Last weekend during SilencerCo’s First Annual Sumer Camp media event in Idaho, which included a factory tour of SilencerCo’s facility in Utah, OWDN Managing Editor Paul Erhardt sat down with Mike Aland, Chief Marketing Officer of the Syndicate Group, which owns SilencerCo. The interview covered the company’s growth and market position, its manufacturing philosophy, customer service (including an amazing, and consistent, 24 – 48 hour warranty turnaround time), and, of course, marketing and company culture. 

This is Part 1 of that interview.

QA Outdoors
SilencerCo started in 2008, when suppressors were still a relatively small niche in the firearms world. Looking back, what did the company see in the market that others didn’t?

Mike Aland
That’s a great question. I think if we take the very first product, the Sparrow, the opportunity there—and maybe this is just a small way of looking at it, but I think the concept becomes universal throughout the history of the brand—the .22 Sparrow answered some questions and solved some problems that people maybe didn’t know they needed solved.

A lot of the .22 cans at that time, you’d unscrew them, push the baffle stack out, get your wire brush out, and start scrubbing and trying to clean. Sometimes a baffle sticks. Sometimes the tube gets fouled. It’s tough to get the baffles back in or locked together appropriately.

So it really became: How do we make a silencer—and .22 obviously requires a ton more maintenance than other cans—that’s more user-friendly, easy to clean, and sounds really good?

So they created the Sparrow. Part of the secret sauce is the patented clamshell design that shields the core from the tube so that, as carbon builds up, it’s easier to disassemble, clean, and reassemble.

I think the concept there is looking in spaces where people don’t look, finding products that are either categorically different or outside the thinking of the group.

I’ll give you one of the other greatest hits of SilencerCo, which is the Omega 300. At that time, people were looking for sealed 5.56, dedicated 7.62 hard-use cans, and the market was probably a little more on the tactical side of life. Our product that fit into that category was the Saker. We had a Saker 5.56, a 5.56K, a 7.62—fantastic, bomb-proof silencers.

But we saw an opportunity that was different. What started out as a PRS pet project by our founder, the guy who invented most of SilencerCo’s greatest hits, became the Omega 300. It was a can he wanted, but he actually didn’t show SilencerCo generally because he didn’t think anyone would want it given the market conditions.

That can was different. When it launched, it had a mix of materials that probably hadn’t really been seen in that combination before, and it was special. It sounded amazing with 5.56. It was a .30-caliber can that was fantastic on all the .30-caliber cartridges it was rated for.

I think that’s kind of the story of SilencerCo: looking in contested spaces and identifying opportunities within those spaces.

QA Outdoors
Early on you had the Sparrow, Osprey, Saker, Harvester, and Omega 300. Certainly the Sparrow and Omega helped establish SilencerCo during those early years. Which decisions surrounding those products had the biggest impact on the direction of the company? Would it be the Omega 300?

Mike Aland
Yeah, I think the Omega 300 really set the table for a design aesthetic, as well as performance benchmarks that other cans in the future would have to meet.

.22 is fun, and there’s only so much juice you can squeeze out of that platform. But with the Omega 300, it opened our eyes to possibilities within other specialized cans or do-all cans that allow you to shoot a ton of calibers through them.

That became pivotal for the Omega 36M and the 46M—introducing modular cans that you can shoot 9mm and rifle rounds through, and everything in between. People weren’t really doing that in such a specific and dedicated way.

Again, it’s working in contested spaces but trying to find those products that really stand out and ultimately give the consumer a massive benefit.

QA Outdoors
SilencerCo has experienced a wide range of market conditions within the suppressor space: rapid growth; post-HPA slowdown; long Form 4 wait times and then dramatically shorter wait times. The elimination of the tax stamp was massive, and now we have the NFA ruling out of Texas. What did those cycles teach the company about managing growth and forecasting demand?

Mike Aland
I think each of those watershed moments taught us different things. HPA was a hard pill to swallow. We were extremely hopeful. The marketing reflected that hope, and consumers adopted that hope. When it fell apart, it hurt.

I think that lesson really required an internal look at how we did business, how we managed funds, and how we allocated capital. There were some really big moments to learn from.

I think every founder-led company goes through these moments of, “Well, I’ve never been here before. What do I do?” That was one we experienced, figured out how to get through, and came out of extremely more wise and more prepared for future opportunities or setbacks.

QA Outdoors
During the Q&A with SilencerCo President Scott Clinger he was asked about the company’s greatest innovation. He pointed to the systems infrastructure SilencerCo put in place from the very beginning, including its custom ERP system, as having the greatest impact on the company’s ability to scale effectively. Today, SilencerCo accounts for 20% of all NFA suppressor registrations—is that ability to maintain operations and scale in the face of demand surges the core competency of the company?

Mike Aland
I think that’s definitely one of our strategic advantages: our ability to assess what’s coming down the road and then determine how to meet that demand.

There’s a nuance to it. We could put out a lot of silencers, but putting out silencers that have the innovation and quality we expect becomes a little more tricky. That’s something we’ve excelled at, and it has been part of the culture since it was two guys in a garage.

That’s definitely not understated in our culture and our ethos. We can always be better, but we also want to master it.

In the early days, forms were tricky. If you have a machine shop, there’s plenty of software out there that you can run a machine shop with. But then you add in the form complexity. How do we do Form 2s and Form 3s and integrate that into an ERP that makes us effective?

I would say that, in the early days, our ability and mastery of forms gave us a strategic advantage and helped us grow at a much more rapid pace than our competitors.

