Bob Johnson's Journey with Ruggedized Laptops

Well, thanks, Stephen. And my name is Bob Johnson. I run Bob Johnson’s Computer Stuff, Inc. over here in Smyrna, Delaware. Our website is bobjohnson.com. We sell ruggedized laptops and tablets to public safety organisations, which would include police departments, fire departments, any of that.

Well, we started back in 1996 and we didn’t start out as a ruggedized laptop reseller. As you know, as time goes on and you run into obstacles in business, you have to reinvent yourself a lot. We actually started as a Dell HP Lenovo laptop reseller refurbisher. And we started out in 1996 right there on eBay, back when eBay was a private company. It was very unknown and we were selling our parts and equipment there, but they were very limiting. Whereas back in those days, even if you, I don’t know if you got involved with it, but they only allowed five or six items to be listed per day. So it was kind of restrictive in that sense.

And back then when I first started the website, my website, I didn’t know how to hyperlink in between pages, if you can imagine. And my website was just one long page with products and prices and stuff sold. That was the amazing thing. We sold, people would send in their money orders and we would ship them. As time went on, we were lucky enough to run into a guy developing a shopping cart and he wanted to test it out and he gave us the opportunity to test it out. It was no cost to us and that doubled our business right there. And back in 97, 98, there wasn’t many websites with shopping carts. You know, the big boys had them like IBM and all the big boys, but the little guys like us didn’t have that. And we just work out of our home. So it was, we were very small.

And as time went on, we grew. We were allowed to take credit cards and then of course we get to the 2000s and our first obstacle was 9 -11 where things changed for us and we had to increase the offering and we had challenges on finding inventory but we grew and moved forward.

Well, absolutely. Anyone can buy our product. Our product is a fully rugged and semi rugged laptop or tablet. So if you can imagine these things are made of metal. They have waterproof, well not waterproof, they’re water resistant, dust and grime resistant. You can drop them from a six foot drop and they’re gonna bounce and you’re gonna pick it up and still use it. They withstand high heat and extreme cold. So if you can imagine in a police car, if you, they leave their units in their vehicles in the, you know, mid summer when it’s 110 degrees outside or 105 degrees outside, that car gets 200, 250 degrees, that laptop is still going to work. Whereas if you had a standard Dell or IBM or Lenovo type unit in there, it would fail almost immediately. And then on the other side is the extreme cold. If you’re out in, you know, Michigan or Minnesota where you know, you get negative 10 degrees, that laptop is still going to turn on and heat and cold are a major issue. And that’s basically what the unit is.

So for the customer, we sell to auto mechanics because hey, it’s a grimy environment. We sell to EMS, you know, it can get wet. They’re very abusive with their laptops and we sell fire departments. Again, water is involved, you know, bouncing around in the car or the truck and that sort of thing. But auto mechanics, construction companies, trying to think of other applications, we sell out to Alaska for researchers in the, you know, in the cold, it gets very cold over there.

We also sell to marine navigation guys that are out on boats. You can imagine the sea breeze and the sprays that are coming up there. It needs to be water resistant. So those are the kind of customs. But we do sell to individuals that just like the look and feel of a rugged laptop. But they look like a tank. I have one here if you want to see it. It looks like a tank. It’s made of metal.

This is Panasonic’s hybrid. It weighs about, almost five pounds. I mean, I can drop it. We can spray water on it. And that’s where I think. So it’s not something sleek and thin that you would see in a retail.

We, whenever, as we’ve moved along, our focus has been on bringing in inventory. So the difference between us and our competitors is we stock everything that’s on our website. At any moment, if you need a unit, we have it in stock if it’s on our website. Our competitors will not have them in stock.

They will source it out and in fact, in some cases, they actually will buy from me to resell to their customers. I have a full team that refurbishes all of these units. They specialise in the brands that we sell, which would be Panasonic Toughbook, G -TAC, DuraBook, and even Dell Rugged laptops. So if you have a problem, you can call us, our technician can walk you through any issue that might occur. And there can be any number of issues, especially when it comes to upgrades, GPS, you know, you can upgrade to GPS and broadband and a lot of times there’s driver issues and that sort of thing. But all of our technicians, you know, they’ve worked for me for seven plus years. They know these units inside and out.

