Sweetwater: Chuck Surack. How a Customer Service Strategy Built a Billion Dollar Online Pro Audio and Music Company.

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Episode: "Sweetwater: Chuck Surack. How a Customer Service Strategy Built a Billion Dollar Online Pro Audio and Music Company."
Date: July 27, 2026
Host: Guy Raz
Guest: Chuck Surack, Founder of Sweetwater

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the remarkable journey of Chuck Surack, founder of Sweetwater, from his early days as a touring saxophonist living out of a VW van, to building America’s leading online retailer of musical instruments and pro audio equipment. Guy Raz unpacks how Surack’s relentless devotion to genuine customer service—not price wars or flash discounts—became the foundation on which Sweetwater grew into a billion-dollar enterprise, outpacing giants like Amazon through expertise, deep relationships, and empowering employees.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Humble Beginnings: Touring Musician to Founder

• Early Life:
  Chuck grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, pursued music after high school, and toured across the United States in his mother’s VW van (05:49).
• Transition to Audio Engineering:
  While touring, Chuck doubled as a sound engineer, mastering equipment and learning recording techniques at local radio stations, which ignited his passion for the technical side of music.

2. DIY Startup: Recording Studio in a VW Bus

• Mobile Studio:
  Upon tiring of the road, Chuck converted his VW bus into a portable recording studio, targeting schools, churches, and corporate clients (09:02–10:17).
• Business Model:
  He offered to record school concerts for free, then made records to sell to parents, sharing profits as a win-win fundraiser (10:39).

3. From CNB Audio to Sweetwater Sound

• First Brick-and-Mortar:
  Chuck formalized his recording business in 1979 as CNB Audio (after himself and his first wife, Brenda) before settling on the name “Sweetwater,” inspired by a creek behind his property (12:45, 25:33).
• Studio Growth:
  He built his first studio in a garage, attracting local musicians. Despite skepticism about starting a studio in Fort Wayne, demand was strong (13:31, 14:16).

4. Inflection Point: The Kurzweil K250

• Discovery at NAMM:
  At a 1984 trade show, Chuck encountered the Kurzweil K250, an advanced digital sampler. He bought one, reverse engineered it, and made professional samples—becoming a go-to expert for K250 users nationwide (15:12–21:47).
• Business Pivot:
  He began selling custom floppy disks of sounds and became a parts dealer for Kurzweil, using a newsletter to serve a growing network of customers and professionals (22:06–24:21).

5. The Magic of Relationships and Service

• Remembering Customers:
  Chuck meticulously learned personal details about his clients, building loyalty by showing genuine care (24:45–25:07).

  "The whole music business, for my point of view, is all about relationships. It’s not a transaction, it’s really a relationship for life." —Chuck Surack (25:16)

• Relentless Value Addition:
  Sweetwater’s early catalogs omitted prices, encouraging phone calls for tailored recommendations (39:39–41:04).

6. Sweetwater University & Empowering Employees

• Training Program:
  Sales engineers undergo 13 weeks (over 80 classes) before taking customer calls, focusing on both product mastery and relationship-building (43:06–48:33).
• Customer Experience Philosophy:
  Employees are empowered to solve customer problems on the spot—no manager approvals needed—fostering trust and quick solutions (50:20–50:37).

  "You’ll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You’ll get chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough." —Chuck Surack (02:44, 50:25)

7. Resisting the Price War

• Not the Cheapest:
  Chuck refused to compete solely on price, winning customers with expertise, added value, and extraordinary support—even competing successfully with big-box and online retailers (37:49–38:41, 56:54–57:13).

8. Scaling Business: From House to Industry Giant

• Steady Growth and Catalog Expansion:
  • Early business ran “hand to mouth,” scaling square footage, staff, and inventory gradually (35:16–37:21).
  • Sweetwater’s extensive, educational catalogs (notably price-free for years) and mail/phone order model fueled rise as an industry leader (39:39–41:04).
• Online Business:
  Acquired the sweetwater.com domain in 1994; focused on education before enabling e-commerce to maintain personal touch (38:59–39:39).

9. Major Events & Turning Points

• Taking on Investors, Buying Back the Company:
  Sold 80% to William Blair Capital in the late 1990s, only to buy it back with the help of 18 friends and high-interest loans following the dot-com bubble—ultimately regaining 100% control (45:14–55:23).
• Crisis and Resilience:
  Survived industry downturns and even COVID-19 by pre-positioning inventory and being first allowed to reopen under mail-order rules—resulting in 40% growth in 2020 (66:33–68:17).
• Empowering the Local Economy:
  Founded/grew 25+ other businesses in Fort Wayne to stimulate jobs, ranging from restaurants and aviation to luxury cars (59:10–64:24).

10. Culture, Retention, and Compensation

• Pay & Empowerment:
  Sales engineers earn significant salaries, often $75k–$500k+, providing motivation to stay and excel (50:45).
• Company Values:
  Employees are reminded that every interaction adds or detracts from the brand’s credibility (02:44, 49:09).

11. New Product Lines and Innovation

• Entering Guitars:
  After customer requests, launched guitar sales with rigorous 55-point checks, high-quality photos, and personalized recommendations. Now sell over 1,000 guitars a day (59:10–60:34).

12. Competition: Surviving Giants

• Against Amazon and Big Box:
  Sweetwater leverages expertise and on-call support to compete with Amazon, which finds pro audio too specialized to undercut (65:00–65:42).

13. Leadership Transition

• Selling Majority Stake:
  In 2021, sold a majority to Providence Equity (with strict conditions to protect company culture, jobs, and values), while remaining involved as Chairman (71:44–74:55).
• Personal Adjustments:
  Navigated the emotional shift from CEO to Chairman, focusing now on philanthropy, community business ventures, and music (74:55–78:15).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Customer Service:

  "You’ll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You’ll get chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough." —Chuck Surack (02:44, 50:25)

• On Relationships:

  "The whole music business, for my point of view, is all about relationships. It’s not a transaction, it’s really a relationship for life." —Chuck Surack (25:16)

• On Doing What’s Right (Empowering Employees):

  "If someone would come to our store or phone into the receptionist and say, my keyboard quit working, they're empowered to replace it… Every employee ever I hired, I would tell them, you'll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You'll get chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough." —Chuck Surack (02:44)

• On Selling by Listening:

  "We weren't going to negotiate the price until the selling was done. I wanted the customer to understand we're the right place to buy it. I wanted the customer to understand it's the right product." —Chuck Surack (44:10)

• On Sweetwater’s Unique Edge:

  "I always have tried to keep track of spouses names and children's names and their interests… the music business… is all about relationships." —Chuck Surack (24:45–25:16)

• On Surviving COVID:

  "It was the hardest year in my 47 years of being in business. And I was stressed, and it immobilized me for six months." —Chuck Surack (68:29)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro & Philosophy on Customer Service – 02:44
• Early Days: Touring Musician & Road Stories – 05:49
• Building the First Mobile Recording Studio – 09:02
• The Recording Fundraiser Model – 10:39
• The Kurzweil K250 Epiphany – 15:12
• Becoming a Kurzweil Dealer & Business Scaling – 22:06, 24:21
• Transition from Engineer to Equipment Dealer – 27:12
• Sweetwater University & Staff Training – 43:06, 48:02
• Catalogs, Relationship Marketing – 39:39, 41:04
• Selling to Investors/Buying Back Company – 45:14, 52:19, 55:01
• Surviving Industry Downturns & COVID – 66:33–68:17
• Expansion into Guitars & Diversified Businesses – 59:10–64:24
• Selling to Providence Equity, Protecting Culture – 71:44–74:55
• Stepping Down, Legacy Reflections – 74:55–78:15

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Flow & Tone

Guy Raz guides a deeply personal yet pragmatic discussion, highlighting both the human and operational side of building a retail empire. Chuck Surack’s approachability, humility, and Midwestern values infuse the entire episode, making it an inspiring masterclass in focusing on people—customers and employees—over transactional thinking. The stories are candid, often light-hearted, peppered with wisdom on trust, resilience, and empowering others to do the right thing.

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For New Listeners

If you want to know how a tiny, quirky business with a homespun ethos can outlast and outshine even the biggest competition, this episode is a blueprint. Chuck Surack’s story is about never forgetting the human element—whether selling a synthesizer, supporting a struggling town, or making sure a kid gets her school concert on vinyl. The Sweetwater way? Relationships over transactions, expertise over flash, and service above all.

Transcript

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[Chuck Surak]

I've always believed everyone in our company, whether it's a sales engineer or the receptionist, is either adding credibility or taking credibility away from our company. And I got to have people Always adding credibility. We empower everyone in our company to make the right decision to do the right stuff. If someone would come to our store or phone into the receptionist and say, my keyboard quit working, they're empowered to replace it, Every employee ever I hired, I would tell them, you'll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You'll get chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough.

