Episode 35

Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Blueprint. Today I’m joined again by Kory Ballard, the founder of Perfect Cuts and Ballard Products. Last time we dug a little bit into Perfect Cuts, but I’d really like to dive a little bit into the Ballard side on this conversation. So we brought him back and hopefully it will provide a lot of value for you. Kory, sure glad you’re here today.

Kory Ballard
Yeah, glad to be back. It’s always fun. I love talking lawn care, lawn care products, business, people, anything to do with our industry. Enjoy it.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah.

And last time we did dive a lot into the lawn care side, but I’m really intrigued by Ballard Products as far as the growth side, the business side, totally different from lawn care, but obviously you’re doing very well with that, or it seems like it from this end. I’m just curious. Maybe it was from your podcast or the last one—you started in 1999. And I was actually listening to the podcast you did with your wife. Your wife was on there with you and Leroy on the Green Grind podcast. And she told him there.

You guys were working out of a storage shed. For those who don’t know, Kory lives in Iowa, gets insanely cold in the winter. Right. No heating. And I was just thinking to myself, Kory, what were you thinking in this no heat space?

Kory Ballard
Right.

Well, the business went through numerous kind of ups and downs. Like we started in ’99 with our first patent, had our second patent in 2001. And so at one point I had a sales guy and one warehouse guy. And so I had a nice little setup where a guy had an office and we had maybe a warehouse that was maybe 15 by 20, 15 by 30. And he did all the shipping, and it was doing about a half million dollars a year. So it’s still not a big business by any means, but

sustained itself and a couple of employees. And then by the time 2016, 2017 hit, it was just literally me. If you wanted something and you called in, I took your order. Didn’t advertise. The website was up, and we had this small 10 by 20, like Lindsay had mentioned—no heat, no air conditioning, of course, one hanging light in it. And if you ordered something, we would go down there, we’d box it up and tape it up and bring it, drag it back down to Perfect Cut ’cause that’s where UPS picked up from. And that was really the pivotal moment where…

I said, we either got to shut this down or we got to do something with it. And at that point it was doing around a hundred thousand dollars a year. So really just eight to ten thousand dollars a month, a little more in the spring months. But just again, kind of a—not even really a hobby business anymore, because I was putting zero effort into it.

And so to get it from there to over ten million in sales this year in such a short amount of time has been an interesting journey. And so we can dig into that a little bit, but.

The answer to your question is, well, I don’t know what I was doing. It was just—didn’t have any—and the reality was I didn’t have any space at any of my other buildings anymore. And so at one point for many years, I had a spot at Perfect Cut where we just had one bay that that’s what we used for the Ballard company. And I needed every square inch of all of our buildings that Perfect Cut occupied. And the other buildings that I owned were all full too. So

I was just renting space from somebody else, which I’m not a big fan of—renting other people’s buildings—but it just wasn’t a very good, it just wasn’t a very good model. And we made it work.

Yeah, if anybody wants to go back and listen to it, think Lindsay shared some pretty vulnerable moments in our path of getting this thing to where it is today.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, that was a really good episode. So that’s interesting trajectory. You mentioned five hundred thousand dollars down to one hundred thousand dollars and then way up here to ten million. First, let’s notice—why did you go from the five hundred to one? What caused that dip? Because obviously we see you can make it grow. Why did you choose at that point to let it dip down?

Kory Ballard
I had just—we were growing, I was focused on Perfect Cut so much, and I had a sales guy that I was paying. And it really, at five hundred thousand in revenue, it wasn’t quite big enough. It really needed—we might’ve had a couple years there where we did seven, seven-fifty, and it was profitable, but again, it was taking more energy.

And so I had just many years where I was focused on Perfect Cut, and finally my sales guy had an opportunity to take another job. And when he did, I made a decision not to replace him. And I said, well, I’ll just do the sales.

And I quickly realized that I didn’t have the capacity to do it well. And so, yeah, I mean, it went from five to six hundred thousand, again, maybe seven hundred, a couple of good years there, and down to one-fifty, one hundred. And I think the year we really kicked it back into gear, I think we did like seventy-three thousand.

So again, almost borderline just shut this baby down. Then quickly when we started doing some marketing and going—when I had the decision to go fully into this and really put my efforts all into this and I stepped away from my role at Perfect Cut, it was just like jumping on a rocket ship. And we put a lot of time into it.

So I think sometimes from a social media perspective, looks like we just—some people think we just started and all of a sudden people just see it, this huge growth. And so it wasn’t without a ton of effort, and it’s still a lot of work today, obviously.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s really interesting. And with obviously all that you’ve put into this, what made you go, okay, why am I going to go into this product business? Because you’re really an e-commerce business, and you were a service-based business. So why didn’t you just start another service-based business when it seems from the outside as if e-commerce oftentimes has very low margins?