Well, mostly 90 % of our businesses in the United States, we do send out to Canada and sell out to Canada. We also have a few customers out in France. Internationally, you kind of got to be careful with this kind of equipment. It’s restricted in some areas, but otherwise, in the UK, I’m trying to think of custom. We ship to Italy, France, UK, Canada. We shipped out to Mexico. So, Brazil, we’ve shipped to Brazil. We have customers all over the place.

So the Panasonic Toughbook would be the number one brand that sold through our company. And they are the flagship of Rugged Eyes. They started it back in the 1980s. And they are the gold standard. The most popular unit that’s bought is the CF -31, which is the police laptop of choice.

And that unit has been around for probably 15 years. The competitors like G -TAC and Durabook and Dell Rugged, they got into the game late. So if you look at Panasonic Toughbook, they’re probably 70 % of our sales in Ruggedized, whereas G -TAC and Durabook and Dell Rugged take up the other 30%. So yeah, the Panasonic Toughbook is the gold standard.

96, 96.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, challenge wise, I would say the first challenge that I encountered in the very beginning was how do you make a website? If you can just imagine back then, that was my first challenge. And then of course, the 9 -11 when that occurred, that we had to reinvent what we sold and how we sold it. And then as you move forward, we hit the recession there in 2008.

Believe it or not, in 2008 is when we had to revamp the entire company, otherwise we’d be out of business, and rebrand what we were doing. And that’s when we really went heavily into ruggedized laptops. It was the way to go. Some folks would say COVID, the lockdown and the pandemic was a challenge for us. It was a fantastic time for us to sell laptops.

Unfortunately said fantastic, but it was a tough time for other people. But for us, we had the inventory, whereas everybody else was shutting down, all the manufacturers shut down their lines. We had the inventory to sell. And so we, some of our best years were in 2020 and 2021. So that and then of course, the current economic climate, we’re finding difficult and we’re we’ve adjusted accordingly, what we sell and how we’re selling it.

I think what’s happening in the computer industry is they’re moving away from, I think they’re moving towards cloud -based type applications. All the police departments do this and specifications aren’t going to be as rigorous. You don’t need a super power laptop to do that type of work. And we’re finding that equipment is lasting longer and longer and they’re not changing out machines very often. So we want to move more into certain repairs and services. So we have a complete repair depot now that we’re building and we expect some high growth in recognized laptop repair and any type of services like networking. There’s other camera systems that police use and that sort of thing. So we want to expand out into that. So that’s kind of our game plan over the next three.

I think the most successful thing that we’ve done and for us success is traffic to the website. I think the most successful thing we did was start a YouTube channel back in 2008, 2009 and create repair videos. We were doing simple repair videos to build the channel and we get a tremendous amount of crossover traffic coming off of YouTube to our website. So that’s how we sell parts to, we sell, we stock all the parts for our equipment. And if you need to fix your whatever recognized laptop, we probably have the part and we probably have a video on how to do it. So that’s how we sell those. And then of course we have a complete video line on our YouTube channel that talks about the different models and what are the strengths and weaknesses and what you can expect from them. So I think our most successful brand building work has been with YouTube.

Well, you know, one of the interesting thing about YouTube, which I didn’t even realise is that less than 10 % of the channels and there’s several hundred million channels on YouTube. The top 10 % only have 10 ,000 or more subscribers on their channel. If you’ve got that 10 ,000 or more, you’re in the top 10%, which is amazing. And then there’s only a small fraction that have, you know, millions of subscribers like MrBeast and that sort of thing. But the average, the more popular unit, YouTube channels typically have between 10 and 20 ,000 subscribers. Our subscribership is 15 ,000, I believe right now. Yeah. And you know, we have a mix of Go ahead.

Well, I think they’re probably going to implement some AI and YouTube as well.

Absolutely.

My advice is don’t pay attention to the TV and the politics. Put your head down and just work. That’s the advice I have to give to anyone that wants to start a business. Don’t get wrapped up in the news. And just put your head down and work and just follow your dream.

You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.