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Chuck Surak went from mixing music in the back of his mom's VW van to building the billion dollar music and audio equipment giant, Sweetwater. There are a lot of ways to build a retail business. You can compete on price, you can compete on selection, you can promise faster shipping, bigger discounts, or endless conven. But Chuck Surak took a completely different approach. He believed that before anyone bought a guitar or a microphone or a keyboard or a recording interface, they should have a conversation. Not with a chatbot, not with a commission salesperson trying to close a deal, but with someone who actually understood instruments and recording gear, someone who played in bands or spent time in recording studios, who understood signal chains and synthesizers and could help a customer figure out not just what they wanted wanted, but what they actually needed. That philosophy became the foundation of Sweetwater. It's a company that's managed to become the largest online retailer of musical instruments and professional audio equipment in the United States, despite competition from retail giants like Amazon and Walmart. Every customer who calls Sweetwater is assigned a dedicated sales engineer. Every one of those salespeople goes through months of intensive training even before they ever answer the phone. And remarkably, Chuck never tried to win by being the cheapest. He truly believed that extraordinary service, not offering discounts, would be the key to building lasting relationships. And over time, it was. And the amazing thing about all this is that Chuck never set out to build a retail empire. He just wanted to play music. Specifically, the saxophone. He grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he still lives and where Sweetwater is still headquartered. After he graduated high school in the mid-1970s, Chuck turned down college, climbed into his mom's old VW van, and spent the next several years playing saxophone with a cover band in bars and clubs across America.

[Chuck Surak]

We traveled almost every state in the continental U.S. i think I missed a couple out on the west coast, but back then you had a booking agent and they would book you for a week or two weeks. In a particular club. And then they'd give you a clue where you're going next week. Or sometimes they wouldn't know and they'd just tell you on Saturday night, get in your bus on Sunday morning and start driving north or start driving south. And you'd call. This is before cell phones. You'd stop at a payphone every so often and go, where am I going? And eventually they would tell you. I remember one time I left Charlotte, North Carolina, and he told me to drive north. And next thing you know, I'm in Sudbury, Canada, and just barely in time for a gig that started on Monday night at 7:00'. Clock.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. And did you make. I mean, presumably you're making enough money to, like, stay on the road, but I can't imagine this was a lucrative lifestyle.

[Chuck Surak]

No. Most of the places you played, you got free room and board. Quite often you'd stay in the hotel or maybe they had an apartment they rented. You got free food and, you know, I laughed. I said, I made about 50 bucks a week. I probably made a little bit more than that. But it barely paid for gas and getting to the next location. And that's why I ultimately quit, because I just. I was a decent musician, but I wasn't gonna be good enough to be a truly professional musician.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. All right. So you're touring around, and from what I understand, I mean, you become like the de facto roadie, right? Like setting up instruments and speakers and making the audio system sound good and I guess even inventing or like hacking audio gear for gigs. So, I mean, you were kind of like the sound engineer.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, absolutely. And so a couple things I would tell you. Back then, equipment was very expensive, hard to get, much different than today.

[Guy Raz]

Heavy, really heavy.

[Chuck Surak]

Heavy. Big heav, heavy speakers, all that sort of stuff. But I would run the. The sound system with my right hand as I played my saxophone with my left hand. And so we didn't usually have a sound man out front. I would just run it from the side.

[Guy Raz]

You'd have a mixer.

[Chuck Surak]

A mixer, right.

[Guy Raz]

And you would run it and you'd play the sax with your left hand.

[Chuck Surak]

Exactly. And then the other thing that was interesting, when we were on the road back then, there weren't a lot of standalone recording studios. Most of the recording happened in radio stations. And so we would quite often on Monday morning go to the local radio station and record. You know, this week we're playing at the Holiday Inn or wherever we were playing. And so I got really used to using recording equipment and through the years on the road, I would gather more and more of that equipment myself.

[Guy Raz]

So it's interesting, you guys would have to record little spots on local stations to promote your live shows at these bars or clubs. And as a result of that, you start to get experience with these recording booths because you would, they would just say, oh, go use that booth over there and you know, record your spot and bring us the eight track cassette of it or whatever it was.

[Chuck Surak]

Exactly. And also a lot of those radio stations had multi track recording studios with either 8 or 16 track recorders, so you could record every instrument on its own channel and then mix it and make it sound good.

[Guy Raz]

So you kind of, even though you, you love the sax, it sounds like you're really kind of developing this passion for the technical side of, you know, of setting up a stage and running the chords and. But when you come back home to Fort Wayne, you realize that maybe you could make a business out of this, like have a recording studio, you know,

[Chuck Surak]

I came back to Fort Wayne, I was really tired of living out of the suitcase and making the quote unquote, $50 a week. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I really didn't. But I knew I wasn't going to go to college. I also knew that I had a lot of this equipment, and so it was a simple way to make money and just start helping my friends. And so that's really what drove me at first.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you're back in, you've got your VW bus. And I guess you come up with this idea of converting the VW bus into a recording studio or like the, the engineering booth of a recording studio. Tell me how you, how you came up with this idea. Was it because there weren't any recording studios in Fort Wayne or, or you knew musicians who wanted to record their music? Like maybe all of that, you know,

[Chuck Surak]

I don't really remember. It just sort of naturally happened. I mean, I do remember it wasn't very long after I had the VW bus doing recordings, I started going to all the high schools and middle schools and saying, let me record your Christmas concert or your spring concert. And then I just got so, so darn busy recording everybody.

[Guy Raz]

And just to like paint a picture of this, it wasn't like they were recording in the VW bus. You had like the mixers and the sort of reel to reel in there, but you would run the cables from the bus into the auditorium where they were recording.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, that's exactly right. I would record their live performance But I would sit in the bus with my headphones on and monitor it and make sure all the levels are coming in correctly and mix it together and all that.

[Guy Raz]

Like an FBI listening booth.

[Chuck Surak]

I never thought of it that way, but kind of.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, like in the movies you see in the 70s. Yeah. They're sitting in there with a reel to reel. Okay, so you're, you're recording. By the way, what would they do with those reel to reel recordings? Like, why would they.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So I would take those reel to real recordings and then go back to the living room of my 12 by 55 mobile home. And then I would edit all the songs in order, take the extra pauses out and. And then we would turn them into LPs or records and then they would sell those records. So it was a fundraiser for the school.

[Guy Raz]

Ah.

[Chuck Surak]

And it was also an interesting way for me to tell the band director or the choir director, look, it won't cost you a thing. Just let me record them and then I'll make my money by selling those records. Or we'll split the profits of selling those records to your parents.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, wow. So you would. That's a great idea. So you would just do the recording for free. So you got church choirs and, and the schools. And these were your clients. Like who else were you recording?

[Chuck Surak]

Everyone we've talked about, but it would be choirs and bands. And I would record them in their auditoriums or their cafeteria. I did many, many presidents of companies, CEOs of companies. I'd go into their boardroom or maybe the speech they were making. I remember one year I did a. I recorded a speech of the CEO of General Motors. He was down in Defiance, Ohio. And all the way through his speech he kept referencing the current year and he meant to reference the next year. So he gets all done with this speech and I figured out how to use a razor blade and tape and change all those references that he made. And I was a hero for them. And for many, many years I got lots of their recording business because I made him great. Wow. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

And by the way, this equipment at the time was not cheap. I mean, a reel to reel was. It was a four track recorder or

[Chuck Surak]

I started on a four track and then I did most of my recording in the VW bus with an eight track recorder.

[Guy Raz]

And how did you finance all this equipment?

[Chuck Surak]

Well, anywhere I could make a few dollars, I would make a few dollars and put them away. And even when I was on the road, I was able to sock a Few bucks away. And then with the recording, you know, in those days I was making $22 an hour if I charge for recording, which wasn't very much, but it was enough that every dollar I made would go right back into the equipment.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so I guess that year 79 was the year you officially kind of founded this business. You called it CNB Audio, which would be. Which becomes Sweetwater Sound. But cnb, what does CNB stand for?

[Chuck Surak]

It was Chuck and my first wife, Brenda.

[Guy Raz]

Okay. And like, I mean, you talk about recording CEOs and church choirs. Or were you kind of looking to get into like bands and recording musicians who wanted to make records?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, no, I wanted to do musicians making records, but in the early days, I paid the bills by doing all the recording we've talked about. But my goal ultimately was to do music for musicians that wanted to record real albums. Yeah, but I needed a location to do that. And for the first couple of years I didn't have a location. All I had was that mobile home.

[Guy Raz]

So it was wherever they were recording. But you really wanted to have a space, build it out and people could come there, rent it, record it, you could engineer it. That's what you were looking to do.

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely. And that started in 1981.

[Guy Raz]

And how did you do that? Where did you find the space?

[Chuck Surak]

Well, I found a small house on the west side of Fort Wayne and I built basically a two car garage. But that garage really was a recording studio. It looked like a garage from outside. But what was interesting about it, where I built this or built this studio, the house was already there, but it wasn't zoned legally, it was zoned for residential. I had to be careful and I didn't want to raise the ire of the local zoning officials.

[Guy Raz]

So let's talk about Fort Wayne at the time, in 1981, 82, when you've got the studio. Because, you know, it's. We're not talking about Sun Studios in Memphis in the 50s. Right. I mean, Elvis and Johnny Cash hanging out there. You know, Fort Wayne wasn't like where tons and tons of bands were recording. Right. I mean, I can't imagine it was. Or am I wrong?