QA Outdoors
SilencerCo was, to a certain degree, founded on the idea that suppressors could become a mainstream shooting product. We’re 18 years later. Are we finally at the point where that has happened, or are we just now seeing the sunrise over the horizon of a new day?

Mike Aland
I think it’s both.

I think a lagging indicator of the growth of this particular segment in the industry is when you have storied, historical OEMs launching threaded barrels on guns that were never considered to be suppressor hosts. Lever actions are a good example of that.

It turns out that, under everyone’s nose for decades, lever guns are some of the best suppressor hosts you can shoot. The sound quality is fantastic.

The fact that you have Marlin or Henry or whoever offering threaded barrels as a factory option shows that the demand is there. A lot of these companies don’t make suppressors themselves, but they want their consumer to have a gun that is modular and can accept muzzle devices like a silencer.

Never before have there been more options for consumers to buy guns that they can throw a can on immediately. But it’s just beginning.

When you look at—I think, and forgive me if these numbers are wrong, but the premise will be the same—100 million gun owners in the United States, and I think the last stat I saw was 500 million, close to 600 million firearms that have been purchased and are in the hands of consumers. If that’s our total addressable market, and you look at how many silencers exist to this date, we’re not even scratching the surface.

The horizon’s bright.

QA Outdoors
We’ve seen significant changes in suppressor technology: titanium, additive manufacturing, low-back-pressure designs, lighter hunting suppressors, and increasingly modular suppressors. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for another meaningful technological leap, or is that hard to discern at the moment?

Mike Aland
It’s probably a little hard to discern.

We sort of distinguish between do-all cans versus what we call scalpels—super-specific cans. I think there’s a need for both.

For us, our R&D team is always looking for white-space opportunities, finding that piece of technology or innovation that puts us in a unique category. But there’s also innovation to be had in existing, known technology.

Can we do a low-back-pressure can that’s better than the one we make today? Absolutely. Can we make a 36M better? It’s been one of our best-selling cans for a number of years. We think we can make it better.

There will always be opportunity there. The hard part is when engineering gives you a list of 10 cans they can make, picking the five that we can do really well and scale at volume. That might be the harder part.

QA Outdoors
SilencerCo emphasizes that it’s nearly 100% vertically integrated. In today’s market, is vertical integration primarily about quality control, production capacity, cost, or the ability to react quickly when demand suddenly changes?

Mike Aland
The answer is yes to everything you just said, and I’ll propose a couple others.

We started the interview talking about our warranty turnaround time, stated at 36 to 48 hours. I looked at our stats over the last month, and it’s 21 hours. It fluctuates, and some of that is due to how many we’re getting back, etc., but a 24- to 48-hour turnaround time is pretty standard.

That’s impossible unless you’re vertically integrated. If you’re using third-party manufacturing, that can comes back to you, you send it to someone to fix it, they send it back to you, and you send it back to the consumer.

The way we have built our business, right off the top of production numbers, product goes straight to a warranty department that catalogs and inventories parts for every can we’ve ever made, including cans we’ve discontinued.

We used to own a company called SWR. Some of their product names still exist, but we took SWR out of the public and focused on SilencerCo. There are a number of SWR cans that we still warranty. If it comes back, we’re fixing it.

When we say lifetime, it also includes discontinued products or companies that we owned and for which we still own all the IP, but that are no longer doing business as SWR. We still warranty those.

That’s impossible unless you do it in-house.

QA Outdoors 
Somebody pointed out to me—and correct me if this is wrong—that you do a significant amount of destructive testing on your products. Is it every 300th can by SKU?

Mike Aland
By SKU, yes.

QA Outdoors
That’s a massive investment in the manufacturing process in terms of time, energy, and certainly ammunition costs. Is that what keeps everybody focused on maintaining quality? And how important is that mentality of not cutting corners—not changing it to every 500th or 1,000th can, or testing by product family instead of by SKU?

Mike Aland
It’s super important to us that the silencers our end users receive are of the most top-notch manufacturing.

We do that to catch potential issues. We do it to make sure the standards we set when we put something into production are adhered to.

I’ll give you an example where this was painful for us, but it caught a problem. We had a recall, I believe it was two years ago, for I think three different silencers. It was caught in this test.

As soon as we knew we had a problem, we issued a public recall statement. The good part is that a lot of the cans affected by that recall hadn’t even made it through our distribution network. We caught it that fast.

Because of the volume we do, it was significant enough that we had to get ahead of it. That destructive testing helped prevent thousands of cans from getting into consumers’ hands and becoming a consumer problem. We were able to repair everything or replace it as needed because of that destructive testing.

QA Outdoors
Beyond that, how important is it for a company to find the problem before the consumer finds it? Because when the consumer finds it, it can undermine the credibility of the company and its product unless the company is extraordinarily good at reacting to it and fixing it quickly.

Mike Aland
I’ll give you an answer that might be a little abstract.

It’s probably cheaper to pull a can off the line and test it to destruction to make sure there are no problems in the manufacturing process than it is to have a can with a wild amount of warranty problems.

Part of the reason our turnaround time is so responsive is that we don’t get a ton of returns. That’s not to discredit the hard work our warranty department does—it only enhances it—but we’re able to be quick because we’ve done the testing to make sure the cans that go out are top-notch.

A lot of the warranty issues we see are user-generated, but we still cover them. It’s our product. We stand by it. If you have a problem, we’ll fix it.

Next Week, Part 2