The Duck Commander Family (24 page)

I like to joke that the Robertson family and bad ideas go together like biscuits and jam. Every action in life begins with a decision, and unfortunately, we don’t always make the best ones. Indeed, we’ve made some bad decisions over the years, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without having taken some risks. Even when we faced tough times and what seemed like insurmountable odds, we persevered through our mistakes and landed on our feet again. We’ve always thought that if we did what was morally and ethically right, while continuing to steadfastly believe in what we were doing, we’d be okay in the end. More than anything else, Duck Commander is about building solid products, fostering relationships that last, and treating our employees like family. Well, most of us are family!

Even after Korie and I took over Duck Commander in 2005, Phil was still the king. I didn’t immediately start making rogue decisions when I became CEO, and I wasn’t interested in changing the way we’d done business for the previous thirty-something years. I never thought, “I’m going to change this,
and I don’t care what Phil thinks.” I always went to him for advice before making a big decision, and he still has a very influential voice in how we operate today. There’s a reason Duck Commander was already a solid business when I took it over, and it started with the foundation Phil built in the early days. We follow pretty simple business practices and we’ve stuck to them, even in turbulent times. Phil was determined to build his company with his family, and that’s something that’s really important to me as well. Unlike a lot of modern businessmen, Phil wasn’t going to let his career get in the way of his family. That’s an attribute pretty much anybody can respect and appreciate.

Korie:
Phil and Willie are so much alike. We went to a marriage seminar at our church one time, and Phil and Kay and Jase and Missy were there as well. Each of the couples took a personality test to see if their personalities were compatible. We all laughed because Phil and Willie scored high in the characteristics for having a dominant personality. They were almost identical in a lot of areas, but somewhat different in that Willie was high in the social category as well. I think Willie got that part of his personality from his mother.

It’s funny because people look at the Robertsons and think Jase and Phil are just alike, and they are certainly similar in their love for ducks. But when we took the personality test, we saw that Jase’s personality is much more like his mother’s. So I guess it makes sense that Phil and Jase get along so well in the duck blind. They make a good team, just like Phil and
Kay do at home. Kay has always said that Willie is a lot like Phil and even calls him “Phil Jr.” at times. While I wouldn’t go that far, I definitely see the similarities. They both have strong, charismatic personalities. They are both big-picture guys with big ideas and deep beliefs. Whatever either of them is doing in life, he does it all the way, and they are both very opinionated, which can sometimes be a challenge. Phil and Willie haven’t always been as close as they are now. As they grew, they recognized the attributes they have in common and learned to value one another’s differences and strengths. Willie says it couldn’t have happened until after he was thirty, though. He needed to grow up and mature, and Phil has gotten more relaxed as he’s gotten older. Willie loves to hunt with his dad and brothers, but there have been times when he’s had a hard time sitting in Phil’s blind. You can only have one leader in the duck blind, only one man who lines up the men and yells, “Cut ’em!” when it’s time to shoot. Willie and Phil have both always been leaders, whether it’s in the blind or in business.

After I took over Duck Commander from Phil, not all of my decisions were popular. When we started
Benelli Presents Duck Commander
on the Outdoor Channel in 2009, while it was hugely successful and helped change hunting shows for the better, it was quite different for people who grew up watching our Duckmen videos. They were used to seeing Phil biting ducks’ heads and watching ducks fall from the sky in
slow motion. Really, our hard-core fans were used to seeing us kill a lot of ducks. But the show on Outdoor Channel revealed a lot of the business side of Duck Commander as well, which gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the company and our operations. Some people really liked seeing those aspects of Duck Commander, but change is hard for some people and there were some hard-core fans who only wanted to see the Duckmen shooting ducks from a blind for an hour. I can certainly appreciate both sides of the argument.

Korie:
We started catching a little bit of flak from some of our longtime fans, and a lot of their criticism was aimed at Willie because he’d recently taken over the company. On the forums on our website, some people told us they liked the way the old videos were filmed and accused Willie of trying to ruin the company. They said Duck Commander was getting too corporate and too big, and it was all Willie’s fault. After a while, I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it any longer. People didn’t realize that Willie was trying to make Duck Commander financially solvent, and with the TV show, he was appealing to a much broader audience. In the old days, Phil made just enough money to pay the bills and feed his family.