[Chuck Surak]

You know, every city across this country has musicians and bands that want to record. But you're absolutely correct, it wasn't a recording mecca. In fact, all of my friends, all my professional friends would go a recording studio in Fort Wayne. They just didn't understand it.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Chuck Surak]

Why don't you go to Nashville? Why don't you go to la, Go to New York, right. But I knew that it was possible to be successful there. I didn't know what level I was going to do, but I knew I could be successful. And we had lots and lots of bands coming in. In fact, I was so busy, we would run from early in the morning till late at night. It was a very good thing.

[Guy Raz]

So you've got this business going, you're running the studio, and I guess there's a real turning point. And it happens in 1984. And I want you to tell me about this because from what I understand, you were invited to a trade show in Chicago, a trade show of musical instruments. And while you were there, you discovered something that would essentially, I think it's not an understatement to say would actually change your life.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, it did change my life. I had a friend that owned a local piano and organ store here in Fort Wayne, and he invited me to the NAM show and he said, well, that means the national association of Music Merchants and they have their dealer show once a year up in Chicago. I said, yeah, I'll go with you again. He was just a friend and I had bought some synthesizers through his store. So we become friends through that. And I went there and I saw a prototype of a music instrument that just set me on fire and frankly set the world on fire for a while. And it was called a Kurzweil K250. Ray Kurzweil, who's a futurist, he's still alive today, still doing some really interesting stuff. But he had figured out how to record a nine foot grand piano and digitize it and put it in memory chips or ROM chips. And you know, back in 1983 and 84, this was unheard of. But not only did it have a recording of a nine foot Steinway piano, it had an upright bass, it had a 50 voice choir, it had a 45 piece string section. But it was an expensive instrument. And so I saw a prototype and I'm going, that is amazing. In my own studio I have a small six foot grand piano that's always in a state of being out of tune. Because that's what pianos do, they're always getting worse. And I thought if I could buy this Kurzweil K250, I would have a nine foot grand piano, always in tune, plus 39 other sounds that came with it initially. And so I bought one early on and then I started reverse engineering how it worked. And I designed my own sounds for it, designed my own software for it, and just took the Instrument to a whole other level.

[Guy Raz]

This was a very expensive machine at the time. $20,000, which is roughly 63, $65,000 today. So this is not no joke of an investment for a 28 year old guy to buy.

[Chuck Surak]

Yes, I had a small Yamaha grand piano and I decided I could sell that piano and put some more money with it and I could squeak my way barely into a Kurzweil K250. And that's what I did.

[Guy Raz]

But once you had this thing, it would generate a lot of income for you because you, first of all, you were probably the only one in Fort Wayne who had this thing. I would imagine I was the only

[Chuck Surak]

one in the Midwest at the time that had one. And so at the end of every one of my recording sessions, I would tell my customers, would you like to hear your music with a 50 voice choir or a 45 piece string section or upright bass? And so I would get a couple more hours of recording time and they would get a better sounding project. I also would throw it in the back of my VW bus and take it down to other recording studios. So one of the real famous studios is down in Anderson, Indiana where the Gaithers used to record. And I would take it down there and do sessions and they would pay me for the day for having it there. I'd take it up to Detroit, other studios like that. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

So you would play it in the studio?

[Chuck Surak]

Either I would play it or maybe they'd have another keyboard player that would play it.

[Guy Raz]

And so you were not just engineering in the studio. It sounds like you, you were doing more production work too.

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely. I love producing music.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, it's really cool because it's, it's like people are. Well, they're paying you more for more studio time, so that's one thing. But. But then I guess you start to. It had the ability to enable the user to make their own new sounds with it, like their own proprietary sounds.

[Chuck Surak]

We could do that also. We did a lot of that. We would record the strangest instruments, or not even instruments, the strangest sounds and turn it into an instrument. It could be a door squeak, it could be rocks sitting together. And next thing you know, you put it across the keyboard and it can sound like a music instrument.

[Guy Raz]

So you could record into the. Like there was a memory chip inside of the synthesizer you could record onto?

[Chuck Surak]

Yes, that's correct.

[Guy Raz]

Which is wild. I mean, today of course, you know, you just record your iPhone. But in 1984 that was really different. I mean, you're Essentially, going for. Most people were still using reel to reel to record music at that time. And these would be sounds like. Yeah, give me an example of, like, a sound you would create. Like, what would you. How would you do it?

[Chuck Surak]

Well, being a musician myself, quite often I would just record myself or other musician friends into the instrument. So as an example, I did lots and lots of recordings of my saxophone.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Chuck Surak]

So a guitar player or keyboard player that didn't play saxophone could now get the sound of a saxophone in his music. And, you know, we record all kinds of things. I did a bagpipes. There weren't bagpipes built into the machine, so I recorded a bagpipe player. I remember one time I brought in a trombone player, a trumpet player, and I played saxophone, and we made a brass section sound. There was not a section of brass in there. And that sound ended up being used by Stevie Wonder on his character's album.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I mean, how did. So that. That sort of segues into my question, which is, you're a guy in Fort Wayne and you're. You start to make your own sounds, right?

[Chuck Surak]

Yep.

[Guy Raz]

But how did you. You know, this is pre Internet. This is like, still early fax machine days. Like, how did anybody find out that, hey, there's this guy in Fort Wayne, Chuck Surlak, he's making samples on the Kurzweil, and they're pretty great. Like, here you go, Steve. You wonder, like, how would help me understand how anybody even knew what you were doing?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, great question. There were two ways. The first way is there were a couple manufacturer reps worked for Kurzweil, and they would travel around the country to other music stores, and happened to be one from southern Indiana who called on all the stores in the Midwest. And he would see me as a customer, as an end user, and he'd come by and trade sounds with me, and he'd take them to the other music store. So that's one way. But the real way I really made it happen is there was a magazine back in those days called Mix Magazine. Mix Magazine covered recording studios around the country. And they would list their equipment. You know, they have an MCI tape recorder, they have an Atari console, and they have a Kurzweil K250. And anytime I would see that they had a K250, I would immediately either call them or write them and go, wow, you have a K250? I have one, too. And I was hoping to trade sounds with them. Generally, I found out most of the players were just players. They weren't technical. They weren't into the musical side or the making sounds for it. And they'd go, well, I don't have any sounds, but I sure would like yours. And it was kind of funny in the early days, they were on a floppy disk that was a three and a half inch kind of a semi rigid disc that the Macintosh has used. And I'm running recording sessions, but I'm copying discs on the side. I'm kind of multitasking and I'm frustrated that people want my discs, but I'm really busy trying to do a recording session. And it took me a while to figure out that there was a great way to do both.

[Guy Raz]

You were recording samples onto floppy disks and selling those to people. Basically, it sounds, I mean, it sounds like was it all that. I mean, again, I don't want to minimize what you did, but it doesn't actually sound all that complex. What you were doing it just like you were just the only one doing it.

[Chuck Surak]

You know, anybody could do it pretty easily, pretty quickly, but to do it to professional levels where all the notes sounded correct and it didn't sound munchkinized and yeah, it was a real skill. It was a real art. And I developed a lot of software tools to make my music or my sample sound even better.

[Guy Raz]

All right, and were you, I mean, selling the, the floppy for? How much were you selling for?

[Chuck Surak]

Well, initially I gave them away and I was getting so annoyed that it was getting in the way of winning my recording sessions. So then I started selling them for $5 a piece of which is really funny. I sent out a dot matrix newsletter. And on that newsletter I had a list of all the sounds that I had. And people would send me back the form with everything checked off. And, you know, I got 2, 3, $400 for all the discs.

[Guy Raz]

So I guess you become at a certain point around this time a dealer for this machine for the Kurzweil K250. And why was that a good use of your time? I mean, I mean, what made you think I should just start selling these machines for Kurzweil?

[Chuck Surak]

Actually, I wasn't that smart, but I mentioned the Kurzweil rep kept coming by and getting my sounds. And he would take them to the other dealers up in Chicago and Detroit and Minneapolis. And I kept telling him about my relationship with all my friends. By then I had about 300 friends around the country that had their own Kurzweils. And he kept saying, why don't you become a dealer? Why don't you become A dealer. And I said, oh, no, I'm too busy running my recording studio. And eventually he talked me into it. He said, I'll set you up to be a parts dealer. That was in the fall. And by Christmas time, I had sent out a newsletter again to all my friends and going, hey, I've just become a Kurzweil dealer. And if you want sound block A or B or C or D, and each one of them had a bunch of different new sounds in it, I am a dealer for all that, so send me your check and I'll get the parts to you and I'll help you get it installed. So through the month of December, I started getting check after check, because the kind of people that had these machines usually were pretty successful, or they were universities and they didn't have a great relationship with their local store. And so I was a little bit the lifesaver for people that had Kurzweil K250s. And I'll never forget, it was a couple days before Christmas, my rep friend called me and said, hey, Chuck, I really need all those orders. It's gotta be done by the end of the year. You know. How are you doing? I said, I don't know. I'm really busy. I'm recording Christmas albums. I've got a pile of checks here. I haven't really figured it all out, but I said, I don't know, it's a couple hundred thousand dollars worth. He said, are you serious? I said, yes. He says, well, you gotta get paid. I said, no, I have checks from everybody already. So he got in his car and drove up to Fort Wayne, and we counted all the checks and ordered all the parts, and I did several hundred thousand dollars of Kurzweil parts. Wow.

