Tom Taylor’s Playbook for Rebuilding Colt and CZ

Most people who spend more than two decades climbing mountains eventually decide to stop climbing. Tom Taylor tried. It did not take.

“I thought I was going to retire right up into the sunset,” Taylor told me. Then the phone rang about Colt CZ, and the man whose fingerprints are on some of the biggest brand comebacks in the American firearms industry did the math on two more legacy names and could not say no.

The Fixer In Person

I sat down with Taylor, now Chief Commercial Officer at Colt CZ, to talk about the thread that runs through his whole career. It is not luck, and it is not a single blockbuster product. It is a method. Over 22 years, he has walked into broken or sleepy gun companies and walked out having made them matter again.

What makes that record unusual is that nobody taught him how to do it. Taylor holds no firearms industry pedigree, no engineering degree, and no formal training in the products he now oversees. Everything he knows about this business he learned inside it, by asking questions, doing the unglamorous work himself, and thinking his way around problems other people had given up on. Now he is pointing that hard-won method at two of the most storied names in the business, and he is candid about how long the road is going to be.

Retirement Did Not Take: Why Taylor Answered The Phone

“If you look at my resume, Smith & Wesson, Mossberg, SIG Sauer, those are three pretty significant brands,” Taylor said. “And then CZ and Colt are two more brands that I just said, man, I’d love to be part of this.”

Three brands that were either in trouble or thinking too small when he arrived, and three brands that look very different today.

The call came, by his memory, “February before last.” He was supposed to be done. Instead, he took on a portfolio that includes CZ, Colt, and Dan Wesson, three names with wildly different problems. CZ is world-class and barely known to American buyers. Dan Wesson builds arguably the best production 1911 on the market and does almost no marketing at all. And Colt is, in Taylor’s words, “the crown prince,” a brand everyone recognizes and almost no one has marketed seriously in a generation.

“Colt, while well known, has just not been well marketed for probably 20 or 30 years,” Taylor said. “It’s really been a long, dry spell for Colt through a couple bankruptcies. But to be part of a team to rebuild the Colt brand into something special, I couldn’t resist that.”

That is the whole Taylor pattern in one sentence. He is not drawn to what is working. He is drawn to what is broken.

From Coca-Cola Trucks…

Taylor did not grow up dreaming about the gun industry. He grew up in a blue-collar family in Dallas, the son of a World War II Army Air Corps veteran who worked the assembly line at a Ford plant. His first trigger pulls came at the range with his father’s war-bring-back Walther P38 and on his grandmother’s and uncle’s farms with a .22, a .30-06, and a .410. Guns and military history were simply the air in the house.

The career came later, and from an unlikely place. Taylor spent more than 20 years at the Coca-Cola company, starting on a route truck and ending up as a senior marketing executive. That is where the reputation that would define him first formed.

“My reputation as a fixer, a troubleshooter, started before the gun industry,” Taylor said.

At Coca-Cola he kept getting handed the messes. In his late 20s he reported directly to the president of Coca-Cola North America on a turnaround project. Then he was sent to New York City, where the company was bleeding shares to an idea that sounded absurd at the time.

“In 1992, nobody would have believed people would buy water,” Taylor said. “You turned on your sink and got water in those days.”

…To Gun Counters

From there came the assignment that made him. Taylor helped start Coca-Cola’s Walmart team, three people chasing a retailer that was still building its first supercenters. Four years later, the numbers were almost hard to say out loud.

“We took the revenue from 32 million in sales in 1993 to 1.7 billion four years later,” Taylor said. “And we went from a team of three to a team of 57.”

When Coca-Cola went through a wave of reorganizations in the early 2000s, Taylor did something risky. He left without another job lined up. A recruiter he had told about his interest in firearms called with an opening in sales and marketing at Smith & Wesson. He had three offers in the consumer-products world that would have looked a lot like his Coca-Cola career. He took none of them.

“I just immediately said, that’s what I want,” Taylor said. “About two weeks later, I had a job offer, and I’ve never looked back.”

No Degree, No Pedigree: Learning The Industry From Scratch

Here is the part of the story that should encourage anyone trying to break into this business. When I asked Taylor what education prepared him for the firearms industry, the answer was one word.

“No,” he said.

He had shot guns as a kid, then barely touched them for two decades while Coca-Cola consumed his life. He arrived at Smith & Wesson in his early 40s with a Fortune 500 toolkit and almost no working knowledge of the industry he had just joined. So he set about acquiring it deliberately.

