Joe Simonds is the CEO and co-founder of Salt Strong, one of the largest saltwater fishing clubs in America, which he built with his brother Luke. In this episode he came back to walk me through the inside story of selling Salt Strong: why they walked away from fifty thousand dollars a month in apparel, the five criteria they set before they would ever sell, the family office that bought them, and why he says members ended up getting more than they bargained for.
Salt Strong is one of the largest saltwater fishing clubs in America, founded by brothers Joe and Luke Simonds. It started as a content project with no business plan, grew through apparel sales, and became a membership fishing-education platform with courses, an app, a community, and proprietary tackle such as the Slam Shady and the Prawn.
Joe explains that Salt Strong was acquired by a family office connected to Sportsman's Guide, a decades-old buyer's club. He emphasizes it was not private equity, and the buyer had a long track record of never selling a company it acquired, which was the dealbreaker criterion for him and Luke.
Joe says apparel was doing roughly fifty thousand dollars a month, but it did not fit their mission of helping people make memories on the water, and the returns were brutal. He describes deciding to step away from that revenue to focus on education and community instead.
Joe says he and Luke wrote down five non-negotiable criteria, and the final one was that they would never sell to private equity. He walks through how those criteria protected the members and the brand when the right buyer finally appeared.
Yes. Joe says he and Luke remain fully operational, and maintaining control was one of their conditions. He describes the buyer as hands-off, telling him to keep doing what he was doing and ask for help when he needed it.
Joe says the deal made the membership better rather than worse, with active members gaining access to the larger partner club and lifetime members keeping lifetime access. He frames the whole thing around adding value for members instead of cashing out.
I remember when Joe and Luke first told me about Salt Strong, back before they even had the name locked in. I have watched them go from not knowing exactly what they were selling, to crushing it with t-shirts, to walking away from that money to build something that actually helps people catch fish. When I heard they had sold the company, I had a lot of questions, because selling a brand you built with your brother is a different animal than selling a normal business. I wanted Joe to walk me through the whole thing in his own words.
The part that surprised me most early in our conversation was Joe describing why they killed a line that was doing real money every month. Most people would protect that revenue at all costs. Joe explained how it kept pulling them away from the mission they actually cared about, and how the math on returns was uglier than it looked from the outside. Hear him explain the decision in the episode.
Joe and Luke did not just wait for an offer. Joe told me they wrote down five things that had to be true before they would ever sell, and the last one was the line in the sand. When you build something with your brother, you think hard about who you would ever hand it to. Joe walks through each criterion and why the final one mattered most. Listen to that part.
The skeptics showed up the second the sale was announced, and Joe gets it, because we have all watched brands we loved get hollowed out after a sale. What he describes is the opposite, a deal structured to make the membership better the day it closed. He breaks down exactly what active members and lifetime members got. Press play to hear how he thinks about taking care of the people who got him here.
The day after we talked, the thing that stuck with me was how intentional Joe and Luke have been at every step, from the five criteria to the refusal to sell to private equity. That is rare.
If you have ever thought about building something, scaling it, and what it actually takes to sell without selling out, this is the conversation. Listen to the whole thing.
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Joe Simonds is the CEO and co-founder of Salt Strong, one of the largest saltwater fishing clubs in America, which he built with his brother Luke. What began as a content project with no business plan grew into a membership platform with courses, an app, a large community, and proprietary tackle. Joe hosts the Salt Strong podcast and recently sold the company to a family office while retaining operational control, structuring the deal to expand what members receive.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 999 with Joe Simonds.
Joe: This is Joe Simonds from Salt Strong, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom: Joe Simonds from Salt Strong, what's going on, man?
Joe: What's up, Tom? I'm back — I got invited back after many years.
Tom: You did. You've been on your own podcast venture. How many episodes have you done?
Joe: We're in the six hundreds, I don't know the exact number. We went from doing one a week, to trying two a week, now back to one a week. It's been quite a few years. I know you've been on there a couple times, and I enjoyed doing them — I learn something every time.
Tom: Same here. I've had quite an adventure with this podcast, and it's taught me something too. It's also been a creative outlet. What are the other reasons you've kept the podcast going for 600 episodes?
