business backgrounder | industry
“If you’re trying to carry the whole load yourself, boy, I
would have failed a long time ago.”
Schmidt credits his core group of long-time employees
with the company’s success. Farwest and its subsidiaries
have a reputation for being good places to work with low
turnover and long term growth opportunities. “I actually
felt very welcome here when I first came in, everyone
knows each other really well and it’s a family oriented
kind of place,” said cashier Kaylin Lovely who just joined
the company last spring.
Another key ingredient when it comes to employees
is local knowledge about hunting, fishing, camping and
other Northwest-specific outdoor opportunities.
While several over-leveraged competitors went by
the wayside during the Great Recession, an interesting
side note about those surviving the recession relates
to the boom in firearms sales that started in 2008 with
the arrival of the new administration in Washington, D.C. There were concerns that major legislation
severely restricting gun rights would be proposed by
48 association of washington business
the Obama administration, but those concerns proved
largely unfounded. Against that backdrop though, it was
Farwest’s robust wholesale business that allowed the
company to get larger allocations of firearms and related
products to capture the hot market.