#6: Clayton Flurry, Founder/Owner | Flurry's Market

About this episode:

In this episode of In the Thick of It, Scott interviews Clayton Flurry, founder of Flurry’s Market + Provisions, a beloved local butcher shop and grocery store in Flower Mound, Texas. After spending nearly two decades in the oil and gas industry, Clayton decided in 2020 to leave his career and pursue his entrepreneurial passion. Despite having no prior experience running a retail business, he bootstrapped Flurry's Market from idea to launch in just 9 months. 

Opening amidst a pandemic came with plenty of challenges from supply chain disruptions to cash flow problems, but Clayton’s commitment to hiring knowledgeable staff, providing quality products, and serving the community with care has allowed the business to thrive. He's learned first-hand how perseverance, adaptability, and faith are key to overcoming the trials of entrepreneurship. Clayton shares his thoughts on surrounding yourself with the right people, treating employees well, and the importance of getting up every day to make a positive difference in people's lives.

About Clayton:

Clayton Flurry is the founder of Flurry’s Market, a beloved local butcher shop and grocery store in Flower Mound, Texas. Prior to launching Flurry’s Market in 2020, Clayton spent nearly two decades working in the oil and gas industry, first as a landman in the field and later taking on leadership roles for energy companies. His experience in the corporate world gave him the courage to leave his career to follow his entrepreneurial passion. Despite no prior retail experience, Clayton’s commitment to service and community has made Flurry’s Market a thriving local business.

About Flurry's Market + Provisions:

Voted best Meat Market in Denton County, Flurry's Market is a specialty meat market, bistro & butcher shop located in the heart of Flower Mound, TX.  Our Mission is centered around quality, service, and value.

To learn more, visit flurrysmarket.com.

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Clayton Flurry

Owner/Founder, Flurry's Market + Provisions

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

If there's anything, I'd change it to the experience.

But I think the lack of experience

has got us where we are now.

It's made us it's forced us to

figure it out and bootstrap it.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Not that I don't get excited about every guest

and every episode that we launch, but today's is

extra special for me for two reasons.

First, as a business owner myself, I'm always

rooting for other people who have taken the

risk to start something on their own.

Second, I'm kind of like Oprah in that I love

to share things that I love with other people.

Maybe one day we'll do a live episode with a

live audience, and I'll give away all my favorite things.

But until then, this will have to do.

Today's guest literally feeds my

family several times a week.

Flurry's Market is located in my town and

has quickly become a fixture in our community.

I look forward to sharing the story

of Clayton Flurry, owner and instagram sensation

behind Flurry's Market in Flower Mound, Texas.

Clayton has built a business on delivering an

exceptional experience, and he shares what it was

like in the early stages of launching his

business at the height of a pandemic.

From running an oil and gas operation to

opening flurry's market, we talk about the importance

of learning from those who've done it before.

You making quality hires and never

being afraid of trying something new.

Welcome to in the thick of it.

Well, man, thanks for coming.

We're glad to have you here and

look forward to hearing your story.

Tell me about growing up.

Where'd you grow?

Man, you know, actually, my wife katie and

I, we grew up in the same town.

Now, we didn't know each other growing up.

That town is Shreveport, Louisiana.

So just 3 hours due east of here, driveway to driveway.

And so, born and raised there and was really able to

stay in the state all the way through probably my mid

to late 20s, which included military service and college.

So it wasn't until 2014 we found our way to Texas.

Okay, so what was growing up like?

Did you go to private school, public school?

Did you play sports?

Yeah, no to all those things.

So we didn't really have money, nor did

I really have the probably I don't know

the wherewithal to hang into private school.

And so I was what's called a

neighborhood kid back in the day.

I went through the public school

system over in my hometown. And this isn't a knock.

It's just the truth. It's glad.

I'm glad I survived it.

So, I went to public school and

wasn't really focused on college, wasn't really

college driven, didn't play sports.

I used my size at the time as an

excuse, but I was really more interested in just

hanging out with my buddies and chasing girls and

really did the former the best chasing girls.

So I didn't really have many aspirations other than

I knew I needed to get out of school.

And that's when all of a sudden, one day, a recruiter, I

guess, came to our classroom, said, if you want to get out

of class all day, you come take this ASVAB test.

And I didn't even know what that was. Come on, do that.

And then I found myself in the military shining boots

on a floor and 17 years old, which was one

of the best things that's ever happened to me.

So went into the army as a C student and got out

of the army, and that's when I'd met my wife, thank God.

Chased her to Louisiana Tech and did four

years there and stayed in Louisiana there after

that and found myself in the oil field. Awesome.

Are you a big Terry Bradshaw fan?

Terry Bradshaw, Carl Malone.

Those are the two people

know Louisiana TECO Terry Bradshaw.

I realized Carl Malone was there. Oh. Carl Malone? Yeah.

And the duck, Commander.

And I learned, and I think it's true.

I think it's true that Terry Bradshaw

actually played backup to Phil Robertson.

I've heard the same.

And Phil just decided he'd rather hunt and fish

and didn't want to commit to the game.

Imagine how different things would yeah.

So college football, really, again, not not chasing

a college or really having the aspirations or

being pushed to go to college.

I didn't really grow up with an

alma mater to root for. LSU,

Louisiana State University is kind

of like the state Texas.

You know, you've got so

many different large universities.

It's LSU or Bus. Really?

Anything outside of that in it's, you wouldn't

even go to your own home game.

You go down to LSU's home games, but I don't

know a single person from Louisiana who doesn't root for

LSU, regardless of whether or not they went there.

That's right. That's exactly right.

I mean, that's the state school quote, unquote.

I wonder if there are more LSU fans than fans.

OOH, I don't know.

I think if you're a fan of either, you're a

fan of both because it's always especially social media.

You see it, it's kind of the trifecta.

You're home school.

If you go to Louisiana Tech and you win, great.

And then if LSU won extra, great.

And if the Saints won that

weekend bonus, it's the trifecta.

There's a lot of people here in Dallas that don't

like the Cowboys, so that could go either way.

So 17 years old, you're finishing up high

school, and you go straight into the army.

You talked about shining boots, but what kind

of jobs did you have in the army?

I had many jobs.

My stepfather, blue collar, he gave me

some wisdom early before I left.

He said, get to know the cooks

and get to know the supply sergeants.

And I had no idea what that meant, but I

did heed his advice and it paid dividends because you

never went hungry when you had access to food, when

others didn't, in the middle of the night when you

really wanted it, and you always had the equipment you

needed when you got to know the supply folks.

But I didn't know what I was doing, Scott,

I just knew that that's where I wound up.

And looking back, it's something I would never change.

And also learned that there's

two sides of the military.

You've got the enlisted side and the officer side,

if you will, or simply put, the educated side.

And I was on the enlisted side and I looked

around my company and I was one of few of

the non court ordered people that were there.

It was a very interesting crowd. Court ordered? Oh man.

Yeah, it's like, hey juvenile, you can go in the

military or you can face this type of punishment.

And so there was a lot of people there

that just didn't have any other path to mean,

I guess hindsight maybe I was one.

I could have just stayed in my hometown of

Shreveport and I don't know, vocational school or an

hourly job or something, I don't know.

But it really opened my eyes to kind of any career.

You kind of learn through life what you don't want to

do more than what you do want to do sometimes.

And so I learned that.

Sure don't want to be a lifer

in this, but I excelled at it.

Humbly, I excelled at it, I enjoyed it

and got to meet all walks of life.

And had I not met my wife while I was serving,

I was on the path to go to what they called

at the time, green to Gold, maybe it's called that now.

And it's where you go from enlisted to an officer

status and go to West Point and what have you.

And I was going through that process, but I

chased my heart with Katie and she was at

Louisiana Tech and that's where I went.

I get that.

So you said something earlier that really stood out

and I don't know that I've ever met anybody

in the military that stayed in the same state

throughout their entire time in the military.

Yeah, well, there's a process when you get

to boot camp, they say pick three stations,

where do you want to go?

And you look at your choices.

And I was just really a homebody?

And I said, well there's Fort Polk,

Louisiana, I don't even know where that

is, but it's Louisiana behind the name.

So one, that's choice one.

I think choice two.

I picked Hawai just because I was like,

man, I could go to Hawaii, why not?

And I don't even know what choice three was.

And they said you can go to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

I was like great.

And so it ended up being 2 hours from

my hometown of Shreveport and so any given weekend,

I was not in the field doing something.

I'd just get in the car and zip

on back home and run around with my

running buddies from high school that stuck around.

So, really, my first two years of full active duty service,

I got to spend a lot of time back at home.

That's a rare thing.

I've got a lot of military in my

family, and those six month deployments they wear

on the home front, for sure.

So that's a huge blessing to be able to be that close.

Yeah, for sure.

So you did your entire military time at Hulk?

Yes, that was my four year station. That's where I was.

But I didn't get that mean, I

literally showed up with papers in hand.

I don't know, call it the end

of the summer, end of a summer.

And they said, well, your unit's

not here, so go mow grass. Go get on this.

I was like, okay, so hey, Mom, I made it.

I'm down here, and I'm mowing grass.

Well, my unit is over in Bosnia Herzka

Kovina, and so I'm going to be joining

them here in about 30 days or so.

And I don't know where Bosnia is, nor

does my mom, I don't think she does.

So, yeah, I spent seven months in

Bosnia right out of boot camp. Wow.

Which was interesting.

It was towards the end of the initial war over there.

What year would that have been?

It was 97. 97.

Clinton was still in office.

And so that was quite the experience.

And looking back at it, even today, I

was just a young 1718 year old kid.

I mean, you could put me on a plane

and say, this is where you're going, and, oh,

by the way, this is where you're at.

Again, I didn't excel in high school in world geography

or any of that stuff, and so I just taken

you for your word, this is where you're at, and

this is what you're going to be doing.

And it was very a simple assignment.

Had no idea the gravity of it.

Setting up checkpoints for war criminals and

confiscating weapons and all this stuff.

It's like, even in the civilian world,

a job's a job is a job.

You come back and you get all these oh, man, service.

It's just a job at the time, it's just a job.

It was fun, though.

I disagree with that, man.

I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

I appreciate the humility, but, man,

it's not just a job.

There is sacrifice, and you're putting yourself in

harm's way, and some people, you don't know

if you're coming home, and some people don't. Yeah.

So it's not just a job.

Well, I think I don't know.

I'll speak for myself.

I'm really doing some reflecting as

we sit here talking through it.

When you're 18 years old and you're sitting over there and

you don't really come from much from the beginning, other than

a loving family, what do you have to I mean, you're

not over there going, Today it'd be different.

I got three kids, a dog, a house, and all this

stuff that if I went over there today, I'd be way

more timid and go, Man, I got a lot to lose.

But then you're over there just hard charging, man.

Just let's go.

And you're trained, and it's not like I

was on the front lines over there. Okay. This is sure.