Joe: Because I keep meeting people who say they love it. I run into people all the time and it's one of the first things they bring up — sometimes with tears, telling me it changed a relationship in their life. That's powerful. Just like you, people who listen to every episode feel like they know you, and there's a real relationship there versus just selling somebody a pack of Slam Shadys as a transaction.
Tom: It's good for so many things. You're in the information business, and a podcast gives you an extended period of time instead of just a write-up or an Instagram post — you can talk about something for two hours if you want. For me, mostly it's been the opportunity to meet people, a lot of times heroes of mine, and with the old TV show we were only filming twelve episodes a year, so guests were a very small part of it — maybe two episodes a year. With the podcast, if somebody wants to do something together, we can just sit down and talk for an hour with the phones off. Even if nobody listens, it's still great.
Joe: How many episodes have you done?
Tom: We're approaching a thousand — right on the precipice of it, so much so that Jake keeps asking what the thousandth episode is going to be. I don't know — it could be you, who knows.
Tom: I remember like it was yesterday when you had the idea for Salt Strong — you didn't even know what it was called yet, you'd just recently acquired the name. What a journey since then.
Joe: I'd have to go back and listen to that original episode because a lot's changed, but the one thing that stayed true was that Luke and I wanted to teach the world how to fish. We grew up in a family that fished and boated, and all our best memories were around that. I've probably shared this story before, but it's worth repeating: it was the very first year of Salt Strong, we hadn't found our way yet, didn't have a business plan, and weren't making any money. Our grandfather passed away — he was the patriarch of all of it, had been on a boat in the war, owned countless boats, and had a little beach house in Daytona Beach where we'd spend every summer with him and our grandma, from catching fish on the beach to going offshore to watching what the boats brought in at the inlet. He passed at 94, and it was a celebration of life. Twelve grandkids, Luke and I among them, sitting at my parents' house having some beers, talking about our favorite memories — him falling off the boat, stepping on stingrays, the jellyfish stings, most of it happening at that beach house. And I realized: twelve kids who spent their whole life with this man, and not one of us mentioned something he'd bought us or a graduation gift. It was all memories he helped create with us out on the water. Afterward, it didn't hit me right away, but Luke and I got to talking and said, man, how cool would that be — to pass away at 90 and have everyone talking about all these awesome memories. That's when it clicked: we need to help people go out there and create memories on the water. That became our North Star.
Tom: You're also teaching people to go out with their families and actually have success, which is super cool. I watched from a distance as you started this without really knowing what it was — was it a club? For a while you were selling t-shirts and doing really well, and then one post you said you weren't going to sell t-shirts anymore. Then it was courses, then a club, then merchandise, then fishing tackle, then an app, then lures. So what is Salt Strong today? What's the elevator pitch?
Joe: The largest saltwater fishing club in America. Early on, as I mentioned, we didn't have a business plan — we loved creating content, and that's how you and I first met. If we could have just gotten paid to create content, that's all we would have done. But that was before YouTube was really a thing — guys like BlackTip H and Lunker Dog, who you've had on here, were basically the only true YouTubers, and even they couldn't make a living off it yet; they all had real jobs. So we started doing shirts and hats, and at one point we were doing about $50,000 a month direct-to-consumer, but it kept coming back to the mission. After our grandfather passed, we didn't feel right doing it as just an apparel company. We were also getting compared to Salt Life, which wasn't who we wanted to be, and I didn't realize women return 30 to 40% of everything they buy online — we had a very liberal return policy and started getting shirts back with cigarette burns in them. We just weren't making much money and hated what we were doing compared to our mission. So we went all in on information — courses, the club, real-time fishing reports that turned into the app. When we hit 20,000 members, our members started telling us we were big enough to go get legit tackle discounts. We reached out to companies like Z-Man, and Daniel Nussbaum was one of the first to bet on us. That was the beginning of the tackle side — now we sell millions of dollars of tackle a year through the club.
Tom: You and Luke are smart, business-background guys — would you suggest someone else start a business without a business plan like you did?
Joe: No — but here was our business plan, and it's not dumb: we knew that if we had enough eyeballs and enough goodwill, at some point we could sell something. The mistake was we took too long to figure out what to sell, and started with the wrong thing — hats and apparel — which almost bankrupted us. When you're stocking small through 4XL in every color, you can be sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own cash in inventory. It can drown you fast, and if you're wrong twice, your whole business can be over.
Tom: A lot of people are going to tune into this because you sold something recently — Salt Strong has been acquired. How did you know it was time, and that this was something you and Luke wanted to do?
Joe: I'm a big believer in five-year goals — ten and twenty are too hard to hit, though it's fine to dream that far. Three to five years is the sweet spot for me. There are two parts to this story. A little over seven years ago we wrote our 2025 vision — this big, hairy, audacious goal of having a couple hundred thousand members, and the very bottom bullet point was acquiring property for a fishing theme park. We're still in 2025 now, and that bullet point was always front and center in our office. Most of the other goals came true, even if we were off on member numbers. Then earlier this year, in January 2025, our leadership team worked hard on a 2030 vision. One of the things we identified was that if we wanted to keep growing the club — our number-one goal — we needed to grow our merchandise selection. Right now we have about 680 SKUs; a Bass Pro might have 800,000 to a million. Our members had told us they wanted more things to buy from us, and there are members who no longer need the how-to content but still justify the club expense through the tackle discounts. We knew we needed help scaling that. When we were doing $50,000 a month in shirts and hats, you have to sit on two to three months of inventory; now we're doing seven figures in tackle, and it's all Luke's and my own cash tied up in stock. We'd never taken on investors — we wanted to bootstrap it — but the bigger you get, the more exposure you carry.
Joe: So we started talking to potential partners — not to sell Salt Strong, but to find someone to acquire the Fish Strong, or tackle, side of the business so we could focus on the club, the content, and the community. Our 2030 white paper also laid out eventually copying what we'd done in saltwater into freshwater fishing, hunting, and camping — becoming a trusted outdoor club, not just a fishing club. We reached out to some bigger players in the industry, under NDA, pitching that idea, but it never quite clicked. Then tariffs hit almost overnight, and since most fishing tackle is made overseas, conversations with manufacturers just stopped. But one company we'd been talking to, Sportsman's Guide, was different — they already understood membership, subscriptions, and discounting from their own buyer's club model. The more we talked, and once they were under NDA and saw our books, they started wondering if it made more sense to buy the whole thing. We let them read our five-year plan, and their leadership was all in — they wanted to help us get to 2030 faster, fund it, and keep Luke deeply involved since he's brilliant at product development. They wanted us focused on content and community while they took over day-to-day inventory management, and eventually help build an app for hunters and campers too.
Joe: This wasn't a split-second decision — it had been going on since March and closed in September, a six-or-seven-month process of back-and-forth with advisors and lawyers. I'm a big believer in God, and I kept praying that if it was the right time, the door would open so wide I'd have to be blind to miss it, and if not, it would slam shut. The tariffs hit and I thought that would slow it down, but it just kept opening up. Even our attorneys said it was the easiest close they'd been part of in over twenty years. It's been about a month and a half now.
Tom: A lot of people are skeptical when a company they love gets bought out, because there have been a lot of roll-ups in recent years that destroyed trusted brands — usually quality is the first thing to go. How are you reassuring your members?
Joe: We had five big criteria that had to be met before we'd ever sell, and the final one was that we would never sell to private equity — money that comes in, grows something fast, and flips it without caring about anything else. It's not private equity that bought us; it's a family office, and I can't say who, but it's someone people would probably know and trust. Family offices are usually run by billionaires thinking generations ahead, not flipping something in three years — like the Rockefellers' family office, still running generations after John Rockefeller. We got to talk with other companies they'd acquired over the past forty years, and as far as I know they haven't sold a single one. One founder who sold to them thirty-two years ago is still on board as an employee today. Luke and I are still making the day-to-day decisions, and there's zero incentive for either side to make the product worse. In fact, all of our existing members got free lifetime Sportsman's Guide membership as part of the deal — even our lifer members who paid extra for lifetime Insider Club access got that extended to them too, at real cost to the acquirer, and they didn't hesitate.
Tom: What are the benefits of Sportsman's Guide?
Joe: It's similar to our own tackle discounts for members — about 10% off almost everything in their store. They're big into hunting and shooting gear and have some of the lowest prices around on ammo; members have told us that's where they buy it by the truckload. It's a buyer's club, no different than Costco or Sam's Club.
