- DECK
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Tecovas CEO David Lafitte joins host Elizabeth Gore to talk about how the “Warby Parker of cowboy boots” grew into a Western lifestyle brand with 50+ stores nationwide, and why “radical hospitality” is critical to the company’s success.
Howdy y’all. Welcome to The Big Idea. I’m Elizabeth Gore, co-founder and president of Hello Alice. So what’s between the spreadsheets this week, Gus? No, not excited. The Small Business Administration announced nearly $4.9 million in grants over five years to expand its Veterans Business Outreach Center network. This is so critically important because US veterans make upA beating heart of our business community. New centers y’all are coming to Alaska, Florida, and Louisiana along with supporting satellite offices. The centers provide free training, counseling, and technical assistance to veterans, active duty service members, member of the National Guard and Reserve, military spouses, and eligible family members. And I want to give a big shout out to military spouses, and I hope they use this. They can help you evaluate a business idea, build a business plan.And find capital, market your company, pursue government contracts, and understand veteran owned business certification, which I hope all of you do, because there’s a lot of benefits behind that. The SBA now works with 51 veterans business outreach center locations nationwide. Uh, love this. Its veteran entrepreneurship program have trained nearly 260,000 people since 2013. So go to SBA.gov VBOC to find.Center serving your area. Even if there is not a new location in your state, the existing network provides support throughout the whole country. Now let’s cowboy up with a man helping turn a Texas boot company into one of the fastest growing brands in America. I am so excited y’all as a cowgirl at heart. Let’s go to Cova’s. David Lafitte is the president and CEO of Toova’s, the Austin-based company known for its handcrafted cowboy boots, Western apparel, and what it calls radical hospitality.Before joining Toova’s in 2022, David spent nearly two decades as a corporate lawyer and then found the light and made an unusual leap from general counsel to the chief operating officer at Decker’s Brands, where he helped oversee y’all $3 billion portfolio that included Ugg, Hoka’s, Teva, and many more. Today, Taova’s has more than 50 stores, generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales, and is expanding from a direct to consumer boot company.To a national Western lifestyle brand. So y’all, David reportedly has almost 60 pairs of takovas in his closet. I mean, that’s not one, that is a herd. So let’s welcome David to the Big Idea. All right, David, howdy. Welcome to the Big Idea.
Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having
me. I mean, clearly I’m incredibly biased because I’m from Texas, grew up on a cattle ranch. I’m surrounded by Takovas in my home.
I love it. You’re authentic.
So gorgeous. My bag that’s been beat to death over the years, but it’s still standing.
Yeah, I love that it’ll keep standing. I can, I can assure you
of that. Gus almost chewed it up once, but we, we subvented that, so.Um, man, congratulations. What, what a beautiful
brand. Yeah, it has been fun. I must say that I’m 4 years in and, um, and still kind of pinching myself, so it has been fun.
How is it going from a very different brands? I mean, you, you were leading, um, Uggs, and so, you know, Hokahs and, and now you’re in.This like quintessential Western world. What’s that
like? You know, there’s a lot of similarities as far as just brand building goes, um, a lot of things learned along the way. You know, one of my big sort of passions is, is about building teams and culture. And I, and I think that sort of crosses every industry and, and every brand, and I’m sure the companies you run, you would probably agree that if you’ve got a strong culture and a strong,Team, you can, you can do a lot and so we, we focus a lot on that and that’s where I spend frankly, a lot of my time.
Let’s talk about your founder because, um, we talk a lot about failure on this show and what it leads to and, and my understanding is that he didn’t get into multiple business schools and that kind of was a, a precursor to this. Tell me that story.
Yeah, well, he, he didn’t, when you say multiple, it’s, it was two, Stanford and Harvard, so.Uh, he didn’t exactly, he didn’t exactly, I went to Texas
A&M, but I think I’ve heard of those,
yeah, and, uh, so he didn’t exactly spray the, the field and, and sort of set himself up for some maybe easier entry schools. But yeah, so after that, he decided that he wanted to start a business and looked at, frankly, a lot of different types of industries, everything from the funeral home industry to, to boots, etc. kind of looking at it, looking at it very objectively, not just what he was passionate about.And, and at the end of the day, landed on, on cowboy boots and Western, and, you know, was a great steward of the brand and, and he could have continued. I have no doubt. He’s an incredibly bright, uh, young man. Um, but I think at, at, you know, year 6 or whatever it was at the time, you know, felt like he, he wanted to bring somebody else in as the CEO and, and so did a search and I, I happened to have met him, uh, because actually Dekker was,Uh, kind of kicking the tires a little bit on Tykova’s at the time, and also just learning because Tykova is one of the digitally native companies coming out in 2015. They were doing some things in performance marketing that even, you know, a firm like Decker’s could learn from. So we came out and had a full day with them on the types of things that they were working on. So, that’s when I got to meet Paul, and he and I kind of kept up maybe once a year just to check in with each other.
