Joshua Waldron had a respectable problem: the magazines knew where to find him. He had photographed for national publications, but being their Utah photographer carried a geographical ceiling. Bigger assignments meant moving to a bigger city. New York and Los Angeles were available. So was staying home. He chose home. “I like Utah,” he said, a small sentence with rather large consequences.
The usual career story rewards the person who leaves. Waldron’s takes its first interesting turn because he stayed. He had spent 12 years in editorial photography, a profession that asks you to notice what other people overlook and then persuade someone to pay for the picture. Those habits would travel farther than he did. The camera eventually gave way to a factory; the attention to presentation remained.
There were experiments before SilencerCo. He invested in a recording studio with Jonathon Shults, a friend from high school, and bought a marble-and-granite countertop business. Neither became the work he wanted. The eventual partnership brought together a photographer and a musician with sound-engineering experience. Their shared interest in shooting gave them a product category to investigate. Their dissatisfaction gave them a reason to investigate it seriously.
One makes it. One goes knocking.
SilencerCo began in 2008 in West Valley City, Utah. Shults and Waldron initially imagined a hobby business while working on a software venture. Research changed the scale of their ambition. They abandoned the software project and concentrated on suppressors. Their first product, the Sparrow, arrived in January 2009. The early division of labor was refreshingly easy to understand: Shults worked in the shop, and Waldron went looking for customers.
Waldron traveled around the United States to meet dealers, showing them the .22 Sparrow and taking orders back to his partner. He recalled demonstrations that involved firing into a bucket of sand. It was an unusually literal sales presentation. A buyer could experience the product rather than admire a rendering of something that might eventually exist. For a business with two people, every order also provided a direct answer to the question of whether the idea had legs.
The ambition extended beyond a single device. Waldron saw openings in customer service, marketing and consumer understanding. A better product needed a business around it that people could actually approach. Photography had already taught him that getting the assignment and keeping the client happy belonged in the same job. In manufacturing, he applied that instinct to the relationship between the person making a purchase and the company standing behind it.
SilencerCo begins
Waldron meets dealers
SilencerCo to Vista
Productive Difficulty
A shape people could recognize
A suppressor is a technical object, but a buyer’s first encounter with one may be visual. SilencerCo’s Osprey had a distinctive profile, departing from the familiar round tube. That shape gave its marketing something useful: recognition. Viewers who saw it on a screen could identify the object and, potentially, the company behind it. Product design was doing some of the advertising before anyone wrote a line of copy.
By 2015, Waldron was talking about appearances on The Walking Dead and State of Affairs. A retailer described customers recognizing the Osprey on Rick’s gun and asking whether they could buy it. The television connection amused the salesman in Waldron, but it also served his larger effort to make a little-understood category familiar. A recognizable silhouette could carry a company’s name into a conversation that would otherwise never begin.
The expanding product range offered other ways into that conversation. In 2014, Waldron discussed the Salvo 12, a commercially available shotgun suppressor. SilencerCo was moving across categories rather than depending indefinitely on its first rimfire product. Each new application required more than a launch announcement. It invited customers to reconsider what a suppressor could be attached to and where it might fit into their own interests.
The market beyond the machine shop
Waldron’s public role became increasingly political. He helped co-found the American Suppressor Association and served on the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation board. Those connections brought the factory’s concerns into a different kind of room. Dealers could stock products; legislators could affect the size and accessibility of the market. A founder working in this industry had reasons to care about both conversations.
In a 2016 interview, Waldron described education as part of SilencerCo’s strategy from the beginning. He wanted consumers to understand that lawful ownership was possible. His marketing argument began before the normal comparison of one manufacturer against another. There was little value in winning a preference contest among people who believed the entire category was unavailable to them.
He also backed federal proposals intended to reduce the regulatory burden on suppressor ownership. In 2015, he explained his involvement with the association and the NRA in developing legislation with Representative Matt Salmon. His account acknowledged the commercial upside for his company alongside his political conviction. The two interests occupied the same desk. Advocacy could enlarge the market, and a growing business gave him a platform from which to advocate.
A market has to know it exists before it can choose what to buy.
The education problem at the heart of SilencerCo’s early strategy
The founder’s chair changes hands
Growth gave the garage story its public milestones. SilencerCo ranked No. 202 on the 2013 Inc. 5000. The company’s expansion meant more products, more employees and more people responsible for keeping the operation moving. A two-person division of labor becomes an increasingly incomplete description once a company has departments. The founder who once carried orders home now works through an organization.