Becoming Part of the World

He immersed himself in company history, tracking down Smith & Wesson’s longtime historian, a man named Roy Jenks who had become estranged from the company, and bringing him back into the fold. Then Taylor sat with him for hours.

He also went out and shot. Taylor took up handgun hunting, which he describes as sitting somewhere between archery and rifle work in difficulty, and did it around the world several times a year. He shot IDPA to sharpen up. None of it was required. All of it was the education he had not gotten anywhere else.

A Timely Caution

The most valuable thing he learned, though, came as a warning. Veterans of the industry pulled him aside early and told him about the pattern they had seen over and over: executives arriving from big consumer-goods companies, convinced they had landed among lesser minds.

“They come with a degree of arrogance because of the big business they came from,” Taylor said. “They’re like, oh, this little industry, these people aren’t as sharp as the people that I knew.”

He heard the same dismissal in a phrase that still bothers him.

“I had people say to me, I don’t understand why there’s a need to get involved, because it’s just a widget,” Taylor said. “You’re just selling a widget. Same selling principles, marketing principles, business principles as anything else. And I think that’s just not true. There’s not very many industries where people have so much passion. They work all day to earn their money, they go home, they read magazines, they watch TV shows. If you miss that in this industry, you’re missing a big piece of what you need to know.”

So he did the thing that separates him from the people in that cautionary tale. He shut up.

“In those days, I listened a lot more than I talked,” Taylor said. “I think that was really, really important, to take a couple of years to really absorb the industry.”

The Broken-Business Rule: “I’d Rather Climb The Mountain”

If there is a single idea at the center of Taylor’s career, it is a preference that most executives would never say out loud. He does not want the healthy company. He wants the sick one.

“I’d much rather step into a broken situation than step in the situation that’s going well and everything’s great,” Taylor said.

He explains it with a sports analogy he admits is imperfect but that lands anyway. Would you rather be the guy who replaces Tom Brady after six Super Bowls, or the guy who replaces the quarterback losing half his games? Nobody wants to follow Brady, Taylor argues, because the bar is impossibly high and there is nowhere to go but down. The broken team is the opportunity.

Starting Small

Smith & Wesson in the early 2000s was that broken team, and it is genuinely hard to picture now. The company that today tops nearly every brand-awareness study in the industry was then a company in freefall. It had signed the Clinton-era agreement that promised to drop a wave of municipal lawsuits, and the backlash from consumers and the NRA was severe.

“They boycotted Smith & Wesson, and the company was under 100 million dollars in revenue at that time,” Taylor said. “The entire management team had been fired or moved on. I walked into a building that didn’t have a lot of resources. So I had to learn everything.”

That scarcity turned out to be the best training he could have gotten. With no deep bench to delegate to, Taylor had to touch product, sales, and marketing all at once, standing up departments that did not yet exist.

“It wasn’t like I walked into this oiled machine and everybody was doing their jobs,” Taylor said. “I had to really roll my sleeves up and learn. That was probably a fortunate situation, that I was forced to learn, because I didn’t have enough resources to just delegate and sit in my office.”

Getting Started

His first major project was a fix. Smith & Wesson’s striker-fired Sigma pistol had stumbled after a Glock patent suit forced a trigger redesign, and the company needed a real answer.

“We immediately launched the striker project,” Taylor said. “About 18 months later, we launched the M&P pistol.”

The M&P became one of the defining American handguns of the century, and it spawned a family of rifles and revolvers that helped carry the brand back to the top.

The Fixer Kept Moving

When Taylor moved to Mossberg in 2010, he found a different kind of broken. The company was not in crisis. It just thought small.

“I wouldn’t say Mossberg was broken, but it thought small,” Taylor said. “It wasn’t a big-thinking company, and we were able to change that mindset.”

It also pushed his self-education one level deeper. Mossberg had engineering and it had sales and marketing, but it had nobody running product.

“We didn’t even have a product manager,” Taylor said. “So myself and our VP of marketing sort of became the product managers. We had to do the market research. We had to write the specs for product. I had to get my hands really dirty.”

The proof was in the shotguns. Mossberg dominated pump-action shotguns but sold only about 7,000 semi-automatics a year. Taylor ran the same play he had run at Smith & Wesson. Identify the gap, then close it with product and credibility. He called Jerry Miculek and convinced him to leave his existing sponsor. Miculek helped design the JM Pro Series, a semi-auto that gave working-class 3-Gun competitors a gun they could actually afford. Mossberg also signed Lena Miculek, whom Taylor calls the best female shooter on the planet.

“Our semiautomatic shotgun sales went from 7,000 to 70,000 in two years,” Taylor said.

Learn Everything

Ten years at two under-resourced companies gave Taylor something a bigger employer never would have. He had no choice but to learn every function of a gun company by performing it himself.

“It was a wonderful 10 years of sort of learning and learning and learning,” he said. “Hunting products, sports shooting products, self-defense products. It was just a wonderful opportunity to learn.”

Out of those years, he pulled the two words he now uses to describe the whole job.

“You have to have these equal parts patience and perseverance,” he said. “Sometimes you walk up to a giant mountain, and you’re like, how am I ever going to get to the top of that? And one of the first things you realize is you’re not going to climb it in one day.”

Value Over Volume: The Case Against Discounting

Ask Taylor for the fastest way to wreck a brand, and he will point straight at the discount rack.

“People get impatient,” he said. “They want to discount their way to the top, or they want to take shortcuts. And there’s almost never a shortcut.”

His philosophy is the opposite of the race to the bottom, and it is the part of his method that most directly explains where CZ and Colt are headed. Taylor would rather build value into a brand, charge more for it, and keep the ownership profitable than move a few extra units at a lower price and hollow out the brand’s equity in the process.

“I’d rather build value in a brand and charge more and have our ownership happy, making more profit,” Taylor said. “If you’ve established a reputation as building your brand through discounting, then your ownership is not going to be happy. Maybe you sold a few more units in the short term, but it doesn’t create long-term growth.”

The catch is that value takes time, and time takes patience from the people signing the checks. Taylor is blunt about the conversation he has to have with ownership and with the distributors and big-box buyers who decide how a brand gets shelved.

“If you’re going to come back to me in three months and say, what have you done for me, I’m going to tell you I haven’t done anything in three months, or six months, or sometimes a year,” Taylor said. “It takes time, and it takes patience.”

The Little Circle: How Gun Marketing Broke Out Of Its Bubble

Taylor has watched the entire way the industry talks to buyers turn inside out, and he thinks most consumers never noticed it happen.

When he entered the business in 2004, the whole industry was talking to itself. He describes it as a small, closed loop of the same magazines, the same outdoor TV networks, and the same faces reaching the same customers.

“When I first entered the industry, there was a study done, and 56 percent of buying decisions were based on articles people read in print magazines,” Taylor said. “Who reads print magazines today?”

The Problem

The problem, as Taylor frames it, is one of scale and money. The firearms industry is small in the grand scheme of American business, and it is trying to reach an audience that is anything but small.

“Somewhere between 150 and 200 million people in America are potentially interested in buying a gun,” Taylor said. “During the surge alone, we had 25 million new gun owners. But generally speaking, those 200 million people are not reading industry magazines. They’re not watching gun shows. How do we communicate a message to those people?”

That question is the entire modern marketing challenge, and it is complicated by the fact that gun brands are locked out of most mainstream advertising. Taylor’s answer is to hunt for the places where gun-friendly audiences already gather. He rattles off the affinities: fishing, NASCAR, UFC. The trouble is the price of admission.

“There’s no gun company on the planet that’s ever going to spend 20 million dollars on a NASCAR sponsorship,” Taylor said. “But we need NASCAR fans. So how do we creatively get to those people?”

Finding Solutions

His favorite example of getting it right came from a competitor. Years ago, Taylor watched an old-school gun company advertise its youth rifles on a Bear Grylls survival show that every 11- and 12-year-old boy in the country was watching.

“How brilliant is that?” Taylor said. “He found a way to get outside the industry and target youth with a youth gun, and he reached a unique audience. That’s our challenge, finding those places.”

The SIG Blueprint: Building A Tribe, Not Just A Customer

Taylor’s ten years at SIG Sauer are the clearest demonstration of his method at full scale, and the piece he is proudest of started as a modest product idea.

He arrived in 2015 to partner with CEO Ron Cohen, an engineer who had already spent a decade fixing SIG’s product and manufacturing. What SIG lacked was a sales and marketing engine, and Taylor built it. One of his first projects was a premium line called the SIG Legion. The internal forecast was cautious.

“The original forecast was that we were going to sell 3,000 to 5,000 guns,” Taylor said. “The first 18 months of the Legion program, we sold 70,000 226s and 229s.”

