For Parker Duffey, chairman and co-founder of Tailgate Guys, having “your back to the wall” isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it can lead to creative thinking and that mindset is useful even when your business is operating successfully.
Duffey also advises seeking business partners who are different from you and know how to do different things than you. Overlapping skill sets can create conflict and impede a company’s growth.
For Parker Duffey, chairman and co-founder of Tailgate Guys, having “your back to the wall” isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it can lead to creative thinking and that mindset is useful even when your business is operating successfully.
Duffey also advises seeking business partners who are different from you and know how to do different things than you. Overlapping skill sets can create conflict and impede a company’s growth.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Currie Dyess.
Currie Dyess:
Parker Duffey is the co-founder and chairman of the Tailgate Guys. Tailgate Guys built its model as a reserve turnkey tailgate system, and quickly evolved into a full service event management group that enhances the college game day experience. Tailgate Guys has partnerships with nearly 50 universities, as well as several ball games and PGA events. Parker launched a sister company, PRE Event Resources focusing on large scale events in 2014, Parker also received a bachelor's degree from Auburn University.
Sarah Gascon:
In today's episode, we will learn how a turnkey tailgate system evolved into a full service event management system, the importance of collaboration and teamwork and the spirit of entrepreneurship. Welcome Parker. War Eagle.
Parker Duffey:
War Eagle.
Sarah Gascon:
What prompted you to be an entrepreneur?
Parker Duffey:
There's probably not one prompt that really triggered me to be an entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of small business owners. My dad, he had a small business. He owned a gym when I was growing up. And then my grandfathers were both small business owners, just kind of scrappy do it yourself, kind of guy. So I grew up in that environment where working for yourself was not foreign at all. And to be honest, I've always been drawn to just results in building something from nothing. So it was a natural fit down to, since this is an Auburn podcast, I think it's appropriate to make a reference to my freshman year when I was a pledge and I'm actually looking at my pledge book right now, it's on a bookshelf. The inside cover that has a little bio that I wrote when I was 17 years old when I started here that says "I'm going to own my own business one day." And so it's just always been in me and I've never really thought that it wasn't going to happen. And fortunately it did, because it's a lot of fun.
Currie Dyess:
Yeah. And you have really knocked it out of the park. I mean, Tailgate Guys is has blown up. How did you initially conceive the idea for Tailgate Guys?
Parker Duffey:
Well, I'd love to sit here and tell you the idea was all mine, but it's kind of like when you hear about Xerox and Apple and I'm not comparing me to Apple either by any means, Tim Cook, if you're listening, disregard that statement. But we saw a concept that was in motion. There was some guys at Alabama actually that were doing this on the side, they were getting their Masters and they were hiring students to help set up and squat and save spaces. And one of the guys that was doing that, he was dating one of my wife's friends and they came and stayed with us while Melanie was getting her Masters. I was 22 probably, right out of college. And they stayed with us for a game day weekend. And he was telling me about his business that he was working for at the time.
And that was called Game Day Tents. And so again, they weren't official with the university, but as soon as they left, I started putting a pen of paper on that idea and what that business really is, because he left me with enough information to where I could back into a model. And the real twist that we put on it was just the adjustment of one providing different layers of service. But then the big one was actually aligning and partner with the universities directly. That's what gave us an edge.
Sarah Gascon:
When you were building this or putting the pen to paper, as you say, were you thinking about just the model and the design or were you also thinking about the components with it? Like the personnel?
Parker Duffey:
Personnel was something I knew when I was putting it together, I knew that I didn't have everything, I didn't have all the skill sets necessary to do this job. So in the back of my mind, I knew that I needed to be thinking about a partner. The things that I was putting together, I had spreadsheets that I was running to try to really understand the financials. I was doing a lot of research on inventory and equipment and really what those numbers need to be, what the CapEx was on a startup. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking about that person that I really needed to jump on board to give me a hand.