When my brother was still in active duty, we got word.

I don't even know how we found out, but he

was deployed, and one of the Hornets in his squadron

went down, and we didn't know who it was.

And waiting for hours and hours and

hours to hear back, that was hard.

That was really hard.

And thankfully, it wasn't him, but there's

obviously a family on the other side.

And the pilot and the Wizzo, the backseat

guy, they were both thankfully okay, and they

pulled them out of the water.

And sure, they had some injuries, but, man, that's a

long wait when you know something like that's gone on.

No, for sure.

And I tell you, I don't know if

it'd been more of a pleasant experience.

This is talking about the deployment in 97.

It's crazy how far we've come with technology.

There was no cell phones.

I mean, their cell phones were really coming on the

scene, but there was no Facebook and apps and all

this stuff over there, and so if I ever wanted

to call home, it was a major process.

You got to use the phone every third day or

so of the week, and you had to wait your

turn in line, and you couldn't just go pick up

a telephone and call the ten digit number.

No, you had to call a military post

and then give them your phone number.

You're trying to call, and you're in a different time

zone, and it was always echoey, and it's funny.

Mom or dad would tell you a joke, and

you'd hear the joke, and you'd start laughing about

it, but they're already onto something else.

It was so choppy and so

just inconvenient and good luck.

And usually the times you got to use the

phone is when they were out to eat dinner.

So you never got them right, and

you weren't calling their cell phone.

You were calling their home was just a different time.

It's interesting.

My wife and I were traveling a few weeks ago.

We were in Vancouver, and kids were back home,

and my wife calls to check on them, and

she FaceTimes them, and it hit me.

We are in another country, thousands of miles away from home,

and we are driving down the highway at 70 miles an

hour, and we're having a video call with our kids.

That's pretty mind blowing as you think of

it, and we take that for granted. We do.

And yesterday, finally, I have a brother.

I have a few brothers, but my half brother with my mom.

We share a mom. He's down in Houston.

And just hit me yesterday afternoon, said, why can't we

just FaceTime, the two of us together, our mother?

And we said, you know, it's amazing technology,

and we leveraged the FaceTime button ourselves yesterday.

Nice.

Yeah, very nice.

All right, so four years in

the army, you met your wife.

How did you two meet?

A weekend off, went back to Shreveport, and she

was so we're two years apart, a year and

a half, and she was graduating high school.

But a few months left, and my buddies again, they

weren't really going anywhere fast, and they were still hanging

around maybe some high school kids here and there.

And so anyhow, I found myself at some high school

party, and she was there, and the rest was history.

I think she even had a boyfriend

at the time, and high school kid.

So, yeah, that's where we met.

I just come back to Shreveport, and so we

hit it off, caught love at first sight, whatever.

And so that was two years in the military.

And then so we stayed together long distance

for two years until I got out. Okay.

And she went straight to Law Tech.

She went straight to Law Tech.

And she graduated twice.

She graduated with her undergrad and stuck around,

call it because I was there or whatever.

We graduated for my first time yet,

her second time in five, 2005.

It's awesome.

When I was getting ready to graduate, I

did not know what I wanted to do.

And one of the things that went through my

mind was, I'm going to get a Master's.

And for me, it was, can I buy two more

years to figure out what I want to do? Anyway?

I've always admired people that go that extra distance.

And anyway, good for her.

I was ready to move on because at that

time, I did feel like I was behind.

I spent four years leave

high school, four years service.

Now four years undergrad, now it's eight years.

I'm like, and some of the friends that I had that

they had already graduated, I felt like I was behind.

I was behind.

They'd graduated college, correct? Yeah.

And I watched some of them already.

They've had their first job for

four years in the corporate world.

They're owning homes and all this stuff.

I'm like, man, I'm still in college.

But I'll never forget my father in law now

saying, you're not behind, you just hang on.

And I didn't realize that.

So now 911 has occurred.

I got out the year of 911, so I

got out in June and then of 2001.

And so 911, it was kind of a huge

favor for military service members because there was this

all new renewed respect, and we love veterans.

And so I got out and went to college and kind

of was able to compete against guys with their masters and

stuff, because I had that on my resume as a veteran

and my father in law was right, I wasn't behind.

It was interesting you talk about that

renewed respect, and I can remember that.

Were you ever disrespected?

Oh, no, absolutely not.

But it was just one of those things that there was

just if you were to check the box of being a

veteran and I say that humbly, it just became true.

I mean, when I got out, when I graduated college,

entered the workforce again, I thought I was behind.

But I was able to compete against guys that had

internships through college and specialized places that I mean, I

could walk in and compete against them just because I

did have a little bit some different training.

It may not have been tailored to that specific career

path, but kind of put me on equal ground.

It was interesting.

I think there's a lot to be said too, for the life

experience, and I did not serve, but I had the opportunity to

intern when I was in college, and that set me up.

I had jobs all through high

school, all through growing up.

I bagged groceries at a grocery store when I was

14 and worked retail jobs and all this and that.

But I got to intern and just being in that

environment, being around other adults, seeing how things work outside

of school, and I don't really care what you're doing

military, working in an office, whatever, there's so much growth

and so many little things you pick up on just

through the osmosis of being around that. Yeah.

So my method of being a C student in

high school didn't wash off in the military.

I went to school to Louisiana Tech, and

I kind of stayed the same way.

Now, maybe that's because that's who I am in

my DNA, but also I was in a fraternity,

and there's just so many different distractions, and I

did maintain almost a full time job.

And so my point of sharing that

is it goes back to the internships.

Obviously, the school provided those avenues.

I was not aware of them, or maybe

I chose not to be aware of them.

And it wasn't until getting into the corporate

world where the companies I worked for, publicly

traded companies, offered internships and I was able

to be a mentor, do those programs.

I was like, oh, these things existed.

I wish I'd have known that these guys, they

can come in here and work a summer and

just realize this isn't for me or not, man.

And there's so much to be said for

figuring out what you don't want to.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I got to go recruit on the campus

of like Ou and stuff, and it was eye opening.

I'm like, I didn't know this existed.

I got to do some college recruiting at

a company I worked for years ago.

And, man, that was one of the highlights of my job.

There definitely wasn't my full time job, but twice a

year we'd go down and we'd make the visits, and

it was a lot of fun, some great. Yeah.

I don't think the dean was coming knocking on my

door to push me to go these recruiting events.

Well, what was your major? Business. Okay.

And I'm really not sure how I even chose that.

I believe I chose it because it was business

with a focus on entrepreneurship, and for some reason

that just, I don't know, entrepreneur, it attracted me.

And also the fraternity had the most

prior tests in their test in business.

I don't know, it's just kind of the path I went down.

The good old test bank.

The test bank.

Now that I think most colleges, their exams are

online, I don't know if test banks still exist.

Probably not.

I'm sure there's something that's equivalent.

It's just different.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

So your business degree was it

a pretty broad general business degree.

You got a couple of accounting classes, a couple

of finance, a little bit of management, HR.

Yeah, it was.

And so if I had to frame my four

years of school, my first two years, if you

looked at my transcripts, I was failing.

It was terrible because I was having to

relearn what I really didn't learn in high

school because I just didn't pay attention.

I started relearning math and history

and English and how to study.

But, man, when I got into business processes not

accounting not accounting, but the things that really mattered,

all of a sudden, I became an A student.

Not economics so much and not finance,

but, man, the engineering management process.

Anything to do with business plans and

stuff, boy, I really loved it.

I'd say I almost excelled at it.

And so I believe I went down the right path.

It was interesting to me.

What was your favorite class? I'm trying to think.

It was not quantitative analysis, for sure,

but it was more of just, I

think, business planning and business processes.

Those really stick out to me.

You can't do C before you do B.

And how do you do B if you do A wrong?

Those supply chain management, those type classes.

So post college, where did you find yourself?

Enterprise Rent a car. Yeah. Okay.

One of the people on our team started

at Enterprise Rent A Car, and, man, I

think incredibly highly of that organization.

I think that they do such a fantastic job

investing and teaching young people, and some people stay.

In fact, we've actually got a neighbor who's

been with them since he got out of

college, and he's probably at least my age.

He's probably been out 20 years and

been with him the whole time.

But everybody I'd know who has ever worked there.

They're top notch people and they

know how to do things right. Yeah.

And I fell into that really by

osmosis of my father in law's neighbor

was the regional guy in Shreveport, Louisiana.

So I think he managed the region.

Being Shreveport, Bozier, it's a neighboring city.

I got to know him and just have driveway conversations.

I'm going to be graduating.

Hey, you should check this out.

And I just observed his life and go,

well, I didn't even know that existed.

And renting cars didn't sound sexy, but he's

putting food on his table over there.

So I scoped it out and really didn't

have anything else lined up, so let's go.

And their management training program,

it was very intense.

But three months of that, I quickly learned

it's not what I wanted to do.

I woke up, I said, I didn't go to school for this.

And that's no disrespect to that program or that

company, it's very well ran, but wearing a long

sleeve white shirt and a tie in the middle

of the summer, washing cars and renting cars you

don't have, and it didn't help my friend.

Some of my buddies that had graduated college a

year ahead of me, they kind of found a

different path in the energy business and were working

half the hours, making twice the money.

And I'm a very curious person by nature.

And so I kept watching that

going, okay, this is not right.

So I was there for a very short three

months and when I left, I was told by

that very regional vice president that was making the

biggest mistake of my career by leaving there. Wow.

Yeah.

Which challenged me to prove him well.

I didn't have like, I'm going

to prove you wrong, right. He was wrong.

Does your father in law still live? No.

I think it's one of those you

go that ladder and then beyond regional.

Now you got to go to wherever and you get moved. Yeah.

Well, I'm sure there are many people who have gone

on to do incredible things that have been told by

somebody, this is the biggest mistake of your life.

I was watching it was like a documentary

about the making of Friends, the TV show.

And Jennifer Aniston was on some other sitcom

on NBC that was like about a pizza

place that was run by an alien.

It was some weird thing.

And the Friends role came up.

Somebody came to her and they're

like, you'd be perfect for this.

And she's like, well, I've

already got this same network.

I don't know if they're going to let me go.

So she auditions and the Friends people

called the other producer and they're like,

hey, we want her for this show.

And he went and told her, I'm not

going to stop you, but you taking that.

That'll be the biggest mistake of your life.

And look at what happened.

And I don't know, I think for a lot

of people, that's motivating to prove people wrong.

Yeah.

And that was the first job I'd ever quit.

It wasn't easy.

In fact, I gave them a two, I think I did.

Here's two weeks notice and, oh, man, we're

about to promote you and all this stuff.

But that was the first job I'd ever

quit, but I sure didn't look back either.

You said it was the first job you ever quit.

You were in the military.

Did you have jobs in high school? Oh, my God. Yeah.

So you'd mentioned you'd work in retail, so yeah, I

mean, my first car, I had to pay for it.

It was a family hand me down on my

grandparents side, and I paid $300 for it.

And if I wanted that thing to go, I had

to put gas in it that I paid for.

So I was working minimum wage,

$4.25 at my buddy's daycare center.

His parents owned it, and I was a maintenance

man, and so maintenance man in high school.

What does that look like?

Well, I changed light bulbs and fixed

toilet paper holders and cleaned up spills

and washed the AC units outside.

I mean, waxed the school bus.

Yeah, I was blessed to have that job.

It was a family business, if you will, that I

was able to go to every day after school.

And I held that job all the way through high school.

And if I wanted Taco Bell, I had to go

to work if I wanted to pay my beeper bill.

You had a beeper? Yes.

If I wanted that beeper to beep,

I had to pay that bill. Yeah. Man.

Did you ever get the 911 text? Oh, baby.

Yeah, I almost got a beeper.

And I forget why.

What did I need a beeper for in high school?

But that's how you communicate.

It is how you communicated.

You would get a page.

It's Friday night, you're driving around

in that $300 car, friend pages.

Or you page your friend and you have to pull over

at the 711 or circle K and use the pay phone.

Find a pay phone. That's it. Yeah.

How far we've come. Yeah.

Hear myself say all that.

You'd think I'm, like, 100, but my

kids would say I'm 243 years old.

So you talked about the maintenance work.

Are you a handy person?

I can do things.

I can change my own oil, rotate my own tires.

I can do small electrical things around the house.

I can clean up my own p traps.

And I learned through that job.

And also my stepfather, he was very handy. Very handy.

He worked for Halliburton, worked on the

railroad and summer jobs with him.

I was replacing roofs for family mean, so I was

exposed to a lot of simply call it blue collar

work, if you will, which I'm glad, you know.

I still mow my own lawn because I get joy out of.

It really it's not because I have to.

It's that whole attitude, no one's going

to do it like you do it.

Am I a handyman?

No, but I can do things, and I'm

cheap when it comes to certain things.

So it's always like, man, I

hate paying somebody to do something.

I can do it myself.

All right, so let's go back

to kind of your career progression.

Enterprise first job you ever resigned from,

where did you go from there?

I went to the oil field, as it's called, as a landman.

A landman is responsible for everything from running title in

a courthouse property title, to securing contracts from landowners to

get the rights to drill or traverse across property, to

put pipelines out, settle damages, meaning you own 100 acres,

they want to drill on it.

I need the lease, I need

the surface rights, all these things.

And so that was what started my career in

the energy business, was I left Enterprise and I

found myself in East Texas in courthouses checking title.

And checking title means, hey, there's a piece

of land, I find who pays taxes on

it, and then I run it backwards.

You just run the history, go backwards to

find out who owns the mineral rights.

And every state's different.

And so I started doing that.

I did that for two years

as what's called a field landman.

It's called a field landman because you're

out in the field, you're in these

various courthouses, you're all over the place.

You're not in the oil field? No.

Well, yes and no.

I mean, I'm in the county seat of

wherever these projects are that are happening.

And who's doing the projects?

Well, the corporate companies

or the operating companies.

And I say that kind of I did

that for two years as a field landman.

And again, I'm a curious person by nature, and I didn't feel

like I figured out the trade or licked the trade, by all

means, but I kept going, who is sending me out here to

do this project, and why are we doing these?

Why do I need to go lease

this property from Farmer Smith or Susie?

And I just kept going back, tying it

back to, well, it's because someone, some geologist

somewhere and some engineer somewhere has figured out

that there's a potential zone of interest that

you could produce commercial hydrocarbons.

And so I just kept going, well,

how do I go to that job?

And so after two years of doing the field,

I was blessed to again in my hometown, found

a publicly traded operating company called St.

Mary Land and Exploration.

Been around 100 years.

I was able to get on as a junior landman.

Now what's called an in house landman.

In house outhouse.

Outhouse for your field guys, where you take a step

up the ladder and you're directing field landmen to go

do the work that needs to be done.

And this is a different company than the yes, correct.

And timeline, this is probably

2006, 2007, somewhere in there. That's correct. Okay.

And East Texas, I remember around that time,

the Barnett Shale was a big deal.

It just started kicking off. That's correct.

That was kind of the mother of the unconventional oil

and gas exploration, if you will, in North America.

That was peak time. It was.

I never worked the Barnett play, if you will.

I did work with some fellow field

landmen brethren that had joined our team.

We were working something different, more conventional stuff in

East Texas that had exposure to the Chesapeake and

McClendon and all that stuff that they were doing

with the airport, leasing the airport.

That was a big deal.

It's interesting even today.

I mean, I still take notice of driving

around the airport and seeing those locations and

Ben Flower Mound, Denton County, learning about all

the fracking and stuff that was going on.

But being over in Shreveport, that was

very pro oil and gas over there.

I mean, a lot of families made a living

from oil and gas, and so we didn't have

the people storming the courthouses with the anti fracking

and stuff that was happening over here.

But yeah, so that's really when I jumped in from

being in the field to being in the corporate scene

of all the unconventional stuff that was taking place.

And, boy, I wish I had a crystal

ball and knew what I knew now.

Yeah, well, and maybe this is part of that.

But the energy industry, it's boom and bust.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

All right, so you go from the field rep to in house.

What was that job like?

It was amazing.

It truly was.

I learned so much.

I was very nervous going into it.

And I was nervous primarily because I

knew I didn't know a lot.

I was probably way over my skis, but

I had to just say, Clayton, stop.

You don't have to know everything.

You work for a company that has

resources, resources meaning dollars that you're able

to bring in outside talent.

Lawyers and other people that

have the 20 years experience.

Get over it, Clayton.

That you're only 23, 24.

You've got resources.

Get surround yourself with smarter people.

And that's what I had to quickly learn to

do, and I was fortunate to do that.

And I got to meet so many people that

were in the energy business back in the 80s,

went through all the bus and learned from them

and how they managed their personal lives through that.

And I don't know where I'm going with

that, other than I just learned a lot,

and I learned that I loved the business.

It was challenging.

It was very stressful.

Energy projects, initially, it was like,

we're going to drill this well.

Costs $10 million, this one, and we're going to

do 20 of these this year, $200 million.

We're going to spend that but it got

to where it's like, that was nothing.

If our region at the time was where the

wells were making the most economic sense out of

the whole company, we could have a three quarter

billion to a billion dollar budget for that year.

Just for drilling? Just for drilling. Wow.

And some of that would be an exploration.

And you don't know if you're going

to hit or hit a dry hole.

No, you don't.

But, well, in that business, by the time

you have a budget of that size approved,

you've spent again, some pretty material dollars on

the exploration side to prove the project.

The energy business really goes

into exploration, then development.

And so I had the luxury of doing both, working

on both sides of started with exploration as just mowing

down wells, just staying in front of those rigs, staying

in front of them, which is a process.

It doesn't matter where you're at in the

country, which state, what field you're working in.

It's all kind of the same thing.

You got to get the lease.

Old saying, no lease, no grease. Got to get the lease.

Once you get the lease, you got

to make sure it's a good lease.

And then you got to get the land all

surveyed and everything and just get the pipe.

You start producing, you got to get it out of there.

The more you talk about this, the more

my mind is blown that this actually happens,

because you got to get the mineral rights.

You got to get the surface rights.

Go through all the title to make sure

that everything's clear, figure out where it is.

I'm sure there's city state permitting

that you got to go through.

And don't even bring up the

subject of drilling on government lands.

That's a whole nother so with the same company.

They closed their office down in Shreveport, and

they said, your job's in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I'm like, I don't even know where that is.

Well, I'm going I don't know what else I'm going to do.

Backing up a second.

At what point did you get married?

We graduated in five, spring of five.

We got married that September, september 10.

My mind almost blanked.

I was waiting. Yeah.

910 five.

It was just before Katrina.

And what was Katie doing?

She was educated in health, fitness, kinesiology, and she

was serving as the regional YMCA fitness advisor.

Yeah, she was teaching aerobics and

running the fitness program at YMCA.

And that's when I was doing fieldwork.

And so our first two years of

marriage, I was living in hotels.

I'd get to see her two days a week, and

that was part of what drove the curiosity, too.

It's like, okay, how do I finish?

I love this business, but I'm not going to continue

to sleep in a La Quinta every other week.

It's not going to happen. How do I get home?

How do I get home? Yeah.

So you come home from work one

day, hey, they're closing our office.

How do you feel about Tulsa?

What was that?

Wasn't good because all of her family, including siblings, all

of my family, which was much smaller than hers.

Shreveport. Shreveport.

And we had just had our second child, who

was going to Hindsight, who did turn one.

The day we followed that moving band out of Shreveport,

we celebrated his first birthday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a

place we did not know anybody, in a hotel with

a little blue bell ice cream cup and a candle

I found in the gift shop downstairs.

Yeah, I imagine there were some. Yeah.

But I said it a hundred times because it's the truth.

We spent three years in Tulsa almost to

the day, and her tears leaving that town

were larger than they were going up there.

That's such a great place to

you found you found community.

Yeah, we found a great church. Great.

I mean, the culture there at the

office that I worked at was fantastic.

Our neighborhood, we just gotta

had his hand in everything.

And so we met great people.

The climate there is phenomenal.

I don't know if you've been to Tulsa, but

it's almost like there's a mother nature switch.

When the counter says it's spring

switch, it feels like spring. Winter switch.

Summer, fall. It's amazing.

You actually have seasons.

You do like here in North Texas. Yes, it was amazing.

That's awesome. Yes.

So you touched on something.

You use the word culture.

You talked about how the office

in Tulsa had a great culture.

Was it different from the Shreveport culture? It was.

And again, this is the same company.

Same company, but at that time, it's

a company that's 100 years old. It's crazy.

It's the craziest thing.

I'll never forget getting an email from the CEO.

I'm still in Shreveport.

Hey, this year we're turning 100

years old as a company.

And every month you're going to get some sort

of swag to commemorate the company and its birthday.

You know what that company did the next year?

Changed its name.

I'm like, wait a minute, we have all this stuff.

And the reasoning behind it, as I understand

it, and I get it, was that was

when we talked about the Barnett Shale.

And up until then, oil and

gas drilling was called conventional.

Conventional meaning straight hole.

It was a conventional way of drilling used up and down.

Well, unconventional is now you're turning

these things, you're drilling horizontal.

Well, everyone starts kind of rebranding.

We're no longer this 100 year old conventional player.

We're now unconventional, and we're going to

shorten our name and a new logo.

So the culture was different up there because

they kind of were changing before everybody else.

And it was newer.

Office space looked really nice, kind

of like your place here, Scott.

And it felt good.

So it was a different culture, primarily was

driven because of the company was changing. Interesting.

Yeah.

And they were hiring a lot of

younger people at that time, too.

It was because the energy programs

with the foresight of hey.

Unconventional petroleum engineers at A and M,

hey, this is the new thing.

