Steven Adams is a lighting master; one of the founders of Rigid Lights, he’s stepped up again with Nacho Offroad Technology. The world is brighter with Steve in it, be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.
5:33 – I’m sure he thought I would just throw my life away because I wasn’t being an airline pilot
17:16 – I pulled up Bender’s How to Bend Tech 101 and taught myself how to make a light bar
21:38 – Hey, if you’re going to do this, here’s what you need to do…
28:14 – We need to make this an American made light
38:38 – not that making money is a bad thing, but that was the only thing
48:24 – I didn’t realize you don’t have scientists growing week, you have stoners growing weed
57:18 – We’re not going to do anything if we don’t have fun doing it!
Special thanks to 4low Magazine and Maxxis Tires for support and sponsorship of this podcast.
Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.
Steven Adams is a lighting master; one of the founders of Rigid Lights, he’s stepped up again with Nacho Offroad Technology. The world is brighter with Steve in it, be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.
5:33 – I’m sure he thought I would just throw my life away because I wasn’t being an airline pilot
17:16 – I pulled up Bender’s How to Bend Tech 101 and taught myself how to make a light bar
21:38 – Hey, if you’re going to do this, here’s what you need to do…
28:14 – We need to make this an American made light
38:38 – not that making money is a bad thing, but that was the only thing
48:24 – I didn’t realize you don’t have scientists growing week, you have stoners growing weed
57:18 – We’re not going to do anything if we don’t have fun doing it!
Special thanks to 4low Magazine and Maxxis Tires for support and sponsorship of this podcast.
Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.
[00:00:01.080] -
Welcome To Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the offroad industry. Being involved, like all of my guests are, is a lifestyle, not just a job. I talk to past, present, and future Legends, as well as business owners, employees, media, and land-use warriors, men and women who have found their way into this exciting and addictive lifestyle we call Offroad. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active in Offroad. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call Offroad.
[00:00:46.160] -
Whether you're crawling the Red Rocks of Moab or Hauling your toys to the trail, Maxxis has the tires you can trust for performance and durability, four wheels or two. Maxxis tires are the choice of champions because they know that whether for work or play, for fun or competition, Maxxis tires deliver. Choose Maxxis, tread victoriously.
[00:01:13.010] -
Have you seen 4-Low magazine yet? 4-low magazine is a high-quality, well-written, four-wheel drive-focused magazine for the enthusiast market. If you still love the idea of a printed magazine, something to save and read at any time, 4low is the magazine for you. 4low cannot be found in stores, but you can have it delivered to your home or place of business. Visit 4lowmagazine.com to order your subscription today.
[00:01:39.300] - Big Rich Klein
On today's episode, I will be speaking with offroad lighting entrepreneur and businessman, Steve Adams. Steve, it is great to talk to you. Got a lot of history and off road, and I'm hoping to pull that all out of you. Thank you for spending some time with us.
[00:01:57.470] - Steve Adams
Well, great to be here. It's fun to do this. It's been fun to listen to all your episodes, and I think you put together a great program and a great service for the industry.
[00:02:06.620] - Big Rich Klein
Well, thank you. Thank you. It's fun. It is definitely one of those passions that you get because you love the industry or you love what you're doing. It's not a job. And now that I'm part of the Offroad Motor Sports Hall of Fame as a board of director, it's even more fun because now I get to interview all of the guys that have been inducted, guys and women that have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. So that's even another special part of all this. But this episode is about you. So let's start at the very beginning. And where were you born and raised?
[00:02:44.590] - Steve Adams
Well, I was born in Phoenix and grew up in, I say North Phoenix, but it really is Scottsdale. But I try not to claim Scottsdale. At least I remember it not being the Scottsdale it is today. I thought it was a great place to grow up with lots of desert and not the Scottsdale aspect of what everybody knows today.
[00:03:11.530] - Big Rich Klein
You don't drive a McLaren?
[00:03:13.820] - Steve Adams
I don't. No, no. No, it was a little different 30, 40 years ago.
[00:03:20.150] - Big Rich Klein
Yes, that's true. So what was early life like in Scottsdale?
[00:03:28.990] - Steve Adams
It's, youtell you. I had a very, I don't want to say vanilla, but I had a great childhood, great parents and great home life. Went to school, typical teenage boy. My kids are going to listen to this, and my wife is probably going to kill me, but I got pretty crappy grades in high school. I got 2.5 all the way through high school and 2.5 all the way through college. But I felt like I was always interested in other stuff besides the school work.
[00:03:59.210] - Big Rich Klein
So it was that interest of what was going on outside of the walls that created that?
[00:04:06.310] - Steve Adams
Yeah. I knew from when I was a little kid, my goal was I wanted to be an airline pilot. I'd ride my bike over to Scottsdale Airport with my dad and just watch Cessna take off and land. I was lucky because my high school actually had an aviation program for a couple of years, and I was able to take private pilot ground school and got my when I was 17. Besides school work, I had a little 4runner, so I would go off roading. At the time, you could drive where the 101 is and go wheel. But my first job was working at a bike shop with this awesome for a high school kid and learning to fly on the side. I wasn't doing anything bad. I just wasn't doing my homework.
[00:04:57.420] - Big Rich Klein
You said paint shop?
[00:05:01.270] - Steve Adams
A bike shop. Oh, bike shop. Okay. Yeah, a bike shop. Yeah, Land of Cyclerie, which still around. And all my buddies were working crappy jobs. I was turning wrenches on bikes after school. So I had a early appreciation of turning wrenches and learning how things worked.
[00:05:23.830] - Big Rich Klein
So tell me about what your dad did for a business. Was that something that led to something else later on in your life?
[00:05:33.430] - Steve Adams
No. My parents were very traditional suburb. I had a great home life. And my mom was my cub scout leader and boy scout leader and super supportive of everything. Stay at home, mom always there for me and my brother. And my dad was an electrical engineer, started at Sperry, got into Honeywell and did work a 35 year career. I think him being in aviation, developed my love for aviation early on. And then funny story, I'm sure I'll talk to you more later. When we started rigid, I had no idea what I was doing. I have this electrical circuit with an LED that's lighting up. I'm 30 years old, 35 years old, entrepreneur with a business, and I got to call Daddy, Hey, Dad, can you tell me how the circuit works? Why is an LED lighting up? What's this resistor and this thing here and this transistor. I remember my dad drawing literally on a yellow notepad how a LED drive circuit worked. And that was my first foray into electrical circuit design and engineering. So he's designing for triple sevens. And all of a sudden now he's got to teach his kid who's a laid off airline pilot how an LED circuit works.
