Sweetwater: Chuck Surack. How a Customer Service Strategy Built a Billion Dollar Online Pro Audio and Music Company.

Chuck Surack never planned to build one of America's largest online retailers. He just wanted to be a musician. So right after high school, he took his sax and drove off in his old VW van to play gigs around the country. It didn’t work out. But with the audio and mixing skills Chuck learned gigging, he decided to convert his van into a mobile recording studio - and started making money fast by making recordings of local bands, businesses, and schools. The game-changer came as a one-two-three punch: first, he created a new product - digitized sound libraries - to sell nationally; second, he started selling high end pro audio gear; third, he instituted a sales culture hyper-focused on customers and relationship-building that resulted in Sweetwater’s enormous and super loyal online customer base. In this episode, Chuck shares how he built a retail giant from his garage, why customer service became his greatest competitive advantage, and why, even in the age of AI, human relationships remain one of the most valuable assets any business can build. What you'll learn The hiring philosophy that transformed customer service into a competitive moat and has helped Sweetwater fend off much larger competitorsWhy under-cutting competitor prices and offering discounts isn’t always the answer to fuel sales and growth Why the best salespeople aren’t always don’t think of themselves as salespeople - and don’t have to come from sales or marketing backgroundsWhy training people—not technology—may be the biggest, best investment a company can makeHow saying "no" to bad products strengthened customer trustThe leadership principle: empowering employees to solve problems without asking permission Timestamps 05:39 — The saxophone player who never meant to build a billion-dollar company09:11 — How turning his VW van into a mobile recording studio was the first step in building a business14:37 — The $20,000 keyboard synthesizer that changed his life forever21:27 — Chuck gets into retail - almost in spite of himself34:39 — Why Sweetwater refused to compete on price37:51 — How Chuck and his early team started to learn the power of customer service44:45 — Inside "Sweetwater University" and being a Sales Engineer: 13 weeks of training before an employee answers the phone46:55 — Leadership rule for employees: Never ask permission to do the right thing1:03:19 — Why Amazon hasn’t stopped him This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music by Ramtin Arablouei, and edited by Andrea Bruce with research help from Carla Esteves. Follow How I Built This: Instagram →@howibuiltthis https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis/ X →@HowIBuiltThis https://x.com/howibuiltthis Facebook →How I Built This https://www.facebook.com/howibuiltthis Follow Guy Raz: Instagram →@guy.raz https://www.instagram.com/guy.raz/ Youtube →guy_raz https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNSfrxNEmCruNtjIzxCBHjg X →@guyraz https://x.com/guyraz Substack →guyraz.substack.com http://guyraz.substack.com/ Website →http://guyraz.com/guyraz.com http://guyraz.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:45Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/HIBT. We get support from US Bank, a question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making

• 1:27Guy Raz?

  until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in, business is growing, you've got expenses coming from six directions, gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing, path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business.

• 2:07Guy Raz?

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• 2:52Guy Raz?

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• 3:37Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Speaker 01

  I've always believed everyone in our company, whether it's a sales engineer or the receptionist, is either adding credibility or taking credibility away from our company. And I got to have people always adding credibility. We empower everyone in our company to make the right decision, to do the right stuff. If someone would come to our store or phone into the receptionist and say, my keyboard quit working, they're empowered to replace it. Every employee that ever I hired, I would tell them, you'll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You'll get chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough.

• 4:58Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 5:12Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Chuck Surack went from mixing music in the back of his mom's VW van to building the billion-dollar music and audio equipment giant Sweetwater.

• 5:30Guy Raz?

  There are a lot of ways to build a retail business. You can compete on price, you can compete on selection, you can promise faster shipping, bigger discounts, or endless convenience. But Chuck Surack took a completely different approach. He believed that before anyone bought a guitar or a microphone or a keyboard or a recording interface, they should have a conversation. Not with a chatbot, not with a commissioned salesperson trying to close a deal, but with someone who actually understood instruments and recording gear, someone who played in bands or spent time in recording studios, who understood signal chains and synthesizers, and could help a customer figure out not just what they wanted,

• 6:14Guy Raz?

  but what they actually needed. That philosophy became the foundation of Sweetwater. It's a company that's managed to become the largest online retailer of musical instruments and professional audio equipment in the United States, despite competition from retail giants like Amazon and Walmart. Every customer who calls Sweetwater is assigned a dedicated sales engineer. Every one of those salespeople goes through months of intensive training even before they ever answer the phone. And remarkably, Chuck never tried to win by being the cheapest. He truly believed that extraordinary service, not offering discounts, would be the key to building lasting relationships. And over time, it was.

• 6:59Guy Raz?

  And the amazing thing about all of this is that Chuck never set out to build a retail empire. He just wanted to play music, specifically the saxophone. He grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he still lives and where Sweetwater is still headquartered. After he graduated high school in the mid-1970s, Chuck turned down college, climbed into his mom's old VW van, and spent the next several years playing saxophone with a cover band in bars and clubs across America.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  We traveled almost every state in the continental US. I think I missed a couple out on the West Coast. But back then, you had a booking agent, and they would book you for a week or two weeks in a particular club. And then they'd give you a clue where you're going next week. Or sometimes they wouldn't know, and they'd just tell you on Saturday night, get in your bus on Sunday morning and start driving north or start driving south. And you'd call, this is before cell phones, you'd stop at a payphone every so often and go, where am I going? And eventually, they would tell you. I remember one time I left Charlotte, North Carolina, and he told me to drive north. And next thing you know, I'm in Sudbury, Canada, and just barely in time for a gig that started on Monday night at 7 o'clock.

• 8:08Guy Raz?

  Wow. And did you make, I mean, presumably you're making enough money to stay on the road, but I can't imagine this was a lucrative lifestyle.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  No, most of the places you played, you got free room and board. Quite often, you'd stay in the hotel, or maybe they had an apartment they rented. You got free food. And I laughed. I said I made about 50 bucks a week. I probably made a little bit more than that, but it barely paid for gas and getting to the next location. And that's why I ultimately quit, because I was a decent musician, but I wasn't going to be good enough to be a truly professional musician.

• 8:40Guy Raz?

  Got it. All right. So you're touring around. And from what I understand, I mean, you become like the de facto roadie, right? Like setting up instruments and speakers and making the audio system sound good. And I guess even inventing or hacking audio gear for gigs. So you were kind of like the sound engineer.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And so a couple of things I would tell you. Back then, equipment was very expensive, hard to get, much different than today.

• 9:05Guy Raz?

  Heavy, really heavy?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Heavy, big, heavy speakers, all that sort of stuff. But I would run the sound system with my right hand as I played my saxophone with my left hand. And so we didn't usually have a sound man out front. I would just run it from the side.

• 9:18Guy Raz?

  You have a mixer.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  A mixer, right.

• 9:20Guy Raz?

  And you would run it, and you'd play the sax with your left hand.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then the other thing that was interesting, when we were on the road, back then, there weren't a lot of standalone recording studios. Most of the recording happened in radio stations. And so we would quite often on Monday morning, go to the local radio station and record. You know, this week we're playing at the Holiday Inn or wherever we were playing. And so I got really used to using recording equipment. And through the years on the road, I would gather more and more of that equipment myself.

• 9:48Guy Raz?

  So it's interesting, you guys would have to record little spots on local stations to promote your live shows at these bars or clubs.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:56Guy Raz?

  And, and as a result of that, you started to get experience with these recording booths because you would, they would just say, oh, go use that booth over there and, you know, record your spot and bring us the eight-track cassette of it, or whatever it was.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And also, a lot of those radio stations had multi-track recording studios with either eight or 16-track recorders. So you could record every instrument on its own channel and then mix it and make it sound good.

• 10:18Guy Raz?

  So you kind of, even though you, you love the sax, it sounds like you're really kind of developing this passion for the technical side of, you know, of setting up a stage and running the chords and, but when you come back home to Fort Wayne, you realize that maybe you could make a business out of this, like have a, a recording studio?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  You know, I came back to Fort Wayne, I was really tired of living out of the suitcase and making the quote unquote $50 a week. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I really didn't. But I knew I wasn't going to go to college. I also knew that I had a lot of this equipment. And so it was a simple way to make money and just start helping my friends. And so that's really what drove me at first.