This is how you study reservoirs now.

All these new technologies.

When I came to this company, to the company at

the time, I think I brought that average age of

40 people in that office down by 20 years. Oh, yeah.

Wow.

And so by the time I left, everyone looked like me.

How many offices did they have?

At the time, I think there

was probably six across the country.

And culture is just such a big important thing to me.

And what you said earlier just kind of

set off this whole thought pattern after the

new brand was kind of settled on.

Do you think that the culture of the

other offices kind of leveled out and had

a similar feel, or was there just a

true distinct difference between HQ and the regions?

No, I think that company they did a very good

job at, you could walk in any one regional office

and it looked the same, felt the same.

So you didn't feel out of place when

you went to go visit different places?

The only thing really different was the food.

So you mentioned leaving Tulsa. That was a hard thing.

How long were you there? Three years.

And again, here comes curiosity creep.

That's what really curiosity creep.

And wanting to get a little closer back

home, we've now had our third child.

I learned that Katie had a plan.

The whole time I had no idea

we're going to have three children.

We had a boy and a girl.

Why do we need more children?

But one thing about Tulsa, at least our friends group,

you have a litter, you don't have one or two.

And so I think some of that influence rubbed off.

So we had our third child and

we needed to get closer back home.

These six hour, one way or twelve hour

trips back to see grandparents every month.

So where is that going to be?

I didn't really want to go back to Shreveport.

One, the energy business was quickly fading away there.

People were moving out.

And so where can I go?

Well, Dallas is pretty close.

That's 3 hours now I've just

cut everything down in half.

And so I just started pulling out the rolodex.

Who would I know in the know?

Just making some phone calls and

I landed in sorry, in Dallas.

I'm sorry, I landed in Dallas.

I landed in Dallas and I left.

Nine years in the publicly traded energy

space to private equity backed energy space.

Two different animals.

You do the same thing, you still drill the same wells.

But how you plan and budget and the projects you take

on or don't take on are driven two different ways.

Mentality is totally different. Yeah.

I call that my six year MBA, if you will.

What were the biggest differences between the two?

Oh, my gosh.

It really comes down to just how money

is handled and how you make decisions.

When you're working for a big three $4 billion

publicly traded company, you move at a different pace.

Your risk reward profile is completely different.

Is it safe to assume that the

PE was spend the money, let's move.

Fast decision.

How quick can we get a return?

Yes, it's all return.

It's more ROR versus ROI.

Yeah, it's that rate.

It's that rate.

And I came in, I believe kind of at

the tail end of it was very attractive.

Because when the energy business went from conventional

to unconventional private equity specifically, there's a group

called NCAP out there that they got really

good at finding and taking young guns from

these big public companies and putting together these

management teams, giving them a 300 million dollar

blank check and saying, Go.

And at that time, it was really more

land play driven of getting in front of

these public companies that would move slower.

So the small, independent little management teams, let's say me

and you, we just got a $300 million check and

we just go, we're very nimble, very nimble.

We can make our own decisions.

We could just get on technology, a computer, and

say, well, there's a bunch of rigs here.

It looks like they're moving this way.

Let's just go lease up land in front of them.

We you do that. Well, guess what?

Exxon needs to keep moving.

So they're going to go pay you

ten X on what you just paid.

And it was just very lucrative.

It was very attractive, very sexy.

Now everyone was successful at it.

I mean, there's a lot of ways around that

rig, and if you guess wrong, you got burned.

And that's what made a big

difference between good and bad teams.

And so I kind of came in on

the tail end of that private equity.

We were still doing that, but the

opportunities were getting fewer and far between.

Is that because the land grabs were kind of over and

now it was more A and D of just people's positions

and companies and how does their balance sheet look?

And are they at the end

of their cycle of private equity?

It was different.

And in the PE business, were you really just

holding the rights and flipping the rights, or were

you guys actually oh, no, we were drilling.

We were full blown. Our breeding team. It was amazing.

Ten people in the office doing the same thing that an

office of 60 or 70 publicly traded guys would do. Wow.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And it's not a knock against my old company.

I see it everywhere.

But there's just a lot of fat out there

that can be trimmed when you're doing anything.

I've learned it my existing business I've cut

labor in half, and I'm still doing the

same thing I was doing last year.

Which did you enjoy more?

I liked them both.

I wouldn't have found my way on a private equity

team starting out, there's just no room for a novice.

You've got to have some sort of experience.

They were both great.

They were both great.

I think the most rewarding was my last call

it three years when we stood up our own

company, when we being two engineers, my last two

business partners and I, we went and got our

$150,000,000 check and hired some very good people and

bought some assets, drilled some wells, had some success.

I mean, that was very rewarding, but very stressful.

So how long were you at the PE backed company? Yeah.

So when I came to Dallas, when the family we

came down here, I went to work for a management

team that was already put together, backed by Natural Gas

Partners, and they had already had their commitment.

And we spent two years, I was on the

land team trying to find something to acquire, trying

to find something that was already produced real quick.

It's like 2010 eleven or eleven 2012 13 ish.

I spent two years trying to find assets

to acquire that were producing cash flow, cash

flowing, and we couldn't really find anything.

By the time you get a deal on

the line, commodity prices would drop down.

It's always like a falling knife.

And we finally said, you know what, let's go

put together our own property, our own deal.

And so we ended up putting together a bunch

of land leases up in Oklahoma, drilling some wells.

And our backer got tired of call it

the team, call it the properties, and really

wanted to sell them, flush them.

We weren't ready.

And so myself and two of the engineers that worked

there said, why don't we buy these properties ourselves?

We believe in them still.

They've been mismanaged, potentially, so

we need to find money.

And so we went to our private equity provider

at the time and said, hey, it could be

viewed as we staged a coup, but we didn't.

We just said, if these guys are going to

be done with it, we're not done, and we

don't want to just go down with the ship.

So we're young, we have families, and let's go for it.

So we went to the private equity sponsor at the

time, said, would you allow us to go try to

find money and buy this from ourselves, from you?

And we got the green light, and so that's what we did.

So you got three kids.

You're early mid 30s?

About late 30s now, yeah. Okay.

And what was that like?

You've had kind of the safety and security

of W two job all these years.

What's going on in your mind?

What was the conversation like at home?

It was fight or flight.

I did not want to go back to the public world

because now I've kind of become not my own boss but

now I'm in the small world and it's great and I

didn't want to go back to making widgets if you would.

I like being out here super nimble

and let's go big projects, potential.

It's skin in the game.

So should the stars align, you make a big lick or

do a lot better, if you will, than sitting there collecting

a paycheck every two weeks at a public company.

It was nothing wrong with that.

Energy business is great.

You could make great money and not

even have an education to boot.

I just didn't want to go back.

And I'd gotten a taste of that, and I just

saw a way of, man, if I've got the will.

And I got two engineers here that

I truly trust that have the will.

And so as things were kind of starting to show themselves

that this thing's going to wind down, we would spend our

lunches down in the public, call it dinner hall, whatever, at

the building, your cafeteria space with a yellow legal pad, and

say, okay, what do you want to do? How does this look?

What's our company name going to be?

Where are we going to get the money?

How are we going to do this?

Do we want to do this? Here's the chart.

If we don't do it, you're going to go.

So we stacked hands and went for it.

For your two partners, were y'all friends outside

of work or were you really just work?

Well, it's funny.

We actually met back in the

public company days in Shreveport.

We all worked together back on an

asset team way back in the day.

So when we're making these decisions and having these meetings,

do we want to go get our own money?

We had actually worked together on and off

through our careers for about ten plus years

and was everybody all in, totally on board?

Yeah, we were.

And one thing I learned through that is I think

it's very important that you're kind of the same like

mind and position in life to kind of because what

we were viewing was we had management, our existing management

at the time, they were in different it was kind

of oil and watery and it just wasn't working.

And I think some of our successes we

were having once we got off and running,

we'd stacked hands, we've got funded.

We're all kind of in the same part of our

lives, young families and all like minded and that's we

voted the same, but we all had the same goals

and aspirations that's just do what you say you're going

to do, put your head down, go to work and

trust God's going to take care of the rest.

We're all believers.

It just always just in fact, we

named our company Acacia Exploration the Partners

and it was biblical based keisha Wood. That's right.

Okay, very cool.

So what was it like having two other partners?

How did you guys make decisions?

That's a great question.

I did not realize until this current venture I'm in

and this is no disrespect to my partner, which is

my wife, on paper, of this venture I'm in now.

But having partners, I've said it so many

times, I'm blue in the face now.

Hindsight, I wouldn't do what I'm doing

now if I could do over.

I wouldn't do what I'm doing now without really? Yes.

Yes. Wow.

And that's just been my experience.

Because you have a sounding board.

You're not making decisions in a of it's

three legs to a stool, if you will. Hey, Scott.

This is what I'm thinking.

I woke up this morning, we need to do this.

And you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Well, remember, this is not what we talked oh.

Whereas I don't really have that check

balance, and I can be one.

I hear it all the time, like, man,

you do you move a lot, you pivot.

I'm like, well, I just pivot.

And I don't really have those three legs.

Those two other two legs.

So what was the question?

How did you guys make decisions?

Was that a positive thing?

We sat around in meetings a lot.

A lot.

I jokingly say I grew a root up my butt every day.

I felt like in chairs, but, man, it was great.

But it was natural.

One's a petroleum engineer, one's a reservoir engineer.

I'm a land guy.

So we all brought different lenses, if you will.

It wasn't three petroleum engineers, three landmen, or three

accountants, so it wasn't a big echo chamber.

We all had different points of views and

reasonings of why we would make decisions.

Yeah, I think that's hugely important.

I assume you had a little bit more of

the business side, and they had the more execution.

Here's how we go about this. Kind of you bet.

I didn't know anything about rock mechanics or anything about

volume displacement, and so I respected them and really, truly

valued and wanted to learn about that stuff as much

as I could on a high level.

But I also got the same respect back

from them of, hey, we can't just go

do that over there on Farmer Bob's land.

And here's why.

But the contract says we can't.

But we are good people, and we're

going to be an operator of choice.

And so we always had this respect, and it worked out.

It's a good team. Great team. That's huge.

Just because you can do something, just because it's

allowed by the contract doesn't mean that you should.

And I think there's a lot of people out there,

a lot of businesses that don't operate like that.

That's right. Yeah.

And we kind of borrowed stole that public company

that both Brandon, Melissa and I, my two partners

that we're speaking of, we're at St.

Mary Land and Exploration, that CEO, Tony Best, that was

there while we were there during our tenure, he just

had some great mission statements, and one of them being,

we're going to be operator of choice.

It just always stuck with me, and

it stuck with my two partners.

And we carried that over to Acacia and we live by that.

We want to be an operator of choice and you're

not an operator of choice if you're mowing down and

disrespecting the people that without their land you had nothing.

And at the end of the day, that's

really where the rubber hits the road.

