Episode 273 features Dynamic Entrepreneur, Jim Winn

Welcome to another exciting episode of "Conversations with Big Rich." This week, Big Rich Klein sits down with Jim Winn, a dynamic entrepreneur with a multifaceted career, whose journey has spanned from professional photography to corporate business, and now, to owning and operating multiple businesses within the off-road industry.

Highlights from the Episode:

• Early Life and Career: Jim shares his story of growing up in a baseball-centric family, which instilled in him a competitive spirit and a drive for excellence. His early ambitions took him from a promising photography career, where he captured significant moments like Hurricane Katrina, to becoming an entrepreneur.
• Entrepreneurial Journey: Jim discusses his transition from photography to business, including a stint as a cross-country truck driver, which helped fund his ventures. He eventually founded a small business selling home and garden products, which laid the groundwork for his current ventures.
• Behemoth Drivetrain: Jim talks about acquiring and revitalizing Behemoth Drivetrain, focusing on designing and manufacturing high-performance transfer cases and underdrives for off-road vehicles. He emphasizes the importance of quality and innovation in meeting the needs of enthusiasts and OEMs alike.
• Family and Future Plans: Jim reflects on the importance of family, his children's involvement in sports, and his commitment to building a legacy in the off-road industry. He shares his vision for continued growth and community impact in Litchfield, Kentucky.

Join Big Rich and Jim Winn for an inspiring conversation about entrepreneurship, passion, and the off-road lifestyle. Don’t miss this episode packed with insights and stories of adventure and innovation.

Transcript

[00:00:05.100] 

Welcome to Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview-style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the off-road 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 off-road. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active and off-road. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call off-road.

[00:00:46.400] 

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[00:01:12.480] - Big Rich Klein

My guest on this week's episode is Jim Winn, who at just 43 years old, is in my book, a classic overachiever. From a childhood filled with high-level baseball to a career in photography, then to corporate business, and now to private business with a focus on off-road. Jim Wyn is driven to Excel. Well, hello, Jim Wyn. So good to have you on the podcast. I'm looking forward to learning all about you.

[00:01:41.220] - Jim Winn

Likewise. I'm excited to be here, Rich. It's a pleasure to have a chance to chat. We've been in your orbit for a long time, so it's really nice to be able to connect and get to talk at length here.

[00:01:53.680] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. So let's talk about first you, and then we'll get into business. Where were you born and raised?

[00:02:04.000] - Jim Winn

I was originally born in South Mississippi, and was there until I was about 10. And then my family moved to Central Kentucky, and more or less grew up in Bowen Green, central Kentucky, until I graduated college and went on from there. We moved because of my dad's job. My dad spent his entire professional life around baseball. He was Played in high school, played in college, became a college baseball coach after graduation, and then started working for the Chicago Cubs as a baseball scout, and then was a scout for a number of different Major League teams until he retired a few years ago. So his job took him to Central Kentucky. We followed him up there and spent a big chunk of our younger life on the road, traveling with him, growing up in Major League, Minor League, baseball field across country.

[00:03:00.980] - Big Rich Klein

So at what age did you go from Mississippi to Kentucky?

[00:03:05.180] - Jim Winn

I was about 10, I think, when he moved up there.

[00:03:08.760] - Big Rich Klein

And I have to ask then, did you play baseball as a kid?

[00:03:13.300] - Jim Winn

I did. So I've got two younger brothers and a younger sister. We all played sports. I was decent but not great at baseball. Loved it, but was really into other stuff, other sports. I played through high school and then got really busy with other hobbies in college and all that. My two younger brothers are the actual athletes of the family. Dennis and Kevin played through college and then both went on to play Major League Base as well and had a career there.

[00:03:44.100] - Big Rich Klein

Then Well, very good.

[00:03:46.980] - Jim Winn

Went off from there, yeah.

[00:03:49.600] - Big Rich Klein

Let's talk about those early years. Southern Mississippi up until '10. Do you remember much of that?

[00:03:56.260] - Jim Winn

I remember a little bit, little snippets here and there. I remember we just roamed the neighborhood and explored and hopped on the bike and just went as far as we could. I remember a lot of that growing up and playing in creeks and stuff like that. Kentucky was really... I remember being 10, we were moving to Kentucky, and in my head, coming from South Mississippi, that was the north, and I fully expected to come up. This is July or something like that, to arrive in Kentucky, and there would be snow everywhere because we were moving to north. I was super disappointed. It was 90 degrees and sunny. And South Central, Kentucky, we got there.

[00:04:37.060] - Big Rich Klein

Well, one of the things that I've noticed about traveling all over the United States, putting on events, is that the higher the humidity and the sweeter the tea, the slower the conversation.

[00:04:51.500] - Jim Winn

That's pretty accurate. Yeah.

[00:04:53.440] - Big Rich Klein

And I think it's to save energy and not sweat.

[00:04:56.900] - Jim Winn

Yeah, probably right.

[00:04:58.110] - Big Rich Klein

You know, Californians, Westerners, and even Southwesterners. You know, everything just moves so fast. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing. Everybody talks so fast. And very few people drink sweet tea.

[00:05:17.540] - Jim Winn

It's an anomaly out there. My wife and I will get to, but we lived in Seattle for a while.

[00:05:22.560] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, so you know.

[00:05:23.610] - Jim Winn

Not a lot of sweet tea in the greater Seattle area, or at least good sweet tea.

[00:05:28.440] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, it's funny Because you go and I remember I ordered tea one time, and I think it was in Tennessee. We were driving through. Well, this is very early days of putting on events, and it was my first trip out there. And I ordered tea, and she brought me sweet tea. And when I first took a sip, I almost spit it out. It's smiling. And I was like, wow, can I get some regular tea? She goes, honey, that is regular tea.

[00:06:03.200] - Jim Winn

When you were there, was that for a We Rock event, in that Eastern, Tennessee? I forget the- Jellico.

[00:06:11.300] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. Yeah, we were on our way to Jellico.

