Dan Beaudoin

President and CEO, DMF Bait Company

He grew up fishing every day with his best friend, out in any weather until the ice turned hard, and then lost the habit somewhere in the building of the business. These days he gets out for the bass tournament on his own lake the second Saturday of June, an event he describes as more of a drinking club than a tournament, where live bait is allowed and he keeps the garlic nightcrawlers in his own boat. The family had hunting property in the Upper Peninsula for years, and he keeps telling his wife that fishing is what retirement is for.

Live Bait Distribution
Big Box Retail Accounts
Perishable Logistics
Family Business Culture
Product Line Expansion

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About Dan Beaudoin

Dan Beaudoin is president and CEO of DMF Bait Company, the Michigan family business his father, uncle, and their friend started by accident in 1977. He has led it for 29 of its 49 years, and its live bait now sits in roughly 12,000 stores across 49 states, from Walmart and Bass Pro to thousands of gas stations.

What Dan built

Dan Beaudoin is the president and CEO of DMF Bait Company, the second generation of a business that began when three Michigan high school teachers were talked into raising composting worms for a buyback company that vanished. He grew up inside it, swaddled in a school bus that ran student crews picking worms off golf courses at night, riding his bike to the original shop to put lids on cups and flip flats, and he came on full time in 1997 after his dad and uncle told him to swap teaching for a business degree because the company was about to explode. What he added was structure to what he calls the organized chaos the founders ran on: proprietary packaging that changes by destination, a parcel shipping model built where no roadmap existed, guaranteed live delivery in 49 states, hospital grade backup power, and two walk-in coolers holding 26 million and 20 million worms. The retail footprint now covers about 90 percent of Walmart stores in freshwater markets, Academy, Bass Pro, Cabela's, Dick's, Dunham's, and thousands of convenience stores, with Texas as the number one state.

Dan in the field

His outdoor life is honest about its own gaps. As a kid he fished every day with his best friend, in any weather, right up until the ice turned hard, and then adulthood and a growing company took the habit away from him. He lives on a lake now and shows up at minimum for the tournament on the second Saturday of June, which he happily describes as more of a drinking club than a bass tournament and where live bait is permitted, to the likely horror of serious bass anglers. He has done some salmon charters. He rarely grabs a pole and walks to the end of his own dock the way he once did, and he blames organized sports for the years his kids could have spent in a boat. The family had hunting property in the Upper Peninsula for a long stretch, a place he says still runs on a quality outdoor life rather than a travel schedule. He tests the garlic scented nightcrawler on his own tournament partners, which is roughly as close to field research as the job gets.

Why this conversation matters

The interesting tension in this conversation is that almost nothing about DMF was planned. The founders got into a business they did not understand, kept going out of stubbornness, and had no goal past selling a million worms, which they reached quickly and then had nothing to aim at. Dan is the one who had to convert that into a company with finish lines, a documented shipping system, and a culture that survives seasonal swings from 100 employees in June to 65 by fall. He is also candid about the parts that did not work, including a stretch when DMF paid the best wages in town and still bled people because leadership had drifted away from the floor. For anyone running an operation where the product can die in transit, where supply depends on whether there was moisture and no moon in Ontario last night, and where the customer has never once wondered where the worms come from, his answers are unusually specific about what actually holds a business together for 49 years.

“Our worms catch fish or die trying.”

Dan Beaudoin

Dan Beaudoin on The Hunt for Success

Sam McGough's full conversation with Dan, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Episode 22, 57 min

Hooked on Success

Sam McGough sits down with Dan Beaudoin, who has run DMF Bait Company for 29 of the 49 years it has existed and whose live bait now sits in roughly 12,000 stores. The company began as a mistake. His father, his father's twin brother, and their friend Fred were Michigan high school teachers in the 1970s, paid only during the school year, so they spent summers siding homes and doing landscaping until a family connection pitched them on raising worms for a company that promised to buy the inventory back. That was 1977. The worms turned out to be red composting worms, almost nobody in America was composting anything, and the buyback company skipped town, leaving three teachers with a rented building and a million worms nobody wanted. Bait shops kept telling them the same thing, that red worms are stringy and nearly impossible to hook, but that nightcrawlers would sell. So they pivoted on the assumption that a worm is a worm, which Dan compares to owning a hamster and figuring a dog cannot be much different. Nightcrawlers do not reproduce in captivity. The one on your hook was picked off the ground at night in Ontario and is probably five to seven years old. What follows is a Saturday morning phone call to Kmart that everyone said was a wasted dime, a 1988 drought they shipped through at a loss for most of a season, a decade of figuring out how to send something alive to 49 states, and a night spent picking worms off a cooler floor by headlamp while more of them fell out of the racks overhead.

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Key takeaways from Dan Beaudoin

The ideas Dan left on the table in episode 22.

A million worms and nobody to sell them to.

The pitch came through a family connection in 1977 and sounded simple, raise worms and the company buys them back. What arrived were red composting worms, which multiply fast and had almost no market in a decade when nobody composted anything. The buyback company took the money and skipped town. Three teachers were left with a rented building, a million worms, and no plan.
I got a hamster, how much different can a dog be.

That is how Dan describes the assumption behind the pivot to nightcrawlers. Red worms reach maturity in six to nine months and reproduce rapidly in a bin. Nightcrawlers do not reproduce in captivity at all, need cool dark space, and the ones on your hook are five to seven years old. Nobody was there to teach them the difference, so they learned it in the building.
The Saturday phone call everyone said was a wasted dime.

By the early 1980s the founders were sitting down to divide up the business. Uncle Mike made one more call to Kmart, whose headquarters was 20 minutes away, and somebody actually answered on a Saturday morning and told him to come in. They left with 50 stores and a promise to provide refrigerators they could not afford. That summer worms were the top item in the sporting goods department.
Shipping at a loss won them the whole chain.

The 1988 drought made worms scarce and Kmart had other vendors bidding against them. DMF bought worms for double what it sold them for and kept filling every store request for most of the season, partly because three former teachers were terrified to ask for a price increase. At the end of the year the buyer called to say nobody else had supported them like that and gave DMF all 750 to 1,000 stores. Dan thinks they would have gotten the price increase if they had asked, and he is not sure it would have been worth as much.