The right thing to do is

the right thing to do regardless.

But when other people are looking at leasing out their

land and they're talking to Farmer Bob, who you were

on, when they hear, hey, who treated you well, who

mean well, and it's also partner of choice, too.

In business, you partner with people, other businesses.

And we always wanted to be the partner of choice.

We wanted people to call us because they knew that

if we said we're going to do something, we're going

to do it, even if it hurt, if we're like,

man, we should have never committed that we'd do it.

I've carried that into what I'm doing now.

If you're going to say you're

going to do something, do it. Absolutely.

It means a lot.

I'm glad to hear the partner model worked well for

you because there's a lot of stories to the counter

to that and it's great to hear when it works.

Well, it does now.

Doesn't mean it's easy.

Got to humble yourself a lot.

Sometimes you get into partnerships that as

soon as that honeymoon's over you sure?

How do we get out of it?

Did you guys ever have any disagreements

that were really difficult to work through?

Probably I'll speak from my experience and if Melissa

ever listened to this, she would respect that and

what I learned or what we went through.

Brandon, Melissa and I, and I guess we're talking about

my last three years in the energy business here.

My communication skills just suck

sometimes and probably not sometimes.

Probably a lot of times I am

a bad assumer, meaning I assume things.

I assume people know what I'm thinking and

can make decisions based on well, they already

know or they know why I'm doing this.

And Melissa is a mother, a wonderful mother.

Brandon is a father, a wonderful father. I'm a father.

And when you enter dynamic of you've got two

men and a woman in a partnership, you got

to treat Melissa a little different than Brandon.

Not treat, but you talk different, right.

And everyone has their different needs.

Brandon's got different needs than Melissa does.

I have different and she taught me

so much of she's not Brandon, right.

She's a woman.

And I hope this isn't coming across as

like sexy, but she needed to be.

Treated different or she needed

to be talked to different.

Her language was different.

That's what I'm trying to say. Not treated.

Her language was different than Brandon's and I

communicate brandon I could high five in the

break room and say, yeah, we're doing the

state boom, and not tell Melissa.

Well, Melissa needed to be involved in that.

And if Melissa and I high fived and made a

decision about Brandon, it didn't really affect him as much,

or maybe he didn't share it as much.

And so Melissa and I got really close

because I could almost bank about every six

months my door was going to slam.

And that's with it behind her coming to my

office and giving it to me, just giving me

the business, and it resulted most of the time

with me in tears saying, I'm so sorry.

But those encounters just strengthened our partnership.

It really did.

And she knew I never would do anything or make any

decision out of spite, and I knew she wouldn't either.

But it was always just like, here goes

Clayton, assuming again that she knew, or, I

don't know where I'm going with that.

But being able to say you're sorry is really

important, and there's a lot of people that pride

just won't let them and so glad to hear

that you weren't afraid to say those words. Yeah.

So you were with them for three years? Yeah.

Three years.

And what caused that to come to an end?

Oil going negative in 2020. I think it was March.

I swore I would never forget the date,

but when oil went negative, we're at home.

I'll never forget where I was at.

We'd gotten funded.

Brandon, Melissa, we'd gotten funded,

put the team together.

We got the old regime out the door.

No disrespect to them.

We bought the assets.

You know, one of the hardest things I've done

in that energy career was buying my own assets.

Imagine spending a million dollars in legal fees, buying

your own house from yourself, and the next day

you still wake up in the same bed. Yeah.

So buying our own assets, we got through all

of that, learned about what an ISDA is.

We learned so much.

And we got through all that and stayed

in our old digs for about eight months.

And our lease was coming due, and we

said, we got to move our office.

What are we going to do?

And we settled over by the Galleria Great office, put

our touches on it, and about five months later, COVID

hits, we go home and we're all sitting there working,

and we're now doing some consolidating for our sponsor.

We're taking out other teams.

And all through COVID and I'm watching all go negative.

And that's what I'm going our number is going to be up.

And it sure enough it was.

Our number came up, meaning we were going to get

consolidated, meaning our team was going to go home.

And naturally you would say, well, if the end

of the road is near, we'll do what you

did earlier, go get some more money.

Well, no, oil went negative that year.

No one's given anybody any money, not in that space.

And so I knew that, and I was very fearful of

just sitting around and waiting for that downturn, if you will,

at the time, to iron itself out, which would it ever?

We got a new administration coming in, killing energy.

Like, I'm not going to be a part of that, no way.

So when you say you got consolidated, does that mean

your backer pulled the plug and said, hey, we're going

to take this and roll it up under that's, right?

So at that time, Kane Anderson was our sponsor, our

backer, our partner, and we were operating assets up in

the mid continent in Oklahoma, and there was also two

or three other operating teams, also royalty companies, mineral companies

in the same fund, operating in the same basin, all

had their own management teams.

And so, I mean, you cut GNA deep, put it all

under one team with the plan of taking it public, potentially.

And we threw our name in the hat to be those

consolidators, and I think we could have done it, but one

of my partners wanted to be done for a little while

and completely respected that, and it changed the dynamic.

And, well, if that person's going home, hey, I

love you, but I think I'm going to do

something different, too, and I'm just praying about it.

I did something different.

Was that a hard conversation?

No, not really.

Yes, but no.

Melissa, she wanted to go be mom, and when she

sat there and said, I want to go home, I

just said, we're going to help you go home.

And then that left her leaving the room.

And Brandon and I looking at each other

going, well, do you want to keep going?

And naturally said, yeah, let's do it. And we did.

It's not like we sat on our hands.

We pulled out the know, started

climbing every tower in Dallas.

Hey, what are y'all doing?

Do you want to sell this asset? You need a partner.

We got a team.

We're going to end up going home,

but we can do these things.

We can operate your assets.

Hey, non operator.

And nothing would really stick.

And I just kept looking at the counter going,

I'm going to give this thing till about October

and I'm going to make a decision.

That's what I did.

And Katie was on board.

Yeah, she's wonderful.

She'd jump off the bridge with me, I think.

Well, no, she wouldn't, but she's that

know, she knows I'm a dreamer.

And I kept thinking, know, what else could we do?

And she's been a big fan.

I can relate to that.

Before we get deeper into what you're doing

today, you talked about oil going negative.

And I remember that being all over the

news for the uneducated like myself, does that

mean that oil companies are literally paying people

to take the yes, yes, that is true.

And there was even a bigger issue is

there was no one to take the oil.

Storage was full cushing I mean we were blessed to be

where our assets were up cushing we could still get oil

out but it wasn't at a pace we needed to.

And we were having to build

these huge which was very risky.

Lightning could strike one tank

and you lose everything.

We were having to stockpile oil, but we were hedged.

So in energy business you can hedge that commodity,

but you're only as good as your counterparty.

But oil went negative.

We were still selling barrels at $56. Yes.

So it didn't affect our balance sheet, but

it sure affected the sentiment in the industry

and people knew what was coming. Oh yeah.

So when you talk about the storage was

full, you had no place to put it.

Is that because, hey, we're in COVID

people aren't driving their cars, we're not

burning and we just don't need it. There was no draw.

It was a demand issue.

That's right, there was no draw.

And the industry got really good at what

it was doing and it's producing a lot

of oil and that's what happened.

The energy business is his own worst

enemy and you're always chasing the price.

Natural gas is starting to trade

up, boy, let's go produce gas.

Well, we're so good at it.

We put too much supply out there, guess what?

Price goes down and it shuts projects down.

People lose their jobs, well, oil starts going up.

And that's what happened was Barnett Shell, big

gas, unconventional and everyone's natural gas is trading

at $15 an m and blah, blah, blah.

We crushed gas, it went down to $2. Guess what? Oil.

We can do that same stuff in oil.

It didn't take a while, man, to figure

out we're going to do the same thing. And it did.

Going back to what we're talking about earlier,

just how long it takes to actually get

some something through the whole process.

You're looking at the spot price today, but it's going

to be six months, a year, two years before you

actually start pulling stuff out of the ground.

So you're making decisions on price today that

may not be that price by the time

you actually start pulling it out.

Yeah, it's what the industry

uses what's called a strip.

And the strip is never right, but it's a guidepost of

well, the industry says in twelve months it'll be this, 24

months will be this, 36 months it'll be this.

And you plug that in your model and if

the project works based on strip with some sort

of discount, typically you go and that's where your

risk profiles by different companies and cultures change.

I mean, some people take strip and

don't discount anything and go and you're

always like, oh, my God, they're idiots.

But hey, sometimes those guys are geniuses.

It sounds like luck.

Timing is everything in that industry.

So how does Clayton go from

the energy world to flurry's market? Yeah.

I don't know. Really?

I wanted to do something.

I had to do something.

And so I just literally came home from

church in November of 2020, I think. Yeah.

I'll never forget coming home from church

in 2020 and sat on the couch,

turned on some football, and looked over.

There was a purple spiral notebook.

I think it was my daughter's.

And I just flipped to the back some

free paper and said, what do I know?

What have I done?

Who do I want to be?

I'm 42.

And so I just started penciling

out the whole pros cons.

Do I stay in energy? Yes. No.

And I kept going.

Energy just didn't I didn't see a path because

I just knew it would take some time.

No one was hiring.

Everyone was firing. There was no money.

And so that pencil to paper just

immediately just went bent to something different.

And I didn't want to go to real estate school or

I got to go to, well, what have I done?

So I had to actually go, what have you done in life?

Well, I wasn't going to go back in the military.

Well, I worked in a meat market.

When I got out of the army, I did that.

I really enjoyed that.

And I still know the guy that owns

that same meat market that I worked in.

I worked in a prep kitchen.

I bartended.

I washed dishes in college for four years.

I like food.

I like service.

I really like my town.

What does this town not have?

Well, would one of those meat markets work over here?

This is truly this is exactly how it went.

Yeah, I'm going to open a meat market.

That's what I'm going to do.

So you put that purple that was it.

Book down, and you got to find

Katie and say, here's what's next, babe? Yeah.

Well, I think I then just reached over and

grabbed my laptop next to the purple notebook, and

I said, do meat markets make money, Google?

Well, I didn't get any results, so I started making

phone calls, made phone calls, and I called my buddy

Ross, that owned Maxwell's Market in Shreveport, Louisiana, that I

worked in back in 2001, I think to Ross, you've

been doing this for 20 years.

Would you do it again?

And, you know, I have to preface before I made that

phone call and I shared Katie with the idea, she says,

I don't want to be married to a business.

I don't want to be married to a store.

I don't want to do it.

Okay, I hear you.

Hey, Ross, would you do this again?

He goes, well, you know, Maureen and

I his wife, we don't have kids.

And so I live here at the store, and

it's easy for me because I don't have kids.

And I was like, oh, my God.

The first thing he told me is what

Katie said she didn't want to do.

But you know me, I'm smart, right?

I'm like, oh, well, I'm not going to tell Katie.

He said that he's going to be married.