[00:06:15.120] - Jim Winn

Awesome. Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee is like a different planet. I love it out there. It's a giant, giant playground.

[00:06:25.040] - Big Rich Klein

It sure is. So then growing up in a baseball family, you moving with your dad chasing the job, and he was scouting the teams and everything. What was that like? I mean, did you guys go to a lot of games, especially I would imagine College games and high school games?

[00:06:47.840] - Jim Winn

Yeah, depending on which team he worked for the Cubs, then the Orials, and then the Royals, and he finally retired with the Twins. Depending on which organization he was with, there's different types of scouting. There's amateur scouts, and so they travel around a certain territory of the US. So they see all the high school and college players in that area, and they cast a big net and then pull out the best of that group. And those get referred on to a cross checker who sees the best of that group. And those are the people who decide who gets signed and who doesn't. And for different clubs, he was both an area amateur scout, cross checker. He's also a pro-scout. And so the pro-scouts will basically scout the other major league team. So when it comes time to trade, they know who's available, who would be good fit to solve this problem in this position and vice versa. So depending on which club he was working for, we were either at minor league games, major league games, high school games, a little bit of everything. But for the most part, he would be home. At After the World Series, baseball just pauses for the most part until February-ish.

[00:08:06.600] - Jim Winn

So he would be home for months at a time, and then spring training would start. And then he would be at spring training for almost a month, and we would typically pack up and travel and spend a month with him, whether it was Arizona or Florida. And then after that, it'd be a week or two or three weeks at a time, he'd be gone. Same thing, a lot of times we'd pack up and travel with him. So my brothers and sister and I, we were home schooled because just makes that a much more doable lifestyle. Okay. But, yeah, just grew up in dugouts and baseball stadium. So it was interesting. We got to grow up. I got to see this whole spectrum of how people get to be where they are on a very high level. You would see these amateur kids in college and high school working really hard and getting signed, and you would follow them as they made it through the minor league. And you'd see these minor leavers getting to the field early and hitting, and hitting, and hitting, trying to make a name for themselves and improve their skillset. You hear all the stories of what they're going through and hear coaches talk to them, and sometimes in a really nice way, sometimes not so nice, depending on how they played.

[00:09:09.900] - Jim Winn

You'd see the coaches, they're all trying to be with the major league. So there's this super intense level of competition, everybody trying to get better. And so be a really young kid growing up in that environment, it made an enormous mark, I think, for my brothers and I, just how we saw the world and how to get where we to be in life. It's a very deep part, I think, of our DNA in some form or fashion. I remember there was this clinic called the Laurel Clinic in Laurel, Mississippi. And my dad would go there and see some... It was like a baseball camp for higher-end players, and a lot of scouts would go there and either teach a session or evaluate players. But I remember they had a T-shirt at the camp one year. It said, Hit until your hands bleed. And that was the environment we grew up around. It was just like, you're going to build yourself into what you need to be. It was a very fortunate way to experience life as a young kid. I think it made an enormous mark on us.

[00:10:13.910] - Big Rich Klein

Well, I would imagine so. Interesting. Normally, I ask what student somebody was, but if you were home schooled, that's a little different because I typically ask, were you the student looked out the window, where were you the studious, get the work done, good grades type student?

[00:10:36.260] - Jim Winn

So, yeah. I got to help you bend of both. We got to live outside the window, but we also had... My mom was very on point with the homeschooling, so we had a pretty rigid school structure within a very dynamic, fluid environment being in a lot of different places. It gives us a lot of flexibility to explore and learn and do stuff, be involved in things that we probably wouldn't have been otherwise. But we had the core, my mom was the foundation that, you know. Making it happen. Organized, made it happen. We were definitely getting work done on time and good grades and all that.

[00:11:16.320] - Big Rich Klein

So did you have time, as you were growing up, to have any odd jobs or start your own working career, or were you just constantly moving?

[00:11:28.700] - Jim Winn

There's a There's a balance. So a lot of odd jobs. When I was really, I think, 14, I started working the nights of Columbus Hall, and I'd clean up for them after events. So that was one of my first jobs, and did all the typical paper routes and cutting grass and all of that. And I was always just poking them proud and making money. And just, I wouldn't say it was super entrepreneurial, but just the standard younger kids, summer job stuff Okay.

[00:12:01.400] - Big Rich Klein

Did you save your money for anything particular, or were you spend it as you make it?

[00:12:08.460] - Jim Winn

I was the hoard every penny I could until I could get the big thing that I wanted. I remember my brother Dennis was a little more free-spirited, and so he was the... When you're going to spend it as he made it. And then my youngest brother Kevin is a mix of both. So you put us all together, we're like a pretty complete person. But I remember... So one of the things I got into and got to be relatively really good at was speed skating, which is an obscure sport to get in.

[00:12:40.500] - Big Rich Klein

Actually, you know that on roller, on Roller skating?

[00:12:45.560] - Jim Winn

Yes. Roller skiing? Okay. Especially, when I was younger. Roller budging was big. I got really into speed skating. I also worked at a skate park and was into all this street skating and stuff like that. I was okay with that, but I was really good at speed skating, and I raced a lot of events. So the first pair of skates I wanted was like a thousand bucks. I mean, I tell you what, I just delivered the shit out of some newspapers for a year to save up enough to buy those carbon fiber Well, here's a little story for you.

[00:13:19.660] - Big Rich Klein

In the '50s, my mom was a speed skater. Of course, nothing was in line, and they had wood wheels and raced on wood tracks, flat tracks.

[00:13:30.000] - Jim Winn

Oh, that's crazy. Wow.

[00:13:32.400] - Big Rich Klein

The precursor to like, roller derby, where they started making the tracks oval and looking more like a NASCAR track.

[00:13:43.680] - Jim Winn

Right, right.

[00:13:44.730] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, but she was a world's champion speed skater.

[00:13:49.320] - Jim Winn

No way. Absolutely.

[00:13:51.040] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah.

[00:13:52.020] - Jim Winn

Don't run into many other people that did that.