[Guy Raz]

And this is 1985-86, I think.

[Chuck Surak]

Exactly.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. You know, I read something that I just. I thought was so interesting because I guess back when you become a dealer, you also become the customer service guy, because assuming they would call you up and ask for support or help, but you really started to focus on learning as much as you could about the people you would sell stuff to. Tell me about what you would do.

[Chuck Surak]

Well, you're absolutely right. And, you know, I always have tried to keep track of spouses names and children's names and their interests, but. But having a relationship with them. Over time, you figure all that stuff out.

[Guy Raz]

And you would. By knowing, you know, a spouse's name or a kid's name, they might call you six months later and you can say, how is. How's Bill Jr doing. And they'd probably be blown away that you remembered that.

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's. The whole music business, for my point of view, is all about relationships. It's not a transaction. It's really a relationship for life.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Surak]

And that became the genesis of Sweetwater Sound.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so. And I should mention, by this point, you know, you were called Sweetwater Sound, and that I've heard different kind of. You describe different variations on the origins of the name. What is this name? Where does it come from?

[Chuck Surak]

So when I was out in the country, a lot of farmers had little wooden signs by their property. They'd sell Bill's acreage or Steve's farm or whatever it was. And when I moved into Fort Wayne, I knew I didn't want to be CMB Audio anymore. So this is about the second or third year of our business. And I had two acres of land, and I had a little creek in the backyard. And I literally just put a bunch of names on a piece of paper, and I'm thinking about this little creek in our backyard. I go, water, that's kind of sweet. And it became Sweet Water. And so I put a little sign, it was about 2 foot wide, foot high, that said Sweetwater. Didn't say what it was or anything, but that helped me get past the zoning officials. And yet my musician customers could find me.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. Okay, so you are now growing as a dealer for Kurzweil. But meantime, are you still doing the recording thing? Because this. You got a lot going on. You're making your sampling, you're putting on discs, and you're recording people, and you're selling equipment for the Kurzweil machines, the synthesizers. So I imagine that the recording studio part of your business has to kind of shrink a little.

[Chuck Surak]

You know, by then, I brought on my first employee, and so we could keep doing the studio thing, and he would do some of the sessions, I would do some of the sessions, and it just grew from there. But, no, I don't. I don't believe in shrinking. You're always going forward or backwards.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so around 85, 86, you become eventually the exclusive dealer in your area for Kurzweil. And so at what point did you sort of begin to become a person who wasn't a recording engineer, but a person selling studio equipment, musical instruments? Like, how long did that take, that transition?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, so I told you that I became a parts dealer in December and started sending all those parts out to my friends in January and February. About March of that Year I got a call from a friend and he said, hey, Chuck, I want to buy another Kurzweil K250. I said, Whoa, you already have one. I just loaded yours completely up. You know, you probably have $30,000 in your machine. Why do you want another one? And he says to me, he says, chuck, Kurzweil only plays 12 notes at one time. And I hold my fingers up and I go, Well, I got 10 fingers. What do you mean 12 notes? He says, no, no, no, no. He says, I do orchestrations with full orchestras and I have to hire an orchestra for a day or two. It's thousands of dollars. He said, if I had another curse wall, I could do 24 notes at one time. And so I called the rep and he says, oh, no, Chuck, I told you that to open a Kurzweil as a retailer, new dealer, you have to buy 10. And I'm 10. Yep, yep, you got to buy 10. And so eventually, over the next couple months, I sold those 10. And over time I sold a lot more. You know, back to your question. By 1990. I do remember one time with the Tascam recording equipment, probably the most popular brand of recording equipment. The national sales manager came to see me with his rep and they wanted to sign me up for the really basic, basic equipment. And I said, no, I want to be involved with selling eight tracks and 16 tracks because I've had higher end customers. I've got people that have been buying these 20 to $30,000 synthesizers. And we went round and round. And the sales manager said, well, I've never opened up anybody for those higher franchises until you've been established for a while and all that. And I said, well, that's really what I need to do, or I don't want to do it because I want to sell the better stuff to my better customers and so much to their, I don't know, disappointment or chagrins. They went ahead and signed me up, I ordered all the stuff and then I wrote a newsletter to my 350 customers at the time and said, I'm getting all this recording equipment. If you need a four track or eight track recorder or a mixing console, whatever I have. It took about two weeks. And I've got orders for everything that I have coming in already. Pre sold.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Chuck Surak]

And I'll never forget this. I called the rep and he was about an hour south of us here in Fort Wayne, and I said, brian, guess what? I've sold all the stuff. I need to place another order. And he says to me now it was like 7 o' clock at night and he says, I'll have to turn the light on. I said, yeah, I guess. You know, it's funny today because any manufacturer's rep today would be thrilled to have any business that would beg for it. But he was kind of upset that I was making him turn his light on at 7 o' clock at night to order the biggest order that he'd ever sold.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment, how Chuck's decision to sell recording equipment and to intensely train his sales staff turns into millions of dollars in sales fast. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built this. We get support from US Bank A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions, gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings. And you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa business card. Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cell phone service and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. bank National Association. Pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. I've noticed that a lot of people we talk to on this show founders, entrepreneurs, creatives, they spend a surprising amount of time thinking about systems. Not because they love complexity, but because they're trying to reduce it. The best Systems usually make life feel simpler, calmer, more manageable. Financial well being works the same way because most people don't want to spend all day thinking about money. They just want to understand where things are going, feel in control, and remove some of the stress and guesswork from everyday life. That's part of what Apple Card is designed to do. You can apply for Apple Card right in the Wallet app on your iPhone in minutes. Once you're approved, you can use Apple Card right away with Apple Pay without any friction. And here's the fun part. You spend and then you earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, every day, not a month later. That's it. It really is that straightforward. And you earn 3% daily cash back on anything you buy from the Apple Store and at select merchants when using Apple Card with Apple Pay. One more thing people really seem to like is being able to track spending right from their iPhone. You can see purchases, search transactions easily, and get a clearer picture of where your money's going over time. It just makes things feel a little more transparent and manageable. Easily pin down spending with Apple Card. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today, subject to credit approval. Some transactions may not be displayed in maps. Merchant offers may change at any time. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and [e-mail] we're supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude When I'm prepping for an interview, there's always that moment where I'm trying to turn a pile of research into an actual conversation. A founder's timeline, early decisions, big inflection points, old interviews, company background. All of it matters. But the real work is figuring out what connects. And that's where Claude has been super helpful. It helps me work through the material, organize what I already know, and find the thread. The thing that turns research into better questions, Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter, from research to strategy to the tasks that slow everything down. Claude helps you stay with the work and keep moving for problems worth solving. Get started with Claude at Claude AI Hibt. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy raz so it's 1990, just four years after Chuck bought that first Kurzweil and Sweetwater's made about $6 million in sales. But Chuck's product list is getting bigger. He's operating out of a tight garage and he's barely keeping up with demand.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, by 1990 we were selling quite a few different brands, probably 20 brands of equipment or so, and just helping people with their recording. Whether it was synthesizers or recording equipment. We really weren't into the rest of the technology yet. We didn't sell guitars, we didn't sell drums. It was just stuff I understood and I knew. Synthesizers and recording equipment.

[Guy Raz]

And how were you financing inventory at that time, Chuck?

[Chuck Surak]

Hand to mouth. And sales from last month and the year and the month before.

[Guy Raz]

And then in terms of what you were actually carrying, your inventory, it would just grow organically because people would ask you if you had it or would you go to trade shows. Did you start going to trade shows and say, I want to sell that, I want to sell that, I want to sell that?

[Chuck Surak]

All the above? Definitely. They would ask and if I heard it enough times, I would go, okay, that might be worth looking at. But I also was very careful back in those days. What we wanted to carry, I only want. I was a little bit arrogant about it. I only wanted to carry the really good stuff. And so there were brands of equipment that I just didn't want to sell to my customers. If I didn't believe in it, if I didn't want to use it myself, I wouldn't sell it. So we tend to specialize on the higher end equipment for a long time.

[Guy Raz]

Tell me what a typical. I mean, were you working seven days a week? Was it? I mean, you've got customers ordering, you've got a pretty robust business, you've got to get the, the shipments out. Obviously it's not like today, which the next day, everyone expects next day, but still, what do you remember about your lifestyle at that time? Because I think you mentioned your first wife and maybe your marriage had split up by that point.

[Chuck Surak]

No, she was around for about 20 years. But you know, I would say that was probably a sacrifice by being so engaged in the business and she had other interests, you know, that we separated. Thankfully there were no children involved at the time. But no, it was definitely a seven day a week. And it was early in the morning to very late at night. I loved what I did though. I mean, I never considered it work. And whether I was selling to a customer or programming our next database updates, I did that for a long time. All the systems that figured out the UPS shipping in those days and salesman's commission, I wrote all the code for that because I like, I like technology.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I mean it's reading about the story, it's like your growth is incremental. You go from like tiny 200 square foot mobile home to you know, a little bigger place than 5,000 square feet. And then by 1991 you got 10,000 square foot place. So this is a robust business. I mean you're just. Was there not a lot of competition? Were there not a lot of businesses doing this kind of work or what explained, you know, really just the growth of this thing at that time?