[00:06:55.630] - Steve Adams
I'm sure he thought I would just throw my life away because I wasn't being an airline pilot. But it was nice having supportive parents and parents that could teach you how electrical circuits worked.
[00:07:07.720] - Big Rich Klein
Right. I mean, anything that a parent can teach you. My dad taught me how to turn wrenches. And it mattered because I turned wrenches for years before I got into many other endeavors.
[00:07:22.380] - Steve Adams
Yep. Yeah, exactly.
[00:07:24.640] - Big Rich Klein
So when you were in grade school or high school, did you play any sports or any outside, any activities besides just going to school and mudding through it?
[00:07:38.450] - Steve Adams
I did not really. I played a little baseball, played a little basketball, club stuff. I mean, not club as in today, but rec stuff, I guess. Did a couple of mountain bike races. You're working at BikeShop, you have to. But nothing I keyed into. And yeah, the flying was it. Yeah.
[00:07:59.360] - Big Rich Klein
Okay. Yeah. Because I know you went to Horizon High, and Horizon has always had a really good, or at least when I know that it used to have a really good baseball team. It always.
[00:08:11.350] - Steve Adams
Seemed to- Oh, yeah. There was a few kids that got drafted that we grew up playing Little League with out of high school. It was either your life or it's not. And it wasn't my life. So that was the end of my school level sports. But no, that's the thing. Once you get into the bike world, I had a cousin who managed a pro bike team. So I was working at Landis. You're around these almost world level cyclists. So you see what that's all about. And got me in the mountain bike world, and I never really did it competitively, but that was more than not the school, letterman jacket. I don't know. I gravitated towards the alternative stuff, the weird stuff.
[00:08:57.220] - Big Rich Klein
Right. Skater, biker.
[00:08:59.620] - Steve Adams
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:00.550] - Big Rich Klein
Spray painting.
[00:09:01.300] - Steve Adams
Exactly. Offroading, building weird stuff. Rc car racing. I was definitely a nerd in high school, so it was not... Yeah.
[00:09:13.250] - Big Rich Klein
Okay. So in those early years, you said you went jeeping and stuff like that, offroading. Did you guys camp? Or what other activities did you do?
[00:09:28.720] - Steve Adams
Yeah. I mean, I was back to the… I wasn't the cool kid in high school. I was in Boy Scouts the whole way. Nothing wrong with that. Until I was a senior in high school. We'd go camp at least once a month backpacking, car camping, you name it. I spent a summer working at Camp Geronimo. Okay. A lot of people were like, Oh, I went to Geronimo because it's such a big part of scouting in Arizona. I'd say a lot of love of outdoor, but I really wasn't big into wheeling really until college. That was when I really started offroading, became a pretty big part of my life.
[00:10:12.550] - Big Rich Klein
Was that it? You went to Fort Louis and Durango to start off with and then to ASU?
[00:10:18.580] - Steve Adams
Yeah. So back to my stellar GPA. Fort Louis, I got in Harvard on the Hill just because I like Durango. We go to Durango for a vacation. My parents took us up there and I didn't realize how good it was there. The teaching staff was amazing. I mean, it was all people who have succeeded in their industry and retired, got bored and then wanted to go back and teach. From a school standpoint, it was absolutely amazing. But it was also Durango. There is a lot of skiing and a lot of partying and everything else. But yeah, no, I got into offroading up there, and I forget why, but somehow I stumbled into the original Avalanche Engineering shop.
[00:11:04.400] - Big Rich Klein
Oh, okay. Steve Remore.
[00:11:06.580] - Steve Adams
Yeah, back with Steve and Eric and Drew, those guys up there. I was just an 18-year-old college kid and knew nothing. For some reason, these guys liked me and took me under their wing, and I learned to weld there and I learned about cars and I mean, very little looking back, but I thought I was an expert. But I tried to buy an FJ40. My parents shot that down, so then I saved up and I bought a CJ7. I remember Eric took me out behind the avalanche. She's like, This is why you need it. He clicked on the dual ARBs. I didn't even know what an air locker was at the time. We climbed this thing and it was just eye-opening. Like, Oh, my God. This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I ended up buying that, and that was really the start of my offroading. It was a salvage CJ7 with dual ARBs. When I was 19 years old and the original, even before they moved to Bayfield. Yeah, just hanging out with those guys, and then that just one thing turned into another. I thought, looking at the time, I thought, Well, if I want to be an airline pilot, I need to get out of Durango.
[00:12:20.660] - Steve Adams
My roommate had the only job in town, so I thought I needed to go.
[00:12:24.840] - Big Rich Klein
To- The only job in town?
[00:12:26.850] - Steve Adams
Yeah. I thought I needed to go to a big school and get a big name degree, which looking back, didn't matter at all. But everything happens for a reason. I moved to Arizona, ended up meeting my wife, soon to be wife, and it worked out. Asu, from a school standpoint is from an education, is worthless compared to the education I would have gotten at Fort Louis, but it carries more weight. It's an Arizona state degree. But yeah, I wasn't overly happy with ASU, and I tell my kids they can go anywhere they want as long as they don't go to ASU.
[00:13:09.290] - Big Rich Klein
Jeremy Hammer, I know you're going to listen to this one. Sorry about that.
[00:13:12.930] - Steve Adams
Yeah, sorry, Hammer, but you know, it's from an ed… It was a great school. I met a lot of good people. I mean, I met my wife there. I got an internship at United Airlines. I was on the fast track to be an airline pilot, and I probably wouldn't have done that if I didn't go to ASU, but from a pure education standpoint, no. But back to the offroading, when I moved down to Arizona, all my buddies from Avalanche would come down to the old Arizona State, four-wheel drive jamborees. This isthey would go camp with the Campbells and Randy Ellis and Bill Shay and the old, old rock crawlers. Now I'm a 20-year-old college kid hanging out with all these guys. It was really cool to see the early, early fabbed Buggies and the Pinky and the Randy's Buggie and Ian, all these guys that were absolute cutting edge and still are today, 30 years later.
[00:14:13.970] - Big Rich Klein
Right. So true. What went on with the airline pilot? Did you pursue that at all? Oh, yeah.