The next chapter arrived in January 2018. SilencerCo announced leadership changes effective January 3: Waldron would step down as CEO and become Senior Advocacy Advisor. Shults would move into the chief operating officer role. Both would remain on the board, and the announcement identified them as the two largest equity holders. Waldron’s connection to the company continued, while his daily responsibilities changed.
The transition followed a difficult period. The business had seen reduced sales and layoffs, and industry coverage described a contraction as customers waited in hope of relaxed regulation. It is an awkward chapter in a founder’s biography, which makes it necessary. Building a market does not grant control over its timing. The expectations surrounding a political change can affect buying decisions before any change arrives.
A public milestone, five years after the company began.
Three brands, a different assignment
On June 19, 2018, Vista Outdoor appointed Waldron president of its Blackhawk business unit, covering Blackhawk, Eagle and Uncle Mike’s. The remit included finance, operations, manufacturing, sales, marketing and new products. He would relocate to Virginia Beach, close to military and law-enforcement customers. The appointment put a former garage entrepreneur inside an established public company, with a much larger organization behind the job.
His explanation of the attraction was specific. He knew and had used the brands, and wanted to rebuild their connection with customers. In a 2019 interview, he discussed a review of products, a more focused assortment, dedicated sales and marketing teams, and closer feedback from users. The work sounded familiar to anyone following his earlier career: product quality and the way a company presents itself were again part of one assignment.
The corporate setting also exposed a tension he readily admitted. “I challenge everything,” he said. That disposition could improve a process and make life awkward within established guardrails. An entrepreneur gains resources by joining a larger organization, but also inherits decisions made long before his arrival. Waldron seemed interested in the trade. It offered room to build, provided he could convince the organization to move with him.
An executive becomes a student
His subsequent career included an interim CEO role at the sporting lifestyle brand Ball and Buck, listed in his work history for 2020-2021. His current biography also places him at Angled Spade Technologies as Senior Director of Revenue from 2023 onward. Its team page describes work spanning product design, manufacturing and business management. The setting changed again, while the recurring questions concerned products, customers and how an operation earns its keep.
Between those executive chapters sits an achievement with a different scale: a business degree. Regent University identifies Waldron as a 2022 B.S. in Business graduate. His LinkedIn education record lists 2020-2022 and graduation cum laude. He pursued the qualification after finding that his executive experience did not substitute for a degree in online hiring systems. A résumé can contain a factory and still lose an argument with a checkbox.
The decision has a practical character. He wanted more options and wanted his children to see him follow the advice he gave them about education. It also complicates the tidy image of a founder who learns everything by doing. Waldron had already run businesses. He still returned to the classroom. Experience and formal study became two parts of the same working life, acquired in an order university brochures rarely recommend.
Choosing the next hard thing
Today his public work gathers around Hard Is Fun and his book Productive Difficulty. By October 2026, his website presents the book as available in paperback, hardcover and ebook. He speaks and coaches business owners, particularly operators in manufacturing and durable goods. The intended audience is people already responsible for an enterprise, where a bad decision has consequences beyond an untidy notebook.
His writing makes a distinction that the cheerful name can obscure. Difficulty alone earns no prize. In his essay on seven characteristics of productive difficulty, he asks whether effort creates lasting capabilities, meaningful value for customers and advantages others cannot easily reproduce. A hard project can consume time without building anything useful. His framework asks the person making the decision to examine the return before celebrating the exertion.
One example in that essay is bringing anodizing into SilencerCo. Waldron describes the equipment, learning and mistakes as expensive, then argues that the resulting internal capability paid back through greater control and expertise. The useful question is what remains after the difficult stage is over. If all that remains is another version of the same problem, the company has bought itself a very elaborate treadmill.
There is still an artist alongside the operator. His personal site lists three albums: Hard to Breathe, Look Back Keep Going and Wherever I End Up. Photography continues as a travel pursuit. His blog ranges from business decisions to handwriting and Mark Twain. The range feels consistent with a career that began by trying several kinds of work before one caught.
In his essay about Tom Sawyer, Waldron remembers building an unfinished cabin with a childhood friend in a Utah canyon. He returns to the appeal of the undertaking itself: making something, testing an idea, going where the plan is incomplete. The adult version has included a factory, corporate brands and a book. The next project still needs to justify its trouble. He has accumulated enough of that to be selective.