I wantto go back to that becauseI think everyone just assumes this is totally normal today, but when this launched, tell me what, uh, digital native meant at the time and why was that groundbreaking, particularly for a boot brand.
Digitally native truly being selling only online ecom. I don’t even mean direct to consumer. I mean solely, uh, selling through ecom. And, and at the time when Paul started, the Western market was pretty, it had two things, uh, that he sort of saw as an opportunity. One,And very few brands were, were, were selling direct to consumer. And then secondly, the distribution was very fragmented. You had a lot of independent wholesalers, retailers, mom and pops. You had two larger, uh, distributors, Boot Barn and Cavender’s, but, but the point being a very fragmented marketplace. So you saw the opportunity to take a brand and go direct to consumer. And at the outset,You know, kind of known as the Warby Parker of cowboy boots and taking out the middleman andYou know, going direct to consumer in order to provide incredible value to, to the consumers and the product.
A bit of a risk, uh, for an actual Western boot brand because even though I live and breathe cowboy, at that time, it was not such a, a household trend that it is today, right?
Correct. And, and also not to mention it’s a dead fit, you know, there’s no shoelaces. So, you know, if you order online and you’re off, you’re off. There’s no way to adjust it.So you’re gonna have a lot of, your, your return rates are gonna be fairly high, um, so yes, you’re, you’re correct
though and bulky shipping, right, and yeah,
large packages exactly.
Well, uh, pre-trend, then suddenly we have Cowboy Carter and the rest of the world waking up to, to Texas andYeah Yellowstone, and tell me how y’all rode that trend.
Well, I, I do think Yellowstone was a big impetus of, of a lot of this, you know, Taylor Sheridan’s show, that’s where Tkoa’s was very, had a very successful advertising on that show. You know, I, my view is that we’re in now a complete cultural zeitgeist, and, and I, I believe American is becoming more Western. Um, I, I don’t believe it’s a trend. I think it’s becoming more mainstream.You know, country music driving a lot of it, uh, you know, look at Ella Langley and being on the top 100, uh, for what now, 25 weeks, absolutely stunning charts, not just, yeah, exactly, not just country, country, yeah, and it continues to be the fastest growing genre in in music that is country music. And, and when, when you look at people listening to country music, it’s not in traditionally western areas that includes the Northeast, the, the West.You know, so it’s not like 80% of the people in Texas listen to country music, but only 20% in California or 20% in New York. It’s pretty widely distributed.
It is, and, um, I wanna go back to the Yellowstone, um, advertising and partnership. How did that come about? Was, was who talked to who on that gig? I mean, it, it was sobrilliant.
Yeah, that was, that was Paul, uh, you know, that was before I started andAnd there wasn’t as much of a partnership as simply, you know, buying ad space on, on their show and, and just getting, you know, spikes on the website, uh, you know, as, as the show was, was being seen by 13 million plus people, um, and so, you know, it was putting content, you know, and fishing where the fish were, were at the
time. Well, I love to fish, so I get that, um, you, you all have a, a concept for, uh, radical hospitality.Yeah I, I wanna understand first what that means and then why it’s critical.
