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Cajun Archery

Seizing Oportunities

By Bill & Sherry Krenz

Ability needs opportunity. Otherwise ability may be wasted.

“I’d just turned 40, the automotive industry upon which I’d built my career was struggling and I realized that if I didn’t strike out on my own now, I probably never would.” Those are the words of David W. White of Cajun Archery.

“I must also admit that I’ve always been a bit impulsive and a lover of adventure. Just eight days after I turned 18, I skipped school, met with a recruiter and joined the Navy, all without consulting with my parents. We had been talking about college. But I felt I just wasn’t ready for college yet, and the navy offered a better opportunity for me right then. I wanted to do something different and interesting. I felt then, and I still believe today, that military service is one of the very few things you can do at 18 to actually make a difference by doing something that’s truly important.”

After nearly six years in active duty in the United States Navy, where he served as a diver stationed aboard a submarine, David finally enrolled in college in 1988.

“I attended Utah State University and graduated with a degree in economics. At the time I thought a great deal about going on to law school and also about a career on Wall Street. Both seemed like great opportunities. But I remember my father telling me that while those courses would be all well and good and that he would always be proud of me, he really thought that I would be happier personally and the world would be a whole lot better off if I actually produced something that someone wanted and needed.

“He advised that making something would be far more satisfying than working, say, on Wall Street. It proved to be great advice and a turning point in my life. I decided to get involved in the manufacturing arena.”

Fresh out of college, David White went to work for an automotive company that manufactured airbags. He worked his way up through the ranks, learned production controls, program management, contract negotiations and even new-business development. And in these later roles, he traveled all over the world for the company. He also went back to school at nights to earn his MBA in 1998.

In 2004, however, David found himself taking stock of his career.

“The airbag company I worked for was great, although the auto industry as a whole was clearly struggling,” says David. “Layoffs were commonplace, and to advance, you often had to relocate with surprising frequency. Things came to a head when I was offered a promotion, but tied to it was relocation to Mexico or possibly China. Things were out of my control.

“I talked it over with my wife, and then quit my job the very next day. It was time to look for my own opportunities.”

Within a month, David partnered with longtime friend and lean-manufacturing expert Clifford Dawson to form Corolla Capital Management.

“The express purpose of our new firm was to identify and acquire existing but maybe underachieving manufacturing companies or brands that we could take to the next level. During my MBA classes, various professors had often asked how many of us hoped to someday start our own businesses. A lot of hands usually shot up. But I always responded by in turn asking why start a company from scratch when you could buy an existing business?

“I’d long realized that I was not a terribly creative person. I admire people that are creative and innovative. But my skill is in taking someone else’s innovative ideas and actually making them work. In manufacturing, that means taking excellent product ideas and then efficiently and profitably producing and selling those products. That I could do.”

About six months later, Cajun Archery was brought to David’s attention by a business broker.

“The broker felt that the business was perfect for me. I’d long been an avid fisherman, hunter and archer. But I was skeptical. Did I really want to turn my hobby into a job?

“Eventually, I relented and flew to Louisiana to meet with Cajun’s founder and owner Billy Armentor. We hit it off almost immediately. Billy had started Cajun Archery in 1963, while he was attending college. He actually began by making wood arrows in his dorm room to help defray costs. After college, the operation had continued to grow so that by the late 1960s, Billy was able to quit his day job and go into the business of manufacturing cedar arrows full time. In short order Cajun Archery became the chief arrow supplier to AMF Wing Archery, one of the leading archery companies of that day. At its arrow-making height, Cajun Archery had 40-plus employees and 20 fletching tables and was making well in excess of a million arrows a year. For the next three decades, Cajun Archery continued to manufacture and distribute arrows, youth archery products, bowhunting products and some of the world’s best bowfishing gear. Somewhere along the line, Billy also founded a successful printing company.”

By 2004, however, Billy Armentor, now in his 60s, was thinking about retirement. His son had gradually taken over the printing business, and the two had decided to spin off the archery business.