Kory Ballard
Couple things I can tell you. A little bit of it was ego, where I felt like I wanted to see if I could do something different and do—

and kind of create the same magic again. But I just felt like I had a really good understanding of our industry. I understood the products that needed to be made. I just felt like if—even though it was e-comm, and that is a totally different model, and I don’t know how much time we have to get into that, because it certainly has a whole other set of challenges—I just felt like we had high, we have good margins in our business.

The way we built this model—at one point it wasn’t, because I was selling to distributors, I was selling to the Northern Tools of the world, and those were high volume, low margin.

Buyers—and we built this direct-to-consumer model that is at least much more profitable. Yeah, different business model, but a lot of different touch points.

I mean, we’re again at around ten million in revenue and we have nine employees. Where at Perfect Cut, at ten million in revenue, I probably had eighty-five employees, maybe ninety, and tons of assets. And anybody listening—trucks and trailers and machines and skid loaders and mowers and all the gadgets, right?

And so I thought, well, this business is so much cleaner. And we can do business 24/7, 365—and we do.

I mean, it doesn’t matter—rain or shine, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, 4th of July, sun’s out here, rain, snow—we can do business 365. And so I liked that model. And it was just a little different model than plant a tree, send a bill, right? Cut a lawn, send a bill.

And I just felt like we could do something really cool with this business. Again, I felt like I knew enough about it that I could manage it. And I knew enough about the industry—that was really my, I think, magic as we kind of talked about around here.

What’s made Ballard special is my understanding of the business and the knowledge, and I think understanding what tools make sense for our industry. And it doesn’t mean we haven’t missed on a few, because we have.

Ezra McCarthy
One thing I’d like to hone in on—you’ve mentioned a couple times, and maybe this is just personal, I just—every time you mention it I’m like, man, I wish he’d say why.

You always mention—you’ve said at least two or three times—yeah, people told you not to get into blades, and you never have expounded on that. So, and if you don’t—you don’t have to go too in-depth if you don’t want to—but why? Why did people say not to? And then you said it’s worked. Why has it worked?

Kory Ballard
Blades is our number one piece of our business, and we continue to expand that. It’s our highest volume, it’s our highest margin. But originally, everybody I talked to—and I should say, I mean, I talked to five or six pretty knowledgeable people in our industry, both e-comm and in the parts and accessory businesses—

first off is, they’re heavy. They take up a lot of space. They’re hard to ship. There’s a million different sizes.

Once you get the sizes figured out, then there’s varieties of a standard lift, a high lift, a medium lift, a multi blade. And so it takes up—you, if you could see in our warehouse behind me, we have four people doing nothing but blades today, and there’s three entire rows of nothing but blades. So they take up a lot of space.

And again, it’s just—they’re heavy, they’re hard to ship. And blades are a weird thing too. It’s kind of like—we just had a one-star review on Google, and Austin was sending that guy a message, and he said, put your blades on, cut, they cut horrible.

And we get that occasionally. We sell hundreds of thousands of blades. We sold 67,000 blades in May—was a record—67,000 blades in the month of May.

Eighty percent of it’s like, loved your blades, they’re the best ever. Twenty percent, your blades are horrible and they don’t cut. Well, the truth of the matter is, every mower blade cuts.

Of every variety—you can take a piece of flat stock steel and put a five-eighths hole in it, it’ll cut grass, because it’s turning at 19,000 feet per minute.

But what we don’t know is, what type of blade did you buy? What are the conditions? What’s your cutting height? Is it tall? What kind of turf is it? Is it wet? Is it dry? Are you going nine miles an hour or four miles an hour?

So many factors. You have a Kubota, you have an Exmark, you have a Toro. There’s just so many factors.

So the tough part about blades also is—we’ve opened ourselves up for, I think, a lot of criticism and also a lot of love, right? It’s kind of this weird—people, like, I mean, they send us photos all the time of beautiful stripes and “your blades are the best ever.”

And then the next one is, “your blades are the worst ever.” And it’s like, huh? Like, we run—we use our blades. Like, we run them on every mower. So it is, it’s a tough business because it’s the one tool that…

Is immediately noticeable, right? I mean, if you put new blades on your mower and it goes out and it doesn’t perform like you think it should—well, a Ballard blade’s gotta be horrible. It’s gotta be the blades.

It couldn’t be that they haven’t scraped under their deck. It couldn’t be that maybe they’ve got a bad spindle. Maybe their deck pitch isn’t right. Maybe the grass is ten inches tall. Maybe—like right now in Iowa—the grass is in seed, and nothing cuts that great. Right now, it’s just—seeded grass doesn’t look good right now. It doesn’t cut well. And there’s about a three-week period that it just—everything looks…

not great. So blades is just a tough business. And we continue to expand our line. We’re mainly, primarily commercial, but we have blade fitment for about 1,100 machines right now. And we’re continuing to expand that.

But it is tough because we get a lot of guys that say, wish you made them for this mower, I wish you made them for that mower. And for me to make a new blade, I typically have to get 3,000 of them. So—and then we have to have them in all the varieties.