[Chuck Surak]

Well, you know, There were about 5,000 other music stores across the country. So there was lots of competition. Every town has two, three, four music stores. I don't mean this at all arrogantly, but what we really worked hard on is having relationships with our customers. What I heard all the time was, I can't believe you can service me better out of Fort Wayne, Indiana than I can get out of my local store in LA or New York or wherever it may be. And I never really competed on price. I always wanted to be a fair value, but I didn't try and undercut the local dealer. We just wanted to know the products better, we wanted to make better recommendations. We had this incredible service. You know, we'll fix anything we sell. By that time, the Internet is starting to happen. So we had all kinds of online educational tools. Our goal was to always add more value. And so if we sold a keyboard, we would include an extra bank of sounds. If we sold speakers, we would show you diagrams on how to set it up and that sort of thing.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I mean now, you know, there's obviously like content marketing and all this stuff. You were essentially doing that before we called it that in. You mentioned the Internet. 1994, you got the domain for sweetwater.com but the website was not an E commerce website. It was a. An education website. Right.

[Chuck Surak]

That's all it was. For several years it was strictly education. There was no way to even place an order online. The technology was there. We just didn't implement it because I really wanted to talk to the customer first. I want to make sure it's the right product for the customer.

[Guy Raz]

And what's amazing to me is virtually all of your business was just, it was a mailing list you had and you had this very nice but simple kind of, I guess two, three page, not catalog, but document that you would send to people and you would have your sales reps calling people. But you didn't actually become a catalog, physical catalog business until like I read 1997, that's correct.

[Chuck Surak]

You know, we started, as you said, with the top matrix couple, three pages, and then eventually went to a real catalog which was, I don't know, 6 to 700 pages most of the time. And by then we'd gotten pretty professional. It was in full four color. A lot of times, though, it didn't even have prices. Again, we wanted the customer to call us. There was no order form. You know, as an example, when we started selling keyboards, you know, it's not just buying a keyboard. You probably need a stand for it. You might need a sustain pedal for it. You might need cables to hook it into other things. All that stuff does take some expertise to explain it to the customer.

[Guy Raz]

What you're saying is, oh, I want people to call in because then we can help them figure out what equipment they need to buy with other equipment and how to connect them.

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely.

[Guy Raz]

That's a lot of time right. On the phone with somebody. So I imagine by the time you launch the catalog in 1997, you've got a significant number of people manning the phones.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, we probably had 20 people or so around that time. But our whole deal was that one on one relationship. And so we know the first call or two with the customer would be a very long call. Our average Talk time was 20 to 30 minutes because we would start to develop a relationship, understand how they're going to use it, what they're going to use it with. And that caused the customers to be very loyal and very sticky. You think about the other places they would call and the other store would just quote a price, and we would spend time engaging with the customer, and at the end of the day, the customer would go, you know, I just felt more comfortable at Sweetwater.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I mean, it's really cool because it's like every time I go into a restaurant or a shop and I walk out and I'm treated really well, and it was a great experience. I know that business was managed well because the employee there, it's not their business. But if they treat it that way, you know that their boss is a good boss, that they're doing a really good job teaching that person how to do it. But oftentimes you walk out of a place and it just sucks. And you. And I think to myself, it's not that employee's fault. This place is not managed well. How did you get these 20 people to learn how to forge those relationships with customers over the phone?

[Chuck Surak]

We spent a lot of time training. But you're absolutely right. Customer service Is just so critical, more critical today than it's ever been in those days. I knew how important it was and it was just the right thing to do. But we started very humbly. You know, at first we met at a little breakfast place.

[Guy Raz]

You would meet them yourself?

[Chuck Surak]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I would meet with the whole team every Tuesday morning and every Thursday morning. And we'd spend an hour, hour and a half, sometimes two hours. And we would talk through things, we'd role play, we'd practice conversations, what we called the perfect conversation. And how do you handle situations like this? And we did that for week after week after week. And it was just really important. I wouldn't let anybody get on the phone talking to a customer until I felt they could do a reasonably good job at it.

[Guy Raz]

Would the sales rep have their own customers or could you just call in and get anybody on the phone?

[Chuck Surak]

You know, I had so many customers from my early days that I couldn't handle them anymore. And I was also starting to run the rest of the business and so I started handing my customers off. And then they got more referrals and they all came to, all the sales engineers came to us with a background of being somewhere so they had their own friends and their own relationships.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. And you, you, you said a word. I'm going to just double click on that. Sales engineers, these are, this is a term you guys use. They're not trained engineers, but you call them sales engineers because what they also have the technical know how on how to help people solve their problems.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah. Unlike myself, most of them come to us with a four year music technology degree. And then we put them through what we call Sweetwater University. And Sweetwater University is 13 weeks of 8 hours a day where they're learning all kinds of stuff. You know, they're learning products specifically, they're learning technologies. But they're taught by 80 different teachers over those 13 weeks. And they're not allowed to talk to a customer until they're through that whole

[Guy Raz]

process that wouldn't be formalized, I think for another several more years.

[Chuck Surak]

Right, A couple more years. But even in our early days, I said we started at the restaurant. Restaurant and then we at our location, we had a place called the Blue Diamond Lounge. And we had training in there several days a week. And I'm not sure exactly when we started, you know, really formalizing it, but it was pretty formal early on.

[Guy Raz]

And did you like. One of the things I find fascinating about especially good sales reps is they often have a script right and so there's like, they will know what the five or six things the customer might say. And there's all kinds of ready responses. Were you guys able to develop those kinds of techniques as well?

[Chuck Surak]

You know, we didn't really do that so specifically because every conversation was different. But what we did do is what we called the perfect conversation. And that really meant that we weren't going to negotiate the price until the selling was done. I wanted the customer to understand we're the right place to buy it. I wanted the customer to understand it's the right product. And once we get through all of that, then eventually we'll talk about a selling thing. But for me to quote a price, which is what all my competitors did, you'd call around and go, I want a Yamaha this or a Gibson that. They would just quote a price. And to me, that's silly because I don't know how the customer's going to use it or what else they want to use it with. And so I was not going to quote a price until the selling was done. We're the right place, and it's the right items for them.

[Guy Raz]

Okay. By the late 1990s, you guys, you hit about 12 million in sales. It's amazing, right? You've got a very good business. And you get approached, I guess, by your attorney and an accountant, and they're saying, hey, you guys got a big business here in Fort Wayne, you might want to take some money off the table. Tell me the story.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And every dollar that we made went right back into the company and growing it and more inventory and the next salespeople we'd hire and all that. So I really didn't have any money, and I was compelled by the thought of having some money. I'm thinking, well, maybe we've reached our limit. Maybe $12 million is the limit for Wayne, Indiana.

[Guy Raz]

How big can you get?

[Chuck Surak]

That's right. So we entertained, and they were good people out of Chicago, the William Blair Capital Company, they're still around today.

[Guy Raz]

And so how much of the business? About 80% of it in the late 90s. So you get a check, which I'm sure is nice, and you could feel like, okay, I've got some security here. But you stayed on running it. They didn't intervene, they didn't get involved. You just.

[Chuck Surak]

Not at all. Okay, yeah, once in a while they'd have some comment, but basically they let me run it. I mean, it was a good business when they bought it, and they let me just Keep running it like it

[Guy Raz]

was okay by 2000ish. Right. So you've got your own 20% of it. You're now able to buy stuff online. Right. But I imagine most people are not ordering through the Internet yet. They're not clicking. They're still calling you or faxing you orders.

[Chuck Surak]

That's absolutely correct. It took several years later, really, the success of Amazon is what got people comfortable buying online.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, yeah, because I remember the first. I'm sorry I didn't buy it through Sweetwater, but in like 1996, I bought my first portable recording machine, which is a Marantz PMD 222. It's the most expensive thing I had ever purchased in my life. I was like this 800 or something. It was so expensive, I was so nervous buying it. I think I bought it from B and H in New York through their catalog at the time. But, yeah, I would not have even in 1999, I was not ready to buy things online yet. Right, but you could. You made that. That was available.

[Chuck Surak]

Yep. And the advantage we had in those early days is we had great relationships with our customers. So they trusted us. And trust is a big thing in our industry. I don't mean this to sound as negative, but a lot of music stores, it's of kind. Kind of hard to trust them. And we'd already proven that we had a good, solid, basic grounding of ethics. And so customers were comfortable buying things early from us or buying things online early from us.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, let's. Let's go back to the Sweetwater University, because I think this is. Really begins around 2001, and it's a training program where you have these people who are just gearheads. Right. They love this stuff.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah. Most of the people that we hired had music technology degrees or maybe they'd been on the road as a musician for a long time. But what we really looked for were people that had fire in their belly. Someone really interested in a company that was growing fast and would do the right thing for the customers.

[Guy Raz]

I'm curious, why did they need 13 weeks of training?

[Chuck Surak]

There's a lot of subject material, and like I say, we taught it with 80 different teachers, a couple hundred classes. We taught every technology, but then also a lot of specific brands and products and that sort of thing.

[Guy Raz]

So you would teach them how to work and operate virtually everything you sold?

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely. If you can't operate it, don't know how it works. I don't know how you could sell it.

