Phil Robertson Case Study
Organizational Behavior II
CEO Willie Robertson
Bachelor of Science
June 25, 2013
Phil Robertson First CEO Phil Robertson was born and raised in Vivian, Louisiana, a small town near Shreveport. With seven children in his family, money was scarce and very early on, hunting became an important part of his life.
As a high-school athlete, Phil was All-State in football, baseball, and track which afforded him the opportunity to attend Louisiana Tech University on a football scholarship. There he played first-string quarterback ahead of Terry Bradshaw. Phil 's been quoted as saying, "Terry went for the bucks, and I chased after the ducks." After receiving his Bachelor 's Degree in Physical Education and a Master …show more content…
's in Education, he spent several years teaching. While his students claim he was an excellent teacher, spending time in a classroom brought Phil to the conclusion that his time and talents would be better spent in the woods.
Phil and his family, which by this time included wife Kay, and four boys, Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jeptha began a quest to turn his passion for hunting and fishing into a livelihood.
Never satisfied with the duck calls that were on the market, Phil began to experiment with making a call that would produce the exact sound of a duck. A duck call for duck killers, not "world champion-style duck callers." Claiming, "No duck would even place in a duck calling contest." And so, in 1972, the first Duck Commander call was born. Phil received a patent for this call and the Duck Commander Company was incorporated in 1973.
His home became his "factory" from where the calls were assembled, packaged, and shipped. Phil traveled store to store in the early days, with most ending in rejections. A certain large store in Stuttgart, AR laughed him out of the building (Oh, yeah, that store is now one of Duck Commander 's largest accounts.) Phil 's wife and four sons assisted in the packaging and shipments of the calls along with helping to run the nets, and take the fish to the market. This family side business of commercial fishing kept food on the table while Duck Commander Company was getting off the ground.
In the mid-70 's, Phil turned his life over to the Lord and made some dramatic changes in the way he was living. Phil Robertson is not only known as the Duck Commander but is now building a reputation all over the country for his faith and belief in the Almighty. Phil is invited to speak to hundreds of different churches and organizations every year, telling them what the Lord has done for him and can do for them.
Duck Commander is still a family business with all four sons and their wives working for the company at one time or another. Duck calls are still being built, blown, packaged and shipped in the Robertson 's home on the Ouachita River, although now their home is surrounded by several offices and warehouses to help the company smoothly, and the nets are still being run, only now the fish that they catch feed all the Duck Commander employees. Yes, it 's a rough life, but as Phil says "somebody 's gotta do it."
Since 1973, Duck Commander Products, which now include much more than just duck calls, have been sold in all fifty states and in several countries. Not long after the success of the calls, Phil began a series of videos that developed a worldwide fan-base of fellow duck hunters. The Duckmen videos revolutionized duck hunting with their rock-n-roll, "in yo face" style, and are the leading authority in the industry. His calls and techniques are helping others bring the ducks right into their blinds, and the Duck Commander faithful swear by the deadly effects of the Duck Commander.
It isn 't often a person can live a dream, but Phil Robertson, aka The Duck Commander, has proven it is possible with vision, hard work, helping hands, and an unshakable faith in the Almighty. If you ever wind up at the end of Mouth of Cypress Road, sitting face to face with Phil Robertson, you will see that his enthusiasm and passion for duck hunting and the Lord is no act- it is truly who he is.
Willie Robertson Current CEO
Willie Robertson was born on April 22, 1972 at Tri-Ward General Hospital in Bernice, Louisiana, to Phil Robertson and Marsha Kay Robertson. He has two older brothers, Alan and Jason, and a younger brother, Jepitha. As a child, Willie grew up around hunting and the great outdoors, as well as a small business ran by his father, Duck Commander. As a boy, Willie handled a myriad of tasks at the company, including building duck calls, and even handling business calls
Willie had a creative mind to make money as early as kindergarten. He sold candy until he was found out by the principal but that did not deter him as he turned to selling pencils. When he was a little older, he learned the art of sales at the fish market and bartering for the best price of the fish he caught. The skills came in handy when he took the company that his father started in their living room and turned "Duck Commander" into a profitable organization.
