, that part's difficult, but yeah. So hiring people is my top line gauge for success of how are we doing. speaker-0: Yeah. So going into that, then what's the legacy or impact that you would want to maybe leave on the outdoor space? speaker-1: Yeah. So with Hilltop, talk about the business specifically. My goal is to grow this business to a certain point where I can sell it back to the employees. I want to grow the company and make an employee company, employee owned business. That's what I really want. And one thing we did, ⁓ we didn't get to do a lot last year, but every year up to that point, we like doing our own trial cleanup. So instead of us donating money to other organizations to do whatever they're going to do, which I'm sure they do good work. There's plenty of trials in our area and things we could do ourselves where I'm going to pay my employees. They still volunteer, but we're paying them to do it. So we'll take me off of work. still getting paid and we're gonna do a trail cleanup. And like I said, we didn't do much that last year because we just struggled so much getting through the year. We're gonna do more this year, of course, but as far as any kind of legacy for the outdoor industry, I want this to be an employee in business that'll keep benefiting the outdoor community and whether it's trail cleanups or whatever that looks like in the future. So I want to benefit my employees and the industry at the same time. speaker-0: That's great. I like that. I like people who want to give back as opposed to just take, take. ⁓ all right. So I guess I want to roll into our kind of rapid fire round, 10 quick questions. Some of them will be a little bit longer than one word answer. And if you want to go into them, you can, but just to get to know you and stuff like that. ⁓ And then I'll kind of give you a part here where we can kind of let you shout out where everybody can find Hilltop Packs, which super easy to do though. ⁓ You just have to Google it. All right, so first question is favorite national park. speaker-1: Well, be honest, I haven't really traveled a whole lot. ⁓ I pretty much backpack a lot of local stuff. So I don't really have a national park favorite yet. Okay. I guess I got to some more exploring. speaker-0: Okay, so favorite local park then. speaker-1: So Dulles Saws, West Virginia is my favorite like state park. I love going down there. That's we go there quite a bit here in Pennsylvania. We have a trail system closest called Quebec Run Trail System and then lower Highlands hiking trail. Those are some of our favorites that are kind of within a few hours drive. But yeah, I'm a there's so many places to explore locally that we're not done yet. And so I don't have any big ⁓ bucket list of places I want to go. I just know so many places nearby. We could be still have to explore. I keep branching out. speaker-0: Yeah. I wish I lived up there where you are just because then I'd have snow. I got to travel all the time to find like I think I said before we got on and I'm headed to Mount Rainier, Mount Baker. That's awesome. like a snowstorm for those days that I'm there. so trying to stay my, I told my wife, I'll stay safe because it's just me and then a buddy of mine who's helping model for me and stuff like that. But, ⁓ that's, that's cool. All right. speaker-1: That'd be awesome trip. Send me some links to your photos when it's all done and published. I'd like to see. speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So this next question, I think I the answer already because you have a coffee shop, but coffee or electrolyte drinks on the trail. speaker-1: Ooh, so both. ⁓ carry both. I like my coffee. If I'm by myself, I'll take my little pour over kit. And if I'm with friends, I'll do an instant coffee from a friend of mine's business that he has. And then throughout the day, yeah, I'll do any kind of, you know, both. That's my... Yeah. speaker-0: Okay, so next one, early bird or night owl? speaker-1: Both. Yeah. As a business owner, ⁓ late in life discovered at ADHD. It makes sense. ⁓ get up early, stay up late. Can't help it. speaker-0: Yeah. All right, next is biggest splurge you've made for your business. speaker-1: ⁓ for the business, probably the laser cutter and it turned out to be an awesome freaking thing for us. Cause we had a person who was just cutting all day. That was his job. Wow. And now we're so much more efficient. We can cut in, you know, in one hour. What used to take, you know, all week. And so it's so much faster. So we have laser cutters that cut the foam out for our straps and the big fabric cutter that cuts all the parts off for literally everything we make. So that was a big thing for us. speaker-0: ⁓ Next one is last thing you Googled or chatted about related to your business. speaker-1: ⁓ boy, that's ongoing every day, all day. So I