Currie Dyess:
You talked about finding that person and making connections with universities and the connections with the universities was really what set you apart from those other guys, right. So kind of walk us through a little bit how you came about making the right connections there with the right folks and with the universities, because it seems to be a pretty critical key.
Parker Duffey:
Oh, it was super critical. And I can't tell that that part of the story without at least giving a nod to my faith and that there's a lot that's going into play with this business, or what I've said or God thinks. There's certain things that were divine. And one of those is that I go back to what I just said, that the twist was developing the partnership model with the universities. And initially I had not really conceptualized that as a process and a potential. And so when I was putting together this model and starting to reach out to university and Bob [Ritenball], he's now retired, but he's a great man. He took a chance on us and he's the first person that I met with over there.
And we started kicking it around with him about what this really could be. And there was a few different things about right place, right time where that conversation, that paired up with that. While we were talking with Bob, he was the associate vice president of auxiliary services at Auburn. While we were talking with Bob, I had my full-time job. I was a project manager for a general contractor. And the job that I was working on was in Montgomery. And my wife was, while she was getting her masters, she had a side job working for an architecture firm in Columbus. So we'd go separate ways and then we'd come back home. And she had worked it out somehow with her background in interior design and her undergrad being in interior design, where she was working with the CFO and executive vice president of Auburn university's wife for interiors for their new house.
And they had some things they needed done around the house outside, like building trellises. They wanted to do a shuffle board court, things like that on their property. And so Melanie, being the scrappy entrepreneur she is too, she's like, my husband can do it. So I'd get home from work and I'd go over to their house and do odd jobs until the sun went down pretty much every day after work. And that's the Larges. So Don Large is that person, Don, I think so so highly of Don and just the person that he is and the character that he just has lived by. And so I was always doing odd jobs at their house. So coming back to where I was with Bob, running parallels meeting with Bob who reports to Don and not wanting to overstep with Don, I never told him anything about this business at all.
He came outside one day and he was like, "Hey, knock off a little bit earlier." And he had a couple beers. He's like, "Why don't you sit down?" And so we started talking, he's like, "What do you want to do with your life?" And I can't remember if that's exactly how he said it, but we came to that and I told him, I was like, "I'm working on this business called Tailgate Guys." And it was like light bulb went off, he's like, "Oh, that's you." And so we talked a little bit about it and he's the one that came back to, he was like, the real way this should work is it needs to be a partnership. And if it's partnership, I think you could really do something big with it.
And he's the one that put it in my head. And it just so happened the next morning after that was our first meeting with athletics. And so I was going into a meeting the next morning with Tim Jackson and Jeremy Roberts. And I woke up the next morning with an email in my inbox BCC'd that was from Don to Tim Jackson, they're buddies, and basically Don was saying, "Hey, I know Parker I've worked with him," which was such an overstatement, I was his yard boy. And it was basically saying, I think this is a good idea and we should give it a shot. And so I came into that meeting, with some momentum in the wind, at my back where it could have been a real uphill battle.
And from there, it was Tim and Jeremy that really took the chance on us. I mean, at the time I was 23 and I haven't mentioned much about my partner, but my partner was a few years older than me. And they took the shot with us. And from that point on, it was built as a partnership. And there was a revenue share for the university and we were aligned. We were mutually incentivized to grow the business. And from that point, that was the model. And that's the model that you still see today at pretty much every campus across the country that has the demand for this type of service.
Sarah Gascon:
In business, many times, the quality of your relationships determine how fast and how far you could go. And you talked a little bit about your partner, but now we're really going to talk about your partner, how important is it to select the right business partner? How do you find that person? And would you ever recommend starting a company solo?