Building A Community As Well As A Brand

The guns were only half of it. The real innovation was turning buyers into members. Legion required owners to register, hand over information gun people famously hate to share, and in return join something exclusive.

“When I left SIG, there were 180,000 Legion members,” Taylor said. “Gun people typically don’t like to join. The percent of Legion guns sold to that number was the highest I ever saw of any joining program in the industry, 10 times over.”

Then Taylor pushed the tribe into the real world with Camp Legion, a paid immersion at the factory and SIG Academy in New Hampshire. The company braced itself to charge $3,500 and lost money on the first one. It did not matter.

“It sold out in a snap,” Taylor said. By the time he left, Camp Legion cost $6,000 plus travel and sold out online in roughly 15 minutes.

That experiential model, layered on top of dealer education, is the SIG signature. Taylor’s team flew more than 700 counter-sales associates from dealers across the country to New Hampshire for two days of shooting and immersion, on SIG’s dime, because the person behind the gun-store counter shapes what a new buyer walks out with.

“We can’t afford to advertise at a UFC fight,” Taylor said. “So we invested in the people who actually talk to consumers.”

Conflict In Multiple Arenas

The other half of the SIG story is the military validation, and Taylor does not shy away from the controversy attached to it. The P320 that won the U.S. military handgun contract has been the subject of persistent claims and lawsuits, and Taylor’s defense of the pistol is unequivocal.

“In spite of all the stuff you hear in the news about the 320, I can tell you from many years of dealing with it, it’s been a social media contrived issue,” Taylor said. “320s don’t go off by themselves. When they go to court, they win.”

The P365, which shares the same striker trigger architecture as the P320, launched in 2018 and has been the best-selling gun on the market since.

“The 365 has the best reputation of any gun on the market,” Taylor said. “It’s interesting, because the 365 and the 320 are essentially the same trigger system.”

Taylor’s takeaway from SIG is a formula, not a fluke. Strong product and manufacturing first. Then a sales and marketing arm that connects buyers to something bigger than a transaction. Then a CEO willing to spend money and wait for the return.

“Consumers want to be part of something,” Taylor said. “SIG did a really good job at building really good products, coming up with great innovations, and then finding ways to connect with consumers.”

CZ’s American Problem

Which brings Taylor to the mountain he is climbing now, and CZ is a very specific kind of challenge. It is not broken and it is not unknown. It is simply invisible to American buyers in a way its quality does not deserve.

“CZ already has a very good reputation globally,” Taylor said. “None is relevant in the U.S. If you shoot the Shadow 2 or the 457 Rimfire rifle, there is a tagline, for those who know. If you know CZ products, you’re probably very loyal to them, because they’re very high quality.”

The global credibility is real and getting realer. CZ recently won the German military contract, and the Bundeswehr’s selection of the CZ P-10, designated the P13, ended a long run of domestically built German service pistols under a framework agreement worth up to 56 million euros for as many as 203,000 guns. CZ also supplies Bren rifles into the war in Ukraine. The company has the combat validation that American marketers dream about. What it has not had is an American story.

A Steep Mountain

Taylor’s job is to translate global respect into domestic relevance, and the value-over-volume philosophy fits CZ perfectly. This is not a brand you discount into the American market. It is a brand you introduce, product by product, to buyers who have never handled one.

He is quick to fold Dan Wesson into the same mission, and it may be the purest example of his thesis. Dan Wesson builds what Taylor calls the best production 1911 on the market, plus the DWX, a hybrid of the CZ 75 and the 2011 platform. It does this with essentially no marketing at all.

“It’s a surprisingly large company with zero marketing,” Taylor said. “That’s because they build such a good product that with no marketing, there’s a demand.”

To tell that story, Taylor has brought family back into it, re-engaging Eric Wesson, a direct descendant of Daniel Baird Wesson, to help carry the brand’s heritage forward. It is the same instinct that led him, two decades earlier, to track down the estranged Smith & Wesson company historian and bring him back into the fold. Taylor treats brand history as an asset most companies leave on the table.

Making Colt Great Again

And then there is Colt, the name Taylor calls the crown prince, and the reason he came out of retirement at all.

The paradox of Colt is that its awareness has never been the problem. Its marketing has. The Python. The M4 that still arms hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the U.S. Army and globally. The legacy that the entire AR category traces back to. The recognition is total. But at various points Colt stopped marketing to commercial buyers, and at times stopped selling to them at all, choosing to live on military contracts.