The company was born when Willie 's father, Phil, was working on manufactured duck calls and was told,"...you weren 't calling those ducks...You were commanding them." Soon a production line was formed with family involved from the start and still run by family today. Willie started out sweeping out the shop and staining the wooden calls and then sanding them. The humble beginnings in their home soon took off as Willie writes his father had a dream with vision and remained focus. Citing instances where the road was not always smooth and his mom worried that they could lose it all, he is quick to point out the Lord never failed and met them every time there was something needed. He acknowledges that any success they experienced then and now has always been "from above." Willie states with confidence that it is necessary to keep an excellent work ethic, and not be afraid to fail or pick yourself and up keep going when you find yourself on the ground. God is with them in the good and the bad.
Ever since childhood, Willie and his brothers have been interested in the family business started by their father, Phil Robertson. Willie used his business degree from Harding University to take Duck Commander from a family business to a multi-million dollar empire. Duck Commander is the company that generated a great portion of the wealth that he has acquired, and he generated the interest to start the TV show, Duck Dynasty. In 2006, Robertson started another pursuit when he started the company Buck Commander. This company has also created the Buckmen series of DVD 's and the television show Buck Commander Protected by Under Armour on the Outdoor Channel.
Willie gives all the credit to his dad for teaching him to be a salesman, hard worker, good man, visionary and great hunter. Phil taught Willie to be independent, confident and fearless, but most of all godly.
Willie Robertson is the CEO of Duck Commander, and known as the resident prankster. He is a graduate of nearby University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM) with a Bachelor 's Degree in Health & Human Performance with an emphasis on business. Using this degree, Willie has grown the company from a living room operation by the river to an outdoors corporate giant. Willie has been CEO of the company for about 10 years. He also produces and stars in a number of outdoor TV shows, and a popular series of DVDs.
4 Management Lessons from Duck Dynasty As the hit television show Duck Dynasty launched its third season last week, setting viewership records for A&E and topping American Idol in key demographics, I was struck by the management success of the company – often in spite of themselves. While the reality show at times seems more scripted than real, the company, Duck Commander, is as real as they get and more profitable than ever. Here are a few lessons on management from the seemingly inept Robertson family.
Keep it simple. All the family sells are duck calls. High quality, industry proven duck calls that work so well tremendous demand made the family some serious cash. If you identify a market with a need and some purchasing power, build some expertise around a product or service that adds value to that market, the management of the business then becomes pretty easy. If the Robertson family began adding products that they don’t understand as well as duck calls it would clearly be a disaster. I do not think it was planned but the focus the company has had – and is committed to drives their success. It’s all about the story. The Robertson family does not just sell duck calls anymore; the television show is based on their story – and the way they tell it. They have become professional storytellers. However, the stories are the brand and the brand sells duck calls, lots of duck calls. The ability to attach a compelling story to your product or service gives it life, the consumer isn’t buying a duck call, they are buying a Si Robertson handmade duck call (or so they think) and that adds huge value, value consumers will pay high margins for. Not all dog barks mean the same thing. Sometimes a dog barks because its just happy to be out in the woods. Sometimes a bark means it has fleas, the Robertson family knows what each bark means. Customers are the same way. Not all customer barks mean we need to jump through hoops to satisfy them. There is the occasional customer who has fleas – and just needs to bark to let you know. Let them bark, thank them for sharing but remember that if they leave you for a competitor they take their fleas with them.
If you’re too busy to hunt and fish, you’re too busy. Episode after episode has the duck call room left empty while the family engages in another adventure. Frog hunting, water park building or donut eating contests take priority over the work. But at the end of the day all of the work always gets done, every order leaves the warehouse on time. Yeah I know, a bit scripted but the producers are making a point – this family loves to be together. Sure they bicker about Willie’s leadership style but they never let the company down. Look at companies like Zappos, Twitter and Google, employee satisfaction is driving growth and innovation.
Duck Dynasty Duck Dynasty is a reality television series on A&E. It shows the lives of the Robertson family, who became wealthy from their family-operated business, Duck Commander, operated in West Monroe, Louisiana, which makes products for duck hunters, primarily the duck call named Duck Commander. The Robertson men, brothers Phil and Si, and Phil 's sons Jase, Willie, and Jep, are known for their long, flowing beards. The moments before a religious service begins are generally ones of quiet reflection for the congregants, but on a recent Sunday at White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ, here something incongruous was going on two-thirds of the way back in the spacious hall. Parishioners were walking up to perhaps the scruffiest, most disheveled-looking man in the church as he sat in his pew, offering a greeting and making a request. They were asking him to autograph copies of his biography.
The man was Phil Robertson, who along with his heavily bearded sons is famous in this part of Louisiana and, increasingly, all over the country. The Robertson family’s duck-call-making business, Duck Commander, has been an evolving media phenomenon, beginning years ago with videos aimed at hunters, then becoming the subject of a show on the Outdoor Channel and last March moving up to the much bigger stage of A&E.
They are busting the image of what might collectively be called backwoods TV, the ever-growing list of reality shows about wrangling alligators and catfish and wild hogs. Where most of those shows are one-note and aggressively low brow, “Duck Dynasty” has a varied cast of characters who fit together seamlessly, and any idiocy is deliberate. Sure, making an impromptu duck pond in the warehouse loading dock, as some of the guys did in a Season 1 episode, might not have been the most productive use of time, but it was pretty funny. And the show always leaves you unclear whether the whole extended family is just pulling your leg.
“Duck Dynasty” is loosely centered on the Duck Commander business, which is headed by Willie Robertson, 39, the third of Phil and Kay’s four sons. Very little duck-call making actually takes place in any given episode. Instead the focus is likely to be some harebrained project instigated by Willie’s older brother Jase, or Phil’s obsession with ridding his land of beavers, or Kay’s determination to open a restaurant, or Uncle Si’s efforts to give driving pointers to a young member of the clan, or some similar bit of frivolousness. Willie, the only man with obvious business acumen, is forever exasperated by his inability to get Jase and the rest of the Duck Commander staff to stop goofing off, although he too has been known to shirk certain duties — for instance, blowing off a career-day appearance at his daughter’s school to accept a $100-a-hole golf challenge from Jase.
The show has gotten better as it has found its natural voice, which in large part has meant letting members of the Robertson family be themselves. David McKillop, A&E’s executive vice president for programming, said the first step was realizing that the clan deserved more than a simple hunting show, which is how the series was originally pitched. “When we looked deeper into the story, what we found here was a very unusual family,” Mr. McKillop said. “Why waste it as a hunting show when in reality this was a great family show?” Then came a process of learning to just turn on the cameras and let the Robertsons go.
“When we first met with the production company,” recalled Korie, Willie’s wife, “they had an intern give us kind of a script they had written that was going to look like our show, and it was just so not us. It was like, the wives get up and go chase the varmints; it was just total redneck. That is not us. That’s not the way we live.” That is not the way they live because everyone in this family is smart and equipped with a keen sense of how to mine a sort of self-deprecating wisdom from the redneck caricature. So now the producers might suggest ideas or setups to get things moving, but what happens next comes largely out of the Robertsons’ heads. “I think Willie coined it: guided reality,” Jase said. “But all the stuff we say is — I don’t know if I can speak for everybody, but all the stuff I say, I just say what I normally say.”
To spend a Sunday afternoon with the extended family in Phil and Kay’s kitchen is to realize that, yes, what you see on television is what you get in real life.
Phil really does sprinkle his conversation with the catchphrase “happy, happy, happy.” Si, Phil’s brother, really does have a penchant for saying the unexpected and outlandish. Willie and Jase really do trade barbs almost nonstop. The wives really do look considerably better and often sound considerably savvier than their husbands. And in the extended family’s presence the question of how much of the show depicts the Robertsons’ actual lives and how much is a plausible variation thereof starts to seem irrelevant. Does the real-life Si possess the hidden sewing skills that enabled the reality-show Si to come to the rescue when, in a Season 1 episode, the women were having trouble making an apron for full-figured women? Who knows, but you can now find the apron on the Duck Commander Web site, priced at $75. “Out of stock,” the listing currently …show more content…
says.
“Duck Dynasty” episodes generally have a sitcom structure, bouncing between two story lines, and the result can be more wryly amusing than many scripted comedies.
Viewers seem to be responding. The Season 1 finale in May was the highest-rated nonsports program on cable that night, with 2.6 million viewers, a record for the series. The growing popularity is affecting everything about the Robertsons’ lives.
“They told us, ‘Look, y’all ain’t going to believe the business this is going to create,’ ” Phil Robertson said while giving an all-terrain-vehicle tour of the duck blinds on his extensive acreage. “We said, ‘Yeah, right.’ ” But now, he said, there’s a race “to dream up stuff to hang, stick on your wall, put on your desk,” to keep up with demand.
At the dinner table Jase held out his hands. “See the scars?” he said, the price of hand-making Duck Commander’s signature product. “That’s a lot of duck calls.” The number of orders caught the family off guard because it was June, months away from hunting season. “Usually,” Jase said, “this time of year people aren’t ordering duck
calls.”
One of the ministers at the White’s Ferry Road Church that morning had been Phil and Kay’s oldest son, Alan, whom the family regards as a sort of reverse black sheep: he’s the only one without a beard. He had recently told the congregation that he was stepping away from the ministry: Willie had asked him to help run Duck Commander because once filming for the show begins, everyone else is occupied with the business of making a TV show.
There has been a change, too, in what happens when the Robertsons are out in public. All the bearded men — the youngest son, Jep, also turns up on the show — have stories about what Jase calls facial profiling: instances in which a security guard tried to have them removed from an event where they were the featured guests, or when someone mistook them for vagrants and offered them meal money, or whatever.
Lately, though, those encounters are being replaced by ones in which they are recognized by fans who get a little too friendly. “Can I touch your beard?’ ” Willie said, imitating a common refrain. “I get that all the time.”
Summary
The Robertson’s have stuck to their roots and their faith to build a successful business. Once Willie Robertson became CEO, he took some more modern ideas and made the family business boom. Phil Robertson prayed, “Lord, if you bless me, I’ll thank You; but if You don’t I’ll be thankful for what I have. I have plenty. I’m in good shape.” Willie Robertson has the same Christian faith and continues to thank God for their many blessings that they have been blessed with and they are able to use their TV show to witness to people.
References
Compeau, Marc . "4 Management Lessons From Duck Dynasty - Forbes." Information for the World 's Business Leaders - Forbes.com. N.p., 7 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 July 2013. .
Genzlinger, Neil. "â Duck Dynastyâ Lures a Growing Audience on A&E - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., 7 Oct. 2012. Web. 20 July 2013. .
Robertson, Phil, and Mark Schlabach. Happy Happy Happy. New York, NY: Howard Books , 2013. Print.
CEO Willie Robertson
Bachelor of Science
June 25, 2013
Phil Robertson First CEO Phil Robertson was born and raised in Vivian, Louisiana, a small town near Shreveport. With seven children in his family, money was scarce and very early on, hunting became an important part of his life.
As a high-school athlete, Phil was All-State in football, baseball, and track which afforded him the opportunity to attend Louisiana Tech University on a football scholarship. There he played first-string quarterback ahead of Terry Bradshaw. Phil 's been quoted as saying, "Terry went for the bucks, and I chased after the ducks." After receiving his Bachelor 's Degree in Physical Education and a Master …show more content…
's in Education, he spent several years teaching. While his students claim he was an excellent teacher, spending time in a classroom brought Phil to the conclusion that his time and talents would be better spent in the woods.
Phil and his family, which by this time included wife Kay, and four boys, Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jeptha began a quest to turn his passion for hunting and fishing into a livelihood.
Never satisfied with the duck calls that were on the market, Phil began to experiment with making a call that would produce the exact sound of a duck. A duck call for duck killers, not "world champion-style duck callers." Claiming, "No duck would even place in a duck calling contest." And so, in 1972, the first Duck Commander call was born. Phil received a patent for this call and the Duck Commander Company was incorporated in 1973.
His home became his "factory" from where the calls were assembled, packaged, and shipped. Phil traveled store to store in the early days, with most ending in rejections. A certain large store in Stuttgart, AR laughed him out of the building (Oh, yeah, that store is now one of Duck Commander 's largest accounts.) Phil 's wife and four sons assisted in the packaging and shipments of the calls along with helping to run the nets, and take the fish to the market. This family side business of commercial fishing kept food on the table while Duck Commander Company was getting off the ground.
In the mid-70 's, Phil turned his life over to the Lord and made some dramatic changes in the way he was living. Phil Robertson is not only known as the Duck Commander but is now building a reputation all over the country for his faith and belief in the Almighty. Phil is invited to speak to hundreds of different churches and organizations every year, telling them what the Lord has done for him and can do for them.
Duck Commander is still a family business with all four sons and their wives working for the company at one time or another. Duck calls are still being built, blown, packaged and shipped in the Robertson 's home on the Ouachita River, although now their home is surrounded by several offices and warehouses to help the company smoothly, and the nets are still being run, only now the fish that they catch feed all the Duck Commander employees. Yes, it 's a rough life, but as Phil says "somebody 's gotta do it."
Since 1973, Duck Commander Products, which now include much more than just duck calls, have been sold in all fifty states and in several countries. Not long after the success of the calls, Phil began a series of videos that developed a worldwide fan-base of fellow duck hunters. The Duckmen videos revolutionized duck hunting with their rock-n-roll, "in yo face" style, and are the leading authority in the industry. His calls and techniques are helping others bring the ducks right into their blinds, and the Duck Commander faithful swear by the deadly effects of the Duck Commander.
It isn 't often a person can live a dream, but Phil Robertson, aka The Duck Commander, has proven it is possible with vision, hard work, helping hands, and an unshakable faith in the Almighty. If you ever wind up at the end of Mouth of Cypress Road, sitting face to face with Phil Robertson, you will see that his enthusiasm and passion for duck hunting and the Lord is no act- it is truly who he is.
Willie Robertson Current CEO
Willie Robertson was born on April 22, 1972 at Tri-Ward General Hospital in Bernice, Louisiana, to Phil Robertson and Marsha Kay Robertson. He has two older brothers, Alan and Jason, and a younger brother, Jepitha. As a child, Willie grew up around hunting and the great outdoors, as well as a small business ran by his father, Duck Commander. As a boy, Willie handled a myriad of tasks at the company, including building duck calls, and even handling business calls
Willie had a creative mind to make money as early as kindergarten. He sold candy until he was found out by the principal but that did not deter him as he turned to selling pencils. When he was a little older, he learned the art of sales at the fish market and bartering for the best price of the fish he caught. The skills came in handy when he took the company that his father started in their living room and turned "Duck Commander" into a profitable organization.
The company was born when Willie 's father, Phil, was working on manufactured duck calls and was told,"...you weren 't calling those ducks...You were commanding them." Soon a production line was formed with family involved from the start and still run by family today. Willie started out sweeping out the shop and staining the wooden calls and then sanding them. The humble beginnings in their home soon took off as Willie writes his father had a dream with vision and remained focus. Citing instances where the road was not always smooth and his mom worried that they could lose it all, he is quick to point out the Lord never failed and met them every time there was something needed. He acknowledges that any success they experienced then and now has always been "from above." Willie states with confidence that it is necessary to keep an excellent work ethic, and not be afraid to fail or pick yourself and up keep going when you find yourself on the ground. God is with them in the good and the bad.
Ever since childhood, Willie and his brothers have been interested in the family business started by their father, Phil Robertson. Willie used his business degree from Harding University to take Duck Commander from a family business to a multi-million dollar empire. Duck Commander is the company that generated a great portion of the wealth that he has acquired, and he generated the interest to start the TV show, Duck Dynasty. In 2006, Robertson started another pursuit when he started the company Buck Commander. This company has also created the Buckmen series of DVD 's and the television show Buck Commander Protected by Under Armour on the Outdoor Channel.
Willie gives all the credit to his dad for teaching him to be a salesman, hard worker, good man, visionary and great hunter. Phil taught Willie to be independent, confident and fearless, but most of all godly.
Willie Robertson is the CEO of Duck Commander, and known as the resident prankster. He is a graduate of nearby University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM) with a Bachelor 's Degree in Health & Human Performance with an emphasis on business. Using this degree, Willie has grown the company from a living room operation by the river to an outdoors corporate giant. Willie has been CEO of the company for about 10 years. He also produces and stars in a number of outdoor TV shows, and a popular series of DVDs.
4 Management Lessons from Duck Dynasty As the hit television show Duck Dynasty launched its third season last week, setting viewership records for A&E and topping American Idol in key demographics, I was struck by the management success of the company – often in spite of themselves. While the reality show at times seems more scripted than real, the company, Duck Commander, is as real as they get and more profitable than ever. Here are a few lessons on management from the seemingly inept Robertson family.
Keep it simple. All the family sells are duck calls. High quality, industry proven duck calls that work so well tremendous demand made the family some serious cash. If you identify a market with a need and some purchasing power, build some expertise around a product or service that adds value to that market, the management of the business then becomes pretty easy. If the Robertson family began adding products that they don’t understand as well as duck calls it would clearly be a disaster. I do not think it was planned but the focus the company has had – and is committed to drives their success. It’s all about the story. The Robertson family does not just sell duck calls anymore; the television show is based on their story – and the way they tell it. They have become professional storytellers. However, the stories are the brand and the brand sells duck calls, lots of duck calls. The ability to attach a compelling story to your product or service gives it life, the consumer isn’t buying a duck call, they are buying a Si Robertson handmade duck call (or so they think) and that adds huge value, value consumers will pay high margins for. Not all dog barks mean the same thing. Sometimes a dog barks because its just happy to be out in the woods. Sometimes a bark means it has fleas, the Robertson family knows what each bark means. Customers are the same way. Not all customer barks mean we need to jump through hoops to satisfy them. There is the occasional customer who has fleas – and just needs to bark to let you know. Let them bark, thank them for sharing but remember that if they leave you for a competitor they take their fleas with them.
If you’re too busy to hunt and fish, you’re too busy. Episode after episode has the duck call room left empty while the family engages in another adventure. Frog hunting, water park building or donut eating contests take priority over the work. But at the end of the day all of the work always gets done, every order leaves the warehouse on time. Yeah I know, a bit scripted but the producers are making a point – this family loves to be together. Sure they bicker about Willie’s leadership style but they never let the company down. Look at companies like Zappos, Twitter and Google, employee satisfaction is driving growth and innovation.
Duck Dynasty Duck Dynasty is a reality television series on A&E. It shows the lives of the Robertson family, who became wealthy from their family-operated business, Duck Commander, operated in West Monroe, Louisiana, which makes products for duck hunters, primarily the duck call named Duck Commander. The Robertson men, brothers Phil and Si, and Phil 's sons Jase, Willie, and Jep, are known for their long, flowing beards. The moments before a religious service begins are generally ones of quiet reflection for the congregants, but on a recent Sunday at White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ, here something incongruous was going on two-thirds of the way back in the spacious hall. Parishioners were walking up to perhaps the scruffiest, most disheveled-looking man in the church as he sat in his pew, offering a greeting and making a request. They were asking him to autograph copies of his biography.
The man was Phil Robertson, who along with his heavily bearded sons is famous in this part of Louisiana and, increasingly, all over the country. The Robertson family’s duck-call-making business, Duck Commander, has been an evolving media phenomenon, beginning years ago with videos aimed at hunters, then becoming the subject of a show on the Outdoor Channel and last March moving up to the much bigger stage of A&E.
They are busting the image of what might collectively be called backwoods TV, the ever-growing list of reality shows about wrangling alligators and catfish and wild hogs. Where most of those shows are one-note and aggressively low brow, “Duck Dynasty” has a varied cast of characters who fit together seamlessly, and any idiocy is deliberate. Sure, making an impromptu duck pond in the warehouse loading dock, as some of the guys did in a Season 1 episode, might not have been the most productive use of time, but it was pretty funny. And the show always leaves you unclear whether the whole extended family is just pulling your leg.
“Duck Dynasty” is loosely centered on the Duck Commander business, which is headed by Willie Robertson, 39, the third of Phil and Kay’s four sons. Very little duck-call making actually takes place in any given episode. Instead the focus is likely to be some harebrained project instigated by Willie’s older brother Jase, or Phil’s obsession with ridding his land of beavers, or Kay’s determination to open a restaurant, or Uncle Si’s efforts to give driving pointers to a young member of the clan, or some similar bit of frivolousness. Willie, the only man with obvious business acumen, is forever exasperated by his inability to get Jase and the rest of the Duck Commander staff to stop goofing off, although he too has been known to shirk certain duties — for instance, blowing off a career-day appearance at his daughter’s school to accept a $100-a-hole golf challenge from Jase.
The show has gotten better as it has found its natural voice, which in large part has meant letting members of the Robertson family be themselves. David McKillop, A&E’s executive vice president for programming, said the first step was realizing that the clan deserved more than a simple hunting show, which is how the series was originally pitched. “When we looked deeper into the story, what we found here was a very unusual family,” Mr. McKillop said. “Why waste it as a hunting show when in reality this was a great family show?” Then came a process of learning to just turn on the cameras and let the Robertsons go.
