 This is something I shouldn't have to do. Normally, I have some of those kids that before I did it. It's family in town. I think that she's like the center of Goldtown. We can call her Mama Goldtown. She's a go-getter. She's definitely made me personally want to be that way. She was really doing two things at once, running a business that turned into a multimillion-dollar business and caring for us. She'll never get all the accolades she really deserves, but she's with all her talent and hard work, I think it's going to pay off in the end and she'll be rewarded. If you work the third as hard as Robin did, then you can keep your job. I think women have a much better chance of doing things. We've made our stand and put the line in the sand and it's like, okay, we are capable of doing this. Just because I'm a woman doesn't make me better. It's just give me a chance. That's all you're really asking. Let me have the exposure to do what I know I can do. This is either box, I got two huge more boxes full of photos. Music was always present in our house. My mother always sang, played guitar. I mean, it was always kind of there. Sunshine's bright on Charlie Chaplin. Something about a mosquito bites him. You are my sunshine. She used to play all that kind of stuff. And then my dad had his office in the basement when we lived in Ohio and he played My Fair Lady and saw the music. And he had this little stereo system down there and that's where he did his paperwork. I picked up a Beertone Eukid Age five and started playing. My mother showed me. So I started that early and I think it's just kind of like part of you and so it was kind of a natural progression when I met Wayne and we started playing music together. It was kind of like, well, this is fun. This is myself and that's Wayne with a beard which was just not a good look there at that time. It was a accident with a guitar that needed to be repaired. We brought it to a local music store and when they looked at the guitar and then I looked around the store it was a majority band instruments. They really had no clue on how to fix this guitar and that was the first inspiration about the idea of opening a music store. When you start something you don't know anything. That's the key. You're dumb. You start something like that you're an ignorant person and if you are so ignorant that you will not take the advice of people that have been there, have done it maybe not the way you want to do it but learn from their mistakes. Anybody that does anything like that that they don't learn from other people's mistakes you're going to, guess what? You're going to make the same stupid mistake that they made. Back in the early, late 70s, early 80s it was just a great time to be. I mean music industry was a new, frontier led Zeppelin the Stones Beatles. I mean there were so many different bands with different styles so it was probably the best time to start off. We got lucky. So with no credit history and no collateral we visited seven or eight banks and they were very polite but at the end of the conversation it was we really can't help you guys out much. You don't have any experience, you don't have any collateral. You know I think when I was starting out I don't think I would have made the effort to get to a bank. It was bad enough with Wayne and I together with our, I think it would have been really tough. All of a sudden out of the blue one of the banks gave us a call. Now that was scary because now this dream was going to be a reality and it was, that was a kind of a scary part. It was like uh oh, okay let's do this. It was complete surprise and we even took it as maybe some good comment you know if they gave us a loan out of nowhere then maybe we're doing the right thing. Oh boy, you know starting out in the music business or just any business you have to have the carrot dangling. You have to know what your goals are. I think if anybody goes in without a goal you're pretty much doomed. We attempted to grow too fast. We started another store front in Merritt Island and I think with that even though we thought, I mean it made sense because we were pretty much maxed out in Titusville we figured why don't we just duplicate what we're doing in Merritt Island. The problem is, is Merritt Island's too close. People were coming as far as Melbourne which is an hour away. They were coming from Orlando. They were coming from Daytona. So we just kind of didn't figure that out. We were going to buy bulk and then distribute it through the two businesses but when you don't have hands on which it takes especially establishing a business in a new area we just didn't have enough energy to split ourselves in that many directions and that's why we failed at that. We had a record and tape that we wanted to franchise and probably would have if the mall situation didn't change so we invested a lot in that and that didn't work all that well but if you can kind of go, oh yeah I can see where that could happen let's not go there. I think that's another key because every mistake you make is costing you money. Plus when we were starting out you had albums and then you had albums and 8 tracks and at one time you had albums, 8 tracks and cassettes so you had all this stock that was the interim that was tough and that's why we kind of stopped with the LPs although I loved it because we always had the latest music that was probably selfish on our part. We didn't want to give that up. I mean you're always going to run into the wall and it's just can you figure out how to go under it, around it, over it. That makes for a longevity of a business. You can't give up. You just don't let yourself give up. We kind of laughed when we looked back but our first opening hours were from 10 in the morning to 9 