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AGI President Gene Kelly interviewed AGI Graduate Randy Sherman in 2020 early on in the Pandemic about how Gunsmithing has helped his finances over the years, especially during times of uncertainty.
Gene Kelly:
I’m Gene Kelly, president of the American Gunsmithing Institute, and I’m having a conversation with Randy Sherman, one of our gunsmithing students, who’s now a graduated alumni and is doing very well. And he just wanted to share a couple thoughts with you. Randy, tell us a little bit about your success and what you’ve been doing.
Randy Sherman:
Well, so I’m thinking about it here after some conversations I’ve had recently, and I had one with you and my student rep down there. And looking at my success is, to me, I didn’t realize how much it was a success until I started to talk about it. And so, for eight years now, I’ve had my shingle out, I’ve been gunsmithing. anniversary with the company that I was with, they came in and terminated my position.
Gene Kelly:
Eight years, you say?
Randy Sherman
Eight years, yeah, since I graduated your core course. I’ve got a bunch of your other information, too. Wherever I needed to go, whatever I wanted to do, you pretty much had what I needed that I could buy that taught me what I needed to know. So I work on the guns that I like, the ones I want to work on, the ones that I have a passion for. Even the week I spent up in Oregon with Ken Brooks, that was phenomenal.
Gene Kelly:
One of our hands-on courses for the graduates, right?
Randy Sherman
Right Yes. That was wonderful. So I got to specialize in Smith & Wessons a little bit. But so I look at this and I’m going, “What makes it so special as far as being a success?” Well, one, I’m really looked up to in the community and the gun community and all the gun guys, and even the Superior Court in El Dorado County in California where I live has recognized me as a firearms expert, partly because of other courses I’ve taken such as your appraisal course. So I look at the money and I go, well, I’ve got a pretty good-paying day job. And people say, “Why don’t you retire full-time to your gunsmithing?” And I say, “You’ve never seen my benefits package, have you?” I still got kids on that thing. But I look at it and I say, if I want to make more money, I can, but I’m making about $1,000 to $1,200 a month. And that’s all on my tax returns. I mean, that’s all legitimate above-board money that I’m making, and that doesn’t include all the write-offs I’ve got for my business that saves me a lot more than that.
Gene Kelly:
And that’s part-time, right? You’re just working part-time.
Randy Sherman
I’m doing this part-time. I go from my day job to a brick-and-mortar gun store where I’ve got my FFL. A buddy of mine of owns that, and it’s a regular gun shop, sporting good place. And I spend about an hour and a half there until they close and I go home. And then I choose whether or not I’m going to go order parts, go online, do whatever, or work in my shop. And in California, of course, I can only do it during business hours, as far as the firearms themselves go, if it’s a serialized receiver, that is a firearm. But anyway, so I take them home on the weekend. I work on Saturdays. When I actually work on the guns is on Saturday in my shop. Okay? And I looked up back and I’m looking at all my receipts. I can look up right here in my office and I can see all years of all these receipts and everything. And I’ve looked back a few times to look at how much, every year when I get ready to do my taxes, how much I used to spend on tools, partly because I just really like tools. I think I’ve alluded to that once or twice with you. But you don’t need all those tools, and I looked at the tools I bought that I probably shouldn’t have, and the ones I’m really glad I did. But I look at the amount. I don’t buy tools much anymore. I’ll make an occasional tool, specialty thing or something, grinding a punch or whatever it is I need to do. But I look at the actual… Throughout all that time, the actual money in my pocket. And I’ve worked just hard enough to make it right about what I wanted, about $1,200 a month. So when I came to this, having to refi my house all of a sudden to get out of some bad debt, that’s my fault, but it was there, it put me over the top. Looking back at eight years, and I realized I would look at the trends from month to month, throughout the year, and there’s the slower periods of time and the times it picks up, right before deer season or whatever, that kind of thing. But I looked at more things I learned from you about direct marketing and some of the things that you’ve done to help us to run a business. And I can make any amount of money I want, depending on how much I want to work it. So when people say, “Why don’t you to retire and do it full-time?” I say, “I plan to. And when I do, I’m going to probably make more than I’m making at my day job now, which is substantial.” So I’ve made, what? Almost just in cash in my pocket, almost $100,000 in eight years.
Gene Kelly:
Wow.
Randy Sherman
When I looked at that, I said, that’s pretty successful.
Gene Kelly:
For a part-time job that you love doing on weekends!
Randy Sherman
Which now, with the state of affairs in the world, I’ve closed my shop for a little bit and I’m going to go back to a whole line of people just begging me to open my doors. That’s incredible in itself. I rode that motorcycle, the one that I bought, back to the last year of Sturgis, and I closed the shop for a couple weeks.
Gene Kelly:
Yeah. You told me with that. Tell everybody the virtually free motorcycle you got. You paid a lot for it, but it was free because of the refinance. Go ahead. Tell about that part.