So it’s not as easy as just, “I wish you made blades for my 42-inch Bad Boy Maverick.” It’s like—oh, it only fits the 42-inch Bad Boy Maverick and I’ve got to get 12,000 blades and hope that I can sell them in the next year.

So—blades are tough. That’s the answer. I don’t know if that answers your question. They’re tough. They’re hard to ship. They’re heavy. They take up a lot of space.

Ezra McCarthy
So how many SKUs do you have? Which is the e-commerce term for products—in blades?

Kory Ballard
I don’t know the total blade SKU. I know we have 1,700 SKUs here total at Ballard. I don’t know how many of those are blades—probably 800 of them, I would guess. I mean, maybe half or a little bit more. So, a lot of blades.

Ezra McCarthy
You bought a—you mentioned that specific one. Have you bought a SKU for a specific mower and then sold just about zero? And then what do you do with them?

Kory Ballard
Yeah, we have them. I mean, we’ve done that with several of them. Like, the Cub Cadet ZT 150s—we had, like, we felt like hundreds of requests. Well, we added it. It’s one of our lowest selling blades.

Now, we’ll sell them, right? Blades don’t go bad. It’s not like produce—like we got grapes and bananas back here. They will sell, but it might take us three years to get through that quantity.

And so we are a little more selective now on what we add. When people say, “If you had blades for this one, I would buy some,” that’s like…

And sometimes in our meetings, they’ll say, we’re getting a ton of requests. I’m like, well, quantify a ton. “Well, I’ve had four requests.” Okay, well, four requests isn’t enough to order 3,000 blades.

So we look at that all the time, because we do want—we would love to be there for everybody, right? We’d love for the mid-level guy that has a Cub Cadet, mid-level homeowner model. Some of these bigger brands—Exmark’s got kind of their homeowner models now, and John Deere has a million different models.

I don’t know why, but these companies just keep making models. And we would love for a do-it-yourselfer, or maybe a guy with a nice acreage that has a mid-level machine, to be able to buy products from us, including blades.

But the challenge with blades is, it’s hard when a blade only fits one specific model and size. Whereas our most popular blades—our top 25 best-selling blades—are universal quite a bit. They may fit five or six models or brands. So there’s a lot less risk with a blade like that.

Ezra McCarthy
You know, something, Kory—you’ve talked a lot about is quote-unquote luck. How much of your—obviously your business is growing, doing well—how much do you think that came from strategy versus instinct versus just putting in the work year over year over year? At this point, literally 26 years just for Ballard.

Kory Ballard
Right. Well, I think the harder I work, the luckier I get. That’s kind of how it goes.

I do think that there is always some luck, and there’s timing in business. But I believe that just continuing to work hard, continuing to stay focused—

every single week I put a new saying up on our wall here for our entire team to see. I just wrote yesterday for this week, “The successful warrior is an average man with laser focus.”

I think that was Bruce Lee. I think we’ve stayed—I’ve stayed focused on the goal. I make the goals very clear. We work hard. We stay consistent.

I like something Mike Dandridge said—it’s kind of lower highs, higher lows. We don’t get too—we kind of just try to stay focused here when things get really bad.

And we’ve had some things go bad. Like, right now we’re out of stock on some products. We’re having a few issues with some other products that we thought would be on the market by now. We’re on our fourth or fifth prototype.

I just kind of try to keep the team focused on the positives.

I do think that—I don’t know, I hate to use the word luck, right? Because I don’t think anybody really gets lucky. But I do think the more prepared you are, and the harder you work, and when you position yourself in the right spot, things tend to go your way a little bit better.

And you can call that luck if you want to.

Ezra McCarthy
Want to hone in on something you said there. I’m a big proponent of goals. Currently, I’ve got with me here my goals for 2025—and I won’t read them to you—but I read them every day, or I try to, and then try to literally make a schedule every day.

So I’m curious, Kory—you mentioned goals there. How specific do you get with your goals, whether that is in personal or in business? And then how often do you articulate them to your team to keep it front of mind?

Kory Ballard
Hmm, good one. I mean, I’m a little bit old school, and I think you’ve probably heard me say this, but I write my goals down. I don’t have them on the computer. I literally have them on paper.

I kind of have my goals laid out—I write down what obstacles will be in the way. What are the things that could keep me from hitting my goals? What would I need to achieve them? Is that people, is it capital, is it equipment? What would it take to get to them? And then, what’s the timeline of this goal?

And so I constantly am working on those goals—both personal and professional.

I do share the professional ones with our team quite often, at least monthly. We’re talking about, okay, here’s where we are.

Tomorrow we have our Tuesday morning meeting. We’re going to talk about May. We finished May with—here’s our sales, which is our record month in May. Which is really good, considering we’ve had a lot of product issues and some stuff out of stock, and there’s been some stuff that we’re struggling with.

But so we’ll talk about how May finished.

Ezra McCarthy
How often, specifically?

Kory Ballard
What our goal is for June, how I think we can get there. Talk about how many orders we had. We’ll talk about order fulfillment. So we try to keep our goals in front of everybody.