[00:13:56.240] - Big Rich Klein

That's incredible. Yeah. When you said that, I just went like, what? What?

[00:14:01.100] - Jim Winn

Yeah, what are the odds? It's so bizarre. That's really neat.

[00:14:04.360] - Big Rich Klein

So then, what did you guys do as a family for fun outside of baseball games?

[00:14:15.000] - Jim Winn

Base was a big part of it because we all played. Our brothers played on, usually, a couple of teams at a time. So if we weren't with dad of baseball, we were at somebody else's games. So we did a lot of that. Our whole family is really We had a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins close to us in Bowling Green. We had some cousins that lived across the street. So as a broader family, extended family, we were all pretty close. We were hanging out with family or we did a lot of camping and outdoor stuff. We were just pretty active all the time. If we weren't doing something like that, the skate park was a quarter mile away from our house, so we spent a ton of time there. Got into golf in high school. My brothers and I, My mom would drop us off at the golf course at 6: 00 in the morning, and then we would just stay there until it got dark, until we could drive. We were just always doing a sport or something outside of some kind or another.

[00:15:15.260] - Big Rich Klein

When you got done with your homeschooling, did you take the next step and go into college?

[00:15:23.180] - Jim Winn

I did. I went to college, and I was originally going to go to college and study zoology. I was also really into birds at the time, honestly enough. I still like birds. But I was going to study zoology, and then as a fluke, somebody invited A friend of the family was a photography professor at Western Kentucky University, which is in the same town I grew up in. I was going to go to Southern Illinois, Carbendale, and study zoology. And then I sat in an intro to photography class, taught by a guy named James Kinney, who still teaches there. And they had black and white pictures on the wall. All the students, they had shot an assignment during the week. They had to develop their own film, print their own pictures in the dark room hanging on the wall. And then there was a critique of their work in that class. And this is the intro class. But I remember sitting in that class and seeing their work on the wall and how they talked about what they did. And it was like somebody had come up and kicked me in the chest and kicked me out of the chair.

[00:16:34.920] - Jim Winn

It was just an emotional reaction. I was like, I don't know why I feel like this or if I'm any good at this, but I was like, that is what I meant to be doing. And that was late in my senior year at high school. I just scrapped all my plans. I was like, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be exceptional at it. And then pretty much from that point on, just every waking moment, that is every breath I took, I took to get a little bit better at refining that craft. And it afforded me a lot of opportunity and a lot of adventure. And that's how I met my wife, Carla, and has effected the rest of my life sitting in that class.

[00:17:21.770] - Big Rich Klein

That's great. How did you meet your wife with photography?

[00:17:27.480] - Jim Winn

She was also a photography, a photojournalist Photogeneralism, specifically. A photo journalism major. And I met her about two years into the program. She had switched majors, and we met in the photo lab. And we were hung around each other for a couple of years. We didn't start dating almost till the end of college. So I met her through the program. And I was fortunate. That program at Western was, in still is this day, one of, hands down, the best documentary photography, photo journalism programs in the country. I don't know how many Pulitzer Prize winners have gone through that program. So just super lucky. In my hometown was one of the best programs on the planet, with some of the best teachers, most creative people. I spent, took me about five years of graduate college because I would occasionally skip a semester and go work on a project somewhere, travel or do whatever. But eventually, five years after I started. Another Another interesting crossover.

[00:18:33.520] - Big Rich Klein

My degree is in Commercial Photography Product Advertising.

[00:18:36.320] - Jim Winn

Is it really? No way. That's a lot of overlap. That's crazy.

[00:18:41.160] - Big Rich Klein

From Brooks Institute of Photography before they- Oh, I know, Brooks. Yeah, for sure. Before they got their accreditation taken away. I graduated in. I was there from '78 through '81.

[00:18:54.580] - Jim Winn

Yeah. Now I'm super familiar with that program. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. That's crazy. Yeah. So you may or may not know Western's PJ program, but that's where Carla and I graduated from. And eventually, like post-college, we worked on newspapers for a little bit, and then really just wasn't the right fit for us for a bunch of different reasons. We just wanted more control of the type of work we were doing. And we ended up doing a lot of commercial work, which funded our documentary, Have It, and then later evolved out of that. But yeah, crazy. That's an amazing overlap. Right.

[00:19:35.240] - Big Rich Klein

So now you're doing photography, you're out of college, you're doing photography, you've met your wife, doing and commercial work, how did that transition work into... I mean, what else happened? I mean, there had to be some more progression.

[00:19:56.660] - Jim Winn

There was this, Carla and I getting married was an amazing catalyst for causing our life plans to change a lot, as it can, as happens when you get married. Absolutely. In college, again, my purpose in life, up until I got married to Carla, was like, I was going to be the best at what I did. I wanted to be in important places when important moments were happening and make the best possible picture that he recorded that moment in time. Let me just see if I can bring this up here really quick. Do you think about D-Day and landing on Omaha Beach? There's one really specific picture taken by Robert Kappa. He was the right guy in the right place at the right time who had refined his craft to make a picture that almost 100 years later still defines that moment in time. And Sorry. I wanted to be at that level. So through college, I was fortunate. I got to the point where I won this award called the Hearst Award, which is like the college equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. And we had a bunch of work that was seen from Hurricane Katrina.

[00:21:25.160] - Jim Winn

We were in New Orleans on a bridge next to the Superdome during the hurricane and made some pictures that are still published from Katrina when you look at retrospective gallery. I was on that progression. And then after we got married, a lot of our documentary work, Carla had a grant that funded us to do a lot of work on the Mexican border. We spent a lot of time doing a project around immigration. We spent a lot of time with the US Border in Texas and Arizona, taking pictures of them doing what they do as people crossing over and them catching people or chasing people. Then we also spent a lot of time in Mexico just document what the other side of that was like. We actually snuck into the United States with a bunch of immigrants through the Arizona border at one point. It was late July, early August. It was crazy dangerous. Almost got murdered a couple of different times, legitimately. It was really dangerous. We made great pictures, and we were really good at it. And we got to a point, especially after that, we had pushed the envelope so hard. At some point, this lifestyle is not conducive to us being successfully, healthily married long term.