I'm going to be married at the store

because I'm going to do this thing corporately.

I'm not going to run this thing like a

traditional mom and pop where the man or woman's

name that's on the door is the butcher.

It's got to be there.

I'm going to do this kind of more of

a white collar corporate fashion, and I'm going to

hire people to do this thing no different.

Jeff Bezos, he's not the butcher at Whole foods.

He runs Amazon.

He just opens own whole Foods.

And I still haven't given that up.

I still haven't given that up.

I haven't seen the light end of the but

so I said, okay, I can get beyond that. What else?

He goes, well, if you can get past that, it's

been one of the most boarding things I've done.

This is Ross telling me this.

I said, okay, tell me why.

He goes, well, you're going to

meet families come in these doors.

They're going to bring their kids in

there on a Saturday after soccer practice.

They're going to get an icy from the icy machine,

and you're going to get to watch those kids grow

up and the rest kids are going to have kids.

Everything he describes, that's what I'm looking for

in life service and part of the community.

And I'm kind of my boss, and this is

my store, and it's not a new concept.

Meat markets and corner stores have been

around for centuries or century getting sugar.

Go get a pack of smokes and sugar down the street.

I don't sell cigarettes with sugar.

But I was like, okay, well, Ross, do you mind

if I come visit you and see it again? And he did.

So the summer we made the commitment to do this thing,

I said, Katie, I think so, we're going to do.

And so I went to my standing

business partner, said, I'm out too, buddy.

I'm going to go be a

meat man in flower Mountain, Texas.

That's what we did.

And so my neighbor is an attorney.

He's good friend.

And I said, man, how do I stand

up an LLC on my own here?

So he helped me do that.

In March of 2021, formed

flurries market and provisions LLC.

A year after the pandemic shut everything down. Yeah.

What gave you the courage to do that?

My experience in the energy because

I was scared to death.

When we moved to Dallas, I was working

for private equity company number one management team.

I was scared to death when I saw that thing winding

down and said, okay, this is where I can either be

scared and ride this wave until it hits the shore and

I have no job or go work back for making widgets

for big public company or let's go do this ourself.

And man, that was such a hard process.

I really think it took years off

my life because we found the funding.

The deal died.

It revived itself.

It died again, revived itself.

And we got through that and I said, well and I

fell in love with the process of starting a company.

I was like, man, this is great, man,

I kind of know how to do this.

Form a corporate go, form it on paper

and go, so what do you need?

You need capital, you need people, both resources.

Go get the resources.

You need enroll.

That's what we did.

So, November of 2020, you have the idea.

March of 21 is when you form the LLC.

And I turned out my lights

March 31 at the energy company.

I walked out.

How long from then until you opened the store?

Yeah, we opened December 13, 2021.

On paper, I was supposed to be open September 1.

We had some conversations running each other around town or

at school events and I got to hear a little

bit of what it took to get the doors open.

Talk about that for a minute.

This podcast going another 6 hours.

It was a very expensive learning experience.

And I wish hindsight, there's a lot of things I

wish I'd have done and use that time more wisely.

I wish I had a partner going into it.

Did you wish that at the

time or no, these are reflections. Reflections.

And here's why I just left

the energy business of 1718 years.

I'm starting a business in a whole different industry I

don't know anything about my experience in it was as

an hourly earner, not an hourly owner, if you will.

And so I'm sitting here building a company

on spreadsheets and building margins and pro forma

based on what I get off Google.

What's the margin on groceries?

What's hourly wages these days?

I was wrong on all of it.

And so, man, I sure wish I had someone

that was alongside me that said, you're an idiot.

Margins on beef.

Isn't that you're going to be paying people twice what

you have on that piece of paper right there?

Payroll tax is this.

I came from that company that

Brandon, Melissa and I were running.

Well, we had a straight up CPA down the hall as our

CPA, a CFO down the know that took care of that stuff.

So I do all that now.

Yeah, sourcing a payroll provider, I mean, all these

things that standing all that up was such a

tremendous learning experience and getting equipment timely.

People are still, you know, now we're on the back end.

I'll say the back end.

We're still kind of on the masks are starting

to go away, but supply chain screwed up.

Everything's screwed up. Need sheetrock? Can't get it.

You need refrigeration?

Can't get it.

Ten week lead times become 20 week lead times.

And so how do you timely hire through all that?

Well, you do the best you can.

We literally carried payroll for almost 90 days

without a dollar coming to that door.

So you had hired and to retain the talent

that I'm sure you had to search long and

hard for, you had to pay them.

Even though there wasn't really a

job, there was nothing to do. There was nothing to do.

I had to make up stuff.

Hey, guys, meet at the coffee shop. Go home.

Here's homework.

Come give us a presentation on how to cut a fish.

Or come tell us about the history of dry aging beef.

It was purposeful.

It didn't really add much value.

But yeah, between equipment and town regulations and rules,

and you can't do this, you can do this.

Oh, by the way, this and it's just man, it

took a lot longer than I sure thought it would.

But in all lessons cost, right?

I had a mentor tell me all lessons cost.

That one costs a lot.

But we're still there.

We're figuring it out.

Hearing you talk about, I need a time clock, I

need a payroll person, I need this and that.

I think a lot of people

underestimate all of the little things.

There are plenty of big things, right?

Get the LLC form, that's kind of a big thing.

Get the lease for the building done, get the permits.

But there are so many of those little things

that I think people just think they just happen.

No, they don't.

Somebody like you has to figure it out and get it done.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, tax filings, insurance, and state of

Texas is the only state in the country.

At least it was last year whenever I formed this thing that

you do not by law have to carry a worker's comp. Right?

And so as a business owner, you could

be like, well, I could save that money.

Well, I'm like, well, I got guys

that are running meat saws and grinders.

I better not skip out on that.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

Hey, I need ice.

Well, I need to get an ice machine.

Well, restaurants have Coke machine.

How do I even get a Coke machine?

Where do I get the groceries? Don't.

There's a lot of self teaching through

that process, but that sounds good.

I had a lot of great people to show up in my life.

Who are some of those people? Oh, gosh.

Some of my food suppliers, my vendors.

It's amazing how you just make one phone call.

There's a well known restaurant in the flower mound

Bartonville area that he champions a particular farm.

44 farms beef.

I said, okay, well, I'm a meat shop, and I'm

going to leverage and ride his wave of marketing.

This town already knows that farm. It's Texas.

It's local.

So I'm going to sell that beef.

Well, how do I get it? I don't know.

Google 44 Farms phone number.

So I called 44 Farms, get a hold of a gentleman.

He said, well, hey, yeah, that's cool.

You're going to open a butcher shop, we'd be glad to

talk to you, but we don't self distribute our beef.

You got to go through this company.

I said, okay, well, who do I call there?

We'll call this person.

And it's just that mesme of just that chain

of people that now I'm talking to a food

supplier that doesn't just sell that beef.

They sell tortillas and toilet mints and everything

you need to kind of supply a restaurant

or a grocery store, if you will.

And then those people have their suppliers, and it's

just this big chain, and it really is funny.

This one phone call to 44 Farms interesting.

Set the trajectory.

Yeah, so I hadn't even thought about that.

So you got the distributor is for that.

How many distributors, how many partners do you have?

Because you don't just sell meat.

You got beer and wine, you

got produce, you got candles. I got it.

I'm the only meat shop in the world

smells like candles when you walk in there.

That's Katie's influence. Yes.

That's Katie's influence.

So I was naive.

There were so many things that I came

out pounding the table at the beginning, I

was like, I'm never going to run ads.

I'm not going to run discounts.

I want to be the Rolex meat markets, but be for

every man, there's all these things I'm going to do.

I'm only have one supplier.

I just wanted to have one.

That was stupid.

No, man, you have a bunch of suppliers.

Keep those guys honest.

Took me a while to figure that out,

because if you have one supplier, how do

you know you're getting the best price?

I mean, the guys look in your

eyes and that's a good price.

Well, I learned no, you get multiple

suppliers that sell the same thing.

Keep those guys honest.

And then I learned later that you

can even put contracts in place.

That kind of lock in your margins or

the percentages above what their costs are, what

you're going to pay for goods.

That sure helps you with your balance sheet, man.

I learned a lot, but, yeah, I used to pound

the tape because I wanted it to be simple.

If one thing went wrong, didn't show up

on time, it was one person I'm calling.

Not like, which vendor was that

or which no more is better.

So you start paying people in September,

and you don't open till December.

The night before you opened, what

was going through your mind?

Are there butterflies in your stomach?

Are you able to sleep that night.

My pants didn't fit anymore.

Not because I got fat, because I'd lost so much weight.

And Katie did too.

Our mirrors kind of reflect each other in the

bathroom, and we both did at the same time.

We've lost, like, 1015 pounds in

the past two, three months.

We're running ragged.

Yeah, because it's the putting on finishing touches,

going to open the doors, all this stuff.

And there's just so much.

Once the equipment is running okay, now we got to

stock it, got to get the food in it's, raw

product, and the timing of getting that ordered and getting

it cut and getting it filled and not changing the

opening date and just getting your certificate of occupancy.

I mean, the town may say, yeah, you're going to

get approved tomorrow, but until you do, and then it's

just, hey, they don't deliver food on Sundays.

And so it's just, man, that

coming together, opening those doors.

That first day, I think I did sleep.

I don't know.

I know I lost a lot of weight, and

I have to give credit to my team.

Remember when I said when I first went in house at

an energy company, I was scared to death, but I quickly

realized I just got to surround myself with smart people.

Well, that's what we did here in hiring.

I hired probably one of the

best young butchers in the Metroplex.

I hired two great fishmongers. Fishmonger.

They just know everything about seafood

sources, how to cut them, everything.

Some really good counterhelp, a chef at the time.

And so they were really there, and they kind

of helped me stay balanced, if you will.

I would look to them, is this normal? Do we have this?

And they taught me so much that if I'd

brought and this isn't anything against the butcher shop

back at home, but if I'd brought the butcher

shop culture of hometown Shreveport, Louisiana, to Flower Mount,

Texas, I'd have gotten crucified.

I'd have got buried.

It wouldn't have done it's

just a different demographic.

Things were done different over there.

In my hometown, they could sell what's called no

roll beef, meaning it's not graded by the USDA

inspector and get away with it just fine.

But here, people want prime.

People want quality.

Not that that's not quality,

but it's just different market. And that's what I knew.

That was the education I was bringing over here.

But I was surrounded by people that knew better,

that worked in this market for several years, if

not more than a decade in some cases, that

it got us across the finish line of opening.

Knowing your customer and knowing that the

customer in Flower Mount is different than

the customer in Shreveport, that's huge.

Oh, yes, that's huge.

So opening day, did it meet your expectations?

Do you remember the day? I do.

I do remember it. It was wild.

I think I cried in the bathroom several

times of just more of just joy.

It's kind of like you finished.

I mean, I've never run a marathon.