• 11:01Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're back in, you've got your VW bus and you, I guess you come up with this idea of converting the VW bus into a recording studio, or like the, the engineering booth of a recording studio. Tell me how you, how you came up with this idea. Was it because there weren't any recording studios in Fort Wayne, or, or you knew musicians who wanted to record their music, like maybe all of that?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  You know, I don't really remember. It just sort of naturally happened. I mean, I do remember, it wasn't very long after I had the VW bus doing recordings, I started going to all the high schools and middle schools and saying, let me record your Christmas concert or your spring concert. And then I just got so, so darn busy recording everybody.

• 11:42Guy Raz?

  And just to like paint a picture of this, it wasn't like they were recording in the VW bus. You had like the mixers and the sort of reel to reel in there, but you would run the cables from the bus into the auditorium where they were recording?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I would record their live performance, but I would sit in the bus with my headphones on and monitor it and make sure all the levels are coming in correctly and mix it together and all that.

• 12:05Guy Raz?

  Like an FBI listening booth?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I never thought of it that way, but kind of.

• 12:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah, like in the movies you see in the seventies. Yeah, they're sitting in there with a reel to reel. Okay. So you're, you're recording, by the way, what would they do with those reel to reel recordings? Like, why would they?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. So I would take those reel to reel recordings and then go back to the living room of my 12 by 55 mobile home. And then I would edit all the songs in order, take the extra pauses out. And, and then we would turn them into LPs or records. And then they would sell those records. So it was a fundraiser for the school.

• 12:36Guy Raz?

  Ah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And it was also an interesting way for me to tell the band director or the choir director, look, it won't cost you a thing. Just let me record them and then I'll make my money by selling those records, or we'll split the profits of selling those records to your parents.

• 12:48Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. So you would, that's a great idea. So you would just do the recording for free. So you got church choirs and, and the schools and these were your clients? Like who, who else were you recording?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Everyone we've talked about, but it would be choirs and bands. And I would record them in their auditoriums or their cafeteria. I did many, many presidents of companies, CEOs of companies. I'd go into their boardroom or the, maybe the speech they were making. I remember one year I did a, I recorded a speech of the CEO of General Motors. He was down in Defiance, Ohio. And all the way through his speech, he kept referencing the current year and he meant to reference the next year. So he gets all done with this speech and I figured out how to use a razor blade and tape and change all those references that he made. And I was a hero for them. And for many, many years, I got lots of their recording business because I made him look great.

• 13:37Guy Raz?

  Wow. And by the way, this equipment at the time was not cheap. I mean, a reel to reel, was it, was it a four-track recorder or?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I started on a four-track and then I did most of my recording in the VW bus with an eight-track recorder.

• 13:51Guy Raz?

  And how, how did you finance all this equipment?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Well, anywhere I could make a few dollars, I would make a few dollars and put them away. And even, even when I was on the road, I was able to sock a few bucks away. And then with the recording, you know, in those days I was making $22 an hour.

• 14:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  If I charged for recording, which wasn't very much, but it was enough that every dollar I made would go right back into the equipment.

• 14:11Guy Raz?

  Okay. So I guess that year, 79, was the year you officially kind of founded this business. You called it C N B Audio, which would be, which would become Sweetwater Sound, but C N B, what does C N B stand for?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  It was Chuck and my first wife, Brenda.

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  Okay. And, and like, I mean, you talk about recording CEOs and church choirs, or were you kind of looking to get into like bands and recording musicians who wanted to make records?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, I wanted to do musicians making records, but in the early days, I paid the bills by doing all the recording we've talked about. But my goal ultimately was to do music for musicians that wanted to record real albums.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  But I needed a location to do that. And, and for the first couple of years, I didn't have a location. All I had was that mobile home.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  So it was wherever they were recording, but you really wanted to have a space, build it out and people could come there, rent it, record it, you could engineer it. That's what you were looking to do.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that started in 1981.

• 15:08Guy Raz?

  And how did you do that? Where, where'd you find the space?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Well, I found a small house on the west side of Fort Wayne and I built basically a two-car garage, but that garage really was a recording studio. It looked like a garage from outside, but what was interesting about it, where I built this, or built this studio, the house was already there, but it wasn't zoned legally. It was zoned for residential. I had to be careful and I didn't want to raise the ire of the local zoning officials.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  So let's talk about Fort Wayne at the time in 1981, 82, when you've got this studio. Because, you know, it's, we're not talking about Sun Studios in Memphis in the, in the 50s, right? I mean, Elvis and Johnny Cash hanging out there. You know, Fort Wayne wasn't like where tons and tons of bands were recording, right? I mean, I can't imagine it was, or, or am I wrong?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  You know, every city across this country has musicians and bands that want to record. But you're absolutely correct. It wasn't a recording mecca. In fact, all of my friends and all my professional friends would go, a recording studio in Fort Wayne? They just didn't understand it.

• 16:09Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Why don't you go to Nashville? Why don't you go to LA? Go to New York?

• 16:12Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  But I knew that it was possible to be successful there. I didn't know what level I was going to do, but I knew I could be successful. And we had lots and lots of bands coming in. In fact, I was so busy, we would run from early in the morning till late at night. It was a very good thing.

• 16:26Guy Raz?

  So you've got this business going, you're running the studio. And I guess there's a real turning point and it happens in 1984. And I want you to tell me about this because from what I understand, you were invited to a trade show in Chicago, a trade show of musical instruments. And while you were there, you discovered something that would essentially, I, I think it's not an understatement to say would actually change your life.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it did change my life. I had a friend that owned a local piano and organ store here in Fort Wayne. And he invited me to the N A M show. And he said, well, that means the National Association of Music Merchants. And they have their dealer show once a year up in Chicago. I said, yeah, I'll go with you. And he was just a friend and I had bought some synthesizers through his store. So we'd become friends through that. And I went there and I saw a prototype of a music instrument that just set me on fire and frankly, set the world on fire for a while. And it was called a Kurzweil K250. Ray Kurzweil, who's a futurist, he's still alive today, still doing some really interesting stuff. But he'd figured out how to record a nine-foot grand piano and digitize it and

• 17:31Speaker 01

  put it in memory chips or ROM chips. And, you know, back in 1983 and 84, this was unheard of. But not only did it have a recording of a nine-foot Steinway piano, it had an upright bass, it had a 50 voice choir, it had a 45-piece string section. But it was an expensive instrument. And so I saw a prototype and I'm going, that is amazing. In my own studio, I have a small six-foot grand piano that's always in a state of being out of tune because that's what pianos do. They're always getting worse. And I thought, if I could buy this Kurzweil K250, I would have a nine-foot grand piano always in tune, plus 39 other sounds that came with it initially. And so I bought one early on and then I started reverse engineering how it worked. And I designed my own sounds for it, designed my

• 18:15Speaker 01

  own software for it and just took the instrument to a whole nother level.

• 18:19Guy Raz?

  This was a very expensive machine at the time, $20,000, which is roughly $63, $65,000 today. So this is not no joke of, of an investment for a 28-year-old guy to buy.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yes. I had a, a small Yamaha grand piano and I decided I could sell that piano and put some more money with it and I could squeak my way barely into a Kurzweil K250. And that's what I did.

• 18:43Guy Raz?

  But once you had this thing, it would generate a lot of income for you because you, first of all, you were probably the only one in Fort Wayne who had this thing, I would imagine.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I was the only one in the Midwest at the time that had one. And so at the end of every one of my recording sessions, I would tell my customers, would you like to hear your music with a 50 voice choir or a 45-piece string section or upright bass? And so I would get a couple more hours of recording time and they would get a better sounding project. I also would throw it in the back of my VW bus and take it down to other recording studios. So one of the real famous studios is down in Anderson, Indiana, where the Gaethers used to record. And I would take it down there and do sessions and they would pay me for the day for having it there. I'd take it up to Detroit, other studios like that.

• 19:29Guy Raz?

  So you would play it in the studio?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Either I would play it, or maybe they'd have another keyboard player that would play it.

• 19:34Guy Raz?

  And so you were not just engineering in the studio. It sounds like you were doing more production work too.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I love producing music.

• 19:42Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's really cool because it's, it's like people are, well, they're paying you more for more studio time. So that's one thing, but but then I guess you start to have the ability to enable the user to make their their own new sounds with it, like their own proprietary sounds.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  We could do that also. We did a lot of that. We would record the strangest instruments, or not even instruments, the strangest sounds and turn it into an instrument. It could be a door squeak, it could be rocks hitting together, and next thing you know, you you put it across the keyboard and it can sound like a music instrument.

• 20:15Guy Raz?

  So you could record into the, like, there was a memory chip inside of the synthesizer you could record onto?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yes, that's correct.