[00:22:52.960] - Jim Winn

We're really good at taking beautiful pictures of dangerous things, but I don't know, it just wasn't conducive to, somebody's going to get hurt eventually. And we came to that realization, we need to scale this back and figure out what to do next. And the commercial side of our business was doing really well. And we thought, well, we love taking pictures. We love running a business. There's a very creative element running a business. But we don't really love a photography business. We should just quit everything and reset and figure out what we want to do next. And we had saved enough to... Oh, in the middle of it, I forgot. To start that commercial business after college, and we started the business doing the commercial work. We funded the reckless documentary Habit. We were gone. We had student loans, and we wanted to put some money in the bank just as a married couple in the startup business. We thought, what is the best way to make as much money as we can quickly? What we eventually came up with was we got our CDLs and we became cross country truck drivers for 12 months. And we team drove for a company called CFI, and we drove aggressively for 12 months.

[00:24:07.330] - Jim Winn

We lived on the truck. We sold everything we had and just saved money. Because the truck, we got paid by the mile, so we just never stopped working. We worked for three months at a time, took a couple of days off, work another three months. And through that, we saved enough money to pay off all our student loans, put some money in the bank, buy all the equipment we needed, despite the commercial side of the business. And then it was off to the races from there. But every now and then the truck would break down. And the only time it ever broke down, it seemed to be was in Seattle. So we got to the point where we wanted to restart and reset. We had some friends in Seattle, and we just really loved it there. And we thought, you know what? Let's start over, move to Seattle, and we'll find a company to work for, to learn from, like a real-world MBA. We didn't really want to go back to college, but we wanted to find a company we could work and grow inside and just learn the business side of things a little bit more intimately and just refine that skillset.

[00:25:07.680] - Jim Winn

And we ended up working for this company called Fastenal. And we spent about seven years working for them. Carla, not quite as long. After our first kid was born, she eventually, after about a year, left FAST and all this stay home full-time. But that was our transition, photography into the world of business and manufacturing, and it was a big part of how got to be where we are today. But we spent, I think, collectively, about three years in Seattle, maybe, something like that. It's a little foggy now. It's hard to remember. But I spent a few years in Seattle working for Fastenal, and we were fortunate. We had a chance to move to the international side of the company when Fastenal was expanding into a bunch of different countries all over the world. And through that, we got sent to Panama for about two and a half, three years, I think, something like that. And so I worked between Panama and Brazil, all the countries in between. As Fastenal was expanding into those countries, I was a part of the team that helped figure out how do we do that, how do we set up new stores and get parts in and implement production lines like Fastener Supply, all these production lines in South America.

[00:26:20.280] - Jim Winn

Then Carla, she was the corporate trainer for Latin America. So all the new employee training, sales and operation training, she led that for all the employees in Mexico, Columbia, Panama, and Brazil. We spent a couple of years in Panama, and then eventually got moved to Brazil because I was spending the majority of my time in Brazil. That was the fastest-growing part of Latin America for us at the time. So it's been a few years down there and then eventually moved back to the States after about, I think, five years in Latin America. That was a lot. That catches the vibe somewhat.

[00:26:55.960] - Big Rich Klein

No, I mean, wow. You've led quite the experience in your life so far.

[00:27:06.580] - Jim Winn

Yeah, so far we've been really fortunate to get to experience and do a lot of really neat stuff.

[00:27:11.520] - Big Rich Klein

And survive.

[00:27:13.860] - Jim Winn

And come back on one piece. Yeah, like nothing too crazy, but we're still married. We still got all our fingers and toes and done a lot in between. So we're very blessed. We're super fortunate.

[00:27:26.860] - Big Rich Klein

So when you moved back to the States, did you move back to Seattle area?

[00:27:31.320] - Jim Winn

No, we moved back to Kentucky. We had been between Seattle and South America, we've been away from family for so long. And we had our first kid, our son, Jude, was born in Panama. Our second child, Able, was born in Brazil. We just like, no point. Two kids are like, we want to be close to family. So when our contract was up in Latin America, we had a chance to renew and go somewhere else with a company or move back to the States. I said, guys, we just be home, close to family. If you could send us somewhere between like, Louisville and Bowling Green, Kentucky, I'll do whatever just to get back in and reset and repatriate and get back in the States. And I said, We need some help at this store in this little town called Litchfield. Needs a general manager for a while. If you want to just something easy to land on your feet and get comfortable back in the States. We got a place in Litchfield, which is 45 minutes from my family in Bowling and five minutes from Carla's parents and sisters down the road. So we said, Amazing.

[00:28:36.000] - Jim Winn

Send us to Litchfield. So we moved to Litchfield, Kentucky, and I worked for that store for about a year, and then eventually left Hassanal to branch out on my own from there.

[00:28:47.660] - Big Rich Klein

That's fortuitous, you might say.

[00:28:51.880] - Jim Winn

Yeah, just a bizarre coincidence. Again, very Icanic-godish. The odds of us wanting to move back there being a spot in Litchfield, close to our parents. The stars had really aligned for that. So again, super, super fortunate to have that come together like that.

[00:29:10.720] - Big Rich Klein

So I'm going to guess that while you were in these various countries, with Faisal, and then doing your photography, and and being out on the border, and doing the things, that you did get some off-road experience?

[00:29:28.460] - Jim Winn

No, none, ironically. Especially when it got to the Faisal phase of our life. I wouldn't say it was a workaholic, but I was just intensely focused on building that skillset and helping. I still do this day, love Fast Sault. I'm one of the greatest companies on Earth. I cannot say enough good things about how they operate and the opportunity they give the people in that company. And I wanted to make the most of everything I could. Especially in Panama, there's a lot of offroading in Panama. And so some of the people we work with, we got to do some stuff with them, but nothing extensive. I just went down there and worked my brains. I should have, in high sight, I should have recreated way more and taken advantage of that. But I'll find a way to make that happen. There you go. But the off-road part didn't really start until Behemoth way, way later, which actually came through fast. And I'll like to fast forward a little bit. At the little store that I was helping out at for a while, we moved back. The original owner, Behemoth, was a customer of that store.

[00:30:44.280] - Jim Winn

So that's how Behemoth as an entity first showed up on my radar. And didn't know much about it and didn't really pay attention to it until a couple of years later when we got more involved.

[00:30:57.040] - Big Rich Klein

So let's talk about that then. So you go from Fast and All, customer comes in, buy a nuts and bolts, and you become, I guess, friends, or at least the business How did that opportunity arose out of that?

[00:31:17.720] - Jim Winn

I imagine you and probably maybe a bunch of your audience. I don't know this is so far back, and I don't know how familiar people are these days. But if you look at the original story The story arc of Behemoth is so fascinating. It's really interesting. But you look at old forum posts, get on pirate four by four and look at Behemoth drive train. Not a lot of positive sentiment from 2010 to 2018, something like that. To that end, there was this account that owed the store money and was two years behind called Behemoth. I was like, What is it? Every now and then, our district manager will be like, Hey, you got to clean past due invoices at this store. What is this Behemoth account that owes that store some money? Figure it out. I would call, get a holding body. I was like, What is this Behemoth thing? I didn't know a thing about it until years later. I just knew it was an account that was way past due on its bills. Like many people, Behemoth owe this money. And never didn't even know what Behemoth was or what it did. It was just this one-word name on an account that was past due.

[00:32:30.000] - Jim Winn

But fast forward a few years, a little bit down the road, it's like behind the scenes, like when we were in Brazil, we knew the writing was on the wall. At some point, we were going to be moving back. I felt like I have probably taken the fast on the thing as far as I want to go. I probably learn what I needed to learn, and at some point, we'd be back to being entrepreneurs and self-employed again. That was in the back of my mind. Carla had decided to stop working full-time to stay home Jude. I was like, Also, I want to make some extra money just to support losing that second income. I've always tinkered and made things, and I got a little bit of it, not great, but decent design skillset just from my time as a photographer, refining my eye and composition, stuff like that. I have a decent ability to design and improve things. And so it started tinkering and designing some products. And when we come home to visit family, on holidays and stuff like that, I would stay up late and make a bunch of stuff, and then sell it on Etsy, or eBay, or Amazon, or whatever, and eventually sold enough of that that I could get some of those designs made overseas, and I would get those made and shipped pallets into Amazon.

[00:33:48.790] - Jim Winn

So I had this small business on the side while we were in South America, just designing and selling some products. And when we moved back to the States after about a year, eventually, that had grown enough that I had two full-time jobs. I was running the Faisal thing and then running this side business. That had become a full-time business. So this group, this product line, was this group of home and garden products. I had a patent for a wine bottle Tiki Torch kit I designed and patented, which sold incredibly well until eventually the Chinese found it, copied it, and our factory flooded the Internet with copies of our products that they were making.

[00:34:33.580] - Big Rich Klein

Because they do that.

[00:34:35.920] - Jim Winn

Yeah. So really common story. To you. But made me very aware of the risks and benefits of manufacturing overseas. But, I forgot. I was going to, I'm rambling. But, oh, so eventually, that left Asanol, focused on that full-time, eventually sold that company and had some money to work with that funded the group that we operate today. But one of the first I wanted to take... I'm not interested in starting a new business ever again. It's really hard. There's a lot of risk, and it's just an uphill battle to get to the point where it's stable, successful, and Our path from that point on was, let's buy something that's already established and make it invest and make it better, whether it's redesigning, manufacturing, operation, whatever. And Behemoth is one of the first companies we did that with. We've done it with several since then. But I was talking to the manager of that same Fastenal store at the time we took over after I left. And I was just asked, Hey, there's got to be a company here that's really small, that's going to you for nuts and bolts, and it's making something interesting but just doesn't quite know how to do it as well as it could be.

[00:36:04.420] - Jim Winn

And we were just chatting about things, and you mentioned this behemoth company. I was like, Oh, yeah. I remember those guys who owe us money. Who is that? I looked at the website and I started to get a better understanding of what it was and read all the same old form posts from a decade ago that everybody else has read. I was like, Oh, this is really interesting. Clearly, whoever this guy is, has designed, invented something that is really successful, solves a problem, does it really well in an innovative way. Nobody really had complaints about the product. They had a lot of complaints about how the business was run, like super valid complaints. And I thought, well, really good at running a business, and we got money to make it run better. I can't make something that's terrible better as a product. If it's a bad design, it's a bad design. But it's not like the designs are good. It's just the problem was fulfilling the demand and doing it well and consistently and taking care of people. At that point, Behemoth had been shut down and out of business for, gosh, probably a year, year and a half.

[00:37:09.770] - Jim Winn

But I got a hold of the original owner and said, Hey, can we work out a deal? I can buy the intellectual property and take this over and restart it as a new thing. We eventually worked something out and spent probably a year and a half just to get blueprints made and just figure out what was being made and how and all that stuff. But from there, we slowly redesigned everything and built it back. And fast forward a few years later, several years later, it's a totally different animal. We do really cool, innovative stuff every day within Behemoth. And the other companies we operate now are in the same boat. They all continue to grow and have some really great operators that run those companies and do really awesome stuff day to day. I'm super fortunate to with a group of really amazing people these days within Behemoth and otherwise.

[00:38:04.020] - Big Rich Klein

Do you want to talk about the other companies or lines?

[00:38:07.660] - Jim Winn

Yeah, for sure. So one of the companies that's really interesting is Prime Rents, a powerwashing company. And there's lots of power washing companies. But what's unique about Prime Rents is they really focus on doing bigger, more complicated projects. So they have contracts with lots of school districts and universities in the central part of the country. So when school ends, they'll go in and wash all the buildings. They have multi-year contracts for that, which isn't that unique in and of itself. The unique part about Primrance is the biggest part of their business is Primrance is one of the few companies that cleans water towers in the country. And the traditional way to clean a water tower is you get up on top of it, and you tie a rope off, and you rappel off the side, and you dangle down there with a scrub brush or a pressure-washing wand, and you pressure-wash the outside, and dangle around, and get blown by the It's scary, dangerous, lots of insurance, and it takes a really long time. It's super expensive. What is unique about prime rents is they have designed and built a custom drone, a massive drone.

