We recently connected with Sam Seeton and have shared our conversation below.

Sam, appreciate you joining us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

Starting Infinite Outdoors was not all glamorous from day one, especially from an employee and manpower perspective. The idea stemmed from spotting a market need through personal experience growing up on a ranch and growing into an avid outdoorsman there after. The initial idea is important but the full vision was only made possible through building the right team, starting with friends and connections at Colorado School of Mines. The core-4 at the beginning were myself and three other fellow Mines graduates. We knew each other from either playing football at Mines or rooming with members of the team. The three other original equity owners were 4-5 years younger than myself and only a year or two out of school when we took on this endeavor. Despite the relatively young age, each person was very well qualified in their areas of expertise.

A major financial, time and attention diverter with starting any business is forming solid legal work and operating agreement. Though not fun, it is absolutely essential, especially when there is such a diverse compensation structure between up-front pay, “sweat equity”, owner draws and physically invested capital. This is vital since it has to protect the company and properly reward and incentivise long-term loyalty to the team all while being extremely forward looking. Since we were lean in both funding and manpower, we all had to sacrifice what we were willing to pay ourselves and I even went as far as to work 50+ hours/ week for the next 2.5 hours as CEO without taking a dime. It wasn’t until 2023 that we were able to significantly increase owner salaries, triple our staff and for me to finally take a draw. To date, I still have invested more of my own money and time to the business than taken from it (holding several upper-management positions at Anheuser Busch concurrently to pay the bills until the company was larger).

Those familiar with tech start-ups, especially in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, know that they are great at raising venture capital money and basically catching it on fire in hope that they are the next unicorn business. We didn’t have that “luxury” or desire to raise big bucks at the start and instead built our company in a manor that was cash conscious and could actually be profitable on a smaller footprint. Admittedly, my background in lean manufacturing and unwillingness to waste money was contrary to the industry but it played out perfectly with the timing of the massive drop in tech valuations over the last year. Our mindset put a focus on automation through tech, scalability and perfecting of our business model and execution. We wanted to be positioned to enter hard times with a truly viable company. This has allowed us to become a national brand and only need +/- 12 employees to run and grow the whole business. But with a small crew quickly came a painful lesson in hiring – culture is everything!

Looking in the rear view, we unfortunately had some rough patches in our early years where we had individuals who overvalued their own contributions, underperformed, complained about working hard, and pushed their grievances and dirty laundry on others. The drop in productivity of everyone and the energy to satisfy the toxic individuals distracted from important business functions, especially of myself and our CTO, David Rhine, a fellow co-founder. This led to some uncomfortable realizations, we were going to have to strip the company down, and run it, with just us two as full time. And so began the difficult rebuild and growth of our labor force. This was the single hardest 6 month period of my life and the next year as a whole was very stressful as we tried to find and develop the RIGHT people. However, we knew what had happened and how to build – culture would be the focus and any deviation, or miss-hire, would be met with a swift removal from our company. No second chances.

With that in mind, we changed all of our interview questions from “how are you qualified” to “who are you as a person and in a team”. We learned exactly how our company should be run from doing it alone, and how to do every job we needed, so qualifications no longer mattered to us. Prove you are a good person, fit the culture, are willing to work hard, and the rest will follow and be trained. The nature of our business attracts a ton of people who want to work for us so the hardest part was filtering through those people and matching the person with the company and finding people willing to grow and mold into the company culture.

Today we are in a wonderful spot but, if we were starting over today, I would immediately lead with cultural guidelines and core values that are MANDATORY to have at Infinite Outdoors. Core values were never put to paper when we first started and only lived in my head, if they were focused on by all from the start, we could have avoided the painful learning curve. But in the end, we are stronger, wiser and better at hiring now than we ever could have hoped to be!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

In short, our team and myself are “High-tech Rednecks”. Myself and our CTO were both raised on our family ranches, attended Colorado School of Mines, majored in engineering and economics fields, played college athletics and have spent most of our lives outdoors. Nature and the outdoors has always been my passion and escape from everyday life. I grew up very blessed with the access to our family ranch, private fishing and hunting land, and a family that knew the best ways to explore and access the public that that our country has to offer. However, it was not without struggle and often found ourselves locked into leases that gave away our own hunting and recreation rights and allowed them to ignore basic conservation principles. The issue rang true with other landowner buddies and then the only people accessing these grounds were very wealthy people being guided by the outfitters now in control of our land. Much of my time turned to teaching friends how to better navigate public land and making deals to help other landowners manage their land without giving away all of their rights. This diverse background led to developing an industry-first company to improve everyone’s access to the outdoors and the quality and control on private land.

Our background in nature and “nerdiness” in school let us hone our passions and built the most used Do-it-yourself hunting and fishing platform in the country. We also integrated advanced mapping capabilities into the app to scout for public land across the country, view 3D interactive layers, and so much more. With thousands of new users a month, more than a million acres of private land listings, and properties within a couple hours of most everyone in the country, our app is changing the outdoors landscape.

We often get asked why no one else built this app before us. Simple, nerds don’t usually hunt, code and own ranches. It was the perfect storm of country and code crunching. Prime for the making by high-tech rednecks.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

We once had a member turn hostile and try to strong arm our company. This led to them leaving the company and the rest of the founders scrambling to pick up the scraps. During this time it completely ran us out of capital and temporarily slowed the growth of our company and our expected runway. This forced a capital call of all founders to keep us afloat and having to get creative with outside grants and investors (versus just boot-strapping the business). When we finally secured our seed round of funding, I was a month into making payroll from my own savings account with only a few more weeks of that being sustainable before we would have had to lay off half our workforce.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We went to college together and two of them were underclassmen when I was 5th year senior and starting running back for Colorado School of Mines. Our current CTO, and arguably the most important person in our company, was a roommate of my football buddies and they brought him on initially.

Contact Info:

• Website: infiniteoutdoorsusa.com
• Instagram: infiniteoutdoors_usa
• Facebook: Infinite Outdoors
• Linkedin: Infinite Outdoors
• Other: Download the app on the App Store and Google Play Store