o'clock on Monday through Friday and I think we closed at 6 o'clock on Saturday. And then we played music at a local Best Western Friday and Saturday night and the only day we really had office Sunday at that time it was doing laundry and house cleaning and trying to get through life. My father was in his business, he was a plumber and he was in his own business so as a young person I realized what it took to make a living and feed a family in the world of business. It was a lot of long hours so the sacrifices that the whole family makes when you own a business is something that occurs just because of the amount of time it takes to be successful. Here's the babes. That is Lindsay, probably age, she's probably maybe three there and Mandy's probably around two. I was working when I had the children, I had to step back so I did a lot of band repair at home in the evenings and early in the morning when they were sleeping. These two little girls were back to back 15 months apart and the kids would come in with me too. We were a family unit and they understood that very family oriented town Titusville is. We're heading from our home site to our daughter and son-in-law's home which is in the same complex which is nice so that's a good thing for grandma. Well my mom has never taken a break. She works, works, works. It's very inspiring especially now that I have kids because you know when you're younger you don't really understand what your parents put in to give you a good life. Growing up with parents that own a small business was a lot of time spent at the business. After school, weekends, homework was done here. Dinners were served when we got home a little bit later so it's kind of affected the way that I am now. I eat a little bit later. I'm fine with working a little bit later. She helps start the business. She put a lot into the business every single day but it didn't mean that she put caregiving second. She really taught me that you can do anything. I mean this woman can change a toilet in Tara Roof and it really gives I think my sister and I inspiration to do things as women and learn how to do things so she really taught me that women can do anything because she can do anything. This is the shed. People brought their instruments from all over to us to repair and that was kind of like how Gold Tone came because we knew we could do this. We knew we could build a product just because of the years of experience we had with putting violins and guitars and the other acoustic instruments together. When the Pacific Rim folks got into making affordable instruments they made great great guitars they made great electric guitars they made great keyboards they made great mandolins but for some reason they just forgot about banjos. This is the TB100 this is the first banjo that we came up with and I never had heard of a travel banjo that was being made and sold so we came up with this idea of a travel banjo with a shorter sized neck and a smaller sized body we started making these in the back of the shop in the store and then we sent one away to a magazine called Banjo Newsletter and they gave it an incredible review and all of a sudden we started having stores call us. And when we built the shed it was kind of like a way of saying this is something that's going to happen. For a company our size we have an enormous amount of famous people playing our instruments Kid Rock and Bruce Springsteen Muffin and Sons if you've heard of them their first album was All Goldhorn Instruments Bela Fleck I mean Bela probably I mean he's very particular in what he does he's one of the best in the world if not the best and to get with Wayne to produce a banjo was a real honor for us I mean that was a real coup because he was willing to work with us and we're a small little family organization and he knew we wouldn't do a good job on his banjo and that was great. We were the first company that actually produced great sounding low end banjos and we tried to produce something in the two to three hundred dollar price range one of the things people don't understand about banjos is you can buy a sixty five dollar or seventy five dollar guitar because they're made all out of wood and the wood in a seventy dollar guitar is probably about fifteen dollars worth of wood on a banjo we can never get down to that ninety nine dollar price range just simply because of all the metal parts in the banjo metals much more expensive than wood. Just in necks and bodies alone screws hooks tail pieces machine heads you're always going to get parts from somewhere else they're not all going to be manufactured in the United States because they simply are too expensive. If you want to pay the prices you're used to paying in this country then this is going to be an issue it's going to be very difficult to make these things in this country because you have taxes and you have wages and health insurance and it's just it's what it is. We also had an ebony situation with the the dots on our the position markers on the necks we were fined really heavily and there was a time that we thought they were going to take strings or gold tone away from us because they're saying for every shipment that you've ever shipped out in the past since you've been in existence if you didn't file and bring it into this certain port we were going to this is how much you should be paying and it was millions. Our factory that we received from sold made everybody's banjos and we were the only ones that were fined and that's where I find that's a little bit in just. We actually went to Louisville and we got in front of the people that were going to have the fish and wildlife and we said okay plead ignorance because we were ignorant there's no way we would have ever done anything if