[00:39:14.200] - Jim Winn

That drone will fly up and wash the water tower. So our people never leave the grounds. The traditional method takes five to seven days to wash. They can do it in four or five hours. It's typically a the cost or less to the city or county water district that they're working for. And so it's faster, safer, more cost-effective. And they're the only people in the country doing it at scale with this type of equipment. And super unique. And so that's one of the one of the cool things we do outside of Behemoth. And then you have the chance, if you guys know, like RAD Designs, Rory out there in Washington. I've known Rory for a long time just through Behemoth. And Rory had gotten to the point where he had wanted to retire, and we had a chance to work with him to take over ownership of RAD designs and move production of the VX shifter and rail controller product lines to Litchfield. So we hired some more people and worked with Rory to improve the design of the shifters to just be able to make it a little more at scale, less bespoke, less like hand-welded, more billet machining to just improve the quality and form and appearance and all that stuff.

[00:40:27.930] - Jim Winn

So RAD did some super cool stuff and starting to get us some bigger types of projects and applications. So Behemoth, Red. My wife runs one of our other companies called Next Level Prints, and Next Level does a lot of custom design work for, going back to our roots, baseball teams, baseball teams across the country. She has about 1,200 teams that use Next Level for custom lineup cards and dugout charts and uniforms and stuff like that. They take care of everything from seven-year-old travel teams all the way up to, I think there's six Major League baseball teams that use Next Level for their custom design work. And so I get to touch on the baseball roots a little bit through that. So that's some of the other stuff we do outside of the Hema.

[00:41:16.980] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, Jim, I got to ask you this question. You can answer it if you don't, if you want to or if you don't. How old are you?

[00:41:24.340] - Jim Winn

Oh, I'll be 43 in three days.

[00:41:29.520] - Big Rich Klein

Forty-three?

[00:41:30.840] - Jim Winn

Yeah. I don't know if that seems old or young. Depending on the day, I'm like, Man, I'm old. I'm just 43.

[00:41:37.120] - Big Rich Klein

That is young. I'm going to say that is really young for everything that you've... Just what we've talked about.

[00:41:45.020] - Jim Winn

We got more to go. But yeah, so 43. Again, we've been really fortunate. When I was really young, I was in high school and looking out the world. I was like, I want to go out and experience the world. I want a really interesting life resume. I just wanted to do lots of just interesting stuff and just poke the world and just see what's out there. I feel like I got more to go, but we've been able to do a lot of that in one way or the other, which is super fun. It's different every day.

[00:42:12.860] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I got into the off-road world at 42, is when I started. No kidding. When I started We Rock, or Cal Rocks, I should say. It was Cal Rocks at first. That's right. It's been 25 years now And I've expanded. We've cut back, we expanded, we've cut back. Everything just keeps the ebb and flow of- That's a good way to put it.

[00:42:43.480] - Jim Winn

Of a business. That ebb and flow.

[00:42:47.000] - Big Rich Klein

It's been interesting. But up until that point, I worked... Well, I had a bunch of different businesses just to make money, and I thought I'd be interested in, and it just never anything held my interest for more than five years. I just couldn't figure out what it was. I always loved off-road, but it was like, I don't know how I was going to make a living doing it. I saw off-road events, the rock crawling get started, and I was like, Okay, that's what I'm going to go do, because I watched a couple of other people's events and went, I think I can better. At least on the event side, it may not be a big circus, but the competition is going to run smooth and honest.

[00:43:40.000] - Jim Winn

The execution of it. Yeah, for sure. And then to this day, We Rock does such an amazing job. We've been involved with We Rock, not quite since the beginning of it's taking over, but close to it. And it's just been a great and very professional, buttoned up, well-run organization since It's day one of our involvement with you guys.

[00:44:02.160] - Big Rich Klein

It's a tried and true... I mean, everybody... Not everybody. I'll say there's been a lot of people out there that have tried to reinvent what rock crawling is. Yeah. And all sorts of different types of events. I'd have to say the the only one that is stuck well and done great things with it, with their expansion and development is King of the Hammers.

[00:44:37.240] - Jim Winn

Oh, yeah, for sure.

[00:44:39.960] - Big Rich Klein

All sorts of things can be said about all the different organizations and the pluses and the minuses and everything. But it's that being able to stick with it, longevity, keeping it going, and refining it to where it works without having to... Because the one thing with any rock sports or off-road is, they say, Whether you're a racer or a promoter, is it the easiest way to end up with a million dollars is to start with two.

[00:45:21.320] - Jim Winn

Very wise and accurate.

[00:45:23.360] - Big Rich Klein

So you really have to get it so that it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it has to be refined. It has to be... There has to be a balance between the product and the reward for the event, at least in... And I imagine with manufacturing of products, it's pretty much the same thing.

[00:45:55.880] - Jim Winn

Very much so. Yeah, it's like figuring out where that balance is. You can take things way too far. You got something that's over-engineered and overly expensive. It's really cool. It's got all the bells and whistles, but it either doesn't solve the need the customer has or solves it too much. I need it solved to this point, not to the nth degree. So it's just figuring out where that balance is. Well, that's where the art part of it is. There's no clear path to building an organization like we are out. There's no manual for It's just like you said, that word refinement, just doing it over and over and over and being committed to it enough for the long haul that you have enough reps, enough... You just develop such an intimate knowledge of that organization, the ecosystem, the customers, the product, whatever it is that you can just continually make it better over time. That's just something that takes years or decades to do.

