We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nathan Mitchell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nathan below.

Nathan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made?

When I was in West Texas before I sold my pipe inspection company I was approached by my father and one of his friends to start a charter boat business in the US virgin islands. I was in the first few years of being a business owner and entrepreneur so I was excited for a new challenge. My father and his friend were both very successful business owners so I thought it would be a great opportunity and learning experience. As it turns out this was the greatest lesson on what not to do in business history.

I had trusted my partners to do some due diligence that never actually happened and the sellers presented a to good to be true story of the business that we just believed. We were told they had a captain trained to take over and it would be very much a plug and play operation. This was not the case. We also had no idea what we were doing when it came to boats and didn’t realise the boat was falling apart below the water line ( the engine area). This was after the hurricanes hit the islands and it was very difficult to do business in the virgin islands as well. So finding anyone to do work on a boat like ours was next to impossible. The sellers also pissed off all the mechanics on island and no one wanted to work on that particular boat.

When buying a boat you should always get an independent survey. Well the seller presented a survey that was used for the SBA loan they had received for the business. This survey was heavily fabricated for borderline insurance fraud by the sellers. We just accepted this survey was done by a company on island and didn’t think we should get a independent one done for us by another company. The survey presented a beautiful picture of a boat that was in great shape and double the actual value. Didn’t care to mention the duck tape keeping the water out of the whole in some parts of the hull.

My partners convinced me that it was a smart business choice to assume the LLC of the seller vs creating our own company and get a new EIN number. This is the number one do not do when buying a company. I made the mistake of assuming my partners were correct because they had ran successful businesses over the last 30 years. I learned that you should always trust but verify and just because your successful that doesn’t mean it you know everything.

I also learned you should just do a google search on people that you are buying something expensive from. I don’t want to go into to much detail about this. Had we done a quick search of one of the sellers though we would have trusted the sellers much less than we had.

There was a promise of a SBA loan being transferred in the deal as well. Anyone reading this that has dealt with a SBA loan will start cringing. SBA loans are very difficult to get transferred and nearly impossible. We took the sellers word that the SBA has agreed to transfer this loan once the sell happened. This did not happen and the SBA cancelled the loan and threated to repossess the boat since the loan terms were violated.

I could write a book on what we did wrong here. There was two good things that came from this. 1 being I learned a lifetime of bad business choices in 3 years. These are all lessons I have taken to other ventures and I have been much more successful because of it. 2 being the boat was in such poor condition it actually sunk on the way to dry dock. We sent it to another island that had a dry dock big enough to get the work done it needed to bring the boat back to life. En route the boats pumps failed and sunk. We were at least smart enough to have boat insurance that made the losses we took slightly less.

Weirdly after all this we still miss that boat and had a lot of good times on it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

After running a few different successful (and some unsuccessful) businesses with partners in various industries such as oil field, restaurants, travel, and hospitality, I decided it was time to do something on my own. That’s when I had to step back and really determine what products I had a passion for and was going to be willing to launch a company solo and grind it out from scratch. That’s when I took a deep dive into the firearms, specifically the AR style rifles. I realized the markets hasn’t evolved as much as other industries in manufacturing and coating technology. These are places the oil field had put a significant amount of money in research and development. I took the knowledge I learned from that industry and applied it to the firearms world. What came from that was a much more advanced version of the militaries favorite weapon.
This industry has an extremely high barrier of entry for new firearms in the sector. I’m extremely proud that I have been able to create a product that statistically out preforms all other brands and am competing with some of the larger brands with not even close to the amount of support they have.
In any business its not just 1 person conquering the world so I’ve been lucky to surround myself with fellow veterans who also own businesses in the industry. They have been extremely helpful in getting me the contacts I have needed to grow effectively.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Being a Veteran owned business I went from the military to running a business and man I can I tell you people thought processes from the military to the civilian world were completely different. I had to un learn a lot of the military tactics to approaching leadership. Coming from the background in the military I did everyone for the most part wanted to be be there and were very self driven. I have to learn to step back and figure out what each individual employees intrinsic motivations were and utilize that motivation to get them to work. That was a very hard transition for me but all in all made me a better leader.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Besides word of mouth from my network I have had a lot of success on podcast. This is both sponsoring them and being on them. It really gives you a chance to show the customers who you are in a long form message. We have gained quite of bit of dedicated customers that go out and sell the products for us from podcast.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mitchelldefense.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mitchell_defense/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanmitchellmd/