Corp. Interview: Minaska Outdoors

President: Steve Borland
By David King

Can you give us a little history of how you and your brother Todd got things started with the company?

In October of 2003, Todd and I decided that we wanted to manufacture hunting products. We had been using a Dennis Kirk call that we put in a dry box. Todd actually mounted everything together. We had been using that call for about five or six years when I thought, “Well, let’s take a stab at making our own version.” So, we started making non-remote calls and selling some of our competition stuff at the same time. It soon became apparent that there was a lack of user friendliness with changing sounds, sound quality and remote operation. We felt that the calls on the market left a lot to be desired. That’s what led us to hiring an engineer. We did the design work and let him know what we wanted it to do and our electrical engineer took it from there as far as the circuit board goes.

Take us back to the early beginnings of how you became interested in predator calling.

I remember the first thing I called in was a red fox, I was using a Burnham Brothers mouth call when I was eight years old and that is when my love of predator hunting began. Todd, Gary (our brother) and I all began hunting and trapping with our father at around eight years old. We started calling coons a lot when I was around twelve years old. We started calling with a boom box. Todd actually started doing that a couple of years before he let me borrow his setup. We were not making our own sounds at that point; we were just using the commercial cassette tape we had. We didn’t start making our own sounds until 2004. It was then that we really started getting to the point where we had the electrical design finished and the enclosures and speakers selected. We began working on our own sound recordings as well as working with some Animal Control guys in. We started out with the non-remote electronic call which you would hook up your own audio source (cassette, mp3 player) to the unit. It was basically an amplifier with a built-in speaker. Then we began working on an electronic call that you could control with a remote so that it would be more user friendly and give the hunter an advantage with the wind. You weren’t limited to just a few sounds; you could actually add 100 sounds to the call.

What are some of the events that have transpired that have brought you to where you are at today?

We literally walked into Radio Shack and bought a few things, went online and bought a few things, and started in the basement. We just progressed from that point until 2006 when we moved out of the basement into an actual building. We outgrew that building within the first three months and moved to a facility twice its size. That’s where we are currently and we are up to the ceiling at that building already.

What can we look forward to as far as new products coming out? It looks like you are going to target younger hunters with The Little Bandito.

The Little Bandito is actually our first attempt at a mouth call. We have another mouth call that is in the works right now as well. I can’t really give you a lot on that other than we are coming out with another mouth call. We have a lot of different products coming out within the next eight months in various areas of hunting. Electronics, mouth calls and decoys. We also have some exciting things coming out for deer.

If you were to breakdown predator hunting from ten years ago to the present-day boom, what do you foresee as the future of predator hunting?

I don’t see a plateau anytime soon. When you walk around any kind of trade show, whether it be the SHOT Show or anything like that, just the exposure that varmint predator calling is getting right now is incredible. Every year it’s growing and growing. I don’t see it coming to a head anytime soon. Predator hunting is gaining in popularity and we want to take it a step further. Our raccoon video “Crumblin’ Coons,” is different from anything else you’d see right now on the shelf. That’s one of our goals, to bring the consumer things that you won’t see on the shelf right now. If you go to the predator calling section, you see coyote calls and some bobcat stuff. We want to produce stuff that won’t get lost among the other products because there are so many things out there that look the same. There are a lot of avenues that have not been addressed, like calling, which we will be covering as the industry keeps growing.

What sets Minaska Outdoors apart from the competition?

I think we have already established ourselves as running our own race, not following anybody else, regardless of how long they have been around. We are the first company to bring products to the market that have the decoy built right into the game call. We were the first ones to bring out a high-end call that would fit into your pocket and still offer great volume and a high quality of sound, removable memory and a lot of those features. Todd and I sit down often and we go through what we would really like to make and what is not currently out on the market. That is our approach, not, “Oh well, this guy over here is making this so let’s come up with our own version of it.”

Tell us a little bit about your operation, your new facility, how many employees you have and what you foresee for Minaska Outdoor’s growth.

We currently have ten employees. Instead of hiring more people, we redesigned our board and eliminated all the time it took to assemble. This cut down the assembly time dramatically. It took about an hour to assemble the board before, now we are down to five to ten minutes. Right now we are looking for a place to build our own facility. I see it happening here within the next year.

Do you see the popularity of predator hunting getting so big that it will affect the predator population too much? Similar to what we are seeing with dwindling mule deer numbers?

I don’t think we will run into anything like that where predator hunting will be completely oversaturated. The reason why I don’t believe there will be a decline in predator hunting is because there are so many things to hunt – from coyotes to foxes to bobcats. That is another thing that leads us to believe that calling coons is going to be so popular. Everyone has got coons, but when you think about calling coons you think you’re going to have to go and fumble around at nighttime. There is a scene in the video where Todd is hunting and it’s 92-degrees out and he is in shorts and flip flops. We try to stay on the edge of continually doing something different so we are not stuck in a rut.

What would be your dream hunt?

I would really like to call in a lynx. I have not done that. I have had plenty of offers but, you know, it is tough to get away. There is something about bobcats and lynx that really appeals to me.

Tags: Corp. Interview, David King, HI33, minaska outdoors

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