• 20:23Guy Raz?

  Which is wild. I mean, today, of course, you know, you just recorded your iPhone, but in 1984, that was really different. I mean, you're essentially going for, most people were still using reel to reel to record music at that time. And and these would be sounds like, yeah, give me an example of like, a sound you would create, like, what would you, how would you do it?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Well, being a musician myself, quite often, I would just record myself or other musician friends into the instrument. So as an example, I did lots and lots of recordings of my saxophone.

• 20:51Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  So a guitar player or keyboard player that didn't play saxophone could now get the sound of a saxophone in his music. And, you know, we recorded all kinds of things. I did a bagpipes. There weren't bagpipes built into the machine, so I recorded a bagpipe player. I remember one time I brought in a trombone player, a trumpet player, and I played saxophone, and we made a brass section sound. There was not a section of brass in there. That sound ended up being used by Stevie Wonder on his character's album.

• 21:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, how did, so that that sort of segues into my question, which is, you're a guy in Fort Wayne, and you're, you start to make your own sounds, right?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:30Guy Raz?

  But how did you, you know, this is pre-internet, this is like, still early fax machine days, like, how did anybody find out that, hey, there's this guy in Fort Wayne, Chuck Surack, he's making samples on the Kurzweil, and they're pretty great, like, how, here he goes, Stevie Wonder, like, how would, help me understand how anybody even knew what you were doing?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. There were two ways. The first way is there were a couple manufacturer reps worked for Kurzweil, and they would travel around the country to other music stores, and happened to be one from southern Indiana who called on all the stores in the Midwest, and he would see me as a customer, as an end user, and he'd come by and trade sounds with me, and he'd take them to the other music stores. So that's one way. But the real way I really made it happen is there was a magazine back in those days called Mix Magazine. Mix Magazine covered recording studios around the country, and they would list their equipment. You know, they have a, an MCI tape recorder, they have a, an Atari console, and they have a Kurzweil K250. And anytime I would see that they had

• 22:32Speaker 01

  a K250, I would immediately either call them or write them and go, wow, you have a K250? I have one, too. And I was hoping to trade sounds with them. Generally, I found out most of the players were just players. They weren't technical, they weren't into the musical side or the making sounds for it. And they'd go, well, I don't have any sounds, but I sure would like yours. And it was kind of funny, in the early days, they were on a floppy disk that was a three and a half inch, kind of a semi-rigid disk that the Macintoshes used. And I'm running recording sessions, but I'm copying discs on the side. I'm kind of multitasking. And I'm frustrated that people want my discs, but I'm really busy trying to do a recording session. And it took me a while to figure out that there was a great way to do both.

• 23:11Guy Raz?

  You were recording samples onto floppy disks and selling those to people, basically? It sounds, I mean, it sounds like, wasn't all that, I mean, I, again, I don't want to minimize what you did, but it doesn't actually sound all that complex, what you were doing. It just, like, you were just the only one doing it?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  You know, anybody could do it pretty easily, pretty quickly, but to do it to professional levels, where all the notes sounded correct, and it didn't sound munchkinized, and, yeah, it was a real skill, it was a real art. And I developed a lot of software tools to make my music or my samples sound even better.

• 23:45Guy Raz?

  All right. And and were you, I mean, selling the the floppy for how much were you selling for?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Well, initially, I gave them away, and I was getting so annoyed that it was getting in the way of running my recording sessions. So then I started selling them for $5 apiece, which is really funny. I sent out a dot matrix newsletter, and on that newsletter, I had a list of all the sounds that I had, and and people would send me back the form with everything checked off. And, you know, I got $200, $300, $400 for all the discs.

• 24:11Guy Raz?

  So I guess you become at a certain point around this time, a dealer for this machine for the Kurzweil K250. And why was that a good use of your time? I mean, I mean, what made you think I should just start selling these machines for Kurzweil?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Actually, I wasn't that smart. But I mentioned the Kurzweil rep kept coming by and getting my sounds, and he would take them to the other dealers up in Chicago and Detroit and Minneapolis. And and I kept telling him about my relationship with all my friends. By then, I had about 300 friends around the country that had their own Kurzweils. And he kept saying, why don't you become a dealer? Why don't you become a dealer? And I said, oh, no, I'm too busy running my recording studio. And eventually, he talked me into it. He said, I'll set you up to be a parts dealer. That was in the fall. And by Christmas time, I had sent out a newsletter, again, to all my friends and going, hey, I've just become a Kurzweil dealer. If you want sound block A or B or C or D, and each one of them had a bunch of different new sounds in it, I am a dealer for all that.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  So send me your check, and and I'll get the parts to you, and I'll help you get it installed. So through the month of December, I started getting check after check, because the kind of people that had these machines usually were pretty successful, or they were universities, and they didn't have a great relationship with their local store. And so I was a little bit the lifesaver for people that had Kurzweil K250s. And I'll never forget, it was a couple days before Christmas, my my rep friend called me, he said, hey, Chuck, I really need all those orders. It's got to be done by the end of the year. You know, how are you doing? I said, I don't know, I'm really busy. I'm recording Christmas albums. I've got a pile of checks here. I haven't really figured it all out. But I said, I don't know, it's a couple hundred thousand dollars worth. He said, are you serious? I said, yes. He says, we got to get paid. I said, no, I have checks from everybody already. So he got

• 25:52Speaker 01

  in his car and drove up to Fort Wayne, and we counted all the checks and ordered all the parts. And I did several hundred thousand dollars of Kurzweil parts.

• 25:59Guy Raz?

  Wow. This is 1985 to 86, I think, right?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You know, I read something that just I thought was so interesting, because I guess back when you become a dealer, you also become the customer service guy, because I'm assuming they would call you up and ask for support or or help. But you really started to focus on learning as much as you could about the people you would sell stuff to. Tell me about what you would do.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Well, you're absolutely right. And, you know, I always have tried to keep track of spouses' names and children's names and their interests. But but having a relationship with them, over time, you figure all that stuff out.

• 26:34Guy Raz?

  And you would, by knowing, you know, a spouse's name or a kid's name, they might call you six months later, and you could say, how is, how is Bill Junior doing? And they would probably be blown away that you remembered that.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's, the whole music business, from my point of view, is all about relationships. It's not a transaction. It's really a relationship for life.

• 26:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  And that became the genesis of Sweetwater Sound.

• 26:58Guy Raz?

  All right. So and and I should mention, by this point, you know, you were called Sweetwater Sound, and and that, I've heard different kind of, you described different variations on the origins of the name. What what is this name? And where's it come from?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  So when I was out in the country, a lot of farmers had little wooden signs by their property. They'd sell Bill's acreage, or Steve's farm, or whatever it was. And when I moved into Fort Wayne, I knew I didn't want to be C and B audio anymore. So this is about the second or third year of our business. And I had two acres of land, and I had a little creek in the backyard, and I literally just put a bunch of names on a piece of paper. And I'm thinking about this little creek in our backyard, and I go, water, that's kind of sweet. And it became Sweetwater. And so I put a little sign, it was about two foot wide and a foot high, that said Sweetwater. Didn't say what it was or anything, but that helped me get past the zoning officials, and yet my musician customers could find me.

• 27:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Okay, so you are now growing as a dealer for Kurzweil. But meantime, are you still doing the recording thing? Because this, you've got a lot going on. You're making, you're sampling, you're putting on discs, and you're recording people, and you're selling equipment for the the Kurzweil machines, the synthesizers. So I imagine that the recording studio part of your business has to kind of shrink a little.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  You know, by then, I brought on my first employee. And so we could keep doing the studio thing, and he would do some of the sessions, I would do some of the sessions, and it just grew from there. But no, I don't, I don't believe in shrinking. You're always going forward or backwards.

• 28:28Guy Raz?