Parker Duffey:
I wouldn't go solo. There's a lot of people that probably could go solo and they should, if that's the case, but I'm not one of those people at all. I mean, I know I've learned a lot about my weaknesses in the past 12 years of running a business. And I'm sure I'll continue to learn more about my weaknesses as I continue to progress professionally. I'd like to say that Michael, selecting him as my business partner after just a few months of working on this business, a few months of knowing him was very calculated, but it really wasn't. It was one of those things that I can't remember where we were, actually, we were leaving church and I was like, boom, Michael, Michael [Lotwell], and he had helped me do some stuff around my house, very hard working guy, but his skillset was completely complimentary to mine and vice versa, mine to his, and we really never have much overlap at all.
And if you're going to have a partner in a business, it's so important to find someone that's different than you, and you see it as human nature, but business owners and people in general gravitate to similarities. And that creates challenges in a business when you have overlapping skill sets, there's competition amongst your team. And so for Michael and I, we really gave each other space and respect with our gifts that we had. And he was absolutely undoubtedly the right person and the right partner that I needed to get this business going and to grow it. And I feel like he'd probably say the same thing about me.
Currie Dyess:
So it sounds like the way Tailgate Guys functions now is pretty similar to whenever you first got it off the ground and you first started rolling. How is your vision and understanding of what Tailgate Guys provides to its customers, how has that changed over the years?
Parker Duffey:
Well, it's not the same in general. So I'll go back and say, if it sounds like it's the same, I'm doing a good job of sugar coating because it's not. We got kicked in the teeth over and over and over again, our growth and our evolution, it was an effort of trial and error in a lot of ways. The vision has changed and obviously, I exited the business right before COVID last spring of 2020. So it's changed a lot now. I mean, it's something we were in the process of really bolstering our efforts towards shifting our revenue focus towards working with Amazons and COVID relief tents and events, things like that for testing. And now simultaneously running a process with our investment bank and working out the diligence with the private equity group that eventually acquired us.
So it's evolved a ton to now with having gone through COVID, but I'm obviously not running the business anymore, but at the time of my exit, it had evolved a lot. And we went from having two guys where we stored all our equipment in Michael's backyard and my back bedroom on my thousand square foot house, just off campus was our HQ for the first three years to having, when I sold the business over 900 employees. So that's 11 years of growth and it's a hard business too. Tailgate Guys is labor heavy, it's asset heavy, there's fleet, there's facilities, there's part-time employment, there's full-time employment. So going back to the vision, the vision kind of evolved every year. I always joked around that building out a business plan for anything more than 18 months was a waste of time, because it was just going to be obsolete for us because we were always going to be behind.
And things would happen so quickly that we really couldn't project that far out. Obviously we did get more dialed in as we went along, but initially we started as just a service. It was something where we saw this as providing tents, tables, chairs, linens, signage, bell hops helping people unload their cars and it evolved to where we were building communities. And I think that that's something that we were in the right place at the right time with that approach. In 2009, when we started, there were not a lot of campuses that were really thinking about game day atmosphere and game day experience. There were not a lot of athletic departments that were really aggressively trying to find incremental additional revenue streams. And campuses in general, I remember I used to get dropped off at the Haley Center for class when I was in college back in 2002 to 2006.
That's when I was around. And there was a huge shift in 2010 to 2015, it's still going on in right now, for campuses to become more pedestrian. So what did that do for the primaries that are close to stadiums? It made them inaccessible. And so we became a resource and a service for not only creating that community, but also providing a service back to the universities and providing access to those premium, those areas that were maybe not even tapped into and in addition providing a revenue stream that was tied to it. And I was so cliche to say it was a win, win, win, but it really was, it was something where the fans benefited, the university benefited, athletic department's benefited. Then obviously we did as being the leaders at the helm of a rapidly growing and awesome business, just a fun business to be in. So the vision constantly changed, from service to community, to a university partnership mindset, too.
Sarah Gascon:
Yeah. What was the response like from the universities?