I think I could do a better job of that still. I know at Perfect Cut, we did a really good job of that—especially in our strategy meetings. We had our goals laid out. Are we on task? Are we on budget? Any new sales leads? What’s hot, what’s cold?

So at Perfect Cut, we had it dialed down. I think maybe because we have such a small team here that I don’t put as much effort into it, because I feel like we talk so much among our maybe three or four key players that I feel like everybody knows.

But that’s dangerous as well, because everybody doesn’t know if it’s not laid out. And so I don’t ever want to go back and be like, “You know, the goal said—” “No, actually, I didn’t know.” “I told you—” “No, you talked.”

I have to be very specific.

So as we continue to scale this, I know I need to do a better job of laying out those goals. How do we get there? What’s it look like?

But we’re always talking. Jamie came up to my office this morning and was talking about how we’re struggling in the warehouse right now getting all of our orders out. We’re definitely behind. And she’s like, we’re 700 orders behind from last week still.

And we’re talking about next year—what’s customer service look like? So we’re already talking about what’s going on today, and then how do we prevent this next year?

How do we make sure that we can make sure our phone calls are answered better in May?

What happens with our staff a little bit is—they panic a little bit more than I do. Because April and May and June are tough.

And so I don’t base the entire year on that—like, “We need three more people in the warehouse,” or “We need two more people answering phones.”

Yeah, we do—in May. But not in August. Not September. Not October.

So let’s not panic.

It’s kind of like a snowstorm, right? If you get a blizzard, you could use twenty more guys and twenty more skid loaders—but we don’t get one of those every three or five years.

So I try not to get too emotionally involved and too panicky about things. When it hits, let’s just do the best we can. Let’s get back to everybody the best we can.

Ezra McCarthy
Good.

And I’m curious—I also recommend writing your goals down. When did you start literally writing them down, maybe, rather than keeping them in your head? And did you notice a change in it helping at all?

Kory Ballard
Been doing it for probably 25-plus years—maybe more, actually.

Yeah, I think I have to hold myself accountable. I have to hold my team accountable. I have to be clear in what my goals are and what the company goals are. Or—I don’t know—I don’t know what you’re really shooting for.

I mean, are you just hoping for the best? You’ve got to set goals, and you’ve got to set accountability.

I have goals for all of our people, and sales goals for our people. We’ve always been a proponent of performance pay.

I like to keep salaries modest, and I like to compensate based on how you perform. I just think—if you pay a guy a hundred grand and he gets a hundred grand whether he performs or doesn’t perform—I just don’t know.

The right guy might still perform well. But if you pay a guy fifty and he can make an additional seventy-five or a hundred based on performance, I want to keep my people hungry. I want to keep them striving and working towards those goals.

I’ve always done that. At Perfect Cut, I did it. I do it here. I want everybody to win together. I want it to be a win-win for everybody.

And you gotta have people with some skin in the game. And so you gotta share those goals with them. Again, I want my people to win when we win.

Like May—we have some big checks to write out. I want to do it. The bigger the check, the better. And so if you build the program right, it’s a win-win.

I’m excited. When Kaz gets his bonus this month, I’m like, “Let’s go, buddy.” I’m like, “I wish it was bigger.” Because I built the program to be a win-win.

So I’m excited about sharing those goals and our people winning together for sure.

Ezra McCarthy
You mentioned obviously—you threw out some numbers here—how much product you’re shipping every month. How in the world—I presume you have some CRM on the back end, some sort of software management.

But did you have to transition as you went along? I’m sure a lot of lawn care companies can sympathize—obviously maybe on a lower scale on volume—but how do you manage customer service when you’re shipping, at this point, sounds like thousands of products a week, if not obviously monthly. Right?

Kory Ballard
I’ve hired some really good people, and we’ve got a lot of software in place that does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Utilizing software is something that—again, I think I’ve mentioned—I’m not great at that. That’s not my strong suit. But I’ve got people in place.

We’ve got software for the warehouse, which does inventory control, inventory management, replenishing. It shows you trends—when you’re going to run out, when you should reorder. So we’ve got that software.

We’ve got a product that we use in customer service called Zendesk, which also works through some sort of program. We’ve got…

Like, probably six or seven different softwares in place. We’ve got one that does state income taxes by state, by product.

This is a little more complex on the backend than it probably would sound like to most people. Everything down to shipping the product, warranty claims—there’s just a lot more going on here than just jumping on a website, order a product, we ship you a box, and then you’re solved.

So, a lot of software in place that all has to feed into our financial program as well, so we can make sure that we’re profitable. We’ve had some glitches with that as well.

But we have a company that works on our website, and it’s built some monster websites—some big e-comm websites. But this is a moving—

we are working on our website every single day. That company is working on something. There’s backend glitches, there’s security breaches, there’s…

new products going up. Somebody will pay with PayPal and it somehow won’t link to the ship station. Somebody will pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay and it won’t link.