“It’s sort of become passe. It’s just an M4, it’s just an AR rifle,” Taylor said. “Well, Colt is the legacy of AR rifles.”

Taylor reaches for the company’s history to make his case, and it is a genuinely remarkable story that most shooters have never heard.

A Mini History Lesson

Samuel Colt founded the company in 1836 and died in 1862, during the Civil War. His wife, Elizabeth Colt, took over and ran the company as managing partner for roughly four decades, at a time when women did not run major American manufacturers.

“There was a woman, in a time when women did not run major companies, running Colt,” Taylor said. “It’s ironic that we now have a new female CEO at Colt, which is awesome, given the heritage of Elizabeth Colt.”

Taylor says the goodwill is already there for the taking. When his team approaches partners and shooters about helping rebuild the brand, the answer is almost automatic.

“It’s been 100 percent, just tell me how I can help,” Taylor said. “Because Colt is important to people. If you’re a service member, it was probably there with you in some pretty important times in your life, and you trusted it. I trusted my Colt rifle, said by millions of service members, since the Old West basically.”

Playing A Long Game

The plan is deliberately slow, in keeping with everything Taylor believes about building value rather than chasing a quarter. CZ, he says, had its first real coming-out party at the most recent SHOT Show. Colt’s is being aimed further out.

“We’re kind of targeting SHOT Show 27 as our coming-out party for Colt,” Taylor said. “By the time SHOT Show rolls around in 2027, I think you’re going to start seeing an evolution of the way Colt is marketed.”

For a man who could be watching his seven grandchildren full-time, the goal is refreshingly unglamorous. He is not chasing one more blockbuster launch. He is trying to put two great names back where they belong.

“My goal here is just to get these brands relevant in America,” Taylor said. “If I can spend the last few years of my career working to help rebuild these brands and getting them in a place where they belong in the marketplace, that’ll be a really nice thing.”

Rapid Fire: Tom Taylor Fun Facts

I closed with a few quick ones so readers can find some common ground with the man behind the brands.

Q: Favorite gun?

A: The SIG MPX, hands down, though he admits he is still getting to know the CZ and Colt catalogs. “Over the 22 years, my favorite gun to shoot has been a SIG MPX. My little six-and-a-half-inch-barrel MPX pistol with a brace on it.” He has also fallen hard for the CZ Shadow 2 and rates the CZ Scorpion as a close cousin to his beloved MPX.

Q: Favorite movie?

A: Top Gun, and it is a running argument in his house. “My boys argue all day long, oh, the new one’s better, it’s got better special effects. I’m like, no, Top Gun will always be my favorite movie.”

Q: What are you reading?

A: “The Fourth Option” by Jack Carr, who is a good friend of Taylor’s.

Q: Something the industry would be surprised to learn?

A: The turnaround man is a family man first. “I have seven beautiful grandchildren, and that’s probably the pride of my life. From 13 years old to four weeks old. I work to be able to spend time with my family.”

Key Facts About Tom Taylor

Current role	Chief Commercial Officer, Colt CZ
Years in the firearms industry	22-plus
Prior career	20-plus years at Coca-Cola
Formal firearms industry training	None
Brands turned around	Smith & Wesson, Mossberg, SIG Sauer
Signature Smith & Wesson project	M&P pistol
Signature Mossberg result	Semi-auto shotgun sales from 7,000 to 70,000 in two years
Signature SIG project	SIG Legion, 180,000 members at his departure
Current mission	CZ, Dan Wesson, and Colt in America
Colt marketing milestone	Targeting SHOT Show 2027

The Taylor Method At A Glance

• Learn it by doing it. Taylor had no formal preparation for this industry. He built his expertise by writing specs, running research, sitting with historians, and listening far more than he talked.
• Chase the broken brand. Taylor would rather inherit a company with room to climb than one already at its peak.
• Patience plus perseverance. No shortcuts, no discount-driven growth, and a candid warning to ownership that results take a year, not a quarter.
• Build value, not volume. Charge more, add real innovation, and protect brand equity instead of racing to the bottom.
• Market outside the bubble. Reach the 150 to 200 million potential buyers who never open a gun magazine, through gun-friendly audiences like fishing, NASCAR, and UFC.
• Turn customers into members. Experiential programs like SIG Legion and dealer education create loyalty that advertising cannot buy.
• Mine the heritage. From the Smith & Wesson historian to Eric Wesson to Elizabeth Colt, Taylor treats a brand’s history as a marketing asset.