Parker Duffey:
The universities love it, if you think about tailgating in general, it's a liability, it's a liability for risk, it's a liability for the expense, the cleanliness, all the athletic departments and universities in general have to do to support tailgating, it's a lot of effort for them. There's a ton of money they spend on waste management. The alcohol issues were something that we spent a lot of time speaking with them about, but that was the solutions we really brought in. One of the things that universities loved about Tailgate Guys, is that for most of our campuses, by noon on the day after the game, you can't tell that tailgating was really going on out there. So us coming in and dialing in and cleaning up areas that they used to have to clean up on their own dime.
But then in addition making money for them, it was a complete swing to the positive for them. I mean, even Auburn, right out of the gate, the green space that we started on at Auburn, it was a parking lot in the Eagles cage for when I was in college. And it was converted into that green space. And our timing there with Auburn was they had no idea what they were going to do with it. So athletics, they were trying to figure out how to program that space so it didn't become a free for all because of the risk and the liability that goes along with that. So we were the solution for that, and that's what it was for most of the universities moving forward, too.
Currie Dyess:
How many folks do Tailgate Guys host on an average weekend in the fall? How long after you conceived the whole business, were you dreaming of it being this big?
Parker Duffey:
Let's see, 2019 was my last season as the CEO and our numbers, we were hosting well over a million people a year as guests at our tailgates. So it was probably I'd guess a little bit north of a hundred thousand, just depending on who was playing, obviously Auburn, we would have 40 to 50,000 people tailgating a weekend with us just at Auburn alone. So half the people in Jordan Hare were tailgating with us. And then you had a lot of other campuses that were well established that were growing to become that size. And then you had a lot of our partnerships and properties were very small. They were in the startup years because we grew so much on the last few years of the business. So I remember sitting at Amsterdam cafe, the first year of our business, my parents came in town and I was at dinner or lunch, something eating with them.
And this was a few games into our first season. At that point, I remember talking about how we wanted to grow this thing. And I wanted us to be at 15 campuses in a few years, things like that. It didn't happen that way. It took us a few more years to get to where we actually had opportunities to grow to other campuses, but pretty much right out of the gate. As soon as we saw that this was going to be successful and appreciated at Auburn university, we knew that we wanted to take it elsewhere and grow it to this type of a scale.
Sarah Gascon:
In 2012, Tailgate Guys had a major business expansion. What was the driving force in this decision? And how did you overcome the challenges the expansion presented?
Parker Duffey:
Well, I said it earlier that I love this business and I still do to this day and I loved every moment of it, even though there was a lot of challenges that we'll get into. But just being wired the way I am, the pursuit of growth and building, like I referenced earlier about wanting to have my own business, it never ended for me. There was never a point where I was like, okay, this is the size that I want us to be. So just the general pursuit of growth was one that was a driving force for growth. And early on, we committed to ourselves that this was going to be bigger than Auburn. And we obviously were successful in that, but it just sounded like a fun challenge to be honest. And I know there's a lot more to that, there's numbers in it.
We knew that we could make more money that way. And I'd be lying if I didn't say that the financial gain in growth wasn't attractive too, and we saw that and there's nothing wrong with that. I don't think there is. But the challenges that we had to overcome, the initial grown from one location to two location was a big pivot for us. And it was one of the more challenging moments. And there's several of those, there's starting the business, there's growing from one to two, there's taking on outside investment partners, there's scale and those are some of the key moments that we had. So going from one to two is in that list of big moments. So how we got through that at the time, it was still just me, Michael, and we had made two hires once we had our second partnership at Texas A and M and what we did is we worked hard.
I'd love to say that we were so smart and we had these processes. But we didn't, we are still doing, Currie, to your point earlier, it sounds like not a lot has changed and not a lot had changed at that point. We are still doing things from an operational position, the same way that we were doing it when it was one location. So and that was fine because we didn't have the money to be very creative. It was still very lean in those days. And so by lean, I mean, like we were sending trucks, box trucks back and forth between here and college station, Texas full of equipment. And most of the time it was Michael or I were driving those things. So I remember putting my headphones and listening to podcasts and chewing sunflower seeds from here to Brazos county, sleeping on our general manager's couch, looking at the ceiling before that first game, thinking is this how Tailgate Guys ends?