But as Jase, Willie, and Jep got older and started working for the company, there were a lot more families to feed. Each of the Robertson boys had his own wife and children to provide for. There are a lot of other Duck Commander employees to pay as well, and most of them are our relatives and very close friends. Willie had to find ways to increase Duck Commander’s
revenue, or we were going to have to start laying people off, which we certainly didn’t want to do. Putting a Duck Commander hunting show on the Outdoor Channel was one of the best decisions we made. We got new sponsors who were paying us money to wear and use their products, and, of course, there were contractual obligations that came with those agreements.

After I’d read enough of the complaints, I wrote a blog entry on our website entitled “Stand by Your Man.” I explained to the disgruntled fans that Willie was only trying to make Duck Commander better, and that without the changes he made they wouldn’t be able to see Phil, Jase, and Si shooting ducks anywhere, because there wouldn’t be enough money to produce the DVDs. Willie wasn’t out to change the core of what Duck Commander was. After all, he’s Phil’s son, so it’s his heritage as well. He was just trying to expand the company and grow it into something even more people could appreciate and love. To this day, we still make the hunting DVDs for the serious duck hunters just like we did in the old days. I think people slowly started to realize that Duck Commander was really a business and it had bills to pay and expenses like any other company. And after my diatribe, the fans who were complaining on our forums apologized for criticizing Willie and we all made up!

Believe it or not, Phil has been making the hunting DVDs for more than two decades. The first ones were actually filmed on VHS tapes. Phil was convinced there was a market for
waterfowl hunting videos when perhaps no one else was. There were a lot of deer- and other big-game-hunting videos on the market at the time, but no one had really tried it with ducks. Phil rented camera equipment from a company in Dallas and hired Gary Stephenson, a science teacher at Ouachita Christian School, to direct and film his first video. Much like Phil’s duck calls, not a lot of other people believed the videos would be a success.
Duckmen 1: Duckmen of Louisiana
was released in 1988 and sold about one hundred copies. Undeterred, Phil set out to film
Duckmen 2: Point Blank,
which took the next five seasons to produce. Obviously, it was a very laborious venture and none of the Duckmen knew much of anything about filmmaking.

Like almost everything else Phil put his hands on, the Duckmen hunting tapes were unlike what everyone else was doing at the time. The videos lasted about an hour each and were among the first to include rock music over hunting scenes. Phil has always been a big fan of classic rock. He loves Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pink Floyd, and Bob Seger. I still remember when Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
came out in 1979. Phil bought the eight-track and plugged it in Alan’s player, and then he just lay in the bed and listened to the entire tape. Lynyrd Skynyrd is definitely one of his favorites, though.

If there’s one rule at Phil’s house, it’s that you never wake him while he’s napping. It was a rule when I was a kid, and it’s
still that way today. One day, one of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd called the Duck Commander office, which at that time was Phil and Kay’s house, wanting to talk to Phil. I can’t remember who answered the phone at the time, but he or she wasn’t about to wake up Phil from his nap. Phil was so mad when he found out. He told us, “From this day forward, wake me up if the president of the United States or Lynyrd Skynyrd calls!”

I grew up listening to classic rock but then started liking country music when I was in college. Phil couldn’t understand why I liked listening to it. While I was home from college for a break one time, a bunch of Phil’s buddies were over at his house, and Phil called me down and started making fun of me for listening to country music. He told me rock ’n’ roll was the only music worth listening to. I got mad, stormed out of the house, and said I was never coming back. I told you we were both opinionated! Of course, Phil listens to country music now.

Rock music wasn’t the only thing different about the Duckmen videos. Phil, Jase, Si, and I have the long beards, and so did most of the other original Duckmen, Mac Owen, Dane Jennings, and Bill “Red Dawg” Phillips. Phillips was the first Duckman to paint his face. “Red Dawg” couldn’t grow a long beard. His beard was pitiful, so he figured he’d paint his face to look different than the rest of us. After a while, Phil figured out paint was the best way to camouflage our white faces from the ducks. After all, a man’s face stands out like a white surrender flag in a duck blind. Before too long, everyone in Phil’s blind
was required to wear face paint. By the time
Duckmen 3: In Yo’ Face
came out in 1997, the videos had a pretty large cult following. There were a lot of funny and uncouth antics involved, like spitting contests, shooting water moccasins (a.k.a. congos or ol’ Jims, as Phil likes to call them), and picking the feathers off ducks. The hunting scenes were really kind of in your face and over the top. In
Duckmen 2,
Phil flipped a deer with a rifle shot, which the cameraman, Greg Eppinette, captured in slow motion. Phil became nearly as famous for flipping the deer as any of his duck hunting. There was definitely a shock value to the early Duckmen videos. We released our sixteenth Duckmen video in 2012, and they’re still very popular.