Tom: Do they have education content like you do?
Joe: They don't — and that's exactly why, when they saw our 2030 plan about freshwater fishing and hunting, they said, we already have the inventory, why don't you start building that content over time. Five years from now, I'd guess it looks like the Salt Strong Insider Club, but as a massive insider club spanning hunting, camping, shooting, freshwater, and saltwater.
Tom: With tariffs and people holding onto their money right now — refurbishing old boats instead of buying new ones, buying new line instead of new rods — is this company strong enough to weather that?
Joe: I can't comment on their financial health directly, but look at their track record — over forty years, they made it through 2008 and 2009 and are still growing. Even the fishing club concept itself dates back to the early 1930s, during the Depression, when roughly a quarter of men were out of work but people still wanted to fish together. Even in the worst economic times in a century, people found ways to save money and be part of a club.
Tom: What about your coaches — any changes to the educational lineup?
Joe: We'll be adding more over time, but it'll look different. At one point we had eight coaches creating content, and members told us they felt overwhelmed by the volume, so we've pared it down to three core, essentially full-time coaches: my brother Luke, Tony — who's been with us forever — and Pat, who once told me he wanted to be hired as a coach but would prove his value first by selling his house, living in an RV, and driving from Texas to Virginia over a year filming the whole thing to show that our tackle and teaching work everywhere. We funded it, and four years later he'd done the whole thing. Beyond those three, we have a number of part-time affiliate coaches who mostly came up through our own club — people with regular jobs, like firefighters, who are just out there fishing constantly and love teaching, and we bring them on part time.
Tom: What do you think will be the biggest challenge moving into freshwater?
Joe: I'm a big believer in momentum, and we have a lot of it in saltwater — moving into freshwater is starting over: from credibility, from trust, all of it. The good news is we have a model that works, formulas for content that really builds trust and helps people, not just content that chases eyeballs.
Tom: Does that excite you or scare you?
Joe: It excites the heck out of me.
Joe: Luke's excited too, though he's more risk-averse and slower to make big moves. Ironically, after the hurricane flooded their house in St. Pete, he's living in Winter Haven now and doing a lot of bass fishing — which is kind of how we all got started. It'll be impossible to pull Luke out of saltwater, and that's not the plan — he and I will still be the Salt Strong brothers, building new teams around the other categories like freshwater, hunting, and shooting. We're not going to be the experts on white-tailed deer or turkeys ourselves, but we know the formula to go find people who are. So there will be job opportunities for people who understand content and community in those niches, likely reporting up to Luke, probably starting to open up in early 2026 once budgeting is set at our November board meeting.
Tom: Is there a chance Salt Strong eventually turns into something like a Sportsman's Guide fishing club, name and all?
Joe: Salt Strong is not going away — they paid a lot of money for that brand. What it looks like in five or ten years, I don't know for certain, but we also own Hunt Strong and Bass Strong, and my gut says those will all be hubs of content leading to one unified membership eventually — one payment for access to everything. But that's five years out, not next year.
Tom: Companies that acquire founders often promise you can focus on what you're good at and drop what you hate. What would Luke say he wants off his plate?
Joe: Finance and inventory management, hands down. He's been half content, half inventory manager since day one, and he hates being stuck in Excel — he's a natural teacher who belongs outside on the water testing gear on camera. That's where our company does best and builds the most trust.
Tom: What about you?
Joe: For me, it's the day-to-day managing of people — I've never had a true COO. We've always had department heads, like IT and tackle and operations, reporting straight up to me. This past year we hired Jason as head of operations, and I don't know that we'd be where we are today, even through this acquisition, without him. Before Jason, I'd come up with an idea, we'd agree, and just start moving — hitting every landmine along the way and duct-taping fixes. Jason sees the landmines ahead of time and loves fixing that stuff; it frees me up to focus on the bigger five- and ten-year vision instead of getting stuck filling out HR forms or managing fulfillment, which we also just transitioned out of this year — we went from doing about a thousand orders a day in-house to a third-party partner, which was an enormous amount of negotiation and analysis that Jason took off my plate entirely.
