Going from Employee to Owner of Two-Rock Amplifiers and Saving a Legendary Brand with mac skinner
Mac Skinner was an employee of Two-Rock amplifiers for over six years and found an opportunity to co-purchase the brand in 2016. Within five years, he and his co-owner, Eli Lester have more than quadrupled sales, released new lines, and built the legendary brand back up and beyond. He shares his story.
Anne McGinty
Take me back to before Two-Rock.
Mac Skinner
Prior to becoming an owner, I was really just a builder. And I was going to college to get my music degree. And I had a friend that worked at Two-Rock and was a builder also. And the co-owners at the time wanted to go to a trade show called the NAMM Show. It's the National Association of Music Merchants.
It happens every year and pretty much anybody and everybody who's in the music industry is there from, you know, everything from drums to the pianos, to sheet music, to guitars, amplifiers, everything. And as a budding engineer, which is really what I wanted to do is produce in engineer music and work in studios. I was all in. So I went down to the NAMM show with them to help them run the show. And it turned into a gig for me.
And being that I was in college at the time, it was like, okay, I'm just doing piecework and building stuff and soldering. And I had soldered before and so it was kind of fun. I loved building Legos as a kid. So it was tactile and it was building things with my hands. And I always loved that. It kind of turned into a gig for me and it went from just building things to then running production and that friend of mine had eventually left and it was just me and like two other guys. And I was doing less building and more production management, build notes and.
things like that. And then eventually it turned into a full-time, not just after school. I graduated from college and we had three or four people working for us in the build process. And then in about 2009, 2010, I caught wind that the co-owners wanted to sell the business. And at that point, I stayed on thinking that, you know, if the sale of the business happened, that it could turn into something totally different.
and could be a great opportunity. And it did, it sold in 2010, and then I stayed on as their general manager for the next several years. And that's kind of how it all started.
Anne McGinty
So this was already its second life.
Mac Skinner
Yeah.
Anne McGinty
From there, this opportunity came up to buy the business.
How did that even happen?
Mac Skinner
There was a big transitional period from working for that corporate company to owning the company for myself. Premier Builders Guild was the name of the corporate company.
They were based out of Pittsburgh. Once they bought the brand in 2010, a lot of things changed for me. So in the early stages of Two-Rock, for me, it was very entrepreneurial. So I was building websites. I was doing sales. I was kind of the point person for artists in a lot of ways. And then when that corporate company took over, a lot of that changed. They said, okay, we have a guy for this and we have a guy for that. We just want you to run production. That's all we want you to do.
not only Two-Rock, but they had another amplifier brand at the time called Tone King. So I was managing Tone King and Two-Rock. And to be honest, it was a ton of work. So there was no way that I could have done any of the other things that I was doing at the time. But I sort of sat on the sidelines and watched as they changed things and not really for the better. For example, you know, websites were just not what I thought they should be. And they weren't up to at least my standards of what I thought it should be.
And they had people coming in to consult on those things. They weren't in touch with what guitar players wanted and what they were after and what they were seeking. I came from more of a grassroots kind of space. So to see them kind of come in for this corporate feel was like, ah, this isn't good. And I went from working with every aspect of the business to eventually, once they brought more and more consultants in and more people to run the business to eventually sitting in a quarter doing shipping labels.
I mean, literally I was doing that. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get out of the whole situation. And I started looking at other entrepreneurial ideas of how to take other small guitar amplifier manufacturers and help them and build them the way that I helped build 2 Rock for its sale to this corporate company. And then in 2016, the owner of the corporate company had reached out to me, or actually I reached out to him and I said, I'm doing a lot of inventory reporting. Can you tell me why?
And he laughed just like I did and said, yeah, I'm done. I want out. I want to sell the business. I don't want to do this anymore. I've lost a ton of money. And it was the, you know, all of the brands were not in a good shape. They started with like six guitar brands. Most of them contract builds ended up with one guitar brand and two amp brands. So, and that was it. It was a shell of what it had started with in 2010. And so he said, yeah, I want to get out. I want to sell. Do you want to buy it? The purchase.
conversation was Two Rock and Tone King, because that's what we built in our facility in Northern California. I had a really strong connection to Two Rock, and while the designer for Tone King and I, who to this day still is a really good friend of mine, had a really strong connection and really close friendship, Two Rock was really my baby. It was really the one that I'd spent the most time of my life with. And I had a friend that I'd met through Two Rock who was a guitar player, Eli Lester. So he and I met
During my tenure prior to PBG, every time we would come out with a new model, Eli would come down and he would purchase that new model and give us feedback. He was playing out a lot. Then he was also a teacher as well. He had a music school that he taught and I think he had some 150 students or something like that. He was a busy guy in the music business and as a guitar player. I had called him after the conversation with the owner and I said, I see you don't have a guest at the conversation. He said, what was it? I said, well, they want to sell.
Two-rock, he said, well, do you want to do it? Do you want to buy it? And I said, well, I'd love to. It's been a huge part of my life for a long time now, 20 years now. So at that time it was probably almost 10 years or a little over 10 years. And I said, well, I'd love to build them, run production. I know every aspect beyond that, but the guitar playing side of it is where I don't have as much of the skill. And he said, well, do you want a partner? I said, absolutely. Especially if it's you, cause we were good friends, you know.
And that's where it started. And that's when we kind of decided, OK, here we go.
Anne McGinty
Were you in the position financially to make it happen?
Mac Skinner
No, not really. That was probably one of the tougher situations where we had to figure out how are we going to finance this? How are we going to do it? Luckily, because of the state that the brand was in at the time, we were able to finance it for a really good deal. And we financed it through the owner at the time, through that corporate company. He was able to finance the company for us.
Anne McGinty
That's amazing.
What was it like once the reins of the company were handed over to you?
Mac Skinner
Well, knowing that we had a massive finance bill on our shoulders already, it was go time. As soon as November 1st, 2016 hit, it was like, okay, now we have this. What are we going to do? Luckily both Eli and I were really aligned on what we saw as the vision of Two-Rock. And we kind of referred it back to 2010 when Premier Builders Guild had bought
the Two-Rock brand and kind of said, okay, let's go back to what made Two-Rock great. What was the stuff about Turok that made it a really well-known brand, even just style of the cabinets and how they look. The corporate company had really tried to change the vision of the company. So we changed back to the original look, some really simple changes there. And then we, this was November 1st and that name show was in January, third weekend in January.
And so we had 10 weeks basically to figure out, okay, what are we going to launch? New owners, here we are, what are we doing? What's going to be that first item? And we went back to a product that we had done prior to 2010 and basically visited the original look and feel of the amplifier. And I think that familiarity for people was really important because as that corporate company started to change the look of the product,
that made it really, I think, to people in their perception go, okay, it's a different company now. And it sort of lost its identity. And so that was like our biggest challenge was, how do we regain Two-Rock's identity as a leading boutique guitar amplifier manufacturer?
Anne McGinty
And what gave you the confidence to know that you could take it over and turn it around?
Mac Skinner
So that's kind of funny because that was Eli and I's deal. And he said, man, I can sell the hell out of these things. You just figure out how to build them and I'll sell them. And I said, I can build them, but I can't sell them. So you sell them and I'll build them. And that was kind of our relationship right away. And, you know, having had the experience of running really every aspect of the business, even from the marketing side, sales, production, all of it, having had that experience already, it really gave me the knowledge right away that like, okay, like this isn't going to be a problem where it became a problem was
probably in my lack of business acumen because I didn't go to school for business. And so learning the accounting side of things was a really big challenge right away. Probably one of the biggest challenges for me is giving up the reins on things where like I need to step back and not have my hands in everything. It's that old, if you want it done right, do it yourself. And you just have to trust in the people that you've trained and you've worked with for years to do those tasks that you normally do.
That's a big challenge for me because I always want to have my hands in there and I always want to be a part of it and do it. I just had this experience a week ago and it was with repairs. I used to do a lot of repairs and I still, I still get on the bench and I still solder and I still put things together and I still, if a repair comes in, I'll go, I'll look at it and I'll assess the problem. And I had a repair sitting for like a week and I finally turned to my production matters when this comes in, you guys need to take care of it because I can't do it anymore. I can't focus on it now. So.
as the last almost 10 years now has evolved, I think Eli and I have really settled into how we work together to lay the groundwork for the people that work for us and with us to succeed and for the business to succeed.
Anne McGinty
And do you have any key business practices that you implement to ensure that smooth workflow with your team or just a friendly environment to work in as well?
Mac Skinner
Our team is our family. We spend...
40 hours, 50 hours a week with them. So they really are family to us. And some of the people that work for us have been working alongside for 10, 12 years or more. It's really important that there is that vibe to me. We always want to create a family culture. Culture can really help and really destroy a company, I think. So having a solid foundation there, I think is really important. Other than that, I'd say communication is key, like in any relationship.
The ability to communicate what's working, what's not working is really important and how you approach that. I've watched people try and rule with an iron fist in business with people that I've worked for or have worked with me and it's never worked. It's never worked. And I think that's a really important aspect.
Anne McGinty
How do you balance work and personal life so that it works for you and Eli and for the team?
Mac Skinner
Yeah, that's tough because especially when you're taking a business from nothing to where it is now. There's some challenges that we're facing right now and things that we're going through where Eli and I have both at the same time went back to our families and said, Hey, just get ready because the next couple of months are going to be really busy. That work life balance is really difficult. It can be. I get home and sometimes, you know, I'll sit down on my laptop and for another four or five hours after work, I'm sitting there with emails and figuring out what I'm going to do and how I'm going to transition and what I'm going to do tomorrow.
How am I going to deal with this problem? Or, you know, and Eli and I spent a ton of time on the phone talking and going, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? So we're four days a week, 40 hours a week. We were doing the eight hour workdays, five days a week. And it's pretty much all I've done my entire life. There's a couple of different reasons why we started looking at one was Eli does not live close to the shop. He's about three hours from where the shop is. And he drives up here every week and spends at least two days a week.
Beginning, it was three, four, five days that he would be here away from his family, staying in a hotel while we brought the company back to life. And then eventually it moved to about two days. So he'll come in on like a Wednesday, work all day Wednesday. We'll usually go have dinner, have meetings, and then start the next day in the morning. Do the entire day Thursday, and then he'll go home, but he doesn't get home until 11, 12, one o'clock in the morning. So essentially he's gone for two full days from his family, which is really tough. And we started talking about it like.
Well, what would it look like if we went to four tens and then you're here for two days, you're here half the week and we get a whole bunch more Eli time. And, you know, we get a bunch more time with our team and how, you know, how does that look? And then we started doing some research and there's a ton of research on four day work weeks now and going back to that work home life balance, it actually proved to be a better scenario for employees for
owners, there was more time at home, more time with family, and ended up being more productive in those 40 hours versus an eight hour work week. So what we actually do is we do a 10 hour work day, we pay them for their lunch break so they don't have to have that extra half an hour. So it's not a 10 and a half hour day. So it's a full 10 hour day from six to four o'clock. Four o'clock they go home.
Anne McGinty
That sounds so ideal. And I can imagine that if I was an employee there, I would absolutely work my butt off four days a week. For 10 hours, if it meant I could have a three day weekend, every weekend.
Mac Skinner
Especially when there's a Monday holiday, because they get Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It sounds healthy. Absolutely, 100%.
Anne McGinty
So back to more of the business, what marketing strategies have you found to be the most effective in getting your amplifiers into the right customer's hands?
Mac Skinner
So a couple of things. One, I would say, you know, during the premier builders guild time, the very first year that they took over, they put like, I think it was like 150 grand in a marketing or something like that. And so the business grew really fast and it was great to see. We were in every magazine. We were on video interviews. And then after the first year, they realized that they didn't have that kind of marketing budget anymore. And so they hold the marketing. I remember having this conversation with one of the marketing guys. I said, why are we not in?
Premier Guitar Magazine, which is one of the bigger guitar magazines. And so nobody reads magazines anymore. They're all online. And I remember thinking to myself, people still pick up magazines. And when you can pick up that magazine and people see your brand, there's a visibility there that I think is really important. At the same time, I think it's important to play in the ecosystem of the music industry, right? So if Premier Guitar is a part of the guitar and amplifier world and pedal world, then you should be a part of that too.
So we regained our relationship with Premier guitar and immediately started ads again, even if it was just a small half page ad every once in a while. And to this day, we have a great relationship with Premier guitar and we still do it. And gee, again, we would sell t-shirts and I had built a small online store, but when Premier Builders Guild took us over, they said, no more of that, not even for swag, which I thought was a mistake. And so that was one of the things Eli and I immediately said, well, let's open up another online store, let's sell t-shirts and like people want to wear.
Two-Rock t-shirt. I want to wear a Two-Rock t-shirt and let's make it cool new swag items. Let's make some neat stuff that people would really be into. So we opened up a new store and immediately we were getting sales off that store and so I think just even the swag that is a great marketing tool.
Anne McGinty
What's better than having somebody who likes your brand just wearing it around for you?
Mac Skinner
My brother-in-law says I imagine that you open the top drawer of your dresser and it's all Two-Rock shirts. I said that's pretty much true. Yeah.
Anne McGinty
How did you know that the ads you were placing worked?
Mac Skinner
What we viewed as our ROI was our production schedule was full, so we must be doing something right. And if we take away these ads and if we look at the history and when that marketing budget was pulled and there were no more premier guitar ads and there's no more marketing, what happened? The sales went down. So.
I think it's really just a visibility thing. People know that we're still here. People know that we're still building product. They know that we're investing in the industry and what we do. And I think that's important. And do you have an idea of how many amps you have out in the world? We're in constant build. So I would say we probably do somewhere around 60 amps or so a month. But if you go all the way back to 1999 and the inception of Turok, definitely thousands, for sure.
I mean, just one of our models right now, that classic reverb signature that we released in 2016, that first one that we said, okay, let's start with this model. That particular model we're on, I think, 1100 right now, something like that.
Anne McGinty
Nice.
Mac Skinner
One of the things that Premier Builders Guild did was they would release new models every year, new model every year, new model every year. And it sort of was this, we have to do this. And I don't think.
Eli and I were very aligned that we don't have to release a new model. We want each model to stand on its own, much like some of the vintage amplifiers do. You know, when you hear super reverb, you know what that amplifier is. We really wanted the classic reverb to be like people go, Oh, that's the classic reverb. It's just as it stands, it's a known name and people know that name. And as the future grows, we don't want to get rid of that model. We want to keep it. And we want it to continue to grow and develop as a staple product of Turok.
Anne McGinty
What's your current lead time and how's your backlog of orders looking?
Mac Skinner
Initially, when we first took over, we had no back order and we are a build to order company, so we don't build the stock. So nothing sits on a shelf at all. By the time you ordered to the time you got product, it was inside of 30 days for the first couple of months. But right after we went to NAMM, immediately we had a three to four month back order and then that grew to about a 12 month back order after the first year and a half or so.
And then in 2020, the world shut down and the pandemic hit. We thought, oh my gosh, here it is. This is going to be the downfall. We're not going to be able to build. We're not going to be able to get product. Our supply chain is going to shut down. What's going to happen. And the exact opposite happens. It ended up, we were about two years backlogged. We both looked at each other and said, this is not a good thing. This is going to be all bad. We were frantically trying to figure out how we can fulfill these orders.
I think what happened was people who wanted to play guitar or used to, but hadn't for a long time, now had the freedom and the time at home to sit down and pick up their guitar and go, I always wanted that amp. So I might as well, since I'm not going on vacation this year, I might as well spend the money on gear so I can sit at home and play my guitar. The guitar industry as a whole saw a pretty big surge in sales. And then over the last two or three years, we've started to even out that backlog a little bit.
We've hired people, we've streamlined a few processes, we figured out how to really work with our dealers to make sure that they have the product that they need. And our dealer network around the world, we often refer to them as our partners because they really are. We don't do any direct sales, it's all through our dealer network around the world in pretty much every continent.
Anne McGinty
It sounds like that was a very conscious decision to not do sales directly.
Mac Skinner
100%.
If our customers can go into a store and sit down and play an amplifier and work with that store, that's work I didn't necessarily have to do to deal with that customer. Otherwise we'd have to have an infrastructure of probably seven, eight, nine customer service representatives answering phones all day. And customers have relationships with their local music shops, right? So they want to go sit down and play an amplifier, listen to what it sounds like. There's no way we would be able to get an amplifier into everybody's hands around the world.
to play if it was just us. We really have to have some conduit for them to go to, to sit down and physically play the amplifier and go, okay, yeah, this is the amp I always wanted.
Anne McGinty
How do you get your amps into these distributors?
Mac Skinner
Well, a lot of them contact us. They'll say, hey man, we see Two-Rock sales, people are requesting, how do we get these in our stores? So that's the first way. That dealer network has been built over 20 years that we've been in business from us to
Premier Builders Guild to even the original co-founders, that network just built and built and built and built. The NAMM show that we go to every year is where a lot of people will go and they'll come and visit me and Eli and they'll go, hey, how do I get this in my store? So that always has been a really big vehicle for new dealers and new business prospects. That's the reason why the NAMM show happens really.
Anne McGinty
Can you give us an idea of your philosophy behind how you approach your pricing?
Mac Skinner
We talk about this a lot. We don't build to a price point.
We never go, OK, we want this amp to be $2,500. How do we do that? We go, we want this type of an amp, and we build it. And then we go, OK, can we source all the parts for this? And what is it going to cost? OK, it's going to cost this. And this is how we break it down. And this is what it's going to cost for us to sell. And we are a higher priced amplifier in the market. But we also build in California.
which is not easy to do, to have a manufacturing facility in California and pay employees in California. And then getting parts these days from all over the world can be certainly a challenge. The philosophy really is build the best thing you can build and let's start there.
Anne McGinty
How did you go about shaping your company's reputation and set yourself apart from your competitors?
Mac Skinner
I think relationships are really important. How you treat people and how you work with people.
Eli is not only a fantastic person, but his ability to work with a lot of artists and other musicians around the world, he talks to the talk, right? Cause he's a player, probably spends more time than anybody I know, changing tubes and trying different pedals and trying different guitars. And he's the wealth of knowledge.
Anne McGinty
What would you say is the biggest setback that you've experienced?
Mac Skinner
During the Ukraine war, when the tube shortage happened. So we build all tube guitar amplifiers and tubes come from two places, China and Russia. And when the Ukraine war happened, Putin put counter sanctions on the U.S. after the U.S. sanctions. And it was forced products and electronics, which meant that our tubes and our Baltic birch wood that we use for cabinets.
was completely halted. There were containers of wood sitting on docks that were not ever going to be opened. And it was like, what do we do? It was an immediate scramble of what tubes can we use in place of these popular tubes that we can't get. Luckily, we were already in the process of changing our tube types to a Chinese brand because we were really seeing a lot of inconsistencies in the Russian tubes. We liked the sound of the Russian tubes.
But when an amplifier lands to a customer's doorstep and it's dead on arrival, that's never good.
Anne McGinty
Thank goodness you had started talking with China already. In hindsight, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self about entrepreneurship and the music industry?
Mac Skinner
One thing I would say is, and I mentioned this before, some of my business acumen wasn't great. There were.
terms and things that I didn't quite understand when it came to looking at financials. So even just a basic business knowledge of here are just some key points to understand and know how margin works and things like that, I think is really important. And I think really understanding relationships on how to work with people I think is really important too. And work hard. It doesn't just happen. Things don't just fall in your lap. You have to have long nights. You got to grind it out.
At least for me, in my viewpoint and what I've seen, those that have really worked hard and worked towards their goals are the ones that have really succeeded. I think some people tend to feel like things will just fall in their lap or they deserve, you know, I deserve this role or you don't deserve it. You got to work for it.
Anne McGinty
Yes, you do. That's all the time that we have for today. Thank you, Mac, so much for being here.
Mac Skinner
Of course.
Anne McGinty
Today's key takeaways.
If you want to break into some part of the music industry and you haven't yet been to the NAMM show, go and check it out and make connections.
If you're looking to start a business and you only have half of the skill sets needed to do so, look for the right partner who has a skill set that is complimentary to yours. At least one of you needs to be good at building relationships.
Your team is your family. You can spend 40 hours or more with your team each week. So take good care of everyone and build a company culture that keeps them there.
The ability to communicate what is working and what is not working is a very important skill for an entrepreneur to have. Practice improving this skill.
Relationships are very important in business. How you treat people and how you work with them.
Don't rule with an iron fist.
Take a course to learn some basic business knowledge. You don't need to go to business school or know all of the answers, but it sure is helpful if you at least understand terminology.
Lastly, work hard. Don't wait for opportunity to land in your lap. Set a goal and go after it.