  Okay, so around 85, 86, you become eventually the exclusive dealer in your area for Kurzweil. And so at what point did you sort of begin to become a person who wasn't a recording engineer, but a person selling? Studio equipment, musical instruments. Like, how, how long did that take, that transition?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I told you that I became a parts dealer in December and started sending all those parts out to my friends in January and February. About March of that year, I got a call from a friend and he said, hey Chuck, I want to buy another Kurzweil K250. I said, whoa, you already have one. I just loaded yours completely up. You know, you probably have $30,000 in your machine. Why do you want another one? And he says to me, he says, Chuck, a Kurzweil, I only place 12 notes at one time. And I hold my fingers up and I go, well, I got 10 fingers. What do you mean 12 notes? He says, no, no, no, no. He says, I do orchestrations with full orchestras and I have to hire an orchestra for a day or two. It's thousands of dollars. He said, if I had another Kurzweil, I could do 24 notes at one time.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  And so I called the rep and he says, oh, no Chuck, I told you that to open a Kurzweil as a retailer, new dealer, you have to buy 10. And, and I'm, 10? Yep, yep, you gotta buy 10. And so eventually, over the next couple of months, I sold those 10 and over time, I sold a lot more. You know, back to your question, by 1990, I do remember one time with the Tascam recording equipment, probably the most popular brand of recording equipment. The national sales manager came to see me with his rep and they wanted to sign me up for the really basic, basic equipment. And I said, no, I, I want to be involved with selling eight tracks and 16 tracks because I've had higher end customers. I've got people that have been buying these 20 to $30,000 synthesizers.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And we went round and round and the sales manager said, well, I've never opened up anybody for those higher franchises until you've been established for a while and all that. I said, well, that's really what I need to do or I don't want to do it because I want to sell the better stuff to my better customers. And so much to their, I don't know, disappointment or chagrin, they went ahead and signed me up. I ordered all the stuff and then I wrote a newsletter to my 350 customers at the time and said, I'm getting all this recording equipment. If you need a four track or eight track recorder or mixing console, whatever, I have it. Took about two weeks and I've got orders for everything that I have coming in already pre-sold. Wow. And I'll never forget this, I called the rep and he was about an hour south of us here in Fort Wayne. And I said, Brian, guess what? I've sold all the stuff.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  I need to place another order. And he says to me, now? It was like seven o'clock at night. And he says, I'll have to turn the light on. And I said, yeah, I guess. You know, it's funny today because any manufacturer's rep today would be thrilled to have any business that would beg for it. But he was kind of upset that I was making him turn his light on at seven o'clock at night to order the biggest order that he'd ever sold.

• 31:21Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Chuck's decision to sell recording equipment and to intensely train his sales staff turns into millions of dollars in sales fast. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 31:46Guy Raz?

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• 33:15Guy Raz?

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• 33:59Guy Raz?

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• 34:40Guy Raz?

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• 35:17Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1990, just four years after Chuck bought that first Kurzweil. And Sweetwater's made about $6 million in sales. But Chuck's product list is getting bigger. He's operating out of a tight garage and he's barely keeping up with demand.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, by 1990, we were selling quite a few different brands, probably 20 brands of equipment or so. And just helping people with their recording, whether it was synthesizers or recording equipment, we really weren't into the rest of the technology yet. We didn't sell guitars, we didn't sell drums. It was just stuff I understood and I knew, synthesizers and recording equipment.

• 35:57Guy Raz?

  And how were you financing inventory at that time, Chuck?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Hand to mouth and sales from last month and the month before.

• 36:04Guy Raz?

  And then in terms of what you were actually carrying, your inventory, it would just grow organically because people would ask you if you had it? Or would you go to trade shows? Did you start going to trade shows and say, I want to sell that, I want to sell that, I want to sell that?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  All the above. Definitely they would ask and if I heard it enough times, I would go, okay, that might be worth looking at. But I also was very careful back in those days, what we wanted to carry. I only want, I was a little bit arrogant about it. I only wanted to carry the really good stuff. And so there were brands of equipment that I just didn't want to sell to my customers. If I didn't believe in it, if I didn't want to use it myself, I wouldn't sell it. So we, we tend to specialize on the higher end equipment for a long time.

• 36:41Guy Raz?

  Tell me what a typical, I mean, were you working seven days a week? Was it, I mean, you've got customers ordering, you've got a pretty robust business, you've got to get the shipments out. Obviously, it's not like today was the next day, everyone expects next day. But still, what do you remember about your lifestyle at that time? Because I think you mentioned your first wife and maybe your marriage had split up by that point?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  No, she was around for about 20 years. But, you know, I would say that was probably a sacrifice by being so engaged in the business and she had other interests. And, you know, that we separated. Thankfully, there were no children involved at the time. But no, it was, it was definitely a seven day a week and it was early in the morning to very late at night. I loved what I did though. I mean, I never considered it work. And whether I was selling to a customer or programming our next database updates, I did that for a long time. You know, all the systems that figured out the UPS shipping in those days and salesman's commission, I wrote all the code for that because I like, I like technology.

• 37:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a reading about this story. It's like your growth is incremental. You go from like tiny 200 square foot mobile home to, you know, a little bigger place than 5,000 square feet. And then by 1991, you got 10,000 square foot place. So this is a robust business. I mean, you're just, was there not a lot of competition? Were there not a lot of businesses doing this kind of work? Or what explained? You know, really, just the growth of this thing at that time.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there were about 5,000 other music stores across the country. So there was lots of competition. Every town has two, three, four music stores. I don't mean this at all arrogantly, but what we really worked hard on is having relationships with our customers. What I heard all the time was, I can't believe you can service me better out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, than I can get out of my local store in LA or New York or wherever it may be. And I never really competed on price. I always wanted to be a fair value, but I didn't try and undercut the local dealer. We just wanted to know the products better. We wanted to make better recommendations. We had this incredible service. You know, we'll fix anything we sell. By that time, the internet is starting to happen. So we had all kinds of online educational tools. Our goal was to always add more value.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  And so if we sold a keyboard, we would include an extra bank of sounds. If we sold speakers, we would show you diagrams on how to set it up and that sort of thing.

• 39:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, now, you know, there's obviously like content marketing and all this stuff. You were essentially doing that before we called it that. And you mentioned the internet, 1994, you got the domain for sweetwater.com. But the website was not an e-commerce website. It was a, an education website, right?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  That's all it was for several years. It was strictly education. There was no way to even place an order online. The technology was there, we just didn't implement it because I really wanted to talk to the customer first. I want to make sure it's the right product for the customer.

• 39:31Guy Raz?

  And what's amazing to me is virtually all of your business was just, it was a mailing list you had, and you had this very nice, but simple kind of, I guess, two, three-page, not catalog, but document that you would send to people. And you would have your sales reps calling people, but you didn't actually become a catalog, physical catalog business until like, I read 1997.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  That's correct. You know, we started, as you said, with the top matrix, a couple, three pages, and then eventually went to a real catalog, which was, I don't know, 600 to 700 pages most of the time. And by then we'd gotten pretty professional. It was in full four-color. A lot of times, though, it didn't even have prices. Again, we wanted the customer to call us. There was no order form. You know, as an example, when we started selling keyboards, you know, it's not just buying a keyboard. You probably need a stand for it. You might need a sustain pedal for it. You might need cables to hook it into other things. All that stuff does take some expertise to explain it to the customer.

• 40:32Guy Raz?

  What you're saying is, oh, I want people to call in because then we can help them figure out what equipment they need to buy with other equipment and how to connect them.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 40:42Guy Raz?

  That's a lot of time, right, on the phone with somebody? So I imagine by the time you launched the catalog in 1997, you've got a significant number of people manning the phones.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we probably had 20 people or so around that time. But our whole deal was that one-on-one relationship. And so we know the first call or two with the customer would be a very long call. Our average talk time was 20 to 30 minutes. Because we would start to develop a relationship, understand how they're going to use it, what they're going to use it with. And that caused the customers to be very loyal and very sticky. You think about the other places they would call, and the other store would just quote a price. And we would spend time engaging with the customer. And at the end of the day, the customer would go, you know, I just felt more comfortable at Sweetwater.

• 41:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, it's really cool because it's, it's like, every time I go into a restaurant or a shop, and I walk out and I'm treated really well, and it was a great experience, I know that business was managed well. Because the employee there, it's not their business. But if they treat it that way, you know that their boss is a good boss, that they're doing a really good job teaching that person how to do it. But oftentimes you walk out of a place and it just sucks. And you, and I think to myself, it's not that employee's fault. This place is not managed well. How did you get these 20 people to learn how to forge those relationships with customers over the phone?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  We spent a lot of time training, but you're absolutely right. Customer service is just so critical, more critical today than it's ever been. But in those days, I knew how important it was, and it was just the right thing to do. But we started very humbly, you know? At first, we met at a little breakfast place.

• 42:19Guy Raz?

  You would meet them yourself?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I would meet with the whole team every Tuesday morning and every Thursday morning. And we'd spend an hour, hour and a half, sometimes two hours. And we would talk through things, we'd role-play, we'd practice conversations, what we called the perfect conversation. And how do you handle situations like this? And we did that for a week after a week after a week. And it was just really important. I wouldn't let anybody get on the phone talking to a customer until I felt they could do a reasonably good job at it.