I've run a five k or two, but just that

you've worked so hard on something for so long.

From the time I sat down with that purple spiral

notebook, it's been over a year now, right from when

we opened those doors on December 13 of 2021.

And so it was just a lot.

And my balance sheet shows that I didn't know what the

hell I was doing because we were just spending I had

the oil filled mentality, just spend money, just go.

But boy, in this industry, pennies matter.

I bet pennies matter.

And so it was just a lot.

It's just a lot of moving parts.

I remember coming in within the first week or two.

I wanted to come the first day, and I think I

was traveling or something, but I feel like a weekend.

You had a refrigeration problem.

Yeah, that was a little bit further down the

road, but yes, we did have one of those.

Quite interesting.

You've made all this investment and your

equipment just goes on a Friday. Yeah.

So in the meat industry or in the corner butcher

shop industry, friday, you live and die by Fridays and

Saturdays, and we are open Sundays now those days, too.

And I never forget coming in, and one of my employees

said, hey, boss, we got a problem on a Friday morning.

I said, what's the problem?

He goes, man, the meat in there is like 80 degrees.

No, come on, really?

It's 24ft of meat case.

And we had just stocked it the night before, trying to get

ahead of the weekend, and we lost a lot of product.

Is your stomach just turning?

I had to just laugh about it.

What are you going to do about it?

What are you going to do?

Okay, well, what is working?

That case is working.

That refrigerator is working.

Well, we open in an hour, guys.

Get this stuff out of here.

Get that one returned over and

fill that one full of beef.

Get those potato salads out of there

and do this and do that.

And we just did the best we could.

And you know what's funny? It was a Friday.

We operated that day with 24 less feet of product,

which is a lot of product, by the way.

We made more money that Friday than we

had any Friday till up to that date. That's awesome.

And that taught me a lesson

that our product mix was wrong.

We didn't need some of those products,

and so we got rid of them.

It was interesting.

There was a lot that came out of that day. A lot.

We had some team, some particular guys on the team

came and said, boss, you handle that real well.

We've had some bosses in the past that I just lost.

It said, well, thank you for that.

I just didn't know what else to do.

I was probably just going stir crazy, and it

looked like I was happy, but I really wasn't.

But I also learned a lot about PMIX, and there's a

lot of things we were carrying we didn't need to carry.

P mix, product mix. Yep. Uh huh.

And you know what I did, too.

That same day, I called my old

mentor Ross at Shreveport, Louisiana butcher shop.

I said, hey, have you ever had this happen to you? Yeah.

You'll get through.

Said, did you ever call insurance

and file a claim on that? No, don't do that.

You'll probably need it for a bigger disaster later.

I said, okay, well, I didn't heed that.

I called insurance and I called my broker.

I said, what do you think?

He said, just file it.

Well, it's a god thing that it did because cash flow

got real tight about four months later in the summer.

And I went and checked the mail one day, and there

was a check that it covered our rent that month.

It was a blessing.

Had those cases not gone down and me filed

that claim, I don't know I'd line of credit.

So it was one of those things you're like

kind of life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Is that how it goes? Yeah.

You've rolled with the punches quite a bit. Have to.

Man are there any other standout stories in what coming up

on two years that you'll have been, you know yes.

Probably none that just tipped mean it's really

been just more to me it comes to

the forefront of my mind is experience.

It's just been quite the experience.

Scott because I left a world of I didn't really

know what was going to happen every day because you

really don't know oil field, but you did know you're

going to come home when you're kind of ready to.

And if you didn't call any landowners, you knew

you weren't really going to get yelled at.

But in this industry, it's service.

It's not energy.

It's retail.

It's not energy.

And consumers with social media have got a lot of

power and you can do a lot of things right.

But if you misstep at the wrong time

with the wrong customer, wrong consumer, it could

be like a big stick out of nowhere.

That's just damage control.

And I don't have any specifics that come to mind.

But you just got to be on your toes

every second of every day and with customers.

Because, again, one star review or you didn't

have this, or this product didn't meet my

expectations, or that employee looked at me wrong,

or that's just from the customer facing part.

Well, now you got to deal with the employees.

And then I'll come in every day and the lights flicker,

and I got to get up there and hammer these Led

lights, man they just don't make things like they used to.

Back in the work in the daycare

days, those lights started acting up.

You change the ballast, and you're good.

It's always something mechanical, something and

it can wear on you.

It can wear on you.

You touched on social, but you touched on

a different aspect than I was thinking about.

You guys kill it with social.

You've always got fresh posts, and

they're always fun and funny.

Who does your social? Is that you? Yeah, it's me.

And that's funny.

That's a good question, because the strategic plan was

Katie, my partner, who owns 51% of this company,

people always ask, Do I own this? Say, no, Katie does.

I just work here.

You handle social media.

And that was a touchy sub.

It kind of became touchy because that

was what we were supposed to do.

She does social media well, I became kind of

in the grind of things every day behind the

meat counter, in the cutting room, in the kitchen,

and I would kind of do some social media.

Then it's like, well, wait, you're supposed to transition

to where I do it now, just naturally.

And there's been a lot of learnings there.

Was that something you knew a lot about?

No, I still don't know a lot about it's funny

you asked that question, because yesterday I was so happy.

My daughter, who's just turned 15, I

said, Brennan, did you know that you

could record your screen on your iPhone?

Did you see my post?

I recorded my screen checking out our website.

She's like tat. Really? Anyhow. I think I know.

But yeah, there's a lot to learn.

But we're blessed to live, and that's

a change that we've recently mean.

We were running print ads.

We were doing a lot of print advertising. I say a lot.

We were running print advertising.

And I looked at my P L last

year, and I just started looking at it.

Go, man, I feel like I'm getting more bang for my buck.

No buck, really, just free social media.

And I could put out there,

hey, we're giving away bacon.

And, well, I better have a lot of bacon, because people

look at that and they're in the store within seconds.

My wife sent me up here.

They saw your thing.

It works. Amen.

That's awesome.

So one of the things you talked about at kind of

the beginning of the story about starting Flurries was getting to

watch the family come in after their soccer game on a

Saturday afternoon and watch these kids grow up.

Have you got to experience some of that and other

things that you were hoping for that you've seen?

Absolutely, I have.

I say it a lot.

This is a hard business, in

a sense, you're dealing with.

Okay, let me back up.

I'm building a brand.

I have literally entered a market surrounded

by big box stores, good Ones, whole

Foods, Sprouts, Walmart Neighborhood Groceries.

Right across the street from me,

there's a few Krogers tom thumbs. And here it is.

I'm coming in here saying, hey,

Flurries Market, that's my last name.

You should come buy your food from me, even

though I know it's going to be inconvenient because

I don't have kitty litter over there, too.

You're going to have to make another stop.

You got to come to me.

And the point of me sharing that is it's

been a slow process to build cash flow.

It's a monthly business.

It's a monthly man, how are we going to do that?

Why are we going to do this?

Maybe now, granted, year over year, we're up 20, 30%.

It's great. It's working.

It's actually working.

The model is working.

And where I'm going with this is if I didn't have

to worry about that bottom line, I'm convinced I'm where I'm

supposed to be because on the days I don't have to

worry about the bottom line and child number one comes in.

Or Mary, who just became a widow, who intentionally drove

to our store to tell me that Bob passed away.

She wanted us to know and to be able to hug her

and embrace her and then sit her down and have coffee with

her in our store and cry with her, pray with her.

That's it. It's everything.

It's everything.

And so should this store start

being able to throw off cash.

And then that weekend, my goal here, literally, and I tell

my employees, and I probably shouldn't have told them so early

because I don't want them lose trust in me.

I want this to be a profitable business,

to give them the opportunity to in a

industry that you don't really make money in.

Make money, give it back to them, because

they're the ones that make it work.

They're the ones that come in and

get their job done, most of them.

And so, man, there's a girl, she came in, Ava,

she brought me a picture and it's still hanging on

my front there's nothing on my front glass and it's

just eight and a half by eleven.

She came in the other day and just mr. Flurry, Mr.

Flurry, I brought you something.

And she drew a picture of little stick figure

of her and I she's got blue long hair.

I've got blue crayons, curly hair.

It just meant the world to me.

To me, that's joy.

That was the crux of me saying life is more than

trying to get a three X on selling an oil and

gas property, which is probably never going to happen.

You only read the headlines about those guys, right?

There's so many management teams out there.

It's not about the money.

The money is meant to be there.

It'll come truly to me.

It's about service, community.

Well, I want to encourage you.

Any kids sports event that I'm at, there's

a Flurry's logo because you've sponsored it.

You guys really have become an

important part of the community.

And it's awesome to see.

The other thing I wanted to say, you talked

about your people and how you treat them. Man.

In retail and in food service, turnover is incredibly

high, and in the last few years, it's gotten

out of control how bad turnover is.

And when I go in, I'm there about once a week, if

not more, if we're not traveling and the faces don't change.

You've done an excellent job keeping your people.

Yeah, and I found my people through

that initial phone call to the farm. Really? Yeah.

And then the supplier says,

well, it's no different back.

I mean, it's the same tool, same process.

I learned back in the energy business, we

all use the same halliburton to go, frack

this well, that, frack the competitors.

Well, he was like, hey, Halliburton,

how are they doing it?

Hey, supplier, you calling these businesses who's

got some good people out there that

probably want to go somewhere, huh? I know.

Jim Bob over at Butcher Shop X.

He's probably one of the best. You want to sell number?

Hell yeah, I do. Yeah. Guess what?

Jim Bob works for me now. True story.

I like to share this when I was still scoping.

This is a little when I was still scoping,

do I want to do this meat market thing?

And I was like, well, I'm going to look up some

local, some metroplex meat markets, and I'm going to call NASA

owner and ask them if they would do it.

How's it going?

And I called one particular meat market in

the metroplex and said, hey, I'm Clayton Fleury.

I live in Flower Mountain, Texas.

I'm thinking about opening a butcher

shop here in Flower Mountain.

I've gone to your website.

We kind of look like we're in the same stage of life.

You got a beautiful family, by the way,

and I've been in your meat shop.

I went and looked at it before I made this phone call.

I loved it.

You got great customer service there.

You think you'd want to have coffee?

Maybe you could help know.

Would you want to talk to me about it?

I was not prepared for the response I got.

The response I'll just boil it down to was, well,

you're not going to be able to do it.

I'm planning to open one in Flower mound myself one day,

and you'd be better off coming and working for me.

Well, it was no different than the enterprise

guy that said, biggest mistake in your life.

I said, okay, all right, I'm

opening a butcher shop right here. Challenge accepted.

Well, you know who's been my number one? Who?

My number one hire was his best guy.

I went and took him. Yeah.

Not really out of spite, but it was

just funny how it all worked out.

Have you had any no.

Follow up conversations? No.

Hey, no. Yeah.

Do you ever think about franchising this or expanding

it out and that's crazy opening other Flurries Market.