Well, it, it’s, I think it’s kind of evolved, you know, first of all, the other thing when I started, the, the beauty of my situation was that the aesthetic of the brand, the look and feel of the brand, the stores that had been opened up at the time, all, I think were spot on. So I didn’t have to be in a position where I’m trying to refigure.Uh, uh, change the brand around or do something to reinvigorate, you know, brand heat. So, I think Paul did an incredible job of his, both on the product, timeless product, as well as, again, the design of the stores, that type of thing. Um, and so, I could just kind of ride that and, and scale it. But radical hospitality, you know, one of Paul’s values was just being in, we want to stand for Western values, authenticity, hospitality.You know, being genuine, straight shooting, and all the values that I think in this day and time, whether you’re on the left or the right, you know, can stand up, you know, people, it’s hard to argue with those values and integrity and those types of things. Now, when we talk about radical hospitality, we want to make sure that when somebody walks into our store, they are coming and getting an incredible experience. I don’t care whether they buy a product or not. I want them walking out feeling like, wow, that’s a cool place.That was, you know, all the salespeople were approachable. I was educated about boots. I was educated about their apparel. I, we have a bar in every store, um, serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. We offer complimentary branding services. So if you do buy a product, you can get it customized and in fact, to the point where 25% of the transactions in our retail stores have some form of customization, whether that’s hat branding or or boot branding.So we’ve taken that concept of radical hospitality.And the fact is,If we don’t treat our own people with the same sort of mantra of radical hospitality, there’s no way in turn we can expect them to treat our consumers in that way. So now it’s almost, we, we’ve put on our flywheel, this concept of just cultivating a, a, a culture of radical hospitality. So it means to our own employees, it means to our vendors, you know, sort of like the Koch Industries principle-based management, we want to be the vendor of choice.Our factory partners, our wholesale partners, because we do what we say we’re gonna do. We forecast well, we plan well, we don’t put a PO out there to our factories and pull it back, and, and we just wanna be the partner of choice. If they had to choose, if I can only work with 3 brands, who would I want to choose? We want to be the brand that they would choose. And, and I think that, that culture has been incredibly powerful. And I think that when you look at the way in which we’re operating in retail, I, I just can’t tell you.The text and, and emails I get from people that have walked out of stores that don’t even know me, they’ve found my email somehow. I’m just talking about not even how great the product is, but just how they were treated in that store. And so, you know, people are, I think, wanting a respite from all that’s going on in this day and time. And I think to walk in a door and be treated in a way that we would like to be treated ourselves.Um, not to mention, uh, a, a product that has an incredible value proposition to it. So it’s really kind of become a very cultural thing at, at Takoa’s and, and one that I think is very important for our success.
Doyou have a, a favorite story, um, around radical hospitality
that I have, I have several, but I, I, one I’ll tell you is we, we opened a, a store in Detroit last year andThere was a permitting issue and, and the opening had to be pushed about 1 week, and we sent out a notice because when we do open a store, we tend to get a line out the door of, you know, 100 people or more, and the memo didn’t make it to a couple who had happened to have driven in from an hour away and got to the store and it wasn’t open yet.And we, we heard about this, um, these two friends who had babysitters, to sit with their kids so they could come in an hour away and drive to the Detroit store. Our store associates heard about that, and they said, we’re going to ship them a little goodie bag for their inconvenience, and they realized that they drove in from Canada, and we can’t, and we can’t ship anything to Canada. So these two associates jumped in a car and drove it across the border and met these two women.And they were crying just like, I can’t believe you would take the time to come do that. But the amazing thing is, and the important thing is, they didn’t call their manager, they didn’t call me, they didn’t call anybody to say, is it OK if we do this? They just knew we would tell them that’s the right thing to do, go do it. So we’re, we want to empower people to use their judgment and just being empathetic. How would you feel if you were in their position?And that, that, rather than sort of doing a bunch of policies and procedures, like, you know, you need to make sure they can only get one of this, so they can’t really, you know, just use your judgment, your discretion, and, and treat the people and make sure they have a great experience. So that, that’s one example, a long winded one, sorry, but no,
I loveit. I love it. AndI can tell that the, the notion of culture radical hospitality when it’s one of your store associates who again just took it on their own intuition, right? Absolutely. when you, um, well, how many employees do y’all have
we, we have about, well, including all of retail, I’d say I don’t know, 1500, uh, at headquarters, and I’ll get to that in a second, but about 180.I hate that distinction between headquarters in the field because my view is we are here at headquarters for that field. They’re the ones on the front lines, whether it’s our CX team on the phones or our retail team members out in the field providing radical hospitality to our consumers. Headquarters is here to, to provide them with the tools and things that they need, great product.Great marketing, but how can they best serve the consumer? So I, I just don’t like that us versus them. But anyway, the, the retail field’s about 1200, I’d
say. When you’re hiring these folks, because I mean you’re not one store anymore, right? You’re, you’re all over the country and, um, as, as our small business owners think, is it time to go from one store to 2 to 4, you know, it’s very personal to them. How, how do you, um, in your founder.Ensure that notion of culture and customer service stays with over 1000 people. Yeah,
it, because we just, we, we obsess about it. And, and if anything is going to get in the way of, you know, can we open 15 stores, the, the answer is going to be, it depends on the human capital. If we don’t feel like we can get the managers and the, and regional managers and people that can handle it.Um, then we would pause. So it’s not even a matter of capital. Can we afford a new lease and, and capital expenditure to go get the design and the aesthetic right? It, it’s gonna be more of a human capital issue. And, and we, we spend a lot of time and money training associates and making sure, as I said, we treat them well, so they in turn will treat our consumers well. And if that starts to feel like we’re getting too big to have that.That feel, then, then we probably need to slow down a little bit.