• 42:45Guy Raz?

  Would the sales rep have their own customers? Or could you just call in and get anybody on the phone?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  You know, I had so many customers from my early days that I couldn't handle them anymore. And I was also starting to run the rest of the business.

• 42:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  And so I started handing my customers off, and then they got more referrals. And, and they all came, all the sales engineers came to us with a background of being somewhere. So they had their own friends and their own relationships.

• 43:10Guy Raz?

  Got it. And you, you said a word, I'm going to just double-click on that, sales engineers. These are, this is a term you guys use. They're not trained engineers, but you call them sales engineers because what? They also have the technical know-how on how to help people solve their problems?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Unlike myself, most of them come to us with a four-year music technology degree. And then we put them through what we call Sweetwater University. And Sweetwater University is 13 weeks of eight hours a day, where they're learning all kinds of stuff. You know, they're learning products specifically, they're learning technologies. But they're taught by 80 different teachers over those 13 weeks. And they're not allowed to talk to a customer until they're through that whole process.

• 43:52Guy Raz?

  That wouldn't be formalized, I think, for another several more years, right?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  A couple more years. But even, even in our early days, I say we started at the restaurant. And then we, at our location, we had a place called the Blue Diamond Lounge, and we had training in there several days a week. And I'm not sure exactly when we started, you know, really formalizing it, but it was pretty formal early on.

• 44:11Guy Raz?

  And did you, like, one of the things I find fascinating about especially good sales reps is they often have a script, right? And so there's like, they will know what the five or six things the customer might say. And there's all kinds of ready responses. Were you guys able to develop those kinds of techniques as well?

• 44:30Speaker 01

  You know, we didn't really do that so specifically because every conversation was different. But what we did do is what we called the perfect conversation. And that really meant that we weren't going to negotiate the price until the selling was done. I wanted the customer to understand we're the right place to buy it. I wanted the customer to understand it's the right product. And once we get through all of that, then eventually we'll talk about a selling thing. But for me to quote a price, which is what all my competitors did, you'd call around and go, I want a Yamaha this or a Gibson that. They would just quote a price. And to me, that's silly because I don't know how the customer's going to use it or what else they want to use it with. And so I was not going to quote a price until the selling was done. We're the right place, and it's the right items for them.

• 45:11Guy Raz?

  Okay. By the late 1990s, you guys, you hit about 12 million in sales. It's amazing, right? You've got a very good business. And you get approached, I guess, by your attorney and an accountant, and they're saying, hey, you guys got a big business here in Fort Wayne. You might want to take some money off the table. What, what, tell me the story.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And every dollar that we made went right back into the company and growing it and more inventory and the next salespeople we'd hire and all that. And so I really didn't have any money. And I was compelled by the thought of having some money. I'm thinking, well, maybe we've reached our limit. Maybe $12 million is the limit.

• 45:52Guy Raz?

  You're in Fort Wayne, Indiana, how big can you get?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  That's right. So we entertained, and they were good people out of Chicago, the William Blair Capital Company. They're still around today, and so.

• 46:03Guy Raz?

  They bought how much of the business?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  About 80% of it.

• 46:05Guy Raz?

  In, in the late 90s? So you get a check, which I'm sure was nice. And you could feel like, okay, I've got some security here. But you stayed on running it. They didn't, they didn't intervene, they didn't get involved, you just kept.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 46:17Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  You know, once in a while they'd have some comment, but basically they let me run it. I mean, it was a good business when they bought it, and they let me just keep running it like it was.

• 46:25Guy Raz?

  Okay. By 2000-ish, right? So you've got, you own 20% of it. You're, you're now able to buy stuff online, right? But I, I imagine most people are not ordering through the internet yet. They're not clicking, they're still calling you or faxing you orders.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  That's absolutely correct. It took several years later. Really, the success of Amazon is what got people comfortable buying online.

• 46:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because I remember the first, I'm sorry, I didn't buy it through Sweetwater, but in like 1996, I bought my first portable recording machine, which was a Morantz PMD 222. It's the most expensive thing I had ever purchased in my life. And I was like, this, $800 or something. It was so expensive, I was so nervous buying it. I think I bought it from B&H in New York through their catalog at the time. But yeah, I would not have, even in 1999, I was not ready to buy things online yet.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:20Guy Raz?

  But you could, you made that, that was available.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yep. And the advantage we had in those early days is we had great relationships with our customers. So they trusted us. And trust is a big thing in our industry. I don't mean this to sound as negative, but a lot of music stores, it's kind of hard to trust them. And we'd already proven that we had a good, solid, basic grounding of ethics. And so customers were comfortable buying things early from us, or buying things online early from us.

• 47:46Guy Raz?

  Okay. Let's, let's go back to the Sweetwater University, because I think this is, really begins around 2001. And it's a, it's a training program where you have these people who are just gearheads, right? They're, they love this stuff.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of the people that we hired had music technology degrees, or maybe they'd been on the road as a musician for a long time. But what we really looked for were people that had fire in their belly, someone really interested in a company that was growing fast and would do the right thing for the customers.

• 48:18Guy Raz?

  I'm, I'm curious, why did they need 13 weeks of training?

• 48:22Speaker 01

  There's a lot of subject material. And like I say, we taught it with 80 different teachers, a couple hundred classes. We taught every technology, but then also a lot of specific brands and products and that sort of thing.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  So you would teach them how to work and operate virtually everything you sold?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. If you can't operate it, don't know how it works, I don't know how you could sell it.

• 48:42Guy Raz?

  So they're like tech support too, in some ways?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  They are.

• 48:46Guy Raz?

  So like. This is a valuable person. Like you're investing a lot of money and time in this person.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Well, 13 weeks before they ever make a dollar for our company. And then we continued to invest in them. I mean, Sweetwater University was just getting you off the ground. You would still, as a sales engineer, meet two times a week, every Tuesday morning and every Thursday morning, for continual training as new products come out, new technologies, that sort of thing.

• 49:10Guy Raz?

  I mean, there's a, there's a sort of a, you know, kind of a stereotype of a good sales rep, right? Who's somebody's just aggressive and just relentless and just closing the sale, closing, closing, closing. But you're bringing in people who were actually not coming from sales. These were people who were like music gear nerds.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we never wanted them to close, close hard, as you've described. We wanted them to present the right options to the customer and jointly with the customer, figure out if that's the right thing for them. I've always preached that I never wanted to sell customer more than they really needed. There were many times a customer would call in for a very expensive thing and I would find out that that was too much for them. And they really should buy a less expensive thing, but get all the other accessories to go with it. I've always believed everyone in our company, whether it's a sales engineer or the receptionist, is either adding credibility or taking credibility away from our company. And I gotta have people always adding credibility. We empower everyone in our company to make the right decision, to do the right stuff.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  If someone would come to our store or phone into the receptionist and say, my keyboard, you know, quit working, they're empowered to replace it. I mean, we might ask a question or two, but they're empowered to replace it. They're never to ask a manager, they never would use the excuse, well, I have to get management approval. No, if you want to replace it, you replace it. And, you know, the worst case, from our point of view, we'll get it back, we'll fix whatever's wrong with it. We'll turn around and sell it as a demo or a used instrument. So it's not a lot of skin off our back, but it's the right thing to do for the customer.

• 50:40Guy Raz?

  So you, it sounds like you discourage like cover your ass type of, of employees.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we would never, I've told every employee that ever I hired, I would tell them, you'll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You'll get chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough.

• 50:56Guy Raz?

  So how would you retain people? Because the amount of money you're investing in an employee is so high that like you really don't want people to leave.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  We don't want people to leave, but they want to stay. There aren't many opportunities like this. You know, you could go work at one of our competitors, but it's just going to be a more traditional music store. I guess you could go back on the road as a musician. But to have a professional job like this, where frankly, in your first year, you're probably going to make 75 to 80, $85,000. In your second or third year, you're well into six figures. And we have people that are making nearly a half a million dollars now.

• 51:32Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  And that'll, that'll keep you.

• 51:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that's a lot of money.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  In Fort Wayne, Indiana. I remember when I was hiring young people years ago, I would tell them the deposit on your house out in LA or some other big cities would buy your whole house in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

• 51:47Guy Raz?