Tom: At iCast you mentioned you were about to be away from work for a month, challenged to see how well the team could run without you. What did you learn?
Joe: I learned that I like working too much to do that again. The rules were no emails, no meetings, completely checked out. The first week was great — my wife and I went to Costa Rica, then Anna Maria — but once she went back to work and my friends were all working, I was bored out of my mind, feeling like maybe how my dad felt in retirement. About day four, my brother called me, even though he's not supposed to unless it's a real emergency, and said one of our accounts had been hacked and $50,000 was stolen. My instinct was to put the cape on and fix it, but I made myself stay hands-off and just checked that the team had it handled. We never got the money back — it was a hard lesson, but the team crushed it, which proved we finally had the right people in place. I wouldn't do a full month again, but I learned we could survive it.
Tom: We had something almost identical happen — someone knew an employee was leaving on a cruise and asked us to wire money before they left port. We never got it back either, and it turned out they'd been in our systems and calendar for weeks, waiting.
Joe: Same story on our end — we've since put real security in place. Wiring money over email or text is now the reddest of red flags, no exceptions.
Tom: With all the video and podcast content you've created, where does it all live?
Joe: Selling a company forces you to document everything — we ended up with something like 8,000-plus final delivered videos, not counting B-roll, spread across YouTube, Vimeo behind a paywall for insider content, Google Drive, and Dropbox. We just hired a head of content who's using AI to organize all of it so members can search and instantly pull up something like Pat's whole Texas-to-Virginia road trip.
Tom: What's the one-year plan now that some things are coming off your plate?
Joe: Honestly, nothing's really come off our plate yet — we're still deep in post-acquisition logistics, changing EINs, bank accounts, all of that. One priority is buying the theme park property itself, just to enjoy as a family for now; the people who acquired us are actually excited to eventually be part of developing it when the time is right. Otherwise, the next year is about our existing insider members — we're at 65,000 and want to get closer to 100,000, especially now that they get free Sportsman's Guide access and real savings.
Tom: Are there another 40,000 inshore saltwater anglers out there to get, or do you need to expand into new groups?
Joe: We've actually had over 100,000 people pay us at some point over the years; not everyone stays, but the majority do, or we wouldn't have sold a leaky bucket. Just in Florida there are over 500,000 people seriously into saltwater fishing based on license and tackle spending, so there's plenty of room — which is part of why we expanded into Texas, the Gulf, and the Carolinas, and are starting to move up the East Coast with coaches in the Chesapeake and John Skinner covering New York and New Jersey. We're not going to the West Coast anytime soon. Short term, it's about doing a better job for existing members — more coaches, more app features, more discounts, since a lot of people, myself included, are trying to save money right now.
Tom: I don't know exactly what a fishing theme park looks like in your mind, but for me it's a place to catch the biggest fish of every species, even if I have to wait in line — plus turkey legs and cotton candy.
Joe: Definitely not roller coasters. The closest comparison is River Ranch, owned by Westgate — think of it as a theme park for cowboys, built around a Saturday night rodeo, with archery, airboat rides, and mud buggy rides all day leading up to it. Imagine that same format built around fishing.
Tom: That sounds awesome, man. You mentioned that idea at our very first meeting — good luck with it, I think you'll do it.
Tom: If anyone wants to join, what's the pitch?
Joe: Go to saltstrong.com and click join the Insider Club. As of this recording you get that BOGO membership — unlimited access to Salt Strong and Sportsman's Guide, so if you're into shooting, hunting, archery, or freshwater fishing, you get discounts there too. Our Smart Fishing Spots app is included for all members, and the community itself is special — no negativity, no cursing, just positive people helping each other, with local chapters now meeting up face to face almost like a small group at church. Tom, thank you — you were a real mentor to us. When we started, nobody in the industry even talked to us at ICAST except you. You told me to just drive up for the day, and we spent the afternoon together at Whole Foods, and that opened my eyes to so much about this industry. Huge thank you to you.
Tom: You didn't need a lot of help — you just needed one person to tell you it wasn't the worst idea in the world. It's been really cool to watch from that first meeting on. Congratulations, and pass that along to Luke. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Joe: Thank you, brother.
Tom: Alright, my man, we'll talk to you later.
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