March 28, 2022

This paid piece is sponsored by Silencer Central.

 You know how it goes when you marry into a family.

You likely try to acclimate – taking on some of the traditions and pastimes your new extended family enjoys.

For Brandon Maddox, that meant figuring out how to navigate sports that involve firearms.

After meeting his future wife, Megan, at a pharmacy conference, the Alabama native determined “to fit into the new world. It almost felt like a natural transition to expose myself more to the firearms world,” he said.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Maddox is the owner of a company making a major impression in the firearms industry.

Sioux Falls-based Silencer Central has found a unique niche, allowing customers in 42 states to purchase silencers online and have them delivered to their homes.

“Sometimes when I tell a new job applicant I’ve doubled the business every year for the last 17 years, they don’t think it’s sustainable,” Maddox said. “But the honest truth is we completely switched our business model.”

Why silencers?

Both Brandon and Megan are pharmacists by training who came to Sioux Falls from Florida in the early 2000s and worked at Cigna.

At one point, Brandon was a manager for another large pharmaceutical company that required travel.

“So I’d be up north of Pierre in the grasslands, and it stays light until 9 or 9:30 p.m., so I started shooting prairie dogs,” he said. “And as soon as you shoot, they all scatter. They’re headed down the hole.”

He was at a gun show and discovered a suppressor, “and it really changed my hunting experience,” he said. “The interesting part is, there’s so much paperwork to buy these. And my instinct was the local gun store isn’t really set up for that.”

Buy a firearm, do the background check and leave, he continued. With purchasing a silencer, “you’re going to be talking to us for a few months,” he said. “So I decided what if we could have someone who only works with suppressors, it’s all they do, and that kind of became my role.”

His background in pharmacy brought an attention to detail and professionalism, he added.

“It’s just like right bottle, right pill, right patient, right doctor. It’s the same detail required. Right product, right serial number, right county, right paperwork. It’s so detailed that for most gun shops it’s not a good fit.”

But for Maddox, it was.

He started sourcing and selling silencers at gun shows throughout South Dakota during their peak season in the first quarter of the year.

The pitch often involved hunting coyotes.

“If you aren’t using a suppressor, you shoot once, and the others are gone,” he said. “That resonated really well. So we’d sell for three months and then do delivery for three months.”

Silencers, or firearm sound suppressors, are like handguns in that you can only buy legally from a licensed dealer, and a dealer has to be licensed in the state where it will be used and have a physical location there.

Inevitably, customers would surface from outside the state, though, prompting Maddox to expand into neighboring states.

“When I first started, we would buy directly from the manufacturer,” he said. “And it was more for a tactical customer, ex-military-type clients. And it just didn’t seem like that was our clientele. Most of our customers were hunters, and they want it a little lighter on the end of the gun and quieter to keep from scaring the game. The tactical crowd is interested in durability. They want to shoot as much as they want and keep their hearing safe.”

He began manufacturing his own silencers in Georgia using a contractor but quickly outgrew the capacity. He then connected with a Sturgis manufacturer “that has worked with us ever since, and we’ve had to re-create them, so we have 25 suppliers around the country making them for us,” Maddox said. “We have 25 shops making parts and five shops that assemble and send us final goods.”

Every place is running three shifts to support the volume – but that’s what happens when you sell 100,000 silencers a year.

“We estimate we’re capturing 20 to 25 percent of the market,” Maddox said. “We also will sell other people’s products – we’re a dealer so we can sell anything – but typically it’s easier to sell ours because we can source it.”

Scaling up

Before the pandemic, Silencer Center revolved its entire business around selling at gun shows.

“Our customers bought at the show, were a repeat customer, their buddy bought, so there was credibility and trust built,” Maddox said.

As events nationwide shut down, an investment he’d made six months prior proved invaluable.

“We had doubled down and decided to be licensed in every state where suppressors are legal,” Maddox said. “So we went from 100 percent events to taking out full-page ads in trade magazines and marketing direct to consumer.”

Tell a typical consumer you can mail a silencer to their door legally, and they’re understandably skeptical, he acknowledged.

“So it took creating relationships with influencers and them realizing we’re the real deal and we’ve been doing it 17 years and have a good relationship with regulators, and they started writing about how we’re legit and we’ve improved and streamlined the process,” Maddox said.

“That whole messaging has been the focus of this year and last year.”

Silencer Central has grown to 165 employees, including 41 based in the field who are back to attending shows.

“We’re looking at acquisitions. It’s moving pretty quick,” Maddox said. “The goal is to continue to grow, and if that requires mergers and acquisitions, that’s something we’re looking at. We feel like our model really works well, so how do we bring other products into that business model?”

New headquarters for growing team

In a move that can be described only as full circle, Maddox also is preparing to move the company into the place he used to work as pharmacist-in-charge before owning a business: the former Cigna Home Delivery Pharmacy building at Fourth Avenue and 60th Street North.

 

The plan is to be done renovating it by late June.

“I think with rapid growth comes opportunity, and there’s definitely opportunity here,” Maddox said. “We’ve pretty much flipped all the leadership, we grew so quick, and now the goal is to put structure around it and backfill people in a lot of positions.”

Many senior leadership roles have been filled by people with health care backgrounds who were looking for something different, he said.

“It feels like a startup, but it has employees and revenue, and people feel like they can have an impact on things going forward,” he said. “And these new hires have given us a good perspective on what we need to do as far as pay and benefits and ensure we’re competitive.”

One thing that has stood out as he’s scaled up: “A lot of people don’t know what’s going on with us,” Maddox said.

“When we did events as Dakota Silencer, they recognized us, but when we switched the model, we didn’t advertise locally, so people don’t know who we are and as a consequence don’t know about working here.”

The opportunities are big, he added. For a list of current openings, click here.

“My first job in pharmacy was at a brand doing $300 million or $400 million in annual sales, so part of this has been thinking big and realizing this could happen and making sure we had everything in place to scale,” Maddox said.

“People probably have no idea we made more than 75,000 firearms last year stamped ‘Sioux Falls, South Dakota.’ But we took the current federal laws and created an entirely new business model where we’re mailing these to people’s front doors, and we’re the only ones doing it.”