So there’s always something—I don’t want to say broken—but there’s never a month where it’s just smooth.

So we have a monthly retainer with our e-comm company. And I’m always like, “They work that many hours a month?” And they’re like, “Yeah, every single month.”

I just thought once the website was built, like, we just move on. Just go.

Apparently, it’s not like that. So I’m reminded every month when I get the bill.

Ezra McCarthy
It’s easy to think, looking at a business like this, that everything goes well—but you mentioned it doesn’t always.

Will you tell us about perhaps one product that you thought, man, this is going to be a banger, that just died? Or maybe a prototype that just never got off the drawing board?

Kory Ballard
We get a lot of products, and we have this little mini Shark Tank thing going here. So I get a lot of people that send me products—that’s really fun too.

I probably get a couple a month, two to three a month, where somebody will send me a product and I get an opportunity to test it. And some of those become great products. We’ve bought them from the people or just send them some mailbox money and some royalties.

But I think the one product that comes to mind that has just not done well—and I’m still blown away, but I’ve got some more insight now—is our Climate King seat.

We have this seat that has heat and cooling. Half the cost of a replacement seat. Like, if you had a Skag Turf Tiger and you called in and ripped the back of it up, and you decided, “Man, I’ve got this $15,000 mower with a ripped seat—I can just put a new seat on it.”

I mean, our Climate King seat delivered—I think—is less than $500. But it’s got a plug-in for your cell phone, it’s got pockets, it’s got the heat and cooling.

I literally thought we would not be able to keep these things in stock.

We’ve maybe sold 50 of them. And I had a PO in for 4,000 of them. I only took delivery of 400.

And then we have our Comfort King seat, which is the same seat, only doesn’t have the heating and cooling—a little cheaper version.

Which is doing better. But I really thought that Climate King seat would just—I was certain it was going to change the industry.

And as I started asking people, the truth of the matter is—it doesn’t make you a dollar more.

They were like, “I’ll just throw some duct tape on it.” I started calling around saying, “Man, like, just break my heart—tell me what I missed here.”

And people are like, “I just don’t really care that much.”

I’m like, okay, so—you’re on it for seven hours a day. It’s the one thing that you’re sitting on for seven hours a day.

If you’re an owner-operator, wouldn’t comfort be absolutely essential?

They’d say, “Not really. I just want it to cut good. I want to mow fast. It’s nice. I’d like to have one, but if I have an extra $500, I’m probably not buying that.”

And by the time my seat’s junk, my mower’s five, six years old—I’m not gonna put a $500 seat on a $4,000 mower.

So maybe I missed—well, I must’ve missed it, because we’re not selling them.

So that one’s been tough for me. I would’ve swore…

Then there’ve been some other ones I thought would be just okay, and we sold tons of them.

Some of the grips, different grips—even the hubcaps I made, the black and chrome hubcaps I made for the mowers—I thought, “Eh, it’d be kind of fun.”

But people want to jazz their mowers up a little bit.

Kory Ballard
So we have three sizes. If you’ve got a Skag Turf Tiger—we keep using Skag for some reason—but your wheels are just black, we’ve got these hubcaps that pop over.

They look cool, right? They’re like 39 bucks.

We’re going to add the hubcaps in an 8, 10, and 12-inch size, which covers all the commercial mowers. We have chrome, and we have black.

Some of the weirdest little gadgets—some of the little gadgets—are our comfort grips. It’s just a foam grip that goes over the stock grips.

Takes some of the vibration away, makes it a little more comfortable.

Ezra McCarthy
People buy that.

Kory Ballard
I think it helps kind of just control them more—if you’re worried about shooting straight lines. They’re like 22 bucks a set, or 24.99 a set with free shipping.

This month, I think we sold five or six hundred sets. So there’s some of those weird little things.

The other stuff sells like it should, but every once in a while you get a product where you think, I don’t know—and then it does awesome. So there’s always some risk with it.

The good thing, like I mentioned, even with the seats—they don’t go bad. But I’ve got 300 and some of them in my warehouse. They take up a lot of space—and that space isn’t free.

So I think slowing down our process a little bit more and asking people…

We have a group of people that buy a lot of stuff from Ballard, and we kind of put them on our VIP list. And we’ve been asking them questions like, “We’re coming out with this new product—tell us what you think.”

Just brutal honesty.

And then we’ll ship them a free demo, or we’ll ship them a coupon. They’ve got a free coupon code that saves them money on any products moving forward.

But I’ve been trying to just use some peer groups a little bit more and ask people. Like—even Leroy. Sometimes I’ll say, “Leroy, would you buy this?”

“It’s cool.”
“But no?”
“Okay, why?”

“I’m not on the mower. If I was on the mower myself, maybe…”

But you mentioned the seat—he’s like, “Dude, I’ll just duct tape my seat.”

And we also sell a seat cover for 39 bucks, right? If your seat’s ripped, you put some duct tape on it, you throw a nice $39 seat cover over it, and you go back to cutting grass.

So I’ve been asking more and slowing down the process a little bit more.

