My name is Aaron Harding.

I'm the owner of Backwoods Guitar here in Sedalia, Missouri.

we do everything from buy, sell, rent, and trade.

Everything from guitars, basses, amps, all the way.

We actually even custom make guitars from the ground up.

They're all hand-carved.

We do it all.

Well, I oversee everything that goes on.

also the head luthier, which is a fancy word for a guy that fixes guitars.

my name is Mason Harding, and, my dad and I own Backwoods Guitar here in Sedalia, Missouri.

My dad and I sort of operate it almost as co-owner, so to speak.

So him and I kind of mak..

He likes to involve me in a lot of stuff just because he knows that, this is something that eventually I'd like to take over someday.

So he wants to make sure that my voice is included and heard as well, which is really rare for somebody, you know, my age to be.. some sort of executive type decisions.

And he's the owner of the final say.

It comes down to him, but he likes to take my opinion and and we talk about a lot of things together.

So our working relationship is very, very close.

So I let Mason and Jeanette downstairs do a lot of a lot of the management and that type of thing, shipping and etc., etc.

but yeah, so I do the owner thing and and concentrate mainly on the repairs and builds.

My day to day stuff is going to be doing inventory counts, ordering products, stuff like that.

I'll, help some customers out in store.

And I answer a lot of online stuff as well.

I also take professional photography of all of our new, guitars and items and stuff like that.

One of our biggest challenges right now is trying to maintain all of our inventory, because we have so much stuff and so few employees.

There's about three of us that are doing everything that you see.

So just having the the amount of time to be able to manage all of that has been has been rather difficult, as well as just managing, you know, online competition because there's so many other people out there that are selling the same types of products.

You have to find a way to stand out.

None of us have formal training in running a business.

We're all guitar players and musicians, so you get to learn QuickBooks real fast.

you know, stuff like that.

It blows your mind.

It's fantastic.

Our store will be able to offer.

We've got a whole ton of instruments.

We've got acoustic guitars, electric guitars, we got bass guitars, we have amplifiers for all of the above.

We've got folk instruments that'll be mandolins, banjos, ukuleles, violins, all sorts of stuff like that.

We've been trying to evolve, trying to, you know, offer better and better deals for our, our customers so that they tend to prefer to come to us first.

So that has been a big thing.

And I think that, a big thing that helps us stand out would be the repair shop aspect of that, because a lot of people aren't going to find a full in-house repair shop.

You can't just go to guitar Center and get .. You know, like they'll just do very basic kind of stuff.

So that's been the big challenge for us.

One year I just finished with a band that we were in and, I was burnt out.

I didn't really want to play anymore because I've been playing for years and years just wanted some time off.

But I knew I still wanted to be around the industry, and I knew that the guys around here, all the gigging musicians, they needed somebody to do legit repairs, like the stuff that they usually have to send off to Nashville or Kansas City and pay a whole ton of money.

So I started dabbling in my garage as word got out, guys started bringing me their stuff.

More word got out, more guys started bringing in my stuff.

Friend of mine and former bandmate, Steve Cox, he was actually going out and flipping guitars.

You know, you go out and yard sales or whatever, chase them down, and he'd bring them to.. get them all going so he could re flip them.

And then one day we got to talk and he came up with the idea and he was like, well, you've already got the repair thing.

Go on with the shop name, because I've got nothing to do during the day.

So I could run the store during the day.

All right.

Fine, we'll give it a shot.

So we were kind of, you know, where am I?

What are we going to name it?

But I live in the middle of 30 wooded acres in the middle of nowhere, and I think we had a pack of little backwoods cigars.

Somebody was like, dude, that's what we ought to know.

Your name, the shop man.

You're back here in the middle of nowhere.. All right, why not?

We'll go with that.

The first time I was working out, I would have been about 16 years old.

And, the shop would have been still fairly new.

That would have been probably six years or so into, into them getting into the business.

And so my dad would just have me work, over the summer a little bit.

I would learn some of the repair stuff at the beginning.

And over time I just started working more and more.

And by the time I was about 18, this became my my main gig.

And this is what I was doing full time.

It was almost like an apprenticeship.

In the beginning, he was teaching me how to fix stuff.

And, he also builds custom guitars from scratch.

So he had me build a couple as well, so that I .. and I understood how guitars work and how the electronics work and everything top to bottom.

So now that I kind of understood that, it helps with a lot of the answering questions and, you know, understanding what people need when they come in.

If somebody comes in and brings a guitar that needs repaired, I need to be able to diagnose it and let him know what needs to happen with it.

And as I got further and further into it, it kind of transitioned into more of a managerial and, taking care of, you know, like the other the other stuff that I stated earlier, you know, that kind of stuff.

So I would say my favorite part of working here is honestly just being being around instruments and being around, you know, music all day, every day because that's that's my passion, that's my hobby.

So being able to do stuff that I enjoy and that I care about all day is definitely the most important part of it.

Another thing that I really enjoy is obviously the fact that, I'm able to make a lot of the decisions and that I feel like my voice is heard and that I'm very involved in the business.

It's not like I'm just coming in and working for, you know, the big man, so to speak.

You know, you kind of come in and you get to do your own thing, get to have fun and just enjoy, you know, everyday work.

It's fun.

It's the best job ever.

You know, you get to do what you love.

And this was what we were put on earth for, man is to play and gig and help other musicians.

I mean, it's never a day at work when you love what you do and we love what we do and like, we all share the same thing.

So we all love it here.

It's great.