  Amazing. Anyone listening to that who is like starting their life, Fort Wayne, Indiana. All right, so you've got, you're running the business. It sounds like you're happy, the business is growing, but your investors get scared. Dot com bubble bursts and anyone who remembers that time, it's a bloodbath, right? It's like venture funding just dries up because all, a lot of venture firms are just getting killed. You guys weren't, because you're not a dot com company really, right? You were okay. The bubble didn't really affect your business that much at the time, or did it?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  No, not at all. So we grew through that period just fine. But the way those capital firms work, after about five years, they want to flip the company and move on to something else.

• 52:28Guy Raz?

  Okay, so five years, they decide, we're going to sell our 80% to a new owner. And you're aware of this, but what did you, what was going through your mind?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  It was a mutual decision. It was about four and a half years in, they started talking about it. And I raised my hand, I said, you know, I'd like to buy the business back. I love what we're doing, I want to buy it back.

• 52:48Guy Raz?

  By the way, how much were you doing in sales by 2001?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Hmm, I don't know, in the 20 million range or something, maybe even more, I'm not sure. And they kind of laughed and scoffed at me because they figured out that I didn't have that much money to buy it back. And I said, no, no, I think I can pull it off. And they said, prove it. And so my best friend, who's an attorney, and I went to about 18 different individuals in Fort Wayne and said, we want to buy the company back. Would you loan me 50, would you loan me 100? One guy loaned me a million dollars.

• 53:17Guy Raz?

  Let's, let's break this down for me. You, you want to buy the company back, which we will learn was a very, very smart decision. But you didn't have the cash to do it. So you had to borrow money from, and borrow, you weren't asking for investors, you were asking for loans.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:34Guy Raz?

  High interest loans, right?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yep, 12%.

• 53:37Guy Raz?

  12%. And can you tell us what, how much you had to raise?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Hmm, you know, I don't know that I remember, but six, seven, eight million dollars in that range.

• 53:47Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  But what I will tell you is I didn't have any money myself.

• 53:50Guy Raz?

  Oh, you didn't? Even though you got cash from the sale?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  No, because during that period, my wife and I got divorced.

• 53:56Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And I gave her all the money, I kept the business. Which, kind of funny, at the time, I tried to keep her as a partner in the business. And my attorney said, no way, I will not let you do that. Give her all your cash and you just keep the business, which was, you know, a really smart, wise move. But I literally had no money. I did have the inventory and so I was able to pledge the inventory and borrow money from, we went to 18 friends, 17 of them said yes. And they did it because they had known me for several decades now and had trusted me and knew I was going to stand behind everything.

• 54:28Guy Raz?

  If you didn't have personal cash and you had to borrow it, that's a lot of stress. And that's, that's like sleepless nights kind of money that you have to raise.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  It was, but I've always, my whole life, I've always said, failure's not an option. But what I will tell you, during the four and a half years, the William Blair people had the company, the one thing they did put in place was some good structure. So we had to do monthly reporting and all that sort of stuff. And that allowed me to understand the totality of the business and where I thought it could really go. And so that probably gave me some confidence through the process.

• 55:03Guy Raz?

  They imposed discipline on the, on the business.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  You know, and the other thing I would add, I've been able to grow this whole thing. I didn't go to college, I didn't have any business degree, didn't have, you know, a lot of that stuff. I taught myself almost everything I've done. And that four years was a great education where they taught me how to professionalize the business.

• 55:21Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you've got, now you've taken over the business back, you've got some debt. But turns out the business is growing and the cash flow is good and you can actually repay these loans faster, but I guess within two years.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Two and a half years, yes.

• 55:38Guy Raz?

  Two and a half years. You are now the owner, full owner again of this business, 100%.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:44Guy Raz?

  And it must have felt pretty great.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  It felt awesome.

• 55:47Guy Raz?

  Meantime, this company has continued to grow and you guys introduced free shipping, I think, early, like 2003.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  It's been a long time, yes.

• 55:58Guy Raz?

  Which is expensive.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  It was expensive, but it just became accepted. And we wanted to take that question out of it for a customer. We'll just ship it to you for free, it's fine.

• 56:08Guy Raz?

  Okay, so let's talk about the growth of this business. I mean, it is now, you've got a catalog, right? We're in the 2000s now. It's not really going to become primarily, I'm imagining today, overwhelming majority of your sales are online.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yes, they are. I mean, we have a great local store, but most of it's online, yes.

• 56:28Guy Raz?

  But in 2005, 2006, when you're now the full owner, I imagine it's still catalog, mostly catalog.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 56:36Guy Raz?

  And so how did you see, what do you remember about imagining what this could be, like where this is going?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  You know, by then, we started to have enough credibility with our customers and our vendors. I should back up, our vendors in the early days, they didn't understand when I was operating out of my house. They'd never heard of such a thing before and many of them wouldn't do business with us. And I remember going to trade shows and begging them to do business. I tried to explain to them how we were different and, no, no, you're just a mail order, you're just a catalog, you're just going to lowball and hurt our other dealers. So it took a while to get their credibility. Eventually, they started coming one by one and wanted to do business with our company.

• 57:15Guy Raz?

  Because you weren't competing on price, you were selling customer service and support.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely, but it was unheard of to most of those manufacturers or those reps that we were working with. They didn't understand that people would pay more or pay the same price if they got a better value or got great customer service.

• 57:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  And I would say that we had to be in the ballpark with the price. We couldn't charge dramatically more. But if I could charge the same price as your local store and I would include a free Bank of Sounds or something extra that really didn't cost us a lot, but gave an extra value to the customer, even down to technical support and a warranty. We offered a two-year warranty on everything we've done. We've done that for a long, long time. Most of the manufacturers offer a one-year warranty. Most of the local stores at best honor that one-year warranty. I wanted to do a two-year warranty. Most instruments will break in the beginning, infantile failure. And if they do, they're covered under the factory warranty. And if they are going to break on month 13 or 14 or 15, I don't like that. I would not have wanted to sell that to the customer. So I will cover that next second year.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  And it's really been a relatively small amount of things we've had to cover, but it gives the customer much more confidence.

• 58:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  You mentioned it earlier, anywhere you go today, especially if you're used to great customer service, most places you go, you're disappointed. And so it can be a huge differentiator and it does not cost that much, but it's the right thing to do.

• 58:37Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Chuck's idea of service leads him to start buying other businesses in Fort Wayne, all while growing Sweetwater into the billion-dollar company it is today. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 59:06Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the mid 2000s and Chuck decides to start getting involved in other businesses, things like aviation and cars. His goal is to grow more jobs for Fort Wayne, which he does. And meanwhile, he's expanding Sweetwater's reach and introducing new product lines, including actual musical instruments like guitars.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  You know, the most fascinating part to me, and I don't remember exactly the year, but we were selling lots of technology, recording equipment and all that. And I kept having customers ask about buying guitars from us. I had a lot of musicians that worked for me that played guitar. And so we finally took on a guitar called Go Dan out of Canada. And it's a guitar that had technology built into it. It could talk to computers and other things. And we thought we'd start with this high-end guitar first. And I kept hearing from customers, why don't you sell Gibson? Why don't you sell Fender and all that? And then I'd also hear from my friends, well, you can't sell guitars online. And that's what the manufacturers would think. But we did it by the same kind of stuff we've talked about. We brought every guitar in and we did our own quality control on it, which you'd go, well, why do you need to do that?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  You would think they're all made perfect. Well, they're not. Some are made by Mary on Monday and Bill on Friday. And if we would take every guitar, we'd do a 55-point check, as we called it, and make sure everything on that guitar is perfect. Then we would take really high-quality pictures and show those pictures online. We'd weigh the guitar. Different guitars weigh different. They have different moisture in the wood and that sort of thing. And then you can now see those online at 3 o'clock in the morning in your pajamas and decide you want this one because it weighs three ounces less than that one. You place your order, the next morning we'll call you and say, thank you for the order. And oh, by the way, don't you want an extra set of strings? Do you need an amplifier? All those sort of things. But we went from no guitars to selling over 1,000 guitars every day.

• 1:00:54Guy Raz?

  Wow. I know this as somebody who's ordered so much stuff from Sweetwater over the years that you get a bag of candy and I think a letter, like you, it wasn't handwritten, but you have a letter in there, did for a long time.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, candy is just our sweet little way of saying thank you. We've done it for, I don't know, four decades now or something. It's just, it's not very expensive and it's just a nice way to say thank you.

• 1:01:18Guy Raz?