I got to ask you, how many boots do youown?
I’m, I’m probably about 60 pair,
I would say. Do you have to builda new closet. Where dothey?
I, I, that, that my wife said you got to get these out of here and put them upstairs in an upstairs guest bedroom closet. So,
well, theyare beautiful. I mean, you could just do a full wall art, right? Absolutely, yeah. How do you decide, oh, I’m going to get the next pair, the next pair.
Uh, sometimes it’s, I want to make sure, you know, just for my, as a consumer, wanting to make sure, like the human capital issue we just talked about.You know, that, that our quality and, and the out of the box comfort that I, you know, our product pillars are being met. So I, I act like it’s me just testing product when I really want that cool new pair.
Do you have one pair that you gravitatetowards?
I, I rotate quite a bit right now. I’m wearing a deerskin cutter toe that I love, but, uh, I, I, I rotate quite a bit.
Well, I, it’s like choosing your favorite kid. I would exactly, yeah.Um, I wanna talk through manufacturing. Uh, I believe y’all’s stuff is built in Leon. Is that right? In Mexico?
For the most part we’ve opened up, uh, India and Vietnam as well, uh, for different types of products where we may need different types of innovation and not yet, but I’d say, uh, a large part of our what we call our best of breed product is in Leon, Mexico.
What was the original decision to start there and, and tell me about those relationships with your manufacturers?
Well, again, Paul started that, Leon being known kind of as the boot capital of the world. There, there are a lot of incredible tradesmen, uh, and, and craftsmen working in Leon. You know, coming from Deckerser where I was chief operating officer and kind of managed the whole supply chain ecosystem, I’m a huge believer in kind of what I said earlier about radical hospitality and, and being the vendor of choice and establishing long-term strategic partnerships with our factory partners.You know, we’re, we’re never gonna be.You know, going and acquiring a factory, but that doesn’t mean we don’t treat them almost like Takova’s employees. And so we, we build very solid relationships with our factory partners. Uh, we, we want to treat them well. We don’t want to be trading off on margin. What is the right long-term sustainable margin where they feel like they’re making.A good profit, and we’re making a good profit, and that’s how you do a win-win situation. If it’s us grabbing every little, you know, nickel off the table, at some point, they’re gonna come and say, OK, this doesn’t really work for us. So, we, we really try andMake sure we’re very transparent with them. If we’re not happy with quality, let’s dig in and where we’re having, you know, things break down and production lines. And one other thing I’d say, a lot of times you see, oh, those boots are made in the same factory as such and such. That really has nothing to do with the quality of, of a given product. We, we have, you know, there’s standards on, on any given production line that are very different.And even at Decker’s, you may have, you know, certain products that are on one, production line and another. There may be different standards. If it’s a more pinnacle product, your standards are gonna be very different. So we, we spend a lot of time, we’ve got probably 60 people in Leon in a, in a Mexico office that supports the factories and supports our product development. So, you know, we, we spend a lot of time and money in product development, in, in quality control, and, and all of that stuff. So it.We’re, we’re proud of the factories and the work that they’re doing, and we help them wherever we can.
With tariffs and with all the policy changes and the whiplash with all of that, how do you, one, as a CEO plan for that from a cash flow perspective, um, or react, I guess. And then I’m curious, the dialogue betweenThe manufacturing leads when those types of things change so quickly.
It’s a great question. Fortunately, and we didn’t know this at the time, but the, the, the, the trade agreement we’re, we’re under now, so, so tariffs have not been a problem at, at when, when all of this started, we just had a lot of contingency planning, and it’s also why you need a diversified manufacturing base, uh, you.It’s just, it, it, there’s too big of a risk to have all of your production in a given region, much less a given factory, and whether it’s a fire or, or some regulatory issue. So you, you, you’ve got to splinter that supply chain a little bit just to, to mitigate risk. And then, then you use your, the needs of, of the product to, to move to that other region.And sometimes you dual source given, you know, the, the size of a given style or, or product. Yeah, I mean, I, you, you just do the best you can staying agile, and, and then knowing that sometimes you may have to, to your point about discussing with the factory, yes, let’s, let’s see how we can each, you know, take some of the pain here, um, before we just pass it along to a consumer. And then sometimes you, you know, you, you’re gonna have to do that as well. Um, we’ve been, as I said, fortunate so far.Um, as far as the, the trade agreement goes, so
we, um, love to talk about mistakes because we all learn from them and, and we call them our dirty unicorns. I wonder if, if you’ve had one in business thatUh, that you could teach us about.