[00:14:25.570] - Steve Adams
That was my first career. I did that. I busted my butt and I graduated ASU. I got married in October. September 11th happened. I got married in October and I went to class at SkyWest January. It was a pretty busy end of 2001 for everybody in the world. But my life really got started. And yeah, flew, got based in Palm Springs, went out to Palm Springs and just wheeling at the time, just I kept wheeling recreationally. I had a little CJ-5. We had hit a couple of times and lived in Palm Springs for a couple of years, moved back to Arizona, got based in Tucson and flew for SkyWest for four years, and then I got hired at America West. It's hometown airline, man. I'm a major airline pilot. I'm flying a 737 and I'm based in Phoenix. This doesn't happen. I was done. I was going to fly for America West for the next 40 years and have a white picket fence and 2.2 kids, and my life was set. Then three months after I got hired, they announced they were buying US Air. I'm like, Oh, my God. They just bought the Titanic.
[00:15:46.170] - Steve Adams
This isn't going to work out very good for me.
[00:15:50.520] - Big Rich Klein
I understand those career choices or turns. Yeah.
[00:15:55.200] - Steve Adams
I made it four years and ended up having a pretty bad motorcycle crash, but I ended up getting laid off, short term, laid off of disability. But when your company announced that they bought USAire, you pretty much know what's going to happen. So in there, this is where I started really saying, Hey, I need to do something different. I'm probably going to have a career change or at least a job change coming up. So in there, we started... I had met some great neighbors, still one of my best friends today, and we started getting into the dunes and we started going out to the dunes. And that first time you go to Glamous or Gordens, it's eye opening. And it was that way for us like, This is the most amazing place on Earth. Over the course of two months, I went from sleeping in the back of a Previa with my daughter, who was probably one at the time in a pack and play in the back of a van, to a free, Craigslist cabover camper to a toy hauler. And then vehicle-wise, we went from... I recall my first quad was a Polaris Trailblazer 250 that you just never let off full throttle in the dunes.
[00:17:16.820] - Steve Adams
So we did the whole through all the quads and then ended up getting a rhino. The rhino is really where my business started because I couldn't find what I wanted. We were out in the dunes and I needed a door. I was like, Well, I should... I remember back in the day, I knew how to bend metal and weld a little bit. I pull up Cammo's How to Bend. I don't even think it was Cammo's article, but it was something on Pirate. Bender. Yeah, How to Bend Tech 101, bending to 101 and 102. I taught myself how to make a light bar and doors for Rhino and all that stuff just because I was using it. And then all of a sudden, buddies say, Hey, can I buy a set of those doors? Like, sure, well, I better jig it up. I better learn how to make a jig. And then I want lights, so I welded up my own light bar. And then I bought some, I won't say the company, but they still today make phenomenal dirt bike computers. But at the time, they made lights and the lights were junk. And it was the most expensive thing I bought on the on the Rhino, and they would flash and they turn on and off.
[00:18:33.810] - Steve Adams
This is ridiculous. I just spent $300 on the set of HIDs and they're junk. I can do better than this. So I started doing some research and learned, hey, I could do headlight retrofits, and I could retrofit KC lights and Hella 4,000 with HID bulbs in it. They're selling them for $500, where I could order the HID bulbs and put it in for 150. So I started and then I realized, hey, I could make a lot more money selling lights than I could fabbing, and I didn't have black boogers every night. So the fab business turned into the light company, and actually, it was a company called Dirt Lights. And this is back when Razor Forms and Rhino Forms and Pirate were the world. You could make a very successful business just being a vendor on those three forms.
[00:19:31.220] - Big Rich Klein
Right.
[00:19:33.170] - Steve Adams
And Jeep forms and JK forms and TJ Forms. So that was the entire business model was I was doing HID retrofits for Razors or Ryantoes and then Razors when they came out, and then buying KC six-inch lights. And I had a little kit that I could put a HID ballast and bulb inside of a KC six-inch light. And it was turning into a real business. Well, I wrecked the motorcycle. It was a Harley, which is stupid. I didn't know how to ride. I thought I should ride to the mountains. And I was just staring at the scenery and drove it off the road and hit a mountain. My friends tell me I got a helicopter ride out of the deal a week in the ICU and a bunch of broken bones. But at this point, I wasn't going to be flying for a while, and the business was actually starting to do really good. So I couldn't move. I had a broken back and two broken arms. So I basically verbally taught the kid across the street and my wife how to solde, so they could make up the kids. And they started keeping the business running.
[00:20:48.580] - Steve Adams
Well, I'd work the forums. Yeah. Then, Oh, well, I'm going to get laid off, so I better start treating dirt lights like a real business. So I went to the Sandshow, went to Pomona, and actually set up dealer margins. You got to treat it like a real business, not a foreign business if you want it to grow. Yeah, it was doing really good. I was learning about lighting, a fraction of lighting, and meeting some really great people in the industry selling essentially headlight retrofits for lasers and rhinos. That was the start of dirt lights.
[00:21:26.380] - Big Rich Klein
Okay. Interesting. Where did get your business acronym to know that what you needed, how you had to change the way you were doing things?
[00:21:38.960] - Steve Adams
You know, it's funny. I actually sat next to a guy coming back from the Sand Show in probably 2008, and we just started talking. It's John Wayne Airport. I have no idea who this guy was. And he said, Hey, if you're going to do this, here's what you need to do. And he sat for basically while we were there on the flight home and drew up an entire pricing model and business structure for me on how if you're going to make it an offroad, here's how the industry works. Here's how distribution works. Here's where your margins need to be. I'm like, Oh. And we just came back and changed everything. And that made all the difference in the world. Wow. And it's just one of those you look back on your life and all the people you meet through the years. I feel like that's probably one of my best skills is knowing when to shut up and just listen to people that are smarter than me. Because I don't know everything. I don't know anything. But there's people around me that do. And if I listen to them, I feel like I've been pretty successful doing that.
[00:22:43.560] - Big Rich Klein
I'd say so. Yeah. And you don't remember who that guy was?
[00:22:48.110] - Steve Adams
Not a clue. At the time, yeah, I couldn't even begin to tell you who it was. Somebody that went to the Sand Show that lived in Phoenix.
[00:22:56.660] - Big Rich Klein
Wow. Awesome.
[00:22:58.100] - Steve Adams
Yeah. All of a sudden, dirt lights is a real business, and we have dealers that are putting POs in, and I have to fulfill them, and it's actually working. Well, I'm getting laid off from the airline, so we're going to try and make dirt lights to go, and I'm not going to try and go back and fly. I was still pretty banged up and pretty immobile, but improving. That was my real business entry into the lighting world. I started meeting more and more people in the neighborhood. Funny, there's four of us in rigid, and... Seth and Taylor were partnered up with Dragon Fire. Dragon Fire was one of our dealers, and they were buying our retrofit kits and moving quite a few of them. Then randomly, all in the same neighborhood, my wife was a soccer coach for our daughter at the time, and Jason's daughter was on the same team, our son, I came one of them. I got to know those guys. At the time, Dirt Lights was a pretty good company in that industry, the UTV world. I was getting laid off. Seth and Taylor had the hardware business, and Jason had just retired from playing ball.