[00:46:55.560] - Big Rich Klein

I always looked at it as a big triangle or pyramid, because you have... I always thought of it like a pyramid, okay, or at least when you look at it from a straight on view. So you have three points, and that's a very solid foundation, an object. If it's a circle, it rolls, it moves all around. If it's square, it can tip over. So I always looked at it as one of the corners being the event or the promoter, one corner being the competitors, and then the third corner being the marketing partners. And that space in between being the enthusiasts or spectators, fans.

[00:47:51.200] - Jim Winn

That's very cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:47:53.520] - Big Rich Klein

And so what I tried to do- As an enthusiast, you touch on, you experience each of those three points.

[00:47:58.940] - Jim Winn

Like, they all collectively combine to make that end customer-Correct. Experience at the event. Yeah.

[00:48:06.620] - Big Rich Klein

And all three of those have to be involved in the design or the execution of the event to make sure that it's good for not only all three, but also for that spectator or fan enthusiast.

[00:48:25.820] - Jim Winn

Yeah, that's super well put. Finding that balance is hard, but once you find it, magic happens.

[00:48:34.300] - Big Rich Klein

So let's talk more about Behemoth. What exactly is Behemoth, for those that don't know, and are on the Internet searching while they're listening to this?

[00:48:45.180] - Jim Winn

Yeah, so today's Behemoth. So we acquired the intellectual property. It was just this shell that didn't exist anymore at the point we started our involvement. It's probably around 2020. We really didn't start bringing products back to the market to mid-late 2021, I think, something like that. So behemoth today, though, is a totally different animal. At its core, behemoth is about transfer cases. It's about gearing. But we are a designer and a manufacturer of incredibly high performance precision transfer cases and under drives. And today we do that in a bunch of different ways. So we have a variety, several different models of transfer cases, designed towards the higher performance, more professional type of driver, your king of hammers, ultra force driver. That's our Billet Colossus model, that product line. Last year we came out with the APEX, which is a cast version of the Colossus. It's basically that same incredibly high performance, super expensive transfer case packed into a cast housing. So you're getting a $6,500 transfer case and a $3,500 package. Just going cast helps us so much on cost for able to pass that on to the customer. So our cast apex is a direct competitor to the Atlas in terms of gearing, function, form, all that stuff, price point.

[00:50:26.660] - Jim Winn

We have a variety of under drives. We call our strong box product line. And then outside of that, we have a constellation of supporting products. We make most of the shafts, actually right now, all of the shafts, except for a couple, we actually make in-house. So we manufacture and spawn shafts in-house. And then just a huge assortment of retainers and amounts and stuff like that that would be used in different applications, the transfer cases, underdrives, whatever. So going back to your triangle analogy or legs on a stool is a phrase we use a lot. So we have our our retail customer who might see us in an event, look us up on Instagram. We put a lot into our social media just so people have a chance to connect with us and the product and how we make things and how we see ourselves as a company. But they may have seen us at an event or a friend of a friend got a transfer case. They call us up and go on their website, talk to a support engineer, figure out what case I need for whatever they're building. They buy it and put it in their rig.

[00:51:30.000] - Jim Winn

Awesome. That's a big chunk of our business. Other chunk of our business is we have distributors and dealers all over the country. We've got about like 80 or 90 dealers in our dealers program. So they're typically higher volume build shops who get, obviously, dealer pricing because they buy a lot and put a lot of our cases in their customers' builds. So that's the other third of our business. And then the fastest growing part of our business, we waited a while to really approach because we wanted to refine our skillset as designers, refine our skillset as manufacturers. But we do a lot more contract designing and manufacturing for other companies. So we do have Some OEM applications that we have designed, specially transfer cases for either in the mining industry. I have a couple designs through a military defense application. And then there's another category I can't really talk about a whole lot, but it's growing for us really rapidly. We have a line of custom cases for this particular other third application. So that's the fastest growing part of our business. Like we've established our reputation as being a team that can design a super high-end transfer case, solve a problem for the customer, and then also manufacture it to the quality standards that customer requires.

[00:52:57.330] - Jim Winn

And sometimes that customer is a guy who just wants to go wheeling on the weekend. Sometimes that customer is a dealer who just needs a consistent supply of really high-end cases and very high-level customer service. And sometimes that's a early high volume OEM manufacturer that needs a solution for a gearing problem they have, and whatever vehicle they manufacture. So that's a big part of what Behemoth is today.

[00:53:24.280] - Big Rich Klein

So I have to ask another question. Yeah. Because to me, transfer case and a product like a portal box, are not all that dissimilar. I've noticed that there's an influx of companies coming out with portal boxes. I think there's four, five or six now.

[00:53:49.440] - Jim Winn

There's a new one every day. It seems like. I keep hearing about new ones every time I talk to you. It seems like that. Every time I talk to you, which is really exciting. It's an amazing advancement in terms of just vehicle design. It makes sense.

[00:54:02.300] - Big Rich Klein

Are we going to see a behemoth portal?

[00:54:05.760] - Jim Winn

No, definitely not. We've talked about it a lot. We haven't, because we can't help, but just culturally, we're always looking for a design problem to solve. It's a big part of what we do. So you look at portals. We have a couple of designs on paper. I thought, this would make a really innovative portal. It would probably solve some limitations of the current portals. But You look at what's out there, like 74 Weld and Quin and those guys, they do an amazing job. They're incredibly good at what they do. And then there's any number of other companies you're coming after Right after that, trying to fill a gap in the market. Portals are close enough to transfer cases and what we currently do to be really tempting, but it's just far enough away from just a design mentality that Rather than, honestly, my approach would be rather than just trying to start our own portal, we would rather acquire a portal company and then just invest to make them bigger, better, and grow that brand rather than start our own Behemoth portal, if that makes sense.

[00:55:18.560] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, like with RAD design.

[00:55:21.180] - Jim Winn

Yeah, exactly. Behemoth doesn't really want to make its own line of transmission shifters. Rad does it really well. They're really well known for it. It was a better fit for us to acquire RAD and then just continue to support Rad, and just doing what it already did really well, and just do more of it, and do it better over time. That would be our approach to the portal side of things.

