Taylor Guitars

“And it grew to over 300,000 circulation, which is bigger than any guitar magazine.”

“Getting our guitars into the hands of artists takes going to those shows. You need to be backstage during, you know, the MTV video awards or the Grammys or those types of things. You have to develop relationships.”

“Yeah, I was on the production line for almost 20 years of our business.”

“At one point, we had to come out with a less expensive guitar for them, and we were selling a guitar to them for a 150 dollars, is what, how much money we would get”

“I really, literally would work two days a day. The first day was guitar making, and then the second day, the evening shift, was making some kind of tool So that the next time I did that job, it was a little bit easier.”

“We make 700 and something guitars every day.”

“Kurt and his sales team got on the phone and spent four months canceling from our end, fifty million dollars worth of orders, knowing that those aren't real orders.”

“We still have way more people working by hand than we have machines. It's not an automated factory. And if anybody here has ever gone through a car factory, The first step, they're gonna be stamping car parts, and there's not even a person in there. It's all r…”

“Well, what happened is we started a we started a series called the Gallery Series, and the first guitar I made, I named it Living Jewels, and I had koi fish swimming around it, and we had this relationship with Taylor, and her birthday is just before Christmas…”

“She ran a contest in the United States and picked, it was a radio contest, and two Winners from every state won, and they all got to bring a guest, and she paid for their air flights and their hotels to come out and get a 200 person private concert from her at…”

“And I always, one of my sayings is invest in the inevitable. And one thing that's inevitable is I'm going to die. Yep. That's inevitable. And so I'm going to sell this company, my shares of it by accident when I die or on purpose before that. ... And so knowin…”

“We had to borrow the money from our folks, but actually, we didn't find out until after we bought it that it didn't include the name. We found out as soon as we signed the papers that we weren't getting the name and then we weren't going to have the phone numb…”

“Part of our success is that that bad market brought competitors down to our size. For a period of time, and we're ready to go when they were ready to go when the market turned around.”

“We'd value the business at 100,000 dollars, and Steve owned it, 30%, so we each borrowed 15,000 dollars.”

“Eight years into it, we were doing about a hundred and 2020, 130,000 dollars worth of business, so if you back up, to put context, we had started by ourselves, we did two years with Rothschild, we quit doing business with them, so we were on our own by the tim…”

“They move down the line and we've run our company that way. That's how I learned about working capital. That's how I learned about just in time. That's how I learned about, you know, cashflow. So that made all the difference for us. It was a huge, huge thing.”

“We're both on the board. We're co-chairs of the board. And I work every day. I still come in all the time. Yeah, we work for free.”

“I came to the conclusion that actually, we should actually employ everyone rather than, you know, their commission when they finish work by the end of that year. So having to pay everybody every week. You know, two and a half months later, we were out of money…”

“And you know, things like that don't directly impact sales. It's more like an impression, and all the impressions add up over time.”

“So we went into debt again, but we're excited, and then that first year, the business doubled.”

“Then a few years into it, when we realized our future was really an In making and selling guitars, and Bob was really the talent, then we, you know, we decided to call the guitars Taylor Guitars, and we added a little Taylor underneath the neck on the little l…”

“So we actually put together 10,000 dollars all together between the other partner, Bob, and myself, and we bought it, and the rest of the money was our working capital.”

“When we say the majority, we're not saying 51%, we're saying 90%.”