“Billy and I both saw an opportunity to remake Cajun Archery into something even bigger and better. Billy also, I think, saw me as qualified to take over what he had long ago started and then lovingly run for all those years because I knew both archery and how to run a business. That’s often a huge challenge in our industry. Frequently a new business owner may intimately know archery but not know business. Or he or she may know business but not have a passion for archery. The ideal situation is one in which the new owner has both the passion and skills for both business and archery, and that’s exactly what I brought to the table.

“I remember flying back to Utah after our meeting and then finally arriving home and crawling into bed around midnight with my already-sleeping wife. After telling her that the meeting had gone well and that I planned to make an offer to buy Cajun Archery, she had just one question for me.

“‘Please tell me that you can make a living at this,’ she said. ‘And that it’s not just an excuse to hunt and fish more.’

“‘I know I can make a living at this,’ I told her. ‘And I also believe that it will enable me to hunt and fish more.’”

In the following weeks, Corolla Capital Management made Billy Armentor a fair offer for Cajun Archery, and he accepted.

“A big part of our strategy at Corolla Capital Management is that we look for companies that are missing something. Companies that have everything going just right––great products, robust sales, awesome product delivery and the like––don’t fall into our spyglass. Partly that’s because such companies command top dollar should they be for sale. We, instead, look for companies that need a boost and are therefore a bit of a bargain. In a word, they are an opportunity.”

The first step with Cajun Archery was to move the operation from Louisiana to Utah.

“That move wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t easy, but I’d promised not to uproot my family. We made the move in stages during the first two quarters of 2005 so as not to totally disrupt Cajun’s production and shipping.

“Then we really set to work to remake the company,” David explains. “That included such key things as redoing the company’s entire production system, re-evaluating every item in the existing product line and developing and introducing brand new products as needed.

“Among the first boost measures was to implement statistical process control and other lean-manufacturing principals to the production side of the business. Of particular importance to us was the development of ongoing programs for continuous quality improvement, increases in manufacturing efficiency and improvements in
on-time delivery and inventory turns.

“At the same time, we looked at every Cajun product and asked ourselves, our pro staff and our dealers how we might make it better. One of the things we did early on was to change the screw-machining processes to tighten up the tolerances on every Cajun bowfishing point. We continue to find such improvement opportunities even today. In fact, we further tightened up the tolerances of two of the points just this year. We also changed the steels in many of the heads.

“And we took a long, hard look at new-product ideas, particularly in the bowfishing area. To do that, we grew the size of our bowfishing pro staff and began tapping them and our dealers for ideas on what we needed to offer in order to become an even better bowfishing supplier.

“In the ensuing years we built up the Cajun bowfishing offering to the point where it has become one of the most complete and diverse bowfishing product lines in the world. Bowfishing is experiencing steady growth. It’s an affordable sport. It’s also a sport that doesn’t suffer from the access issues that hamper bowhunting today. You can bowfish almost everywhere, often year-round, with an over-the-counter fishing license and on public waters near and far.

“Today’s Cajun Archery bowfishing offering includes superb proprietary, signature bowfishing points with trusted names like Sting-A-Ree, Piranha, Warhead, Talon and Lil’ Stinger. We also offer other excellent fish points by Steel Force and Shure Shot. In fact, today we offer a total of 16 different types of bowfishing points. That’s by careful design. You see, while on the surface it may appear that bowfishing is simply shooting common carp in a nearby river or lake, the truth is that bowfishing today is getting more and more sophisticated, and there are actually increasing opportunities to shoot an amazingly wide variety of different fish species in both fresh and salt water. No one bowfishing point can do it all. Cajun Archery offers the spectrum of points that today’s bowfishing fans need and want.

“As a side note, Cajun’s now-lean manufacturing systems enable us to efficiently do even short runs of specific products to fill every demand. Supplying 16 different fish points, for example, is not a problem for Cajun Archery.”

In addition to a broad array of fish points, Cajun Archery also serves up the best in fish arrows, bowfishing kits and accessories.