Even our new chute—we’ve got a new chute blocker coming out called the Hex Factor. I really wanted to release it in March, and now we’re into June.

It’s not perfect—and I’m not going to release it until it is.

We were close, and we talked about it, and I’m like, “Man, it’s pretty good.”
And I’m like, “Nope.”

Pretty good—not gonna work.

Because we released one last year and we had some trouble with it. Some guys loved it, some guys hated it.

I would just rather get it right than get it fast. It’s just—I don’t… our reputation is too valuable to me.

And once you sell somebody something that’s not good, they’re probably not coming back.

Ezra McCarthy
What’s one product or category that you’re just really looking forward to growing—or maybe expanding into a new one?

Kory Ballard
We’re really working on a whole set of what we call the Sabre Series.

So a whole set of, I would call it, entry-level racks. A guy starts up and he’s got a small lawn care company—he wants a backpack blower rack, but he doesn’t need a $300 Fast Rack. He just wants one for $99.99. He just wants to hold his blower, and that’s what he needs.

So we’re working on a whole line of what we call the Sabre Series—about 8 to 10 different products: trimmer racks, blower racks, hedge trimmer racks, gas can racks.

Stuff that’s already out there—but we think we’re making it a little bit better.

But really, entry-level pricing with high-quality products.

So I’m excited about that. It’s a tough space because it’s flooded on Amazon, it’s flooded everywhere. But I think we can make the products, and I think we have a great customer base that will trust us.

I think it’ll help when you’ve got a guy who just needs a two-line trimmer rack and he wants to spend $129. He doesn’t need all the gadgets and all the locks and all the—he just wants to hook the two trimmers on there.

He’s 18, 19, 20 years old and he wants to just set his trailer up for a couple hundred, 500 bucks so he can carry his trimmers and blowers.

So I’m excited about that. We’ve got probably 8 to 10 new products in prototype to finishing stage—somewhere on that level.

And so I’m always working on new products. Most of those are our products. A few of them are, like I mentioned, people send us some pretty cool stuff.

And it’s like, “Man, I built this for myself. I’ve been using it in the field. It saves me and my guys tons of time. What do you think?”

My wife calls me a dream crusher—because some of them I’m like, “That’s horrible.”

And some of them I’m like, “That’s pretty slick.”

The MagTarp came from a friend of ours—same deal. Him and a guy built the MagTarp. They were tired of buying tarps at every big box store and ripping them.

It’s called the MagTarp. It’s just a tarp, right? But it’s got the corners—all have magnets. So when you fold it, it holds together.

All the corners have little kick plates and eyelets with handles so you can drag it easier. It folds up, and it has zippers.

So when you’re done—if you have debris—you can fold it up like a burrito, zip it, put it in your trailer, and get your debris home to the dump site without just throwing it on your trailer and having leaves and debris flying everywhere.

So it’s really—we call it a tool, not a tarp. But at the end of the day, it’s just a really awesome tarp with some features that cheap tarps don’t have.

They’re around $100, so maybe three times what a tarp would cost you at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

But man, if you use it right, guys are like, “I paid for it the first day.” You can make it three different sizes, you can fold it up, you can zip it up.

So those are some of the things our industry friends have brought to me and said, “Hey, we built this. We’ve been using it every day for three years. What do you think?”

And I have the ability and the resources and the manufacturing connections to actually get stuff made.

And a guy like them—they get a royalty in perpetuity. Forever. Right? So it’s kind of a win-win.

Because what people don’t get is—making the product is the easy part.

Then you have to figure out how to sell it.

People think making a product or patenting the product is the hard part.

And I have a friend that has a really cool product he made, and he has a patent on it. And now he’s like, “Kory, I had no idea. I thought that was the hard part—now I can’t get anyone to buy it.”

Making a product is hard—a good product—but the real hard part is figuring out how to market it, manufacture it, box it, sell it, warranty it—the whole process.

There’s so much more to a product than just saying, “I’ve got this cool gadget.” Because you’ve got to be able to sell them at the end of the day.

Ezra McCarthy
Said obviously with all these products—even like this, that’s super neat—and I’m curious how much you sell.

But how do you combat people just looking at your site, then going to Amazon and trying to buy something they think is comparable, whether it is or not?

Kory Ballard
Well, yeah—we’re getting knocked off all the time.

Amazon—I thought—was going to be really good for business.

Unfortunately, Amazon’s our number one competitor.

And we sell stuff on Amazon. But if you Google anything lawn care related, our SEO is so good—it’s usually us and Amazon. We beat Amazon quite a bit, which is amazing.

But Amazon is really—to be honest, and this is going to sound bad—it’s horrible for people that have done the right thing.

There are people that created products, did all the right work—patented the product, trademarked the name—and their product has been completely knocked off and destroyed on Amazon.

There’s tons of knockoffs to our products on Amazon. And people think we knocked them off.

Like people will say, “You bought this from China, and you can get the same thing on Amazon.”