  Okay, let's talk about Fort Wayne because you've gotten into a lot of other businesses. It's too complex. I'm not going to be able to talk about them all, but it started with flying. You wanted to, I guess when you turned 50 in 2008, around then, you wanted to learn how to fly helicopters, which would lead you to getting into that business. Like, I think you've got like 12, 13 other businesses and they're all based in, they're all around sort of Fort Wayne area.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of them are around Fort Wayne. There's actually about 25 of them today.

• 1:01:49Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  But helicopters, I was at an airshow at a local airport and I saw a guy flying his personal helicopter. And I said, oh, Pete, that is so cool. And he said, well, you should do it. I said, nah, I'm 50, I'm too old. And he said, no, no, no, I have a friend in his 60s that got his helicopter rating. So I went home, started working on my wife. And that Christmas, she got me an FAA logbook and how to fly helicopters. And by August, I had my helicopter rating.

• 1:02:11Guy Raz?

  And eventually you would start a helicopter charter business out of this. Okay, I want to just mention a couple of businesses you have. Amore, an Italian restaurant in Fort Wayne.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:23Guy Raz?

  You've got a live music venue there. Okay, not surprising, you've got a cafe there. Aviation company helicopter charter flights, charter helicopter companies, a car dealership. You've got an optometry shop that sells glasses and does eye care. Tell me about this because these are a lot of businesses that it doesn't seem like you really need to do them. I mean, Sweetwater, that will get there, eventually became enormous. But even as you were sort of acquiring these businesses, were you doing it just to diversify your business portfolio? Tell me what all of this is about.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Well, you're absolutely right. Don't need any of it, but I love our community. And there were just lots of opportunities that became available. So as an example of the 25, six businesses we have now, every one of them has a general manager running it. And then he or she has a whole staff of people working for them. And so it's created a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunity for our community.

• 1:03:19Guy Raz?

  And you acquired these companies when they're going to go out of business? Or like, what's the story? Because you're not starting them, right?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  All the above. Some, you know, were in distress modes. There's been others like Sweet Cars, where I started from scratch. 15 years later, we sell.

• 1:03:32Guy Raz?

  What kind of cars do you guys sell?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  All kinds of one and two, three-year-old higher-end cars. So Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches, Mercedes, all that sort of stuff.

• 1:03:41Guy Raz?

  Do you hear a lot of people buying Lamborghinis in Fort Wayne?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  We do, believe it or not. And about 50% of our sales are local and the other 50% go around the country. But these were brands that were not sold in Fort Wayne at a new dealership. And we just found a way to bring these one or two-year-old cars that have a little bit of depreciation taken out of them. And now we can sell those kind of cars to Fort Wayne.

• 1:03:59Guy Raz?

  What happened to the modest Midwesterner driving their Lamborghini in Fort Wayne?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  There's quite a few. I went to a car show this weekend. I bet there were eight or nine Lamborghinis. I think we sold most of them, but it was fun to see, yeah.

• 1:04:10Guy Raz?

  Okay, so a lot of this is around Fort Wayne and bringing jobs to Fort Wayne. Outside of Sweetwater, I'm just curious, how many, what's the name of the company that oversees this? It's not called Sweetwater.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  No, it's Sirec Enterprises.

• 1:04:26Guy Raz?

  Sirec Enterprises, okay. How many roughly, how many employees do you think Sirec Enterprises oversees?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have about 700 right now, 700.

• 1:04:33Guy Raz?

  And it sounds like, if I imagine you're a businessman, you want to, you want these to be sustainable, but that's not really, it's more about, you grew up in Fort Wayne and you've got the money and you want to support Fort Wayne now.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been very blessed. My wife and I have been so, so blessed and we just want to do everything we can to help our community.

• 1:04:50Guy Raz?

  All right, so coming back to Sweetwater, during these years, right? E-commerce is taking off, right? Like Amazon and Walmart got huge, right, online? And I should say, Sweetwater does sell on Amazon, right? Like other third-party sellers. But Amazon has gone after a lot of other competitors in big markets, like Toys R Us, right? But not Sweetwater. Why do you think that is? I mean, I mean, Amazon could just decide to undercut you by, you know, by selling the same things you do, but for like 10% less.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  They could. And I'll tell you, the reason we're on Amazon is access to customers. But that being said, Amazon has decided that there are other markets that are much easier to get into and to be an expert at. And I've mentioned it multiple times, but the expertise that we have and the investment we make in our people to offer, they don't want to have people. I mean, you can't, it's hard to call Amazon and talk to them on the phone. We encourage people to talk on the phone. We, we have those sales engineers and tech support people that really understand the products. And I think people are comfortable buying little inexpensive things on Amazon, or if you know exactly what you want. But when you have any question or anything like that, you'd be much more comfortable buying that sort of technology from Sweetwater.

• 1:06:01Guy Raz?

  It's interesting, yeah. And again, I mean, I'm not, you know, I buy tons of stuff on Amazon. I just bought a foam roller for my thoracic spine, right? Cheap purchase.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. And we've had many big companies try and compete against us. And they've gotten in the business and out, whether it's Circuit City or Best Buy or, now, we're not naive, we have to compete against Amazon. So that's one of the reasons that two years ago, we opened a warehouse in Arizona. We can now ship to Nevada or California in one-day shipping. Can't quite do the four hours or whatever, two hours now that Amazon's about to do, but most of our customers will wait one day to get the product. And the other thing about being in Indiana, we can reach 38% of the United States in one day.

• 1:06:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  And FedEx and UPS both have big warehouses or distribution centers, one in Indianapolis, one in Louisville, right down the road from us. So we can get to a big part of the country right away. And what we can't get, we'll get out of Arizona.

• 1:06:53Guy Raz?

  Okay, let's get to 2019. By this point, you guys are selling about 35,000 products on your website, huge number, 70,000 customers a month. That year, you're going to do around a little over $800 million in sales. And you build an enormous warehouse, distribution center, 580,000 square foot distribution center. I think it opens in February of 2020 in Fort Wayne to.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it did.

• 1:07:25Guy Raz?

  You know, for growth. And that's exciting. It's high-tech. You've got 580,000 square feet. And then bam, COVID. A week or two later, the world shuts down.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  You know what was amazing? We knew that warehouse was coming. Nobody knew COVID was coming. In fact, during the fall, we had ordered all kinds of inventory in anticipation of filling that warehouse up. We wanted it to be full. And fortunately, all that stuff came in in January and February and early March. And now our warehouse is full. And then COVID happens and the world stops, including myself and Guitar Center and many of our other competitors were told they couldn't ship anything. You couldn't have employees in your building or anything. It didn't take very long. And our governor said, no, no, mail order is good. We want mail order to stay in business. So they gave us permission to open. And my wife and myself and my daughter, who was 13 at the time, and the local police

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  chief and a whole bunch of others came in and we started packing boxes because I was desperate to take care of our customers because they were still buying equipment. And they were at home wanting to get more equipment. We were selling equipment for streaming church services. We were selling guitars for first-time owners. And our business that year grew by 40%.

• 1:08:37Guy Raz?

  You were quoted, I guess, in a retrospective article about COVID by an Indianapolis magazine, you said, "I was somewhere between panicked and trying to inspire those around me."

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would tell you that six months, a combination of COVID and Black Lives Matter, was the hardest year in my 47 years of being in business. And I was stressed and it immobilized me for six months.

• 1:09:03Guy Raz?

  And mobilized you?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, and every day was tough. I just didn't know what tomorrow would bring. And it took me about six months to get through it. And by September, I met with the whole leadership team of our company. And I said, "I'm choosing not to participate and we're moving forward."

• 1:09:19Guy Raz?

  Not to participate in what?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Just the whole, the whole world of where it was at that time. When the Black Lives Matter thing came out, you know, to me, it was just awful. I've been a big supporter of every person. I don't care what the color of your skin is. And I think the Black Lives Matter group, the people behind that were not necessarily good and strong. I believed in the movement. I believed in all a bunch of stuff, but not the kind of rhetoric that was being thrown about.

• 1:09:46Guy Raz?

  You felt like it was divisive?

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  It was very divisive. And, you know, as soon as you support a Black Lives Matter, then the police, I remember very clearly, putting a very small innocuous statement. And I got a call immediately from the police department. And I go, "No, no, I bought you guys all lunch last week. So I love the blue lives as much as I love the black lives as I do the yellow lives and the white lives and so on and so forth." So, but I just chose to not, you know, that time I had 40 years of being in business. And I knew what my track record stood for and what I believed in. And I just wasn't going to get stuck in that anymore.

• 1:10:18Guy Raz?