“While some bowfishing suppliers refuse to offer beginner bowfishing gear and others shy away from selling advanced bowfishing equipment, Cajun Archery offers everything for absolutely everyone interested in bowfishing. We have, for example, a complete lineup of bowfishing kits, ranging from inexpensive kits designed to retail for around $20 all the way up to $80 kits complete with the best arrows, reels and line. That’s precisely why so many archery dealers look to Cajun Archery as their favorite bowfishing-gear source. We have bowfishing products for every price point, every bowfishing customer and for every type of bowfishing. Cajun Archery has become the one-stop bowfishing shop for knowledgeable archery retailers.”

True to its roots, Cajun Archery also remains one of the largest suppliers of quality youth arrows for the school and camp market, manufacturing well over a quarter million such arrows every year along with a wide variety of target and specialty traditional cedar arrows for wingshooters and bowhunters. As the new Cajun Archery has grown, more and more savvy archery dealers have tapped into the sales possibilities of Cajun specialty arrows.

“An expanding number of archery dealers are using our cedar youth arrows in at least two different ways. Some especially progressive dealers are selling our cedar arrows to their local schools, camps and scouts. For the dealer, it’s a great additional market. The dealer makes the sale, orders the arrow from us and we drop-ship directly to the buyers. Everyone wins.

“Many of the same dealers are also offering the same cedar kids’ arrows in their shops to their regular customers. Almost every archer seems to wants his or her kids to shoot, and kids go through arrows. We offer inexpensive cedar kids’ arrows in a half-gross display box. The dealer simply opens the box, sets it out near the cash register with a sign that says something like $2.39 each and watches his customers add a handful of arrows for the kids with almost every purchase. When one display box gets low, they call us for another. Inexpensive cedar kids’ arrows just may be the ultimate impulse-buy item for any archery shop.”

One way to boost business success is to always watch for new opportunities.

“Just two years after we purchased Cajun Archery, we also purchased Warhead Manufacturing, the makers of a series of exceptional bowfishing points. Warhead became available because the owner was retiring. Warhead points were great fish points with a strong following. We saw a promising opportunity and went after it.

“Last year we purchased Hot Shot Manufacturing. Hot Shot is a grand old name on the archery release market, being one of the very first to offer a mechanical release way back when. Hot Shot’s been around forever, but it had fallen on tough times. We acquired the company based largely on our vision of what it could again become. And we’re now in the process of innovatively re-inventing the entire Hot Shot product line for a big 2010 re-introduction. We’re combining a thorough understanding of what archers want from a release with new technologies and new materials to develop a brand new lineup of superb Hot Shot index-finger hunting releases along with a number of very innovative target releases. It’s a project we’re very excited about. It’s a project with tremendous potential.”

In the midst of all that, Corolla Capital Management is also somewhat diversifying its holding. In 2007, they purchased a struggling company with a great hunting product called The Plucker.

“I learned all of my bad four-letter words,” says David, “while plucking ducks with my Dad. Duck plucking is hard work. The Plucker is a consumer-oriented duck-plucking machine. It attaches to a regular cordless drill and it completely picks the feathers from a duck in about a minute and a half. Under our management, its production and sales have increased dramatically.

“We’ve also begun offering engineering and manufacturing services to other companies. We have a great engineering staff and first-rate prototyping capabilities. Individuals are now coming to us with back-of-a-napkin product ideas and we’re turning those rough ideas into professional engineering drawings so that they can go out and have their new product quoted. In many cases, if they would like, we can also offer them prototype quotes and even OEM manufacturing services.”

None of this takes place without a solid team of professional engineers, managers and manufacturing associates. David White heads the group and is president and general manager of all operations. Heidi Bowen is office manager and is also instrumental in production scheduling. Steven Gilberston is operations manager responsible for all manufacturing and operations within the building. Al Coon is customer service manager and is particularly proactive at staying in touch with the company’s many customers. A qualified support staff of production associates rounds out the team.

“We’re very excited about our diversified approach to archery, manufacturing and engineering services,” David admits. “By managing properly, we’re able to offer unprecedented value, quality and on-time delivery, which is exactly what our many customers want and our brands need.

“It’s a much better situation nowadays. We control our own destiny, and that’s grown out of our habit of seizing opportunities.” For more information, log onto cajunarchery.com or call 800-551-3076.

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