“When we first met with the production company,” recalled Korie, Willie’s wife, “they had an intern give us kind of a script they had written that was going to look like our show, and it was just so not us. It was like, the wives get up and go chase the varmints; it was just total redneck. That is not us. That’s not the way we live.” That is not the way they live because everyone in this family is smart and equipped with a keen sense of how to mine a sort of self-deprecating wisdom from the redneck caricature. So now the producers might suggest ideas or setups to get things moving, but what happens next comes largely out of the Robertsons’ heads. “I think Willie coined it: guided reality,” Jase said. “But all the stuff we say is — I don’t know if I can speak for everybody, but all the stuff I say, I just say what I normally say.”
To spend a Sunday afternoon with the extended family in Phil and Kay’s kitchen is to realize that, yes, what you see on television is what you get in real life.
Phil really does sprinkle his conversation with the catchphrase “happy, happy, happy.” Si, Phil’s brother, really does have a penchant for saying the unexpected and outlandish. Willie and Jase really do trade barbs almost nonstop. The wives really do look considerably better and often sound considerably savvier than their husbands. And in the extended family’s presence the question of how much of the show depicts the Robertsons’ actual lives and how much is a plausible variation thereof starts to seem irrelevant. Does the real-life Si possess the hidden sewing skills that enabled the reality-show Si to come to the rescue when, in a Season 1 episode, the women were having trouble making an apron for full-figured women? Who knows, but you can now find the apron on the Duck Commander Web site, priced at $75. “Out of stock,” the listing currently …show more content…
says.
“Duck Dynasty” episodes generally have a sitcom structure, bouncing between two story lines, and the result can be more wryly amusing than many scripted comedies.
Viewers seem to be responding. The Season 1 finale in May was the highest-rated nonsports program on cable that night, with 2.6 million viewers, a record for the series. The growing popularity is affecting everything about the Robertsons’ lives.
“They told us, ‘Look, y’all ain’t going to believe the business this is going to create,’ ” Phil Robertson said while giving an all-terrain-vehicle tour of the duck blinds on his extensive acreage. “We said, ‘Yeah, right.’ ” But now, he said, there’s a race “to dream up stuff to hang, stick on your wall, put on your desk,” to keep up with demand.
At the dinner table Jase held out his hands. “See the scars?” he said, the price of hand-making Duck Commander’s signature product. “That’s a lot of duck calls.” The number of orders caught the family off guard because it was June, months away from hunting season. “Usually,” Jase said, “this time of year people aren’t ordering duck
calls.”
One of the ministers at the White’s Ferry Road Church that morning had been Phil and Kay’s oldest son, Alan, whom the family regards as a sort of reverse black sheep: he’s the only one without a beard. He had recently told the congregation that he was stepping away from the ministry: Willie had asked him to help run Duck Commander because once filming for the show begins, everyone else is occupied with the business of making a TV show.
There has been a change, too, in what happens when the Robertsons are out in public. All the bearded men — the youngest son, Jep, also turns up on the show — have stories about what Jase calls facial profiling: instances in which a security guard tried to have them removed from an event where they were the featured guests, or when someone mistook them for vagrants and offered them meal money, or whatever.
Lately, though, those encounters are being replaced by ones in which they are recognized by fans who get a little too friendly. “Can I touch your beard?’ ” Willie said, imitating a common refrain. “I get that all the time.”
Summary
The Robertson’s have stuck to their roots and their faith to build a successful business. Once Willie Robertson became CEO, he took some more modern ideas and made the family business boom. Phil Robertson prayed, “Lord, if you bless me, I’ll thank You; but if You don’t I’ll be thankful for what I have. I have plenty. I’m in good shape.” Willie Robertson has the same Christian faith and continues to thank God for their many blessings that they have been blessed with and they are able to use their TV show to witness to people.
References
Compeau, Marc . "4 Management Lessons From Duck Dynasty - Forbes." Information for the World 's Business Leaders - Forbes.com. N.p., 7 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 July 2013. .
Genzlinger, Neil. "â Duck Dynastyâ Lures a Growing Audience on A&E - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., 7 Oct. 2012. Web. 20 July 2013. .
Robertson, Phil, and Mark Schlabach. Happy Happy Happy. New York, NY: Howard Books , 2013. Print.