[00:24:33.450] - Steve Adams
We're like, Well, we had the opportunity to get the original light bar from Ron Holder, Holder Off Road in California. I was like, Well, we all need something to do. Let's try to make a go with this light bar, this LED thing. I started playing around with LEDs a little bit on the side for dirt lights, knowing that HID wasn't the future. Once I saw the original technology with the and the original E-Series light bar, I'm like, Oh, this is years, if not a decade ahead of everybody else. It was a good timing with friends to merge everything together. So dirt lights basically went away. All the HID business got rolled in. Dragon Fire, I mean, you've talked to Taylor, Dragon Fire went away and we went with the rigid name. The rigid name stuck and we just started doing it.
[00:25:27.900] - Big Rich Klein
And the rigid name came over from the Lightbar?
[00:25:34.740] - Steve Adams
No, the rigid name came from Jason. Jason had a UTV company doing, I don't know, he did three or four Rhino builds, and it was originally going to be a T-shirt company, a Big Johnson style T-shirt. But the rigid name worked really good for Lightbars because all of a sudden now people are used to round lights their entire life, and we're selling 40 and 50-inch light bars, rigid worked really good for it. So dirt lights was very pigeonholing it because we didn't want to be just off-road lighting. We knew there was more to it than that. So yeah, rigid stuck.
[00:26:16.760] - Big Rich Klein
Yeah, it worked out really well.
[00:26:19.170] - Steve Adams
Yeah. It was fun in the early days because none of us had a clue what we were doing. I'd say Seth and Taylor, if anybody knew what they were doing more than Jason and I. Jason is a ball player. I'm an airline pilot, turned engineer. Jason is a baseball player, turned operations president. We didn't have a clue what we were doing. But I feel like we had the right team and we all learned as much as we could and grew as much as we could into the position. And it was never a, Hey, you take over product development. Hey, you take over ops, you take over marketing. We just did it and it worked.
[00:27:07.120] - Big Rich Klein
Everybody fell into their positions.
[00:27:09.530] - Steve Adams
Yeah. And I didn't let people say, Oh, where did you get your engineer? I don't have an engineering degree. I just listen to people. I hire people smarter than me and listen to them and let them do what they think is right and then try and be inquisitive. Try and ask like, Hey, what if we did it this way? What if we did it that way? Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, we worked that. And I've had the benefit of working with some of the most brilliant industrial designers and electrical engineers that were patient enough with me to explain it to me. Our electrical guy that did all our designs for the first three or four years of rigid, Jim Rhodes, we'll talk about him later because I partnered up with him after rigid, but he would take the time to teach me. And I remember his ex-wife was yelling at him one day because he said, hey, man, that's really cool. You know the difference between a diode and a transistor now. And she got so mad at him. I'm like, no, man, I took that as a compliment. I'm trying to learn all this stuff.
[00:28:14.690] - Steve Adams
And... Yeah. So electrically and mechanical engineering and all this stuff through rigid. I mean, we had some home runs and we had some flops from a product design standpoint, but every company is. And it was really fun. I mean, it was really scary in the beginning when we didn't know what we were doing and we thought we needed to order just from China because that's what people do. There was one 4x8 section of Palaracking with 50 lights on it. I remember the four of us standing around it one day saying, Oh, my God! We are never going to sell this many lights. What have we done? Because we ordered them. We took over the manufacturing, and our first batch of lights we ordered from China, and they were junk. We ended up having to rework them all. We had friends and buddies on the weekends reworking these lights. Then that's when we said, Look, we need to bring this stuff here. We need to make this an American made light. That was the end of Asia. We started bringing all the parts in. I took over to getting all the electrical stuff redesigned. Taylor started making friends with everybody in the industry.
[00:29:42.330] - Steve Adams
Seth made sure we had money when we needed money and did a great job of it. Jason worked the production line and it worked. We battled, we fought, but never once in the, we'll say the eight years before we sold did we ever have to say, All right, well, you own this amount. You own that amount. We're taking a vote. We always came to an agreement and we always decided on the direction. We might not have started that way, but by the time we did something, everybody agreed and I think that's what made us successful is that we could fight, but we could always come back to the table and agree. Then once we agreed, we move forward together.
[00:30:25.430] - Big Rich Klein
Perfect.
[00:30:26.820] - Steve Adams
I.
[00:30:27.800] - Big Rich Klein
Thought you guys had some really innovative stuff. Like you said, everybody was doing round lights. You guys went to the light bars. I remember there was the first time I saw a light bar that I remember, or at least it triggered me was there was somebody at King of the Hammars that had this... Well, basically, I think he cut a piece of pipe and welded it and then the light bar in it and then was driving over it, throwing it off the rocks, all this stuff. It was really bright. I had no idea. I'm just thinking, Okay, that's pretty cool. Round lights, the old Casey, smiley lights, that thing. Those things, the Pias, all that stuff would just get destroyed. Then I saw this light bar the guy had, but it was like, I swear to God, it weighed 50 pounds. He was carrying it around with this battery pack. I thought, Okay, pretty cool. Then I started paying attention to other lights because as a rock crawler, we didn't have lights. In competitive rock crawling, it's not really a market for lights on a competitive rock crawler, even though we did some night events, but that was all people that put rock lights on, the low level lights.
[00:31:55.060] - Big Rich Klein
It was not until I started getting more into the desert racing and night stuff that I saw where the lighting was much better with the or at least filled in a lot better with the LED.
[00:32:09.250] - Steve Adams
Yeah, it was probably Taylor and I at Hammers. I think him and I went out, and it probably would have been 2010 because I guess the first year would have been '09. That was the OG-13. Right. I think we went out in '10 and just loaded up the race arrow, the pace arrow, absolute Uncle Eddie RV, and went and tried showing off. At the time, the rock crawl world was still people building stuff in their garage that could build their own. The JK world hadn't really come in yet. There was no $100,000 LS-swapped four door Jeeps yet. True. So the rock crawl world really wasn't successful for us until we startedgetting until people started building the Jeeps. We had the bracket on Taylor's JK, and that really opened up the Jeep market. People started spending $2,000 for a light on their Jeep, and it opened up so much stuff. There was a whole group of companies that really were just poised perfectly. Poison Spider, Magna Flow. We did a lot of work with Jeremy at Rockcrawler. All these companies that all of a sudden were poised perfectly to do premium Jeep products. And the explosion of the $50,000 JK build, I think, allowed a lot of us to be successful.