And I wasn't sleeping actually, those two days straight before our first game at Texas A and M, I did not sleep at all. And I know people like, well, you probably slept a little bit. No, I really didn't sleep for two days straight. There's a picture of me once that game started, once everybody was in the stadium, when we passed out in a tailgate chair in our welcome tent, because I was just toast. And that day went well. So it was this success and that was fun. But we moved inventory back and forth, we moved people back and forth and we just worked our tails off to get to that point. And then we got a little more savvy and we had brought in some professionals that brought new skill sets that helped along the process and streamlined our systems as we went along from there.
I lost like 25 to pounds in a month. I really did, that August of 2012, man. I remember because we also added the Chick-fil-A kickoff games as a partner that year too. And so we had two games on labor day weekend, and then we had to turn around and go to Texas A and M right after that for our opening game, which was the Johnny Manzel year. And they start off with Florida. It was their first SUC game, lightning in a bottle, our timing was perfect there. But Michael, the operations guy, my partner in crime, he decided he was going to have his first child that week too. So I was the guy out there trying to run ops and just stressed. And I remember seeing my brother-in-law at the kickoff game in Atlanta, because Auburn was playing in it and he looked at me and said, "Dude, are you okay? You look sick." I was like, I'm fine. I'm not sick. I'm just stressed. And so it took its toll on me physically, for sure.
Currie Dyess:
Yeah. You getting beat up.
Parker Duffey:
I was man. I was like 180.
Currie Dyess:
Oh wow. So what were some of the lowest points in the business and how were you able to handle them?
Parker Duffey:
Our first few years of the business, the lows became another day at the office later on. And I didn't realize as we went along, as our capacity was growing as a company, our capacity as leaders to handle stress and to handle these challenging moments. I didn't really realize how stressed out I was in my head. And my body was probably telling me I was really stressed out, but you would learn to cope with those things. So in the first few years, our lows were operational lows. I mean, weather was a big stressor. It took me about six months, of after selling this business to hear a storm laying in bed and wake up and not freak out and think where are the tents, what do we have set up? And what's the damage tomorrow?
In your growth of years, it gets more complicated. When you add people into a company with young leaders like myself and Michael, that really don't have a lot of the experience and season that more established companies do, there's complications there. When we sold 25% of the business, which we haven't really talked about that a lot, but there was a lot of inbound interest from multi-billion dollar companies to buy us back in 2016, 2015 and 2016. And so every one of those organizations that we told, no, that was their shot across the bow essentially. They were making it pretty clear that if we didn't sell to them or sell some piece of our company to them, that they were going to be a competitor of ours.
So battling that, and then even one of them specifically, one of the lows, that was a challenge that we actually overcame and I'm proud of it. One of the groups that we told, no, they were a family office and we had spent a lot of time with them. We had built a level of trust with them and pretty much laid out our plan. And I learned not to do that at that stage of the game. And then we ultimately backed away from working with them. And so what they did, they tried to go buy our competitor in Tuscaloosa, that we were actually in the process of buying. And so the guys in Tuscaloosa, they called me like, "Hey, we're not going to do the deal, we're selling to these guys. And it's just, there's nothing you can do about it. And they're actually going to be here tailgating with this tomorrow on Saturday. And so we're going to spend some time with them and get it done. Just want to let you know."
And that was one of those moments when I was like, okay, this is a multi-billion dollar family office that has public traded companies and they're going to be our competitor across the state. And I remember that evening, I was like, no, this is not happening. Absolutely not. And the next morning I hopped on a little prop plane that I borrowed from one of my buddies, flew to Tuscaloosa and then got there on the ground while that other group was tailgating with them and got the Tuscaloosa guys off of campus and we went to their office and we hashed out the deal and got the deal done right then, right there. So that low was that night of like, holy crap. I'm about to go against these guys and overcoming it the way we did and working with those guys to build a relationship and acquire them was a pretty big win.