No—we started it. They knocked us off. We didn’t knock them off.

But it is what it is. It is challenging. And that’s why I think I’ve continued to expand our line.

We continue to try to explain to people—Amazon is going to be what it is, and they don’t care about patents.

Amazon is just a machine. They have everything—and at prices I don’t even understand.

Some of the prices are so insane.

Like the trimmer handle—Darwin’s Grip—that was something we sold for years. It’s been knocked off so many times.

There’s over 50 listings on Amazon now that have all knocked that off. And it’s patented and everything—and Amazon won’t do anything about it.

You can get one—and I have, we buy stuff on Amazon all the time to test it out—for $14.99. It’s almost identical. With free shipping.

I don’t even know how they can do that. I mean, it costs eight or nine bucks just to ship.

Kory Ballard
No, it’s always—it’s all Chinese. I mean, yeah, you know that from the packaging and when you get it.

But I’m not gonna lie to you—it’s pretty good for $15.

We’ve got the one for $19.99. We got the one for $14.99. They’re pretty good. They work.

And so that’s the challenging part too. And Amazon’s going to continue to do that.

I don’t really worry about other companies competing with us. I encourage them—if they have a good quality product and they run a quality website.

I don’t mind that at all. I’m actually shocked that more haven’t done what we’ve done, which is really put a name and a brand to the product line.

We were just having a conversation about Oregon blades, right? Oregon sells the most aftermarket lawn care blades—but there’s no name to it.

There’s no brand to it. Like—you just buy an Oregon blade or you don’t. And it works, and you get exactly what you get. And it’s a pretty good blade.

And you don’t go on their website if you’re mad. You just buy them or you don’t.

And so we’ve tried to make it feel less transactional and more personal.

And with that has come some good and bad, right?

When you buy from Ballard, you feel like you probably know the people you’re buying from.

You can reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or our website—we answer.

We answer the phone. We answer Facebook comments.

Whereas nobody else is really doing that.

Which—I’m shocked that somebody else hasn’t tried to do what we’re doing.

But at the end of the day, you’ve got to have the product. You’ve got to be willing to spend the money.

I mean, we have almost $4 million in inventory right now.

And so, somebody—you have to have money to do it.

And that’s one thing people don’t get either.

It’s like—I don’t have trucks and trailers and skid loaders now. Now I have inventory of product.

So it’s just a different business model.

But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there’s always going to be competition.

I just tell our team constantly—let’s just stick to what we do. Our core values and our business beliefs. Let’s just do what we do—and do it really, really well.

It is what it is. There’s enough people out there—we’ll be just fine.

Ezra McCarthy
The feedback you get from people now—would you be able to tell us a customer story, leaving out names to protect the innocent and guilty?

What’s one of the craziest customer stories you’ve had at Ballard?

Kory Ballard
Oh, there’s millions of them. Like, there’s so many.

I mean, that’s the unfortunate part—there’s a lot of misinformation out there.

We did a funny kind of spoof video about being the middleman, because people just keep saying, “Well, Ballard’s just the middleman. Just the middleman.”

We just had one this morning—I was talking to Kaz and Austin about it. It was pretty funny. The guy said, “Don’t buy blades from Ballard, they’re just the middleman. Go to your dealer.”

That makes no sense. Your dealer is 100% the middleman.

And so it’s such a confusing thing. We get this quite a bit—it happens probably a couple times a day—people will say, “Ballard’s just the middleman, just buy direct.”

And I’m like… from who?

A guy just posted, “I heard you don’t make your own blades.”

Like, well, no—we don’t have a 10 or 15 million dollar metal forging factory out here with blacksmiths building blades. No, we certainly outsource to the best high-quality manufacturer we can.

But I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: the people who make our blades make almost all the aftermarket blades. There’s like two companies that make them.

And if you think Oregon blades are made in the United States—that’s not true either. I know exactly where they’re made.

Same thing with string trimmer line. The people that make our line—they make Black Diamond too. I’m just telling you right now—Echo Black Diamond, that’s the best ever? Same company makes it.

And I probably shouldn’t even say that.

But there’s this misconception—like you should buy Echo Black Diamond because it’s the “best line ever,” or you should buy Oregon blades because they’re “made in the USA”—but they’re not.

There’s just this weird thing. So the middleman thing constantly comes up.

And yeah, I don’t answer many of those questions anymore because I’m too jaded, and I’m too emotionally connected—because I take it personally, and I don’t know why.

But yeah, it’s this “Ballard doesn’t make their stuff” thing.

And I’m like, you do know that when you buy a Chevrolet—they don’t make Chevys in the back, right?

And you do know when you go to the Exmark dealer and you pick up your mower, and you buy some mixed fuel, and you grab an Echo off the shelf—they don’t make those in the back, right?

And when you go to the grocery store—there’s not a dude in the back making Doritos and dipping them in nacho dip.

Everything you buy—every single place—they don’t make it there.

Everybody’s the middleman, unless you’re in a few rare scenarios where you’re buying directly from the manufacturer.