[00:55:41.140] - Big Rich Klein

Rory had great ideas, but it was a one-man show.

[00:55:46.300] - Jim Winn

Right. And he was super happy with that. He had it to a point where it fit for the life he wanted to lead, and it was great. But within that, there's limitations. There's not 25 hours in a day. There's only so much you can do as a one-man band. But, man, Rory, such a brilliant guy. It's been really exciting to work with him to transition that to Litchfield. We've got just way more machining capabilities and fabrication capabilities and design support to just take what he did so well and just amplify it a little bit. Been really privileged to work with Rory to be a steward of what he had done so well for so long.

[00:56:31.360] - Big Rich Klein

Anything else out there in the world that you're eyeing that you can talk about?

[00:56:40.060] - Jim Winn

As far as like Wind Capital, the group that we operate now, We have a couple of acquisitions we're working on. Majority of our focus going forward as a group is in the automotive industry off-road. We just have invested so much into just being a manufacturer in that industry, and we have such a deep knowledge from a product and design standpoint. That'll probably, whatever we acquire next, will probably be in the automotive industry. And then as far as just what we already do in-house, like I said, the biggest part of our business so far over the last year and a half has been doing some of the work for the OEM. So we're really investing in just improving our quality platform, our MRP, our manufacturing software, and just getting everything to a point where we can just support more of these OEMs and do it at a larger scale. So there's a gap in the market that we feel very well from a design standpoint, from a manufacturing capacity standpoint, and we are going to aggressively expand on that side of things over the next couple of years.

[00:57:57.100] - Big Rich Klein

And your facility is in Litchfield?

[00:58:00.000] - Jim Winn

Yeah, Litchfield, Kentucky. So we're roughly about… Litchfield is really small. Probably nobody's heard of it, but we're roughly like an hour from Louisville, Kentucky, is where we're at, more or less. A really small town. And the cool thing, as we continue to grow and employ people here in Litchfield and acquire more companies and when it fits, base them here. That's one of the reasons why we like keeping manufacturers, a lot of reasons why we like keeping manufacturing in-house. But The more we do in-house, the more people we hire, more impact we have in this very small rural community that we're based out of. And you talked about refinement. I'm 43. I got a solid 20 years plus to go until I get to the point where I would maybe retire. I don't know. I don't see myself getting really bored, but who knows? In 20 years, how I feel about it.

[00:58:50.580] - Big Rich Klein

I'll tell you one thing, you retire, you get busier.

[00:58:54.440] - Jim Winn

Well, that's good. I hate not being busy. But our goal is we just want to Keep refining and doing what we do, and be very committed to that for the next two decades, and expand our presence in Lynchfield, support our community, hire more people, improve the products that we work with, and just create more opportunity across the whole ecosystem. We're rapidly committed to being good at that. That's what we'll do for the next 20 years.

[00:59:19.280] - Big Rich Klein

Great. One last question.

[00:59:22.360] - Jim Winn

Yeah.

[00:59:23.880] - Big Rich Klein

Are your kids playing ball?

[00:59:27.480] - Jim Winn

Kids play ball. So I've got an My oldest boy is way into baseball. He loves that. My middle boy Abel, he's about to turn 10. He's done baseball up until this year and took a break for whatever reason, but he's gotten into jiu-jitsu, so him and his younger sister. I've got four kids. Abel and Lucy, they're into jiu-jitsu is the thing right now that they're really into. Then my youngest kid, Jane, she's like two and a half, so she's just.

[00:59:59.980] - Big Rich Klein

She's just into walking right now.

[01:00:01.380] - Jim Winn

She's just in the... Yeah, getting in the thing. Everything. Yeah, so that's what the Wend family is into.

[01:00:07.860] - Big Rich Klein

Awesome. Well, Jim, I want to say thank you so much for being a guest.

[01:00:13.200] - Jim Winn

This has been really fun. I really appreciate it.

[01:00:15.580] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I've had a good one. This is awesome. We have to meet at some point in person.

[01:00:23.880] - Jim Winn

We definitely need to cross paths. That would be amazing.

[01:00:26.460] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, we've got to do that. We're going to figure out a way to do that.

[01:00:30.140] - Jim Winn

For sure.

[01:00:30.800] - Big Rich Klein

Are you going to be out at CEMA by chance?

[01:00:33.740] - Jim Winn

We have some of our customers. Some of those OEM customers have our stuff on display at CEMA, so we won't have a booth this year. We just don't have the bandwidth for that. We're pretty busy, but we'll be out We'll be out there and visit some customers, and we'll make some content at their booth and show us some of the really cool applications that are using our boxes this year.

[01:00:55.640] - Big Rich Klein

Well, I'd like to- So, yeah, if you're out there, we should cross past.

[01:00:58.320] - Jim Winn

It'll be amazing.

[01:00:59.020] - Big Rich Klein

I do plan on We'll be in at SEMA, at least for the first two days, but we'll be there on Sunday night for the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame gala. I'm on the board of directors for that. That's the meeting I had this morning before this, and it's It's something that now that you're in the off-road world, you should look at coming to. It's quite the night. It's probably the biggest night in off-road.

[01:01:25.320] - Jim Winn

We'd love to be involved. And yeah, we'll be Dylan Meherin. He's our sales manager. He's in a lot of our content. A lot of people know Dylan, see him on Instagram. So Dylan and I will both be out there. We'll make sure to cross past these. Okay.

[01:01:40.340] - Big Rich Klein

Sounds good. Thank you, Jim.

[01:01:43.200] - Jim Winn

It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[01:01:44.940] - Big Rich Klein

And For 43, you're knocking that out of the park, so to say.

[01:01:49.240] - Jim Winn

That's great. I appreciate that. That means a lot. You've done a lot yourself, so that carries a lot of weight.

[01:01:53.840] - Big Rich Klein

All right. Well, you take care, and thank you very much.

[01:01:56.780] - Jim Winn

Likewise. Thank you so much. Okay. All right. Take care.

[01:02:00.580] - 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 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 gusto you can. Thank you.