Sarah Gascon:
A lot of successful people talk about how money is secondary and loving what you do is a primary goal. And it sounds like that was exactly your experience with Tailgate Guys. How can young folks like our Harbert college of business students and recent graduates see the forest and not the trees when our society is so financially driven?
Parker Duffey:
I don't really find a huge issue in people being motivated in building wealth and being driven to earn more money. I do think it's an issue when that's the main motivator. It's finding that balance. One of the things that I think about, and I tell people about when this kind of question comes up, which is funny because it does come up more often than not, especially with young people that are looking to get into business, because they see success and they see where people are. They don't really want to do what they did to get there. They want to do what they are doing now. And you heard the backstory. I mean, it was three years before I got out of my back bedroom, but there's just so many moments in business and growing a business and those pains and those challenges are moments where it's just not worth the money. And so if you're financially driven, I think it'd be really hard to really build the resilience that's required to go through that, to get past those challenges without loving the business.
Again, coming back to it, there's a balance. I think it's fine to pursue financial success and wealth in the business, but you got to love what you do at the same time. They're going to bolster one another as you move through those challenges.
Currie Dyess:
Listening to all of your experiences from partnerships with universities, to your business partner, the guys over in Tuscaloosa, it seems like you are very community, very relationship oriented towards all of those people. And you actually acquired a minority partner and a new business group. And to me that seems like again, relationship driven. Given that experience, would you make the same decision if you were presented with the same opportunity?
Parker Duffey:
Every business is different. And for us at the time it was kind of a necessity. And like I said, in 2015, 2016, that's when we started to consider that. And really before then, it hadn't really crossed my mind that we had something of enterprise value that would be acquired by a large group. And we had several groups start to approach us. 2015, it was one or two and then 2016, there was five or six. But for us, like I said earlier, we started this business from scratch and we paid our way through college to a certain extent. And we used to have student loans. And so there was a personal financial gain that we couldn't turn our back on. And from Michael too, it came down to a few things.
One was the personal financial gain of being able take some chips off the table. We had, at the time we were four or five campuses and having offers that were putting us well, multimillion dollar acquisition offers. So it's hard to see your student loan balance and say, "No, I'm going to say no to that." And without really considering options to take some chips off the table. So that's why we ended up going the route of taking on a minority partner is because we wanted to have control of the business. But at the same time, taking those chips off the table was an important thing for both Michael and I and our families. But then there was also obviously competitive pressures that when every time we said no to someone again, that was their trigger to go create a competitive arm against us. And so taking on a minority partner that had relationships in the college sports space was another big factor for us in choosing who that was.
It insulated us from those competitors by being able to take advantage of those relationships because Live Nation and IMG both created competitive arms against us that same year that we ended up going with the group that we did. That group, they had relationships in the space, and it helped us with those relationships. So there was more than one partnership that those guys really did a really good job of helping us protect those potential partnerships and keep them from shifting into the hands of those groups too. But I think it's really, if you're going through that process of deciding on taking investors, which it's different, there's a lot of people right now. And a lot of these younger businesses, they want to raise money and take on partners before they even get operational. I tend to disagree. I think there's a lot of value in trying to bootstrap a business on your own and I learned a lot from having my back against the wall, and taking on a partner in our seven or eighth year of business.
It was a different strategy then, a lot of people do it upfront. But when you do take someone on, if that's the plan and that's what you're committed to, I think alignment is a really important thing to consider, what does that group want? Long term, short term or are you short term, they're long term? Making sure your goals are insistent with one another. Because during that phase of courting one another, a lot of those, you don't see the bad in it and misalignment can create some issues, but alignment can create just some really, really impactful, powerful growth opportunities. And we were really well aligned early on in our relationship with the group that we brought on. But it is one more group that you have to please. And one more group of people that you have to please, and for us having eight years of Michael and I running a gun in the way we work, adding additional groups to the mix was a change, for sure.