we had known that's what we needed to do it doesn't it makes no sense to do that they gave us a little bit of time to pay it off which was good they didn't hit us all at once because that would have been devastating that would have cleaned out and when you were the only one doing it and filing these papers and the competitors aren't doing it you just you lose we lost a lot of our high-end business because of that or we just paid it and made less money. Hi welcome to 2017 NAMM show here in Nashville Tennessee and we're at the Gold Tone booth my name is Justin and I'm going to walk you through a few of our products here at NAMM this is an electric banjo six string this is a Paul Beards signature series so this is the micro base it is like I said our top selling product and out of the 150 pieces that we manufacture we sell this one five to one to our next top selling product which happens to be the F6 guitar NAMM is probably one of the most important things we do as far as the shows concern what it enables you to do is all the dealers actually come to you you bring in your products so you're bringing in the new products some of the standard older products that a new dealer might be interested in but the one thing that I've always capitalized in trade shows the main reason of going is just walking around the trade show and looking and exploring and trying to come up with other ideas it's the people that you meet we can go to the actual builders of guitars heads of factories from different countries NAMM is probably where we met most of the people that we deal with it's comforting to know that your problems in your successes are shared by other individuals a lot of times you think in a business that you are really in control and you're really the only person on the map but once you get to these trade shows and find out that it's a whole group that is causing the movements and causing either successes or failures you just have a better understanding we got a lot we're going to get some work now when we had any extra money we bought more inventory our way of thinking of investing because you weren't making any money if you had it sitting in a bank so if we keep investing in us and in our product eventually that product was going to go up for us there are costs and if we had still a lot of warehousing full of our product it was better than money in the bank and luckily we did that because there was a society's a Rosewood incident that happened last year the end of last year back in October the world organization for saving the trees got together and they came up with a new regulation which meant that you had to have certain licensing to transport Rosewood internationally the problem with it was is no one realized how long it would take to recover from it when you have a business such as ours that has employees 20 people it's a definite impact if it had Rosewood and every one of our finger boards had Rosewood you had to have these certain licenses and so as of January 2nd we couldn't ship out of country and we couldn't receive any stock this came about because of the Chinese furniture companies and they were soaking up all the available Rosewood all over the world making furniture out of it it really didn't have any cost to do with the music industry because we used so little Rosewood a Rosewood tree could probably make a thousand finger boards where it may only make a dozen pieces of furniture so unfortunately for us they gave very very little time to comply and then there was such a demand for businesses that evolved with Rosewood which included knife makers and musical instrument makers there was such a enormous attempt to get these new licenses that the government agencies just couldn't keep up with us so that was my biggest beef with the way that the government handled it and the way that we had to suffer really for no need at all if they had done some sort of research I think just the bureaucracy of the machine is what really was harmful and a lot of the Chinese factories and a lot of the music business they closed their door because they couldn't sustain months of having no no exports well you know Wayne and I are getting to that point in our lives where these hurdles become a little bit much to get over the next one we're kind of like you know I need a boom truck to get me over this one because I'm not going to work to get there this is a family business our daughters, our son-in-law my brother we can't walk away from this this is not something we walk away from this is something we pass on I would like to see my parents retire possibly running it with my brother-in-law and keeping it as a family business I would love for Goldton to be the top of the bluegrass and folk at the top of the total poll we just opened a distribution company with 11 new countries we're going to have 2200 new stores obviously the retail side of things is taking a different route with all the internet sales happening right now and we're losing a lot of strong mom and pop representation that I think is really the drive for the music industry and I think we're going to lose just a specialness that was there with that that was rehearsal mother I'm not certain if it's an innate part of your mind I just know that there's certain people a good percentage of people that find playing a musical instrument is very very comforting it's not all electric, it's not all digital this is a vibrating body that creates pretty harmonies and no matter how good you get there's always something to learn that's part of the excitement every time you learn a new lick or a new song you feel like you've accomplished something I want to keep this going because I think it would be a sad thing if these instruments weren't out there for people to enjoy