Randy Sherman
Well, I paid it off. That last year, I bought a brand new Indian Roadmaster of 2018, but I bought it in 2019. And it had a couple thousand miles on it and it had all the upgrades on it. And so I didn’t pay near what I would’ve. So I only paid 32,000. I know, choke on that, and realized that I should have waited to find out that I wasn’t going to get the survivor’s benefits I thought I was going to get, and I’m, oh, no. So of course, then I maxed out my line of credit loan to buy a toy hauler to put it in, right? Stupid. Well, comes to down to the fact, I need to refinance my house and this was right before this bad virus hit. And I was able to get it refinanced by looking back at that hundred grand or so that I’d made. And the fact that this $32,000 motorcycle and the interest payments on that and the line of credit loan, and that was 9 or 10%, pretty crazy. The bike is a luxury item, you can’t get better than 7 or 8%. And the amount of money that I’m spending on just the interest alone for the year too, is ridiculous. So I refinanced the house at a better rate, okay? I paid off the bike and I paid off the line of credit loan. I got another 12 or so thousand in the bank that I’m sitting on right now to see how things are going, see if I need to help my kids. And a lot of jobs and businesses out there that aren’t coming back. Mine is. But so I’m looking at all this, I’m going, I’m incredibly lucky. And I’m a Christian, so I’m also thanking God. Okay? Yeah. Amen for that, because I’ll tell you, I could be sitting in a pretty bad position right now, but instead I’m sitting in a position where I’m deciding whether I’m going to go interface with the public right now or not. I’m deciding how much I want to work. This is kind of a vacation for me right now. My day job is working from home right now and I’m not working on the guns. I’m kind of starting to miss that now. I like getting into them. But so it’s a little bit of a vacation, and I can enjoy it because now I’ve got those things paid off, got the money in the bank, got my cash flow back up where it needs to be. And again, when I look at that, I look back and see, when you say my business being a success, I go, I guess that’s what a success is. Everything I’ve described, for me, that’s successful. That’s doing pretty good. It blows me away that I could pick up the phone, I can do a direct mailer, direct marketing, whatever. If I right now had to come up with a bunch of money, I could easily get a whole bunch of people in my shop, because I know, I’ve got eight years worth of phone numbers, addresses, emails. I’ve got a business. And I can get ahold of them and I can get them in there and tell them, “Hey, I did something stupid I need to repair.” Oh, I got a $1,200 machine, I don’t know if I told you about that. I need to replace it now. It’s an expensive one, but I repaired it. And I worry about that and I think, no, I don’t have to worry because literally with an hour or two of work of getting in touch with customers, I can get them in there with enough jobs to pay for that machine within a week or two, so I’ll just work the extra day for a week or two. But I’ve actually at points had to do that, taken paid time off of my day job to work at my bench. And I was raking in the money those days, getting paid for not being at work and then making what I did all day gunsmithing. It pulled the fat out of the fire a bunch of times over the years. I think back about how many times I had the option, I had the choice to do that. Some people think, “So you take vacation time to go work more?” I said, “Yeah, but look at the money and look what I did with it”.
Gene Kelly:
Yeah.
Randy Sherman
It’s phenomenal.
Gene Kelly:
Yeah. And a lot of fun too. You’re having a good time doing it. You said that the difference to get the loan was the income that you made or…
Randy Sherman
Absolutely. They actually made me pay off the motorcycle out of escrow in order to qualify for the loan, which is how close it was. And when you look at the numbers, that extra, I think it was 12 grand last year on my tax return, was enough. And that’s income, let alone the write-offs helped also with my other taxable income. But you put all that together, I would not have qualified for the loan without it. And it wasn’t just one year. If it had just been one year or two years, they wouldn’t have counted it. It takes several, at least, of an income like that to be viable, especially with a small business. I’m like, oh, okay, wow. I’m not just lucky, I guess I’m pretty smart. I’m a gunsmith and I’m making money.
Gene Kelly:
Right on.
Randy Sherman
It works. It works, man.
Gene Kelly:
Pretty good for a part-time job. Yeah.
Randy Sherman
Hell, yeah. And you know, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. And I love both my full-time day job and this gunsmithing. I’d rather do the gunsmithing full-time, but yeah, it’s fantastic. AGI’s the real thing, Gene, and I thank God for what you were able to do with Bob Dunlap and everything at the beginning to get this thing going. And I’m here to tell anybody that wants to hear me, I swear to God it’s proven true that every promise you’ve ever made to me you kept. And the money I’ve made has really put me in a position now and the ability to make money and the tracking of it and doing an above-board viable business right down to my tax returns has come back to bless me.
Gene Kelly:
I tell you what, Randy, you can’t ask for much better than that. I feel good because that’s what we want to do is help guys just like you.
Randy Sherman
I wear this hat all the time. I buy one every year. And that’s the only hat I wear. I’ve got all kinds of really cool hats, a lot of gun people, whatever, manufacturers, reps, and whatever, give them. I just wear an AGI hat. That’s it.
Gene Kelly:
I love it. I love it. Hey, Randy-
Randy Sherman
I wear this shirt all the time, but I’ve got Sturgis shirts and things that I wear [inaudible] But the hat all the time.
Gene Kelly:
Well, thank you for your time, man, and thank you for sharing, It’s good stuff.
Randy Sherman
Any time.
Gene Kelly:
God bless you, man. Bye-bye.
Randy Sherman
You too. Bye-bye.