[00:33:41.860] - Big Rich Klein
Right.
[00:33:43.200] - Steve Adams
Because nobody was ever built the $50,000 $50,000 TJ. Right. So it was a totally different change in mindset of the industry. I think it was the right product at the right time. And it was fun. I mean, it was really fun when we could... And that was what was cool having the partners. They basically had ideas and nobody ever told me no. Like, hey, I want to do this. Cool. I want to do an airplane. Like, cool, do it. Hey, Taylor had an idea for a camera, a GoPro and a tennis lightbar. Cool. Let's do it. I love that. A lot of these business wise were flops, though, but we had so much fun designing all these random products. And at the end of the day, the Dulie, the E-Series, and the Single Row carried the company. It was fun. We got to do a lot of fun electrical stuff. We got to make all... Ron Holder, the guy who invented it, became my optic mentor. I would just fly over to Orange County and just spend a day with him and just brainstorm and talk about optical theory. I listened and learned a lot.
[00:34:54.100] - Steve Adams
It was really fun learning all about this stuff, not college degree level, how to do parabolic reflectors using calculus. I hate math, but I understand how reflectors work and material selection and all that stuff just because I had smart people around me for a lot of years.
[00:35:16.040] - Big Rich Klein
So did you guys get into house lighting as well?
[00:35:21.350] - Steve Adams
Never did general lighting. We talked about doing landscape lighting because it's the same ruggedized sealed and closers, but it never worked. It's such a different industry and a different path to market that it was never the right fit. We had our niche and we owned it, and we stayed at our lane pretty good.
[00:35:46.420] - Big Rich Klein
Right. Now you guys did own the niche, that's for sure.
[00:35:50.360] - Steve Adams
Yeah.
[00:35:52.870] - Big Rich Klein
After eight years, how did the sale work out? I know that it was Pensky Truck came in and made an offer? Or did you guys approach them? How did that happen? I know that's the dream of it. It seems like that's the dream anymore, is build something and then sell it. They approach that. I could never find that.
[00:36:15.210] - Steve Adams
Yeah, they approached us and it was time. After eight years married to three different dudes, it was not that we weren't getting along, but it was time. And then we felt the China wave was a lot bigger than it really was. So we were scared of the big import wave. One of the things I talked about, we didn't know what we were doing. One of the things we didn't know for the first three years is we needed to patent everything. So we really had no patents on anything early on. So other than just a poor trade dress case, we couldn't stop any of the Chinese stuff. So it was time. We actually almost went through an acquisition a year earlier with a different company, and that 11th hour, it wasn't the right deal. Terms were changing. So we backed out at the end, and glad we did because the deal with Trucklight was much better for us. But yeah, Roger Pensky came out and sat in our conference room in Gilbert, Arizona, and told us everything we wanted to hear: brand matters, reinvestment. We're going to keep doing everything. We thought this is the right partner.
[00:37:32.600] - Steve Adams
We really, really believed that it was going to be the right partner. We went through a year of diligence and tried to keep it a secret. We announced, and it is. It's life-changing. It opens up a lot of doors in life that we would have never had. We all planned on it. It was great. We could have stayed on as long as we wanted. Seth and Jason, obviously, the more GNA employees, they didn't need accounting operations. So Jason and Seth were the first out. And then I don't know, it was probably four or five months later, Pensky sold out most of his ownership stake to Coke Brothers. So all of a sudden we went from a majority-owned, very brand-centric, brand-to-wear company to we were a line item in a private equity firm, a massive private equity firm.
[00:38:35.680] - Big Rich Klein
And that always changes everything.
[00:38:38.870] - Steve Adams
It changes everything. And this is all public. There's nothing hidden there, but it totally changed the feel. It totally changed the mentality there. Not that making money is a bad thing, but that was the only thing. And it was cut and cut until we made that number. I made it about a year. And you can only go to so many meetings where people say, Yeah, it's a great idea, but we can't do that because we have to hit this profitability number. All right. Well, so yeah, it was... I love the company, I love the product, but it was going a direction that just it wasn't for me.
[00:39:22.890] - Big Rich Klein
A lot of Offroad has gone that way. And I mean, you look at the magazine side of the industry, the bean counters and lawyers got in there. And when you look at the magazines when they were still around, they would have, Here's the editorial staff, and it was like six lines. Then you'd see all of the accounting staff above it or the corporate staff above it, and it was like almost a whole page. It's like, Okay, well, now you know why the magazines are are starting to fail and why everything's being moved around and bought up. And it's the same thing that's happened with a lot of businesses. And it's great for the companies, the company owners and the people that started the companies, but for the industry overall, I think it's been sad.
[00:40:25.150] - Steve Adams
Yeah, well, honestly, it's sad for the employees because rigid was a family. We brought all production back to the US. We had 250 employees. And of course, at 250 I couldn't tell you everybody, but I would say I probably knew the names of half of them and a lot of them were family. They had been with us early, early on. We'd been through three buildings and a lot of the guys had been with us through all three buildings. So all these guys are suffering and engineering is getting gutted, marketing is getting gutted. It's just like, Oh, man. It wasn't an overnight process, but watching these people I care about go to other companies or leave the industry altogether, we'll get back into this here five years down the road, but it was painful watching it. You still love the company and you love the brand and you love what you built, but you're like, Oh, man. It's just going in a direction that I don't think any of us were real happy with it.
[00:41:32.970] - Big Rich Klein
Right. Because it's like watching your kids grow up and then move out of the house and then all of a sudden, they're in jail.
[00:41:41.600] - Steve Adams
Yeah, I know. It's like, yeah, your kid screwed up, moved out and was just screwing their whole life up and you can't do anything about it. But you still love them and you still care about them. But yeah, it's very, very similar.
[00:41:54.200] - Big Rich Klein
Yeah. I'm always torn that way because I have a lot of friends that have been in the industry a long time have built a great brand. And then same as you guys, somebody comes in, the offer is really great. You can look back at Pirate 4x4. That forum was... It was groundbreaking in the fact that it was a platform for so many businesses to get started on. We rock and and Calrox included from the very beginning. Lance was a friend, and it helped us. It helped him. And the thing grew. Then when when the Canadians bought them, they, Lance, they tried to keep it together. And it just at a point it just became, you couldn't do it.