[Guy Raz]

So they're like tech support too. In some ways, they are so, like, this is a valuable person. Like, you're investing a lot of money and time in this person.

[Chuck Surak]

Well, 13 weeks before they ever make a dollar for our company, and then we continue to invest in them. I mean, Sweetwater University was just getting you off the ground. You would still, as a sales engineer, meet two times a week, every Tuesday morning and every Thursday morning, for continual training as new products come out, new technologies, that sort of thing.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, there's a. There's a sort of a, you know, kind of a stereotype of a good sales rep. Right. Who's somebody's just aggressive and just relentless and just closing the sale. Closing, closing, closing. But you're bringing in people who were actually not coming from sales. These were people who were like music gear nerds.

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely. And we never wanted them to close, close hard as you've described. We wanted them to present the right options to the customer and jointly with the customer, figure out if that's the right thing for them. I've always preached that I never wanted to sell customer more than they really needed. There were many times a customer would call in for a very expensive thing and I would find out that that was too much for them and they really should buy a less expensive thing but get all the other accessories to go with it. I've always believed everyone in our company, whether it's a sales engineer or the receptionist, is either adding credibility or taking credibility away from our company. And I got to have people always adding credibility. We empower everyone in our company to make the right decision to do the right stuff. If someone would come to our store or phone into the receptionist and say, my keyboard, you know, quit working, or they're empowered to replace it. I mean, we might ask a question or two, but they're empowered to replace it. They're never to ask a manager. They never would use the excuse. Well, I have to get management approval. No, if you want to replace it, you replace it. And you know, the worst case from our point of view, we'll get it back. We'll fix whatever's wrong with it. We'll turn around and sell it as a demo or a used instrument. So it's not a lot of skin off our back, but it's the right thing to do for the customer.

[Guy Raz]

So you. It sounds like you discourage, like cover your ass type of employees.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, we would never. I've told every employee ever I hired, I would tell them, you'll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing. You'll get Chastised for not doing the right thing quick enough.

[Guy Raz]

So how would you retain people? Because the amount of money you're investing in an employee is so high that, like, you really don't want people to leave.

[Chuck Surak]

We don't want people to leave, but they want to stay. There aren't many opportunities like this. You know, you could go work at one of our competitors, but it's just going to be a more traditional music store. I guess you could go back on the road as a musician, but to have a professional job like this, where, frankly, in your first year, you're probably going to make 75 to 80, $85,000 in your second or third year, you're well into six figures. You know, we have people that are making nearly a half a million dollars now.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Chuck Surak]

And that'll keep you?

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. That's a lot of money.

[Chuck Surak]

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, I remember when I was hiring young people years ago, I would tell them the deposit on your house out in LA or some other big cities would buy your whole house in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

[Guy Raz]

Amazing. Anyone listening to that who is, like, starting their life. Fort Wayne, Indiana. All right, so you've got. You're running the business. It sounds like you're happy the business is growing, but your investors get scared. Dot com bubble bursts. And anyone who remembers that time, it's a bloodbath. Right? It's like venture funding just dries up because all a lot of venture firms are just getting killed. You guys weren't. Because you're not a dot com company, really. Right. You were. Okay. The bubble didn't really affect your business that much at the time, or did it?

[Chuck Surak]

No, not at all. So we grew through that period just fine. But the way those capital firms work, after about five years, they want to flip the company and move on to something else.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so five years, they decide we're going to sell our 80% to a new owner. And you're aware of this, but what did you. What was going through your mind?

[Chuck Surak]

It was a mutual decision. It was about four and a half years in, they started talking about it. And I raised my hand. I said, you know, I'd like to buy the business back. I love what we're doing. I want to buy it back.

[Guy Raz]

By the way, how much were you doing in sales by 2001?

[Chuck Surak]

I don't know, in the 20 million range or something, Maybe even more. I'm not sure. And they kind of laughed and scoffed at me because they figured out that I didn't have that much money to buy it. Back. And I said, no, no, no, I think I can pull it off. And they said, prove it. And so my best friend, who's an attorney and I went to about 18 different individuals in Fort Wayne and said, we want to buy the company back. Would you loan me 50? Would you loan me 100? One guy loaned me a million dollars.

[Guy Raz]

Let's break this down for me. You want to buy the company back, which we will learn was a very, very smart decision. But you didn't have the cash to do it, so you had to borrow money from. And borrow. You weren't asking for investors, you were asking for loans, right? High interest loans, right?

[Chuck Surak]

Yep. 12%.

[Guy Raz]

12%. And can you tell us how much you had to raise?

[Chuck Surak]

You know, I don't know that I remember, but. Six, seven, eight million dollars in that range.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Chuck Surak]

But what I will tell you is I didn't have any money myself.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, you didn't? Even though you got cash from the sale?

[Chuck Surak]

No, because during that period, my wife and I got divorced, right? And I gave her all the money. I kept the business, which, kind of funny at the time, I tried to keep her as a partner in the business. And my attorney said, no way, I will not let you do that. Give her all your cash and you just keep the business. Which was a really smart, wise move. But I literally had no money. I did have the inventory, and so I was able to pledge the inventory and borrow money from. We went to 18 friends. 17 of them said yes. And they did it because they had known me for several decades now and had trusted me and knew I was going to stand behind everything.

[Guy Raz]

If you didn't have personal cash and you had to borrow it, that's a lot of stress. And that's a. That's like sleepless nights kind of money that you have to raise.

[Chuck Surak]

It was. But I've always, my whole life, I've always said, failure is not an option. But what I will tell you, during the four and a half years the William Blair people had the company, the one thing they did put in place was some good structure. So we had to do monthly reporting and all that sort of stuff. And that allowed me to understand the totality of the business and where I thought it could really go. And so that probably gave me some

[Guy Raz]

confidence through the process, they imposed discipline on the, on the business, you know.

[Chuck Surak]

And the other thing I would add, I've been able to grow this whole thing. And I didn't go to college, I didn't have any business degree. Didn't have, you Know a lot of that stuff. I taught myself almost everything I've done. And that four years was a great education where they taught me how to professionalize the business.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so you've got. Now you've taken over the business back. You've got some debt, but turns out the business is growing and the cash flow is good and you can actually repay these loans faster. But I guess within two years.

[Chuck Surak]

Two and a half years.

[Guy Raz]

Yes, two and a half years. You are now the owner, full owner again, of this business. 100%.

[Chuck Surak]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

And it must have felt pretty great.

[Chuck Surak]

It felt awesome.

[Guy Raz]

Meantime, this company is continuing to grow. And you guys introduced free shipping, I think early, like 2003.

[Chuck Surak]

It's been a long time. Yes.

[Guy Raz]

Which is expensive.

[Chuck Surak]

It was expensive, but it just became accepted. And we wanted to take that question out of it for a customer. We'll just ship it to you for free. It's fine.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so. So let's talk about the growth of this business. I mean, it is now you've got a catalog. Right? We're in the 2000s now. It's not really going to become primarily. I'm imagining today, overwhelming majority of your sales are online.

[Chuck Surak]

Yes, they are. I mean, we have a great local store, but most of it's online.

[Guy Raz]

Yes, but in 2005, 2006, when you're now the full owner, I imagine it's still catalog. Mostly catalog.

[Chuck Surak]

Yes, it is.

[Guy Raz]

And so how did you see. What do you remember about imagining what this could be like, where this is going?

[Chuck Surak]

You know, by then we started to have enough credibility with our customers and our vendors. I should back up our vendors in the early days, they didn't understand when I was operating out of my house, they'd never heard of such a thing before. And many of them wouldn't do business with us. And I remember going to trade shows and begging them to do business. I tried to explain to them how we were different. And no, no, you're just a mail order. You're just a catalog. You're just going to low and hurt our other dealers. So it took a while to get their credibility. Eventually they started coming one by one and wanted to do business with our

[Guy Raz]

company because you weren't competing on price. You were selling customer service and support.

[Chuck Surak]

Absolutely. But it was unheard of to most of those manufacturers or those reps that we were working with. They didn't understand that people would pay more or pay the same price if they got a better value or got great customer service.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Surak]

And I would say that we had to be in the ballpark with the price, we couldn't charge dramatically more. But if I could charge the same price as your local store and I would include a free bank of sounds or something extra that really didn't cost us a lot, but gave extra value to the customer, even down to technical support and a warranty. We offered a two year warranty on everything we've done. We've done that for a long, long time. Most of the manufacturers offer a one year warranty. Most of the local stores at best, honor that one year warranty. I wanted to do a two year warranty. Most instruments will break in the beginning, an infantile failure. And if they do, they're covered under the factory warranty. And if they are going to break on month 13 or 14 or 15, I don't like that. I would not have wanted to sell that to the customer. So I will cover that next second year. And it's really been a relatively small amount of things we've had to cover. But it gives the customer much more confidence. Yeah, you mentioned it earlier. Anywhere you go today, especially if you're used to great customer service, most places you go, you're disappointed. And so it can be a huge differentiator and does not cost that much, but it's the right thing to do.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment, how Chuck's idea of service leads him to start buying other businesses in Fort Wayne, all while growing Sweetwater into the billion dollar company it is today. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built this. Welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the mid 2000s and Chuck decides to start getting involved in other businesses, things like aviation and cars. His goal is to grow more jobs for Fort Wayne, which he does. And meanwhile, he's expanding Sweetwater's reach and introducing new product lines, including actual musical instruments like guitars.