  Do you make political statements? Do you get involved in political issues? Or do you just kind of like to stay out of it?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  I try really hard to stay out of it.

• 1:10:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And it's interesting, because I think a lot of companies have reevaluated this and have kind of gone back to this view, which is, the role of a business is to be a good employer, to be good to its customers, to make great products, to offer good value, but not to run the country or run policy. Like, that is not the role. I mean, you know, you look at the 60s and the Vietnam War, I don't think Pepsi or Coca-Cola had a position on that. They personally may have, but they didn't, this business didn't come out saying anything about that.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think the challenge, or what was different, is we had the internet. The internet empowered so many people to have a voice. So they drove it and encouraged a lot of it. And again, that's the positive and the negative of it, from that point of view.

• 1:11:11Guy Raz?

  So it makes sense to me that this next chapter, which is, I imagine you get through that year, 2020, it's an amazing, you broke a billion dollars, over a billion dollars in business that year. And since then, it's been over a billion every year, which is a billion dollars, right?

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:11:28Guy Raz?

  Unbelievable. So you, you get through this year, 2020, clearly very stressful for you. But going through that year, because I was wondering, I was like, you know, in 2021, he decided to sell a majority stake of Sweetwater to a private equity firm. Now, I mean, you're doing over a billion dollars in sales, amazing opportunity to sell. But I have to imagine now, knowing what I know from the previous year, maybe you were like, this was a lot. I just, I think I need to step away.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  You know, it wasn't so much that. I had previously tried to figure out, what's life after Chuck? And what's the long-term plan? And we have this problem in our country with estate taxes. And you have to pay about 50% of whatever your net worth is, just when you both die, for estate taxes.

• 1:12:22Guy Raz?

  Over a certain amount?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yep. So I realized it's a big problem. And so for two years, my financial advisor, my attorneys, all that, brought in all kinds of experts and had us look at various strategies. And I learned terms like irrevocable trusts and all these sort of things that we could move our company to. And I just felt weird. And so December of that year, I said, "Well, why don't we consider selling it?" And decided to go through the process. So they went away and we worked on what we call a book.

• 1:12:51Guy Raz?

  They, you're talking about the bankers?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, JP Morgan, right?

• 1:12:54Guy Raz?

  JP Morgan.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  Yep. So they, they sent out a copy of this book to 32 companies. And I was really clear, when I started working with JP Morgan, there were some principles that I would not give up on. I had no debt, didn't need to sell it. I was in a great position. But going forward, they had to continue to support our community, whoever bought the company. They had to support our sales management process, the team, you know, couldn't dismantle it. They had to really keep the company, kind of the way I'd been running it. And that was just a prerequisite. We weren't going forward. So 16 sent back incredible offers. I mean, blew my mind, life-changing incredible offers. And we narrowed it down to two. And I just really liked the one that ultimately won. And it'll be five years in August, and

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  they've done absolutely everything they said they would do. And it's just been a great relationship. My wife and I still own a big piece of it. We just don't own the majority anymore. And that, of course, has freed us up to do lots of other things.

• 1:13:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, this Providence Equity acquired you.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Providence, yep.

• 1:13:53Guy Raz?

  A majority stake, and you retain a minority stake.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:56Guy Raz?

  And how did you guarantee that they are going to do the things that you really need them to do? Or that you, you have a certain view about your employees, the business, the community? How do you bake that into a guarantee forever?

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if I can do it forever. But, but when I did interview them, and I interviewed them as hard as they interviewed us. And we talked to references of other companies they had done. The best thing I can tell you is, they've done exactly what they said they would do. And what they really did is they sped up some of the stuff that I was going to do anyway. You know, I'd have done things in sequential order, very monitored and measured, taking on selling band instruments, as an example, or opening the warehouse on the West Coast, or they did it all at once. It was a little bit stressful for the team, but it allowed us to go even faster. And that's, that's what they really brought to the table.

• 1:14:46Guy Raz?

  So 2021, this happens, you come to terms, and the company, again, has done, Sweetwater's done over a billion in sales. So, you know, that acquisition was certainly considerable. Part of this is you decide that you're going to move on. You're going to step down as CEO. What did that mean for your day-to-day life? I mean, here you go, 2021, you're running this thing. And then what, is this like one day to the next? It's like you're not, there's not like a million questions coming at you? You're not going to a bunch of meetings?

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  I will tell you, I didn't believe it ever happened. But the money was so amazing. Not only the money for me, but the money for all my team. You know, all my top people had a really nice payday.

• 1:15:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  But I stayed in my office until the day I saw the money in my checking account, or in my savings account, actually. I wasn't going to leave my office. And it was hard. It was really hard. My staff helped move me out of my office. I couldn't have done it by myself. But I stepped up to chairman of the board. I'm still involved. I've got so many friends that are there, lifetime friends that are there. And it's my baby. But I've now sent my baby off to college and doing really well.

• 1:15:51Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, again, like, just emotionally, was part of you, you know, there's still the emotional thing of like, I'm not coming in every day anymore. I'm not, sometimes people get, sort of say to me, I didn't feel as needed right away, you know?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  I miss it. That's what I would say. I miss my friends. I miss going there every day. But I am fulfilled with other things that we're doing. And I'm glad I have that. You know, I talked to a lot of my friends, of course, retiring right now. And I go, "That scares the crap out of me."

• 1:16:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah, how old are you, Chuck?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  I'm 69.

• 1:16:25Guy Raz?

  You're a young guy, yeah.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  I feel like I'm 39. I guess I don't quite look it, but I really have lots of energy. I'm up early and I'm going late. And I sleep, you know, very few hours per night. And so I love what I do.

• 1:16:36Guy Raz?

  And today, I think Sweetwater's got like 2,600 employees, roughly, something like that.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:42Guy Raz?

  You've got a warehouse in Glendale, Arizona, but most of the employees are in Fort Wayne.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yep, it's pretty amazing. I left, we were doing a billion five in business. This year, they're doing $2 billion in business.

• 1:16:52Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:16:54Guy Raz?

  Amazing. I guess in the lobby, or somewhere in the Sweetwater headquarters, you can still find, well, maybe it's not the original, but there's a replica of that VW bus that this all started out of, right?

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, my rusty old VW bus went to a junkyard over in Vanwort, Ohio. But many, many years ago, I got a version of it. It's kind of a facsimile of the original VW bus.

• 1:17:15Guy Raz?

  And it's in there in the headquarters and you can go see, and I guess your Boy Scout uniform's also in there.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  My Boy Scout uniform's hanging on the door. And my first saxophone's on the floor right in front of it. And just a little bit of the story of Sweetwater and the foundings. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

• 1:17:30Guy Raz?

  Chuck, when you, when you think about this trajectory of your life, right? Everything happened. Just even for like, the four years of going, gigging around the country and starting this little recording studio, to a multi-billion dollar business, man, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Again, it's amazing. How much of this do you attribute to the work you put in and the hard work and the skills you brought to it? And how much do you think had to do with luck and fortune?

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not a big believer in luck, but it was hard work. I think it was the grace of God. And the more you're given, the more you're expected, you know? It's, it's just been amazing. But it's been a lot of work and a lot of support from others around me, whether that's customers or friends. I don't take credit for it. There's no way that one human being can do everything that I've been able to accomplish. I get credit, but I don't, I don't, I don't believe in that.

• 1:18:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  I reflect all the time. You know, I started with nothing, no business degree, no background, a rusty VW bus. I mean, it's just been an amazing, amazing ride.

• 1:18:33Guy Raz?

  That's Chuck Sarek, founder of Sweetwater. And by the way, even with everything he's got going on these days, Chuck still makes time to gig as a musician, on the instrument that kind of launched his career, the saxophone.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he played Saturday night, and I'm playing three times this week, three different bands.

• 1:18:54Guy Raz?

  Where are you playing?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  I play in a nine-piece R&B soul band. I play in a little three-piece jazz trio. And I play in an 18-piece big band. And there's just various clubs and places we play around here.

• 1:19:04Guy Raz?

  We'll plug you. What's the next venue?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the next venue, I play at the Club Room at the Clyde Theater.

• 1:19:10Guy Raz?

  The Clyde Theater? When is this happening?

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  We're there a couple of times a month. So you can look at the calendar and find it.

• 1:19:16Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was researched by Carla Esteves and produced by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Eriblui. It was edited by Andrea Bruce. Our engineer was An Li Huang. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, J.C. Howard, Chris Messini, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, Kerry Thompson, Niva Grant, and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.