I don’t know of much else like that.

So we’re as close to it, I think, as you get. We’ve taken the dealer network and the distributor network completely out of the middle.

Otherwise, I’d have to just charge more money. If I sold my blades to Joe’s Lawnmower Shop, and he’s got to mark it up 35%, by the time the customer gets it—

That’s what I think has been the nice thing. The customer can get it direct from us.

You go to our website, you order blades, you get them in three or four days. Problem solved.

So I don’t really have any one direct customer story—like, we have a lot.

But I’ll tell you this—we ban and block faster than anybody in the United States, man.

I just don’t participate in negativity. I don’t participate in misinformation.

We don’t argue with people that go on our website and use any sort of cursing.

Listen, I cuss too much—but when you go on our website and start saying stuff about me personally, my wife, my family—anything like that—we just ban and block.

We just don’t participate in that nonsense.

There are people out there trying to talk poorly about our brand. When people tag us, I don’t even—

We don’t participate.

I actually kind of find it funny. When someone says, “So-and-so said this,” we always just say, “Never heard of them.”

Truthfully—we do know who some of them are. But I’m not going to give them any validity.

I’m just not gonna.

Ezra McCarthy
It sounds like some of this is just a misconception on what business is at its fundamental.

Kory Ballard
For sure, right? I mean, like—“You don’t make your product.”

No, you’re right. We have great manufacturers that make products. We design them, we test them, we build them, and then we choose the best manufacturer to build the highest quality product to give the customer the best price. That’s what we do.

Even on lawnmowers—when people say, “Ballard doesn’t make their own blades,” I’m like, you do know that lawnmower is made up of numerous parts from overseas, right?

It has a Kawasaki motor, the tires are from overseas, the pulleys, the belts, the electronics. Even though Ferris mowers are built in the United States, the components on it…

Just Google how much of a Chevy Avalanche pickup is Chinese. Just Google it. I think it’s the highest. I think the Avalanche is the highest. Dodge is up there too.

But it’s like 60% of the components on a Chevy pickup are from China.

I know they’re made in Detroit—but it’s still…

And we get the funny ones like, “I don’t buy anything that’s not made in America.”

And I’m like, you’re typing on a phone not made in America. Come on, man. You click on your TV—your Hitachi or whatever. I don’t know. Come on, man.

Ezra McCarthy
I listened to this podcast talking about Apple and their time up there. There’s this one factory in China—which, maybe now they’re diversifying some—but this one factory produced, I would love to see a picture of how big it is, 500,000 iPhones a day.

And I was doing the numbers—I’m like, this is just absolutely mind-boggling.

Well, I want to respect your time, Kory. One last question for you:

Which product at Ballard do you personally love or use the most?

Kory Ballard
Yeah. Isn’t that bonkers?

Blades and blockers. I mean, those are the simple ones.

Perfect Cut runs blockers on all their machines. We run the Ballard blades on all of them.

It’s kind of weird—a company like Perfect Cut doesn’t use all the things that we sell. And people ask why. And I’m like—because of the size, we have to keep things very simple and clean, right?

A lot of the gadgets or add-on things that are convenient and ergonomic and comfortable—they’re really nice for an owner-operator.

But when you get into scale, it gets hard to do.

Almost every commercial operator has a chute blocker of some sort on their machine.

I just think it’s a nice tool—whether you’re trying to control the discharge, or you’re around people, buildings, glass.

It’s just a great option to be able to close off the discharge, even if it’s just for a minute or two—to keep grass from going where it doesn’t belong.

We’ve got several different options for those, and we’re working on a couple of new ones right now that we think are pretty cool.

So that’s probably the most-used product—and one of our best sellers as well.

Ezra McCarthy
Well, thanks, Kory, for this great business advice and insight into Ballard.

If someone’s looking to find out more about Ballard, where’s the best place to find you?

Kory Ballard
Yeah, we’re pretty easy—it’s ballard-inc.com.

So ballard-inc.com.

Facebook is Ballard Products.
Instagram is Ballard Products.

If you watch one video on Facebook, you’ll never get me out of your feed—so sorry about that.

We try to do some fun stuff too. We try not to be super pitchy all the time. We’re trying to mix it up a little bit more again.

And then we have The Green Grind, which is a podcast that Leroy and I do.

We try to get lawn care owners on weekly and just really talk about what’s going on in their business.

And you’ve been on The Green Grind three or four times now.

We try to get guys to help with marketing and insurance and some of the pitfalls to try to avoid.

If you’re looking for another podcast to check out—The Green Grind is, we think, a good podcast.

Every time we talk about stopping it, not doing it, our customers or our friends and listeners blast me with messages and say, don’t stop, we like it.

So we’ll keep doing it.

Ezra McCarthy
It is good. Go check it out.

Well, big thanks to Kory for sharing this behind the scenes there at Ballard.

And if this got your wheels turning, be sure to share it with another lawn care business owner.

And until next time, we’ll catch you on the next one.