[00:42:58.030] - Steve Adams
Yeah, Lance and Cambo were the heart of that. Absolutely. You mean, it doesn't mean, you look at any business. Larry was the heart of Poison, Sherry were the heart of Poison, the fighter. Right. People believe in who the company is. They want to identify, people want to identify with the products that they're running. And that was the great thing is Taylor was a great base of rigid. He was the marketing. I was the back-end technical training, working with our customers, and Taylor was the public face of the company, and it just worked. It worked so good. I feel like people could identify with us both from an employee standpoint, a customer standpoint, a company partner standpoint. And that's what made us so fun. And then the other thing that I feel like people miss out on is that we were all enthusiasts. We were all out there wheeling. We were all out there doing these events because we wanted to, not because it was a job. And that's a lot of what got me back into it is I don't see that anymore. You look at these lighting companies and they really hire these pro drivers to come in and then it's like, Well, what should we build?
[00:44:11.380] - Steve Adams
No, you got to know what you want to build. You got to know what the industry needs, and you got to be creative of what is next, not what somebody that you pay is... It has to come from the heart. It doesn't matter if it's suspension or armor or bumpers or axel design or lighting. You have to use it and you have to understand what the industry needs to improve to be better.
[00:44:39.660] - Big Rich Klein
True.
[00:44:40.640] - Steve Adams
It can't come from a boardroom.
[00:44:42.770] - Big Rich Klein
Correct. Absolutely. I think that everybody that's listening to this will agree as well. Yeah. We're all boots on the ground people, everybody that listens to this.
[00:44:55.600] - Steve Adams
Yep. Well, I mean, my wife likes to tell me I made a short story long.
[00:45:01.470] - Big Rich Klein
That's okay. It doesn't matter. We got time unless you got a meeting.
[00:45:05.000] - Steve Adams
I do not know. Perfect. I don't want to be dragging on too long and lose all your listeners.
[00:45:10.440] - Big Rich Klein
You won't. You won't. This is great stuff. Let's talk about after-Rigid. Before we get off to rigid, I visited there when Armando was working for you guys. And Shelley and I walked through and got the full $10 tour. I was really impressed. Everything was being done in-house. We know that the Cree Lights or whatever they're called, those are all coming from Asia, but that's everybody. Everybody has that. But it's the way you guys were assembly and everything, all the other product was there in the US. Everybody seemed to enjoy what they were doing. As we walked around the assembly and the packaging and everything, it was people were happy. It wasn't something that we saw with a lot of tours that we did.
[00:46:08.650] - Steve Adams
Well, it's funny because you probably came, we'll call it the Ivy Building, you probably came to the Ivy Building if it was Armando, because we still use his cubicle and we're still in the same building. When we sold out Trucklight, I didn't want any of the real estate. The other three, so we as the four partners, got all the real estate, and then we sold the big building, and then the other guys didn't want anything to do with the Ivy Building, so I ended up buying them out just because it's such a cool building. It's in the neighborhood. It's two miles from my house. I figured somebody would go in it someday. And obviously we did that. But we've got 25 employees in the new company and we're having a Christmas party later today. And we're grilling for them out back, just like we did 15 years ago back in the early rigid days. Yeah.
[00:47:03.100] - Big Rich Klein
Awesome. Well, let's talk about the next step after rigid.
[00:47:07.940] - Steve Adams
Yeah. I left rigid, and I still love rigid. I love the offroad world. Offroading was a hobby, and I had a non compete, which I didn't need the non compete, though, because I didn't want to compete with rigid. I still wanted rigid to succeed. I started a company. I partnered up with Jim Roads. He was my electrical mentor, and he had a company called the Loop Technology. I stayed retired for a couple of weeks and just bored out of my mind. Then it was time to start poking around and find something to do and partnered up with him. He wanted to grow his business. I thought I could provide value there. Plus, I had this dream. I thought I wanted to get into the horticulture lighting world. Horticulture lighting being wheat. Grow wheat. I am not a pothead. I wish I was because there's a lot less calories and weed than beer. But weed has never agreed with me. But it was the green rush. Hey, this is going to be the next big industry. And I thought I could take a lot of what I learned from optics and electrical design and go into cannabis.
[00:48:24.570] - Steve Adams
And we designed some products with the Loom technology that were absolutely too advanced. Wireless mesh technology, full power spectrum tuning over time, apps, I mean, you name it. And there was a lot of cool technology. I mean, we had 14 utility patents in four years. Wow. All in lighting and an incredible engineering team. I brought in one of my best friends growing up and just blind trust. He built the brand and did a really good job of building the brand. But in the end, the company really... It is successful today, but we failed. We failed for a lot of reasons. We had too advanced of a product for cannabis. I didn't realize that you don't have scientists growing weed. You have stoners growing weed.
[00:49:22.480] - Big Rich Klein
Right. Cheach-and-chong, dude.
[00:49:24.810] - Steve Adams
They'll tell you, and it is. I still fly. I still have a little airplane. I would fly my Cessna to these cannabis meetings, and this is $2 million lighting deals, and they'd want to smoke a bog. They're like, hey, man, let's go hit the bomb before we meet. Hey, I got to fly all in an hour. I'm not going to hit the bomb. It's really a culture, and it's a culture that we didn't fit into, and we had a product that was too advanced for it. We did do a lot of stuff that worked, though. The optics worked. The optics helped grow better cannabis. The problem is we created too advanced of a product, so we lived along. Blind trust and one of my best friends growing up, and it didn't work out. I should have been watching closer. Nobody was watching The Hennhouse. Lawyers had to get involved. But we found a company that came in and took over, and science is actually doing really good. It's still in the same building we are right now. We're in Ivy, and we've simplified the product, and the industry has advanced. Five, seven years ago, wireless and spectrum tuning was too advanced for cannabis.
[00:50:51.950] - Steve Adams
Well, now people are starting to come around and say, Yeah, you know what? Actually, it does make a difference. Me personally, I can't tell the difference if it has different terpene profiles and flavor profiles, but our growers say it does, and the company is actually doing all right. But we made a lot of mistakes getting there. And it's life. You know what? I can't win them all. So it's fun watching the, I don't want to say the death, but the death and the rebirth of the science, S-C-Y-N-C-E is the is the grow-line company. So as science was starting to, I don't want to say flounder, but I missed off road. I missed off road. Any non-compete I had was long gone. But more than that, I really saw the floundering of rigid. Baha Designs was crushing them. Kc was crushing them. And it gets back to the kid they grew up, and they just went more and more corporate. It was a revolving door in the front office. They did some stuff, and I still have lots of friends there, and they just did some stuff that was hard to agree with. The guy that was running it is still a friend, and he was being relieved of his position.