Well, I, I think to your point, we all have them, and, and I think the key is learning from them and moving on. And I, I think, you know, as a former lawyer, what I would say is,I don’t mind risk. Business is all about risk. What, what you don’t want is falling backwards over a cliff that you didn’t know was there. So, I think just identifying risk and then managing how you want to navigate those risks is important. And as you said, you learn from all of those, you know, I, I don’t wanna have people looking over their shoulder. I want to empower them, make a decision, let’s move on. If it turns out to be the wrong decision, if we have the right process.That’s more important because then more often than not, we’re gonna get the right decisions made. But in, I guess to answer the question more specifically, about one year after I got here, I, I feel like things were, were starting to, we started to get very diluted in our, our look and feel, our content. It, it didn’t feel like rich storytelling, and, and yet, the Western steeped in that ability to do storytelling, and I felt like the, the brand started to move away from a North Star.Which in my view, and, in our view, is, you know, gritty, authentic, romantic, um, and I, I thought it got a little too watered down and diluted. And as a result, we stopped putting our content in upper funnel and focused more on lower funnel type work. And I mean, we started to really feel the results.So, we, we needed to hurry up offense. We needed to get back to a North Star, aligning the entire marketing and frankly, product team and company around this North Star, and, and then getting out and creating content that met it, so that we felt proud to be putting the content back and spending an upper funnel to grease the skids for, for the lower funnel. And, but we really saw a dip in, in traffic, qualified traffic.And started to hit our results. Uh, fortunately, we, we, we did a hurry up offense and we were able to correct that. And, and that’s been now a couple of years and, and, and things have been, on a much better path. But, you know, those are the types of things also.That sometimes it’s not just one decision. It, it’s, you allow things to kind of incrementally millimeter at a time, go out of place, and before you know it, your ship is just going in the complete wrong direction. And, and you can’t look back and say, well, it was that one thing. It was just,And, and that can happen in product if you take your eye off the ball and allow, well, what’s the big deal? It’s just a, a stitch that’s out of place. You know, but those things accumulate over time and then people let their guard down and all of a sudden you’ve got a major problem on your hands.That didn’t happen in one decision or overnight. It was just, it was the cumulative nature of these things adding up.
The worddiluted is really interesting, and I’m curious if as you grow and you get more customers, more interest, more employees, it’s not taking your eye off the ball, it sounds like, but, but it’sServing so many opinions and agendas, like how
does it’s a great, great, great question. And I think that our goal is to make sure that, that we stay anchored. And if we open up in SoHo in New York City, we’re not going up there in a way that is going to try and cater to a consumer in New York City. We need to go up there authentically Western, um, and being who we are, and either over time convincing them, you know, that.Here’s a shirt or here’s a Monterey, a slip-on product they can wear. They’re not quite ready for cowboy boots, but I think to try and create a product line, yeah, to try and create a product line that’s suited for that, um, region as opposed to what we are good at, that’s where we have to just make sure we’re staying true to ourselves and our consumers. And I, and I do think.You know, threading the needle of, of welcoming people into the tent of Western, but in a way that doesn’t embarrass the, the, the, you, you know, who is authentically from Texas and grew up on a ranch, and that, where you would be proud of the way in which we’re doing it and stewarding it as opposed to embarrassed by it because it’s like this drugstore cowboy or concrete cowboy, whatever you want to call it. And I think,We try and look at all hat no cattle. Exactly, yes, even more appropriate. So we want to kind of use a filter of, of folks like yourself to make sure that, that you would be proud of what we’re doing and not embarrassed by it.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Um, you know, Yeti is a great example, you know, that they,
yeah, and, and they, um, you know, going hardcore fishing and hunting.But the, the, the, the person sitting in an office in Chicago that might have a Yeti cooler, uh, Yeti tumbler on their desk, they’re not gonna go market that person like, here’s a Yeti that you can put on your desk. You know, that, that, it’s an aspirational situation where that person knows what that brand stands for and, and, and wants to be part of it. And I think that’s, they’re, they’re a great example of, as they were growing and, and,You know, and expanding that beyond their, their roots, but in a way that, that remained authentic.