[Chuck Surak]

You know, the most fascinating part to me, and I don't remember exactly the year, but we were selling lots of technology, recording equipment and all that. And I kept having customers ask about buying guitars from us. I had a lot of musicians that worked for me that played guitar. And so we finally took on a guitar called Godin out of Canada. And it's a guitar that had technology built into it. It could talk to computers and other things. And we thought we'd start with this high end guitar first. And I kept hearing from customers, why don't you sell Gibson, why don't you sell Fender? And all that. And then I'd also hear from my friends, well, you can't sell guitars online. And that's what the manufacturers would think. But we did it by the same kind of stuff we've talked about. We brought every guitar in and we did our own quality control on it. Which you'd go, well, why do you need to do that? You would think they're all made perfect. Well, they're not. You know, some are made by Mary on Monday and Bill on Friday. And if we would take every guitar, we'd do a 55 point check, as we called it, and make sure everything on that guitar is perfect. Then we would take really high quality pictures and show those pictures online. We'd weigh the guitar different. Guitars weigh different. They have different moisture in the wood and that sort of thing. And then you can now see Those online at 3 o' clock in the morning in your pajamas and decide you want this one because it weighs 3 ounces less than that one. You place your order the next morning, we'll call you and say thank you for the order. And oh, by the way, don't you want an extra set of strings? Do you need an amplifier? All those sort of things. But we went from no guitars to selling over a thousand guitars every day.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. I know this as somebody who's ordered so much stuff from Sweetwater over the years that you get a bag of candy and I think a letter like you. I know it wasn't handwritten, but you have a letter in there. Did for a long time.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah. Candy's just our sweet little way of saying thank you. We've done it for, I don't know, four decades now or something. It's just, it's not very expensive and it's just a nice way to say thank you.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, let's talk about Fort Wayne because you've gotten into a lot of other businesses. It's too complicated. We're not going to be able to talk about them all. But it started with flying. You wanted to, I guess when you turned 50 in 2008, around then you wanted to learn how to fly helicopters, which would lead you to getting into that business. Like I think you've got like 12, 13 other businesses and they're all based in. They're all around sort of Fort Wayne area.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, most of them are around Fort Wayne. There's actually about 25 of them today. But helicopters. I was at an air show at a local airport and I saw a guy flying his personal helicopter and I said, oh, Pete, that is so cool. And he said, well, you should do it. I said, Nah, I'm 50, I'm too old. And he said, no, no, no. I have a friend in his 60s that got his helicopter right rating. So I went home, started working on my wife and that Christmas she got me an FAA logbook and how to fly helicopters. And by August I had my helicopter rating.

[Guy Raz]

And eventually you would start a helicopter charter business out of this. Okay, I want to just mention a couple of businesses. You have Amore, an Italian restaurant in Fort Wayne. You've got a live music venue there. Okay, not surprising. You got a cafe there, aviation company, helicopter charter flights, charter helicopter companies, a car dealership. You've got an optometry shop that sells glasses and does eye care. Tell me about this, because these are a lot of businesses that it doesn't seem like you really need to do them. I mean, Sweetwater will get there eventually became enormous. But even as you were sort of acquiring these businesses, were you doing it just to diversify your business portfolio? Tell me what all of this is about.

[Chuck Surak]

Well, you're absolutely right. Don't need any of it. But I love our community and there were just lots of opportunities that became available. So as an example of the 25, 6 businesses we have now, every one of them has a general manager running it and then he or she has a whole staff of people working for them. And so it's created a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunity for our community.

[Guy Raz]

And you acquire these companies when they're going to go out of business or like, what's the story? Because you're not starting them right?

[Chuck Surak]

All the above. Some, you know, were in distress modes. There's been others like sweet cars where I started from scratch, you know, 15 years later.

[Guy Raz]

What kind of cars you guys sell?

[Chuck Surak]

All kinds of one and two, three year old higher end cars. So Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches, Mercedes, all that sort of stuff.

[Guy Raz]

Get a lot of people buying Lamborghinis in Fort Wayne?

[Chuck Surak]

We do, believe it or not. And about 50% of our sales are local and the other 50% go around the country. But these were brands that were not sold in Fort Wayne at all. New dealership. And we just found a way to bring these one or two year old cars that have a little bit of depreciation taken out of them. And now we can sell those kind of cars to Fort Wayne.

[Guy Raz]

What happened to the modest Midwesterner driving their Lamborghini in Fort Wayne?

[Chuck Surak]

There's quite a few. I went to a car show this weekend. I bet There were eight or nine Lamborghinis. I think we sold most of them, but it was fun to see. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so a lot of this is around Fort Wayne and bringing jobs to Fort Wayne outside of Sweetwater. I'm just curious how many. And what's the name of the company that oversees this? It's not called Sweetwater.

[Chuck Surak]

No, it's CEREC Enterprises.

[Guy Raz]

CEREC Enterprise. Okay. How many, roughly how many employees do you think? CEREC Enterprises overseas.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, we have about 700 right now. 700.

[Guy Raz]

And it sounds like, I imagine you're a businessman, you want to, you want these to be sustainable, but that's not really. It's more about, you grew up in Fort Wayne and you've got the money and you want to support Fort Wayne now.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, I've been very blessed. My wife and I have been so, so blessed. And we just want to do everything we can to help our community.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so coming back to Sweetwater during these years, right, E Commerce is taking off, right. Like Amazon and Walmart got huge right online. And I should say Sweetwater does sell on Amazon. Right, like other third party sellers. But Amazon has gone after a lot of other competitors in big markets, like Toys R Us. Right. But not Sweetwater. Why do you think that is? I mean, I mean, Amazon could just decide to undercut you by, you know, by selling the same things you do, but for like 10% less.

[Chuck Surak]

They could. And I'll tell you, the reason we're on Amazon is access to customers. But that being said, Amazon has decided that there are other markets that are much easier to get into and to be an expert at. You know, I've mentioned it multiple times, but the expertise that we have and the investment we make in our people to offer, they don't want to have people. I mean, it's hard to call Amazon and talk to them on the phone. We encourage people to talk on the phone. We have those sales engineers and tech support people that really understand the products. And I think people are comfortable buying little inexpensive things on Amazon or if you know exactly what you want. But when you have any question or anything like that, you'd be more, much more comfortable buying that sort of technology from Sweetwater.

[Guy Raz]

It's interesting. Yeah. And again, I mean, I'm not, you know, I buy tons of stuff on Amazon. I just bought a foam roller for my thoracic spine. Right. Cheap purchase.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And we've had many big companies try and compete against us and they've gotten in the Business and out, whether it's Circuit City or Best Buy or now, we're not naive. We have to compete against Amazon. So that's one of the reasons that two years ago we opened a warehouse in Arizona. We can now ship to Nevada or California in one day. Shipping can't quite do the four hours or whatever or two hours now that Amazon's about to do. But most of our customers will wait one day to get the product. And the other thing about being in Indiana, we can reach 38% of the United States in one day. And FedEx and UPS both have big warehouses or distribution centers. One in Indianapolis, one in Louisville, right down the road from us. So we can get to a big part of the country right away. And what we can't get, we'll get out of Arizona.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, let's get to 2019. By this point, you guys are selling about 35,000 products on your website. Huge number, 70,000 customers a month. That year you're going to do around a little over $800 million in sales and you build a, an enormous warehouse distribution center. 580,000 square foot distribution center. I think it opens in February of 2020. 2020 in Fort Wayne to. Yes it did, you know, for growth. And that's exciting. It's high tech. You've got 580,000 square feet and then bam. Covid. A week or two later, the world shuts down.

[Chuck Surak]

You know what was amazing? We knew that warehouse was coming. Nobody knew Covid was coming. In fact, during the fall we had ordered all kinds of inventory in anticipation of filling that warehouse up. We wanted it to be full. And fortunately all that stuff came in in January and February and early March. And now our warehouse is full. And then Covid happens and the world stops. Including myself and Guitar center and many of our other competitors were told they couldn't ship anything. You couldn't have employees in your building or anything. It didn't take very long. And our governor said, no, no, mail order is good. We want mail order to stay in business. So they gave us permission to open. And my wife and myself and my daughter, who was 13 at the time, and the local police chief and a whole bunch of others came in and we started packing boxes because I was desperate to take care of our customers because they were still buying equipment and they were at home wanting to get more equipment. We were selling equipment for streaming church services. We were selling guitars for first time owners and our business that year grew by 40%.

[Guy Raz]

You were quoted, I guess in a retrospective article about COVID by an Indianapolis magazine. You said I was somewhere between panicked and trying to inspire those around me.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah. I would tell you that six months combination of COVID and Black Lives Matter was the hardest year in my 47 years of being in business. And I was stressed, and it immobilized me for six months.

[Guy Raz]

Immobilized you?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, I just. Every day it was tough. I just didn't know what tomorrow would bring. And it took me about six months to get through it. And by September, I met with the whole leadership team of our company, and I said, I'm choosing not to participate and we're moving forward.

[Guy Raz]

Not to participate in what?

