My Patriot Supply – Our Story

I always wanted to remain true to the concept of self-reliance and I was adamant that I would never borrow a dime to start or grow this company. In fact, to this day, My Patriot Supply has never borrowed money from anyone. We do not accept credit terms from our vendors, and those who force us into credit terms we pay the same day the invoices arrive. Unlike a lot of my “competition”, we have no venture capitalists backing us. Just good old fashioned hard work.

I decided to focus on doing everything the opposite of everyone else in the industry. I knew what the industry lacked because I had dealt with the industry on a personal level. My quest to provide a better alternative combined with the power of the free market worked very well. Quickly, My Patriot Supply  grew out of my two bedroom apartment and into a full sized garage, where the company gained its first few employees.

Can you imagine the cramped quarters of having 4-5 employees, a stock room, a shipping area, and a desk in a small garage? We quickly had to find additional room, and so we set up a heavy duty outdoor tent to store anything that didn’t have to be temperature controlled.

As you can imagine it didn’t take us long to get into our first real warehouse, which was an old abandoned beer distribution facility.

In retrospect, the one thing we didn’t anticipate fully at the time was the tremendous growth we would experience. Not long after moving into the old beer distribution facility we expanded into another section of the same building, as well as the building next door. Every time we acquired more space we thought “This is it!” but were quickly proven wrong.

In 2013 we realized that all of the moving and expanding were taking a toll and so we relocated to Muncie, Indiana where we acquired a large warehouse facility and opened our first retail store. Not finished growing, we opened a second warehouse to act as our west coast distribution center in Salt Lake City, UT.

In 2013 we also launched our own brand of emergency survival food, Patriot Pantry. In less than a year Patriot Pantry has become one of the top brands of emergency survival food distributed in all of North America!

Along the way many of my friends and colleagues stopped by to ask about our progress. I always measured our success by the amount of jobs we were creating, and so my answers were “We’re up to 25 employees now” or, “We just hired our 39th employee”. Sometimes other businessmen gave me a funny look when I answered in that way – I guess they were wanting to know sales numbers or something official like that. But to me, success has always been about “How many people have we helped?”

My Patriot Supply now has over 50 full time employees in several states. We have also helped over 125,000 families on their emergency preparedness journey, with hundreds more being added each and every day. Those are my “numbers” and to me, the most important statistic of all.

We realized early on the mistakes made by some of our predecessors. Some became too focused on the almighty dollar, and many had lost the passion for the industry they represented. Straying too far from your roots can be dangerous, and so we have tried our best to continue to think like a small business, even though we are not a small business any more.

The backbone behind this whole operation really is the people you have working for you. We started with our Customer Service Team. Our customer service manager, for example, is an excellent gardener (although she is too humble to admit it). Her green thumb has helped countless customers who’ve called in, needing a little extra guidance as they go play in the dirt for the first time.

Another one of our reps lives completely off-grid in the mountains of West Virginia. To work for us he had to string a phone line 1/4 mile up his driveway from the road and only goes “on grid” when it’s time for his regularly scheduled shift.

Other great members of our customer service team have been practicing preparedness for years, and eagerly share the same passion, as our customers who call in.

Having the right people and practicing what we preach is what lets every single customer know that they are working with folks just like them.

Remember when I said earlier that one of my goals was to move into a place of more self reliance in my personal life? A while ago I purchased an off-grid home in Northern Idaho. I intentionally selected a property that never had any chance of being connected to the grid. It took a lot of work, but one small step at a time I improved the property. I built redundancies into every system. For example, I have at least four ways to get clean drinking water. This job of getting my off grid home ready kicked into high gear when my wife informed me that we were pregnant.

You want to see a “prepper” kick it into high gear? Tell them they have a baby on the way!

I imagine I was the source of quite a bit of amusement for those around me. I stocked up on a years supply of baby items six months before her due date. I even have my own version of a diaper bag, which I lovingly refer to as my baby “go bag”. Apparently I’m the only guy to have his own (and no mistake, it’s mine) diaper bag.

All I could think about was the fact that I had been so busy helping others prepare that I had neglected certain areas of my own life. It was a horrible realization, but it also came with the ultimate truth – most people put off making preparations until they have a very solid reason to prepare staring them in the face.

This was my own experience in life, back when I was homeless. In fact, the unfortunate reality is that this is the way it works for most people in this country. Instead of preparing because we know it’s the right thing to do, we wait until we have that little extra bit of motivation.

For me the realization that my daughter was on the way was enough to get me back on track.

In what little spare time I had finally got our off grid home ready. Just in a nick of time as our daughter joined us two weeks ago. Welcome to the world, Alexandra!

This entire journey has been an incredible one. We have proven a few things along the way.

1. You can break the ‘rules’ by starting and growing a business without going into debt (you can also break these rules in your personal life when it comes to your education, house, car, etc)
2. The free market is alive and well, and people do really vote with their dollars
3. You can be successful without being opportunistic
4. Good old fashioned business ethics and great customer service is more powerful than any form of advertising
5. Anyone can make the journey towards self-reliance, regardless of circumstance