Absolutely. So David, you’ve had such an incredible career and, and I’m, I’m so proud that you, you stepped to the right from the legal profession into.Bringing us all these beautiful brands. Um, I’m curious if there’s an, an artifact or something that it kind of embodies your experience.
I, I don’t know that that crosses over all of that, but I do have one thing I’d like to share, um, and I, I, I actually met Will Gera, who was the author of Unreasonable Hospitality fortuitously, fortuitously at a, at a duck hunting trip. He and I were guests of, of the host.And I’m embarrassed to say at the time, this is last year, I wasn’t aware of Will, uh, I had never met him, but I was not even aware of him or the book. But, as, as you may know, he was, he took the helm at 11 Madison Park in New York, and at the time, a two-star restaurant, brought it to a, uh, the number one restaurant in the world, 3 Michelin stars, and I happened to meet him, and he and I were talking. Actually, I told him,I was talking about our, our concept of radical hospitality, not knowing at the time he wrote Unreasonable Hospitality. And I told him the example of what I shared with you about the couple who drove to Canada from Detroit. And so after the duck hunting trip, we had a great, uh, time and over drinks and talked about where hospitality is going and, and I just learned a ton. And then I got home and he, and he sent me an autographed, um, copy of his book. So I’d say this is an artifact.And just because it, it, we were such, at the time, you know, building this concept of radical hospitality and, and then to hear him take it to the next level, and now applying some of the stuff that he, uh, you know, uh, applied in his restaurant to, to our world.And now actually he’s coming this spring in, in 2027 to, to talk at our, our annual retail conference where we have all of our field managers come, come to Austin. So I’m, I’m really excited to have him speak to the entire group about unreasonable hospitality. Yeah, that is great, but he’s quite a guy. It’s incredible. It is a very good read for sure.
No matter what industry you’re in and even how you treat your own friends and family.Yes, I mean, that is, that is important.
Yeah, very good, and, and, and, and it does apply in not just our world or the restaurant world, but really any industry,
I think.Every business starts small, and we love to get back on our show and shout out a small business that’s doing amazing work. I’m curious, David, if you have afavorite.
One would be, it’s not very small anymore, but it’s founder-led and it continues to be founder-led and owned, which is Bucky’s, which I’m sure you know very well.I, I just, yeah, I mean, you talk about hospitality, you know, you walk into their store, you’re greeted, hello, ma’am, hello, sir, it’s spotless, um, their attention to detail. So I, I’m just a huge fan of what they’ve been able to do in these, you know, big box sort of stores, but doesn’t feel big box. They, they’ve got a lot of point of sale service across the entire store. So that,That’s one that
I’m, so now I just got to say really quickly, when I land in Texas, there’s multiple things I have to have, and one of those is a chopped beef sandwich at Bucy’s. I mean, I, I go and then I do the thing where I, I do a dirty soda where I get every fountain drink like in there.But the chopped beef sandwich, I like crave it. I loveit.
Yeah, I agree. My, my drives to Austin to Dallas, I, I, I stop there every time. I’m like, and get a car wash, which is incredible too.Uh, the other one I’d say, which is again not very small business, but Mark Maggiore, I mean, I think recently at his auction, he just sold about $9 million worth of paintings, and actually I’ve got, I don’t know if you can see, but two prints in my office here. It’s one, and then one behind me. I can’t afford his originals, but he’s somebody else I just look up to as far as storytelling and western and what he’s able to accomplish with that small brush is just unbelievable,
um.And, and again how he’s inspiring western as well. So that’s another one I would say.
Beautiful. I love both and, um, as a fanatical, I think I’ve read every western and I love all the art and that’s amazing. Well, I, David, just wanna thank you for giving us your storytelling and your time andUm, and, and truly to you and Paul, it is so important to me if you saw my office here, it’s, you know, I can tell from the ranch and, and growing up on agriculture and being a cowboy is, I think, the heart and soul of this country. It’s how we were built and the fact that it is, everyone is embracing it now is, is a, is a big testament to you all, so.Uh, I have a thank you quote for you, and actually it’s from my grandmother Opal, um, and she, she would always say, uh, keep your horses fed, your boots polished, and your wits about you, and you’ll be just fine.
I love it.Yeah, that’s great. Well, thank you to Opel.
The big idea.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.
Oh, thanks again to David for joining us in his radical hospitality and Paul’s beautiful boots. Oh, so amazing. And thank all of you for joining us this week. I’ll see you next time with more stories and insights to help your small business succeed. Until then, come say howdy to me at any of my social channels at Elizabeth Gore USA as my grandmother always says, hold your head up high and give them hell.