[Chuck Surak]

Just the whole world of where it was at that time when the Black Lives Matter thing came out. You know, to me, it was just awful. I've been a big supporter of every person. I don't care what the color of your skin is. And I think the Black Lives Matter group, the people behind that, were not necessarily good and strong. I believed in the movement. I believed in a bunch of stuff, but not the kind of rhetoric that was being thrown about.

[Guy Raz]

And you felt like it was divisive.

[Chuck Surak]

It was very divisive. And, you know, as soon as you support a Black Lives Matter, then the police. I remember very clearly putting a very small, innocuous statement. And I got a call immediately from the police department, and I go, no, no, no. I bought you guys all lunch last week. So I love the blue lives as much as I love the black lives, as I do the yellow lives and the white lives and so on and so forth. So. But I just chose to not, you know, that time. I had 40 years of being in business, and I knew what my track record stood for and what I believed in, and I just wasn't going to get stuck in that anymore.

[Guy Raz]

Do you make political statements? Do you get involved in political issues, or do you just kind of like to stay out of it?

[Chuck Surak]

I try really hard to stay out of it, yeah.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, it's interesting because I think a lot of companies have reevaluated this and have kind of gone back to this view, which is the role of a business is to be a good employer, to be good to its customers, to make great products, to offer good value, but not to run the country or run policy. Like that is not the role. I mean, you know, you look at the 60s and the Vietnam War, I don't think Pepsi or Coca Cola had a position on that. You know, they personally may have, but they didn't. This business didn't come out saying anything about that.

[Chuck Surak]

Well, I think the challenge or what was different is we had the Internet. The Internet empowered so many people to have a voice. So they drove it, encouraged a lot of it. And again, that's the positive and the negative of it from that point of view.

[Guy Raz]

So it makes sense to me that this next chapter, which is, I imagine you get through that year 2020, it's an amazing. You broke a billion dollars, over a billion dollars in business that year. And since then it's been over a billion every year, which is a billion dollars. Right.

[Chuck Surak]

It's unbelievable.

[Guy Raz]

Unbelievable. So you, you get through this year 2020, clearly very stressful for you, but going through that year because I was wondering, I was like, you know, in 2021, he decided to sell a majority stake of Sweetwater to a private equity firm. Now, I mean, you're doing over a billion dollars in sales. Amazing opportunity to sell. But I have to imagine now, knowing what I know from the previous year, maybe you were like, this was a lot. I just, I think I need to step away.

[Chuck Surak]

You know, it wasn't so much that I had previously tried to figure out what's life after Chuck and what's the long term plan? And we have this problem in our country with estate taxes and you have to pay about 50% of whatever your net worth is just when you both die for estate taxes and over a certain amount. Yep, yep. So I realized it's a big problem. And so for two years, my financial advisor, my attorneys, all that brought in all kinds of experts and had us look at various strategies. And I learned terms like irrevocable trusts and all these sort of things that we could move our company too. And I just felt weird. And so December of that year, I said, well, why don't we consider selling it? And decided to go through the process. So they went away and we worked on what we call a book.

[Guy Raz]

They. You're talking about the bankers.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, J.P. morgan. Right?

[Guy Raz]

J.P. morgan.

[Chuck Surak]

Yep. So they, they sent out a copy of this book to 32 companies. And I was really clear when I started working with JP Morgan, there were some principles that I would not give up on. I had no, no debt, didn't need to sell it. I was in a great position. But going forward, they had to continue to support our community. Whoever bought the company, they had to support our sales management process. The team, you know, they couldn't dismantle it. They had to really keep the company kind of the way I'd been running it. And that was just a prerequisite or we weren't going forward. So 16 sent back incredible offers. I mean, blew my mind. Life changing incredible offers. And we narrowed, narrowed it down to two and I just really liked the one that ultimately won and probably five years in August and they've done absolutely everything they said they would do. And it's just been a great relationship. My wife and I still own a big piece of it. We just don't own the majority anymore. And that course has freed us up to do lots of other things.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I mean this Providence Equity acquired a majority stake and you retain a minority stake.

[Chuck Surak]

Right.

[Guy Raz]

And how did you guarantee that they are going to do the things that you really need them to do or that you, you have a certain view about your employees, the business, the community? How do you bake that into a guarantee forever?

[Chuck Surak]

Well, I don't know if I can do it forever, but, but when I did interview them, and I interviewed them as hard as they interviewed us, and we talked to references of other companies they had done, the best thing I can tell you is they've done exactly what they said they would do. And what they really did is they sped up some of the stuff that I was going to do anyway. You know, I'd have done things in sequential order, very monitored and measured. Taking on selling band instruments as an example, or opening the warehouse on the west coast or they did it all at once. It was a little bit stressful for the team, but it allowed us to go even faster and that's what they really brought to the table.

[Guy Raz]

So 2021, this happens, you come to terms and the company again has done. Cuarto has done over a billion in sales. So you know, that acquisition was, was certainly considerable. Part of this is you, you decide that you're going to move on, you're going to step down as CEO. What did that mean for your day to day life? I mean, here you go, 2021, you're running this thing and then what is this like one day to the next? It's like you're not, there's not like a million questions coming at you. You're not going to a bunch of meetings like just.

[Chuck Surak]

I will tell you, I didn't believe it would ever happen. But the money was so amazing. Not only the money for me, but the money for all my team. You know, all my top people had a really nice payday.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Surak]

But I stayed in my office until the day I saw the money in my checking account or in my savings account. Actually I wasn't going to leave My office. And it was hard. It was really hard. My staff helped move me out of my office. I couldn't have done it by myself, but I stepped up to chairman of the board. I'm still involved. I've got so many friends that are there, lifetime friends that are there. And. And it's my baby. But I've now sent my baby off to college and. And doing really well.

[Guy Raz]

So, I mean, again, like, just emotionally was part of you, you know, there's still the emotional thing of like, I'm not coming in every day anymore. I'm not. Sometimes people get sort of say to me, I didn't feel as needed right away.

[Chuck Surak]

You know, I miss it. That's what I would say. I miss my friends. I miss going there every day. But I am fulfilled with other things that we're doing, and I'm glad I have that. You know, I talk to a lot of my friends, of course, retiring right now, and I go. That scares the crap out of me.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Surak]

How old are you? I'm 69.

[Guy Raz]

Young guy. Yeah.

[Chuck Surak]

I feel like I'm 39. I guess I don't quite look it, but I really have lots of energy. I'm up early and I'm going late, and I sleep, you know, very few hours per night. And so I love what I do.

[Guy Raz]

And today I think Sweetwater's of got lot A, like 2600 employees, roughly. Something like that.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

You've got a warehouse in Glendale, Arizona, and. But most of the employees are in Fort Wayne.

[Chuck Surak]

Yep. It's pretty amazing. I left. We were doing a billion five in business this year. They do $2 billion in business.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Chuck Surak]

It's crazy.

[Guy Raz]

Amazing. I guess in the lobby or somewhere in the Sweetwater headquarters, you can still find. Well, maybe it's not the original, but there's a replica of that VW bus that this all started out of, right?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah. My rusty old VW bus went to a junkyard over in Vanward, Ohio. But many, many years ago, I got a version of it. It's kind of a facsimile of the original VW bus.

[Guy Raz]

And it's in there in the headquarters. And you can go see it. And I guess your Boy Scout uniform's also in there.

[Chuck Surak]

My Boy Scout uniforms hanging on the door. And there's my first saxophones on the floor right in front of it. And just a little bit of the story of Sweetwater and the foundings.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, it's pretty amazing, Chuck, when you think about this trajectory of your life. Everything happened just even for like the four years of going gigging around the country and starting this little recording studio to a multi billion dollar businessman in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Again, it's amazing. How much of this do you attribute to the work you put in and the hard work and the skills you brought to it? And how much do you think had to do with luck and fortune?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, I'm not a big believer in luck, but it was hard work. I think it was the grace of God. And the more you're given, the more you're expected. You know, it's just been amazing. But it's been a lot of work, a lot of support from others around me, whether that's customers or friends. I don't take credit for it all. There's no way that one human being can do everything that I've been able to accomplish. I get credit, but I don't believe in that. Yeah, I reflect all the time. You know, I started with nothing. No business degree, no background, a rusty VW bus. I mean, it's just been an amazing, amazing ride.

[Guy Raz]

That's Chuck Surak, founder of Sweetwater. And by the way, even with everything he's got going on these days, Chuck still makes time to gig as a musician on the instrument that kind of launched his career, the saxophone.

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, he played Saturday night and I'm playing three times this week, three different bands.

[Guy Raz]

What are you playing?

[Chuck Surak]

I play in a nine piece R& B soul band and I play in a little three piece jazz trio and I play in an 18 piece big band. And there's just various clubs and places we play around here.

[Guy Raz]

We'll plug you. What's. What's the next venue?

[Chuck Surak]

Yeah, the next venue. I play at the Club Room at the Clyde Theater.

[Guy Raz]

The Clyde Theater? When, when is happening?

[Chuck Surak]

We're there a couple times a month, so. Yeah, look at the calendar and find it.

[Guy Raz]

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was researched by Carla Estevez and produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Erabloui. It was edited by Andrea Bruce. Our engineer was An Li Huang. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, JC Howard, Chris Masini, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, Kerry Thompson, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this.