And for some businesses it might not be a change because it might have started that way, but make sure, consider alignment, character and the resources that you were looking for in a partner before ever going down that path.
Sarah Gascon:
So what's next for you?
Parker Duffey:
Well, it's a pretty day today. So I was out riding my bike with my little four year old on her scooter. So that's what my day is like right now. And, I joke around, but I did do this. We started this process in summer of 2019, hired the investment bank that repped us, Stevens out of Little Rock, they're great guys. And there's some Auburn guys that are over there now, and we hired them and the plan was always to do this. And a lot of the plan for Melanie and I was to get some time back.
I was spending a couple hundred days a year on the road. It was the right time for the business to sell. It was the right time for my family, for me to take a step back. And it was the right time, really for the business to be a part of something with a little more resources than what Michael and I could provide too. But going back to that, I am spending more time with family and we've traveled a good bit together. And we have another daughter now that we didn't have when we sold, a COVID baby. And so now I have two little girls and so spending time with them, but I have some other investments now that I'm a part of, I've expanded my real estate portfolio some and I like that passive investment approach, but at the same time, going back to the people side of things, I was talking about how people can add complication to business and they do, but man, people are such a blessing in business.
Our first few hires, first five hires actually, were still with the company when I sold it, and those people and some, several people along the way are so important to me. And just being a part of a team is something that I look forward to be doing again. And a lot of those people that I connected with early on in the business and that were with me along the way, I look forward to finding ways to work with them together too. And I think that I've taken a step back, but at the same time, I'm actively looking and working on a few things that could be a lot of fun to build and work with some really cool people on the way. But I don't want to go on the road for 200 days a year again, though. I think I might commit to dialing that back permanently.
Currie Dyess:
Well, Parker look, anybody would be wise to learn from your experiences. You have really incredible stories to tell. And, and Sarah and I are very grateful, the Harbert college of business is honored to have you as a guest on the show. One last thing, what advice would you give to our listeners?
Parker Duffey:
I'd tell them to try to do everything they can to prepare themselves for the reality of running a business. And then I tell them, it's going to be a hundred times harder than what they think it's going to be, and it's going to be a hundred times more fun than they think it's going to be, being quick to fire, slow to hire. It goes against human nature but those are some things that I really believe in that I've learned more about, as I went along, that I haven't perfected by any means, and also try to find a way to be uncomfortable, try to find a way to get your back against the wall. I said that earlier that I think a lot of businesses right now, they come out with funding and that provides a real false sense of security and a cushion that might not have been necessary.
And it kind of takes your eye off the ball a little bit. You're focusing on raising money versus running a business, that can be really damaging. So my advice would be try to do as little of that as possible, just to try to boot strap it on your own. Like I said, keeping your back against the wall, you learn a lot of valuable lessons.
Sarah Gascon:
How can our listeners keep up with you or connect with you?
Parker Duffey:
My email is still, it is parker.duffey@gmail.com. Anybody can reach out and if they need anything, want some advice or input or just questions about what we talked about today or anything like that.
Currie Dyess:
Well, Parker, thank you so much for your time. This has really been wonderful. We can't say thank you enough.
Parker Duffey:
Oh, thank you all for having me. And obviously Auburn means a lot to me and our business wouldn't be here without Auburn. A lot of my personal relationships wouldn't be here without Auburn. My wife, I met her in non-business major accounting class because I might not have been a business major, but this community has just been behind us from day one. And it means a lot to me. So I'm happy to be on with you guys and to share a little bit more about our story.
Sarah Gascon:
We appreciate it. War Eagle.
Currie Dyess:
War Eagle.
Parker Duffey:
War Eagle.
Narrator:
Harbert, inspiring business.