[00:52:21.720] - Steve Adams
And they did it publicly in front of the whole company. Like, Come on, guys. They've lost the entire corporate culture. And I didn't like that. All of my original friends that had left rigid and almost got out of the industry, but we keep talking and was, Hey, let's get back into that. It honestly became a I still wheel and I still go out to stuff and I want something I can be proud of. And it was getting harder and harder to be proud of rigid. They still have the best product in the world. But so many customers were saying, Hey, man, I will never buy another rigid product. The sales department, the marketing, I get no customer service. And that was the motivating factor was customers asking me to get back in it and ex-employees asking me to get back in it. And then on the flip side, me going to Hammers every year and going to Nora and racing. And I became really good friends with the guys that let's roll off road, started racing.
[00:53:24.480] - Big Rich Klein
With them. I'm sorry about that.
[00:53:26.660] - Steve Adams
I know. No, I.
[00:53:28.210] - Big Rich Klein
Love those guys. Yeah.
[00:53:31.390] - Steve Adams
I got into racing. I never raced when I was at rigid, but I raced hammers three or four times. We raced Nora. We won Nora. We run the Ulta four class in Nora. I wanted something that I could be proud of. I wanted a light. And then on top of that, I had all this technology and I had this engineering. It was just a perfect match. I had the guys to run it. I had the smart guys. I know these guys are going to be successful if we can partner back up. We had lots of beer conversations talking about, Well, if we do this both from a product design standpoint and a name and how we're going to run it. We promised ourselves if we get back into this, we are going to have fun doing it. The first question is always Nacha. Where did the Nacha name come from?
[00:54:27.530] - Steve Adams
Honestly, it was one night I was in the shower and we were going through names and we had been doing this for a few weeks and we just couldn't come up with anything. We didn't want to be hardcore. We didn't want to be scientists wearing lab coats. We were going to have the best life. We didn't want to tell you that. The product will speak for itself. We had to have fun doing it. And it was one night like Nacho LED like, Nacho LED. Oh, my God, I love that. And everybody that knows me, nachos is by far my favorite food. I'll get nachos wherever we go if they're available. And you hop out of the shower, dry off real quick, and check GoDaddy. Godaddy is always the most important. Can you get the website? And natcholed. Com was available and I bought it on the spot. The next text was to the group, the group that's going to do it, the lighting group. Without fail, every single one of them told me I was an idiot. It was, No, you're an idiot. Shut up. Even my wife, You had no way. That's so stupid.
[00:55:29.930] - Steve Adams
And then you put together all the fun we could have with it. These are nacho lights. These are my lights. It's stuck. And I was able to convince everybody. It's a memorable name, and everybody laughs when they hear it. We spent probably six, eight months developing the business. And then we decided, All right, we've got something here. Let's come to market with this. So it was... It was four of us guys that were all early, early rigid. I mean, early, early. It was Brad, Brian, and Pete. And Pete was the guy that designed almost everything, but he was out of rigid. Brad had left rigid. Brian had left rigid. So it was a lot of the early, early rigid guys. We all got back together and we said, We're going to do this. We're going to have fun doing it. We're going to make the best lights on the market, the highest quality. We're going to keep it here. Our electronics are in the same facility that all the early Ridgeet stuff was done. Rigid has moved everything to Mexico by now, and it's quality is still good. But we wanted to... We had our secret sauce and we were going to do it again.
[00:56:47.330] - Steve Adams
And it's smart or not, but we're having fun doing it. And it's fun going out to these events. It's fun wearing a brand that we are proud of. And that's the coolest thing, is we want to have something that we are proud of. And I think Charlene asked me, are you having fun? Yep. Are you proud of what you're doing? Absolutely. I thought that was a great question from Charlene.
[00:57:16.780] - Big Rich Klein
I agree.
[00:57:18.240] - Steve Adams
We're not going to do anything if we don't have fun doing it. And we're going to absolutely stay cutting edge and push this industry just like Bridget did. We pushed the technology, push the user experience, pushed the functionality forward. And we're going to have fun doing it and we're going to have a brand that people can identify with. I want people to know all of us. I want people to know Ryan. Iwant people to know me. I want people to know me. I want people to know Brad and why we do what we do. And it's fun. We're having a lot of fun doing it.
[00:57:54.970] - Big Rich Klein
That's awesome. I think that is one of the keys to life. It's why I stayed in the promotion of the rock crawling because I loved what I was doing. Physically, my body is telling me I can't climb on the rocks for four days in a row, setting everything up, and then two days, tearing everything down. I just can't do it any longer. I'm 65 now. My body has had enough. My mind is still there, and that's the hard part. But luckily, I got a partner now that can climb all over the rocks and enjoys doing it as much as I do. That's worked out really well. It's not a corporate thing. In any way, as means. But I'm so glad to hear that you guys are having fun doing this.
[00:58:53.820] - Steve Adams
Yeah, and it's fun. Science is... I'm very hands-off science. We've got a great team running that. Science had the best month they've ever had last month, and I have very little to do with it. And it's just fun to watch. It's fun to watch the fruition of what we created five years ago. I don't have to do anything. I don't ever have to go sell another light to a grower. I love them. Growers are great, but they're hard to sell too. I get to focus on off-road. I get family time. I've got a 17-year-old son who is awesome. I swear I'd never do it, but I'm racing hammers again this year. And my son is going to be my co- driver. And it's awesome. I'm so excited for that. My daughter is a freshman up at CMU in Grand Junction. Awesome. I get to go visit my daughter an hour from Ure, an hour from Moab, an hour from Glenwood. Things are working out. I'm very blessed to have a phenomenala phenomenal family, an awesome wife that puts up with all my crazy ideas. We get to have fun with Nacho. The big announcement with Nacho at Cima last week was, or two weeks ago, three weeks ago now, was we partnered up with A.
[01:00:17.870] - Steve Adams
R. B. We were in no way looking to sell, no way looking for this. We didn't sell. That's the great thing because A. R. B, I'm friends Andy and Lachlin, the two Andy Brown and Lachlin, the Australian guys, and ran into him and Seymour a year ago and just made the joke like, Man, you guys want a light company forever. Why don't we do something together? They made a minority investment into Natcho with the specific intention that they don't want control. They don't want us out. Which is funny because they're like, This is nothing without you guys. We want to invest in you and see what you do with it and take your lights all over the world. Because North America for A. R. B. Is only about 25 % of their business.
[01:01:08.470] - Big Rich Klein
Right.
[01:01:09.090] - Steve Adams
They're saying, No, we want Nachos in Japan and Thailand and Saudi Arabia and all over Europe.
[01:01:17.600] - Big Rich Klein
Their distribution is phenomenal.
