We were lucky to catch up with Nick Blumer recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nick, appreciate you joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

While growing up both of my parents worked extremely hard, and they made difficult sacrifices to provide for our family. I believe this work ethic rubbed off on me at a very early age and instilled valuable lessons about perseverance, resilience, and the importance of a having a strong work ethic. My mother often worked multiple jobs and put our family’s needs before her own.

My parents set a powerful example of putting family first and working hard to provide for those you love, and this is what drives me now in providing for my family.

Nick, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My wife Kellee and I both grew up in Sioux Falls, SD and were high school sweethearts at times.  After graduating, Kellee went on to work at a healthcare clearinghouse as an administrative assistant and claims processor.  She was responsible for processing health care claims from the providers to the payers to ensure claims would transmit without rejection or errors.

I’ve always had a passion for helping and serving others, I believe that is part of the reason that I joined the military right out of high school. I Joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served 4 years on active duty followed by 16 years in the South Dakota Air National Guard.

Throughout my time in the Air National Guards, I also worked for a multinational financial services company as a risk consultant, VP of Operations at a national recognized healthcare clearinghouse and the Sioux Falls VA Medical Center as their HIPAA Privacy and FOIA Officer before starting an online e-commerce company and purchasing our current one.

Kellee and I reconnected after I moved back to Sioux Falls and married in 2005 and our son Austin is 16 years old.  After retiring from the military, we knew that we wanted to own a business with a purpose. As a military family, we’ve learned to persevere and work hard through tough times and to lean on each other for support and we did that along our way to purchasing a small business that had strong ties to the community since 1973, JD’s House of Trophies. JD’s House of Trophies specializes in custom awards, engraving, gifts, and promotional items.

With my military experience and 20+ years’ experience in areas such as risk consulting, IT, audit management and privacy I felt it was time for something more fulfilling.

Owning a small business and having the creative liberty to apply our expertise to make it more efficient and effective is, by far, one of our favorite aspects of being business owners. In addition, watching the company thrive and transform as we remodeled, overhauled, and expanded our production has been incredibly fulfilling.

I feel like I am accustomed to working under pressure and making pivotal decisions. At various times throughout my career I’ve had to be responsible for overseeing and maintaining multi-million-dollar military assets and civilian network infrastructures, which have proven to be beneficial experiences to becoming a business owner.

Kellee focuses on some of the communications aspects of the company. In this role, she is focused on reconnecting the company with both established and new clients through social media. Our workplace culture is really like a family and it’s our goal to extend that same feeling and sentiments to our clients. Since JD’s House of Trophies is a long-standing company that has seen great success since 1973, we are committed to continuing that legacy through superior customer service and products that go beyond expectations.

The days are never the same which can be exciting. We could be working on a very large glass awards order for a company one day to making a custom trophy out of an old racing tire the next and we believe that is what sets us apart from others…it’s a true custom operation.

When we have time away from the office, we love spending time together as a family with their son and two dogs and two cats. Kellee enjoys sewing or planning our next travel adventure. In my spare time I enjoy practicing Judo and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, deer hunting and snowboarding.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When Kellee and I decided to go into business for ourselves we initially entered into a Joint Venture agreement with a company out of state. Unfortunately, this company did not meet some of their obligations and we had to take a risk and back out of the venture.

For us it was a risk to enter into the agreement and another risk to notice that it may not be a good fit. Even though it was a difficult decision to back out and lose some of our initial investment we kept pressing forward to start something ourselves or look for the right company to purchase.

Thankfully not too long after that venture fell apart, we were notified about the possibility of buying JD’s House of Trophies.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

When we purchased JD’s House of Trophies, they did not have a website where customers could purchase items online. I was familiar with Shopify so right away I worked on building a custom Shopify website from the ground up. It still needs work, but we are very happy with the design and ability for customers to upload their engraving information in the order.

In the future we do have plans to build an Etsy site as another sales channel into the business.

The pros of Shopify has to be the large community of developers, apps and plugins to other software. It has made having a physical retail store and an online store pretty seamless. Some cons would be if you have to rely on a 3rd party app to accomplish something specific it can be hard to have features added to that “app” whereas if another platform was used it may be a bit more customizable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jdshouseoftrophies.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jdshouseoftrophies/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jdshouseoftrophies
• Other: https://jdshotpromos.com/