I was getting those questions week one.

Where are there other ones of these?

Are you going to do more of these?

You should do more of these.

And Scott, I don't know.

I still stand until I can make this one profitable.

No, but I do look at other things, right?

I am looking at other things along the way that are

industry related, called the A D experience in me of just

in just I see a product sitting in my store.

Who owns it, who manufactures it,

do they want to sell it?

I like it, I believe in it,

could I scale it, stuff like that.

There's a lot of great mom and pops out there

that have created cool products that they don't know how

or don't want to take it to the next level.

And I kind of don't know how, but I

sure would like to because I believe in them

and I think you could make some money.

And so I was telling Katie the other day where

I'm at right now with Flurry's Market, and I think

this thing, Lord willing, will continue to slowly grow, slowly

become a part of the community again, Lord willing, and

let it do that over time.

But I'm a little impatient.

I'm going to try to find other things

and just kind of diversify, if you will.

Flurry spice co.

Flurries beef jerky co, flurries dog food co whatever.

It doesn't be had to be Flurries, but know,

just put some more corporate boxes out there.

So you want to tinker, you want

to have multiple irons in the fire? Yeah, I do.

Because I think one of them surely work.

So you touched on a few things that I

think are consistent with what other entrepreneurs have said.

You had a mentor back in

Shreveport who came alongside you.

You talked about surrounding yourself with good

people and people that knew more than

you did about certain things.

And that right there, I think it takes humility because

I think there are a lot of people that don't

want to admit that they don't have the answers.

So recognize that you don't have all the answers

and that you need other people around you.

Treat your people well.

And what else would you tell somebody

who is thinking about starting a business?

Well, this may fall on some deaf

ears just because of everyone's different beliefs.

And last time I checked, we're in a

free country and we can believe and have

faith or no faith, however we choose.

But for those believers, I say just listen to God.

Ask God.

And I stand on that, Scott. I just do.

And I don't wear it on my sleeve.

I'll never forget calling my father

in law was so knotted up.

Do I make this decision? I don't know.

I mean, just so just I can't even think straight.

Almost dizzy, fearful.

And he simply just said, have you prayed about this.

I said, man that's such a simple solution.

And it's not like it gave me the answers and

I said, hey God, I don't know what to do.

And he said, go do this.

No, but it did just help me get in

the mindset of well, practice what you preach.

I mean, if you believe there's someone that's created and doing

all these things and God put you here and put your

wife in your life and he's truly loving, it may not

feel good and you may not make the money you want

to make, but put your faith there.

So that's the first thing really.

And then the rest of it just kind of falls in place.

You may not see it at the time but man,

I can look back at almost every single move, every

fork in the road and say, man that makes sense.

Man, sitting in all those different private equity providers offices

and getting told no so many times I used to

think that it was us, it was just we're failures.

But no, that was getting experience.

That was just learning how to do it better the

next time, how to go send over to that bank

and Fort Worth and say, yeah, I'm not a meat

man, but I want three quarters of a million dollars.

Go open up a butcher shop.

Had I not set in those boardrooms, I would have known

how to do that or had the courage to do it.

So learn from experiences, every experience, whether it

be good or bad, learn from it.

If there was one thing you would go back

and do different, if you were starting all over

knowing what you know now, what would it be?

I don't think there is one because I

don't think there's any one thing that I

would do different that would change much today

other than maybe the experience partner.

But I don't know how that really would have

turned out because I'm again very curious person.

I think I needed to learn the things I've

learned through this past year and a half the

way I've learned it the hard way I do.

And it doesn't mean I have all the answers

now because I know I sure as hell don't.

I'm still every day trying to figure

out, well, should I open more hours?

Do I need to do this?

Should I hire?

Should I fire?

There's just a lot.

So Scott, I can't give you an answer. I don't know.

I don't think there is.

Mean, the partner thing sticks out but

having deeper pockets, yeah, who wouldn't want

that opening in a different location?

Who knows if that would have been better

or worse or in a great location. Experience.

If there's anything I changed the experience but I knew

that I knew going into it I didn't have it.

So I'm not supposed to sit here today.

Go man, everything has been bad.

Well, I should have been bad, kind of, but

I tell you but that's what I kind of

course corrected, though, Scott, is we now sell barbecue.

Well, I don't do the barbecue.

I got somebody that does barbecue does it really

well who's 64 years old, who's owned 14 restaurants.

I didn't just do barbecue to do that.

I joined with him because he's got a lot

of wisdom, and his wisdom to me is I've

shared with him some of our numbers.

He says, man, for you to do

what you've done so far, that's great.

Just keep doing what you're doing.

For you to keep doing what

you're doing, just keep doing it.

So it'd been nice to kind of have that from the

beginning along the way, to have some of that encouragement.

But I've had Katie.

She's encouraged me. Thank god. We all need that. Yeah.

So I think just the experience, if there's

anything I'd change, it'd be the experience.

But I knew I didn't have it going in.

But I think the lack of experience

has got us where we are now.

It's made us it's forced us to figure it

out and bootstrap it versus someone telling us based

off their experience, which there's value to that, right?

Can save you money, save you

some missteps, save you some time.

Don't do it that way.

Hey, be careful there.

But so far, I mean, look,

don't file that insurance claim.

Well, man, I'm glad I did.

The old adage of slow to hire, quick to fire.

I probably should do better at that sometimes.

Are you a go with your gut kind of

person or you no, I got to analyze this.

No, put it in the spreadsheet.

No, I am a buy it now, figure

out what I bought later type guy.

Just go for it, make the move.

What's my gut tell me, which is probably all washes.

It's been good and bad in my

life, but I pivot fast, man.

If something feel like it's not working,

I want to know what's the alternative?

And go same way I always like, back in my corporate

days, I would change my office around every 30 days.

I just like, change.

I want to be different.

So if I'm not making money this month, well, let's

throw this at the wall and see if it sticks.

And one thing I'm learning with that in this

particular industry is some people perceive that as you're

failing, he must not be doing good.

And I had a lady I had a customer look at me

in the ass Sunday and said, you're not closing, are you?

Said, yeah, we're closing about 30 minutes.

She goes, no. Like, closing close? I said, no.

She goes, well, there's people out there

that think that you're not doing well.

I said, well, I've heard that.

I hear some people have been so far as

taking it because you're always doing different things.

Yeah, because what I'm doing isn't

where I want it to be.

In your world, though, there's so many knobs to turn,

and the knob you need to turn today may not

be the knob you need to turn tomorrow.

Yeah, there's several things.

Like the loyalty program.

You go to any grocery store, whatever,

people have loyalty programs to create loyalty.

I get that.

And so I did that early on.

Our POS system allows us to

put a loyalty program in place.

You get a discount after you earn loyalty points.

Well, that was stupid, because is it

really making people loyal to us?

If you've got a really good product, good

service, good quality, do you really need to

incentivize them to be loyal to you?

Probably not.

And you're already operating on razor thin margins,

and so to give more discount, and it

took me a year to figure it out.

And so when you go, take that away.

Yeah, I can see why people go, oh, he's not doing good.

No, it's just if you want me to

be here, I got to do this.

And so there's things like that.

I mean, it's little things along the way.

I wish I'd never done that.

I mean, someone forgets to get

their points, they're mad at you.

I'm like, Man, I'm trying to do your favorite.

You have the program.

There's so many things.

You got a lot of people you're trying to please. A lot.

We're running a big sale on

prime grade briskets right now. I'm giving them away.

I call it the robin.

I do a lot of Robin

Hooding, and I'm doing it intentionally.

At the stage that we're in, I'm trying

to just create foot traffic and brand awareness.

Who is flurries because we hear

40,000 cars drive by every day.

I don't think a day goes by that we're open.

So how long have you been here? Year and a half. What?

Year and a half? Yeah.

So we're always finding deals in the market that

we could super leverage them, we could juice them.

Some people would call it gouging, but I choose not

to say, well, I know what my price is.

I can use this as a marketing tool.

Cost me nothing, and just pass along to consumer.

But if it's only that easy, consumers

like to sometimes can booger that up.

Example, hey, I'm going to sell you this for 399.

I'm only making a penny on it, but they're going to

want you to do a little bit of extra to it.

And it's like, well, I didn't bake. That labor in.

I didn't do it.

No, it's oh, well, then you

suck and your service is terrible.

But wait, you're missing the thing.

It's the best deal in the world. I'm better.

I'm cheaper than HEB or the big box. Guys.

Wait, what about that guys? Doesn't matter.

You didn't cater it's. That balance.

And it's an easy balance when you got the right people.

That's the key.

Got to have the right people.

We've covered a lot. Yeah.

What else would you want people to know about you?

About your story, about your

store that you haven't shared?

Well, I don't think there's anything special about me.

I don't know.

I'm just a big believer.

I'm a big believer in taking advantage of

the free market world we live in.

If you want to go do something, don't not

do it because you don't have the experience.

If you in your gut or have prayed or just

you were convicted, you need to go do something different.

I don't care how old you are.

I don't know, it's easy for me to

say, sitting here in my mid forty s.

I really don't care.

I think you just go do it now.

Don't go blind, don't jump off the cliff, but

at least Google, get the purple spiral notebook out,

pen to paper, man, and just go for it.

And I think if you go for it and you surround

yourself with the right people, man, I think you do anything.

And I tell these young kids that come in

the store, we have high school guys and girls

that come in and work for us.

So where are you at in school again?

It's the joy I have.

This is what I love.

What do you want to do?

It's okay, man, you don't know.

But just know that you can do anything you want to do.

Just know.

In 20 years you think you're going to be a

doctor, but you're going to own a meat shop.

I mean, things are going to happen.

I don't know, Scott.

I think if that's an answer of, man,

just live your dream and no meat.

Owning a meat market was not at my

damn dream, I can promise you that.

But my joy is people.

And I think I found a way to

be around people a lot and influence them.

Not that I'm trying to influence people, but I do

believe that my heart is in the right place to

be a light and cast hope in a world that

really needs a lot of that right now.

Whether you intend to or not, you influence

people just by being who you are.

I mean that in the general sense, if

you're intrinsically good natured, that influences people.

If you're intrinsically bad

natured, that influences people.

Well, Clayton, thank you for being a

guest on in the Thick of It. Heck yeah.

Appreciate it, man.

I'm proud of what you're doing. It's awesome.

You got a beautiful place here.

You really do.

The whole time I've been talking, I feel

like the Saturday Night Lives get the radio

station, I don't remember what it's called.

The two ladies. The two ladies.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

It's real soft. Yes.

Monotone. Yeah.

Well, keep up the good work.

Thanks for having me, Scott. Appreciate it.

Thank you, man.

That was Clayton Flurry, founder of Flurry's Market.

To learn more, visit Flurrysmarket.com and be sure to

follow them on Instagram, where you will be entertained

and your taste buds will be watered.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of

It, email us at [e-mail].