mean, we're adding DTF printing to our lineup and so we can do a lot of our own custom shirts. So you want to get a sun hoodie with your own logo on it for your podcast or your YouTube channel. We can do that. So we actually just got that up and running with all three weeks. So a lot of research on DTF printing and design considerations. you because I want to make some videos now, explain people how to design for your own DTF prints. So we do it for you or we can do it. Yeah. that's DTF printing. Don't Google DTF printing. Don't Google DTF. It's not what you think it is. Direct to film is what it is. You can Google direct to film printing. Google that. OK. speaker-0: Google that, Google that. will make sure that I don't Google a lot of that. Next one is worst trail snack you've ever tried. speaker-1: ⁓ I'm not a real picky eater. I'll eat anything. ⁓ speaker-0: So what's your favorite one then? Maybe that one will help easier. speaker-1: Beef jerky, like we grab snacks on the gas station on the way to the trail. could be nuts, beef jerky, very, very simple, easy to grab. Yeah. speaker-0: All right, next one is, I always love this one just because it's interesting to hear people's perspective is if you could collaborate with any brand, who would it be and why? speaker-1: Hmm. So I'm actually, you know, we have several friends in the business that we talked to quite a bit. Devin from Backcountry Exposure, we talked to him a lot. He was just sharing ideas. We don't really collaborate on gear, but we talk a lot. Chad from UGQ is a good friend. We talk a lot about business and about the scene stuff. And me and Chad talk a lot about our websites and SEO things that was really beneficial to both of us. We just met Dutch from Dutchwear Gear, who we've actually worked with for the last three or four years, but now we finally met in person. came down to the shop and So I'm constantly trying to network with people and it's not always to make a dollar with that relationship, but sometimes just sharing knowledge between the two of us and just a common, just trying to find some common ground where can both benefit from knowing each other. And I'm not saying we're trying to steal their ideas and I'm trying to steal mine, but just flushing out my own ideas and having them think or dwell or comment on my ideas is helpful. speaker-0: That's cool. All right, second and last question. The most used piece of gear in your life right now. speaker-1: Let's see. ⁓ You know, I don't, love using it like my fanny pack. use it more than I thought I would. I never thought I'd use a fanny pack backpack. I didn't think I'd be that guy. And I use it on every trip. I can't imagine not using it. As far as everyday use, I do have a backpack that I made that was based off of our 24 seven. I turned it, I'd made it with a sleeve for a laptop. I use it every single day. So my, my daily driver, anything back or Hilltop related would be my backpack that I made for my laptop. speaker-0: Okay, awesome. All right, and the last question is what's one outdoor skill you still kind of suck at? speaker-1: ⁓ Fire fire Yeah, I Survive me and is probably the one I suck at Me and Tim we we've built a fire a few weeks ago going on a trip to work Was that dollies? No, that was Quebec run. Yeah, come back around We tried to build it took us four hours to get this fire going and ground was wet in our defense. But Yeah, Tim knows what he's doing and he still sucked at it. So ⁓ it was pretty it was pretty bad. speaker-0: Surviving! speaker-1: Can I build a fire? Of course, but the conditions I would love for them to be much more perfect than they usually are. yeah. speaker-0: That's great. Well, I mean, thank you so much, Ben. I I appreciate you being on, taking the time. I know you're busy, especially running so many businesses. I don't know how, like I only run two and you run like six or seven. Good people. speaker-1: ⁓ I've good people to run all this business. I just do the parts. I like the marketing, the branding, the product design. They handle the business every day. speaker-0: That's cool. Why? I appreciate you being on and then where can people find Hilltop Packs if they're looking for anything from you guys. speaker-1: helltoppacks.com and we're on every platform, TikTok. You're not gonna find us dancing or anything on there, but we're on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. We post on Instagram and Facebook pretty much once, twice a day. YouTube, we post a lot of stuff on YouTube every week. But yeah, we're easy to find. You just Google us and we're gonna pop up. speaker-0: Awesome. Well, thank you so much and everybody. Thank you for listening to Beyond the Trailhead this week and we can't wait for next week with our next guest. And then again, thank you so much and we'll see you. Thanks man. speaker-1: Thanks for having me.