[01:01:20.230] - Steve Adams
It's amazing. They've got amazing engineering. A. R. B. Makes some of the coolest stuff. You think full circle that that ARB, the air lockers going up that hill behind a metal building, Avalanche Engineering in 1996, and now we're partners with ARB, and they're selling our lights all over the world. It's just such a cool industry that that can happen. And it's fun and the customers are awesome. The vendors are awesome. It's just a cool industry. And that's where back, I still had the opportunity to go back to fly because in the airline world, you get furloughed, you don't get laid off. So I had, it was about 10 years. So it would have been in 2000, and '18, I had the opportunity to go back to American Airlines at this point because after all the mergers and I would have on the seniority list, I would have retired, I think, number three or four if I would have flown the rest of my life. I could not see myself packing a suitcase every three days, packing a suitcase to be gone from my family every week for the rest of my life. I resigned from the airlines because I love the off-road world.
[01:02:48.870] - Steve Adams
I love the manufacturing. I love the product design world.
[01:02:55.520] - Big Rich Klein
And the lifestyle. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about Off Road is it's an addictive lifestyle. There's a lot of businesses out there that people are very successful at, but they have to go outside of their business world to create their lifestyle. And it's great in Off Road, the people that have been able to create a life within the lifestyle.
[01:03:25.210] - Steve Adams
And it's special. Yeah. Honey, sorry. Yeah, we got to go camping again this weekend. It's too bad. We got to go get content. We're doing content, though. It's content. It's always about the content. Or I got to go to the thousand. It's for content. I got to go sleep in the desert on the race course in San Felipe and yell race cars at 3:00 AM for content. But it's always for the company.
[01:03:50.320] - Big Rich Klein
Right. And speaking of content, next time I'm down in the Phoenix area, I'd like to come by and visit and sit with you guys and for For Low magazine and do a shop visit.
[01:04:04.420] - Steve Adams
Yeah, you bet. I've been promising you for years that I'm going to do a trip write up because I've got to hang out with some brilliant trip photographers and writers, the Helen Johnson and Will Gentiles of the world. You offered, Hey, I'll publish something if you can write up a trip report, man. I promise you someday I'll do that.
[01:04:27.700] - Big Rich Klein
Well, I'll have to stay on about that. Yeah. There you go. So what's in the future?
[01:04:36.310] - Steve Adams
Right now we're focusing on Nacho. I figure I can't really retire until they're out of college. You never know what's going to happen if they're moving back in. So far, I don't think they are. But I'd say we got years of Nacho. The product roadmap in Natcho is so cool. We've got three or four years of patented technology. We've already got our first issued utility patent for Natcho. We've got another one pending, and we've got five more after that, all in aftermarket automotive lighting technology. And as long as I get to have fun doing it and we get to go to these events and I get to go camp at Hammers. As I get hammered long, I'm... I don't see... There's no reason for me to get out of this. I tried chasing the money with science. I thought the cannabis world is what I like. And I wasn't happy doing it. It wasn't exciting for me like, Oh, we created a new girl light. But now it's like, Oh, my God. Look at this light. Oh, this is going to be so awesome. I can't wait to show this to all my buddies and the press release.
[01:05:57.860] - Steve Adams
This is going to be so fun. That's what gets me up in the morning. Everybody says, Why didn't you retire? I was bored. I was bored for the month I was retired, and there's no reason to stop as long as I'm having fun doing it, and we got the right team to do it now.
[01:06:16.940] - Big Rich Klein
Great. What I noticed is Nacha is typically and primarily Round Lights. Are you going to go back to the bar at some point? Or is that something you want to talk about?
[01:06:33.980] - Steve Adams
Eventually, we're going to have to. Yeah.
[01:06:37.840] - Big Rich Klein
I like the round light look.
[01:06:41.360] - Steve Adams
Yeah. The round light is awesome. We need to fill in spaces. One of the biggest complaints we get is, Dude, I would buy your lights, but customers want all of one brand. Okay, well, we'll change that. But we need to fill... We need to fill in the holes. And we are going to fill in the holes. The bigger lights, smaller lights, more technology, more performance, better usability, and better esthetics. And that's it. If you can make the user experience better for the customer, if they are wowed when they open it and they are wowed when they turn it on, that's everything. And that's what we were early on. If somebody took a 10-inch light bar out of the box in 2010, they were blown away, both with the user experience, the customer service experience, and the performance. And that's what we're trying to do.
[01:07:41.220] - Big Rich Klein
Excellent. Well, Steve, I want to say thank you so much for spending the time this morning and talking about your life and your experiences. And everybody should get out of this the passion. And that's one of the key things that a company needs to have is the passion. I see that in you, and I see that in your products that you've designed and brought to market. That really helps the industry. I thank you for that.
[01:08:16.890] - Steve Adams
Well, I appreciate you trying to tell stories. We need more storytellers because that's what... Hopefully, there's a kid listening saying, You know what? I can do that. It might not be okay, great. If somebody wants to get into lighting, awesome. I'd love some... Start your own company, believe in it. Fail. Learn from your failures, because that's how we push everybody. The more competition I have, the better we're going to be.
[01:08:49.580] - Big Rich Klein
Very true. Competition breeds excellence.
[01:08:52.970] - Steve Adams
Yeah. And get people interested in the industry. I still love flying. Kids don't want to fly these days and kids don't want off road. And if I can get kids interested in either of those or mountain biking, I don't care what it is. Yeah, we need more passion. We need more kids that say, I want to do that. So I hope my passion feeds more passion and gets people into the industry.
[01:09:20.230] - Big Rich Klein
Excellent. Great segue. Thank you so much.
[01:09:24.000] - Steve Adams
I appreciate the.
[01:09:24.770] - Big Rich Klein
Time, Rich. Have all the success in the world that you can handle, and we'll talk some more. Appreciate it.
[01:09:30.870] - Steve Adams
We'll see you at the next event.
[01:09:32.160] - Big Rich Klein
All right. Sounds good. Thank you, Steve. Bye.
[01:09:34.140] - Steve Adams
Bye.
[01:09:35.900] - Big Rich Klein
Well, that's another episode of Conversations with Big Rich. I'd like to thank you all for listening. If you could do us a favor and leave us a review on any podcast service that you happen to be listening on, or send us an email or a text message or a Facebook message, and let me know any ideas that you have or if there's anybody that you have that you would think would be a great guest, please forward the contact information to me so that we can try to get them on. And always remember, live life to the fullest. Enjoying life is a must. Follow your dreams and live life with all the gust of you can. Thank you.