If you’ve ever played guitar, you’ve probably seen a pack of Ernie Ball guitar strings. Wrapped in psychedelic packaging, Ernie Ball strings are often the first products to catch your eye when you approach the counter at a guitar shop—be it a mom-and-pop store or a regional chain; Ernie Ball has consistently made some of the most popular guitar strings on the market for over half a century.

Ernie Ball was also the first company to offer individual guitar strings by gauge in stores, meaning that if you bent a note too far and snapped your G string in half (yes, guitars have G strings), you wouldn’t have to buy a whole pack just to replace one broken offender.

Recently, an interesting tidbit of Ernie Ball information caught my attention: the company has boasted double digit—or nearly double digit—growth every year for the last decade.

Consider the implications: we often consider this to be a shrinking music industry, yet the numbers of a guitar-centric manufacturer are rising steadily; in a heavily digitized landscape filled with jousting tech companies, this family owned, family operated business has continued to grow within decidedly analogue boundaries.

It is also worth mentioning that the mainstream has either forgotten about or fetishized the guitar lately; for some time now, we’ve taken our pop production cues from the UK and Sweden, arriving at a mostly synthetic palette on the pop charts. While such fare is increasingly shrinking in sales, this American company’s business is growing at a rate between eight and thirteen percent a year, as disclosed to me in communications with the company’s president.

How can we reconcile these seemingly disparate phenomena? CEO Sterling Ball—son of the company’s founder, Ernie Ball—gave me an analogy:

“Look at beer,” he told me. “If you look at how much less Budweiser is selling, you’d think that beer is dying. But then you look at Stella, and you look at craft beer,” and suddenly the picture racks into a different kind of focus: “The pie isn’t going away,” said Sterling. “It’s being redistributed.”

This analogy holds water within the context of the music industry at present: mainstream sales are undoubtedly down, with niche markets splitting off all over the place (Sterling Ball calls it “a fracturing of genres”). And while some of these niche markets are more synthetic than others, guitars still figure heavily into the mix. Also, one cannot discount the number of hobby guitarists either—consider that in the last five years, over 12 million guitars have been sold in the US alone.

Going back to the beer analogy, think of pop music as Budweiser, indie music and as craft beer, amateurs as home brewers, and Ernie Ball as one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of hops.

But let’s take the analogy further and define a key difference: in the food world, a large multinational corporation can often exert control over beer’s primary ingredients. However, an essential ingredient in the world of guitars—the strings, without which there’d be no sound—seem to be controlled by smaller, American companies: brands like D’Addario and Ernie Ball (each controlling a significant stake in the market share).

So how has a company like Ernie Ball maintained its hold on the industry?

The answer lies in Sterling’s approach to governing the business his father built; not surprisingly, he took a lot of cues from his dad, a man who “always [took] an unorthodox approach to doing business.”

“My dad was great,” said Sterling. “My dad was hard. My dad was the best teacher I ever could’ve gotten. I didn’t go to college—I worked.”

Indeed, when Ernie promoted Sterling to sales manager, he gave his son an ultimatum: “If [business] stays the same or goes down, you’re fired. If it goes up, you’ve got another year.”

This didn’t faze Sterling; he had secured the job by doubling the territory of Ernie Ball in Southern California and expanding the business internationally to twenty two countries in one month—and doing so under the nose of the previous sales manager, who quit when he saw how effective Sterling was.

The trend continued: under Sterling’s auspices, Ernie Ball began to offer bass strings individually, in much the same way they did for guitars. Sterling built a team that helped take the company from fourteen employees to four hundred. In 1984, he steered the company to acquire a guitar manufacturer that he himself beta-tested under Leo Fender—the Music Man guitar line. Perhaps most importantly, he created events such as The Battle of the Bands, events which bolstered Ernie Ball’s name recognition while connecting the company to outside brands (Vans Warped Tour, for instance), alternative audiences, and artists alike (Eric Clapton and John Petrucci, to name a couple).

“Everybody was sitting around seventeen years ago saying that guitar was dead and Nintendo was the enemy,” Sterling told me. “I sat back and said, ‘you know what? That’s our demographic now.’” He saw that youth culture was one that could multitask—one that could play videogames, ride BMXs, and play guitar at the same time. “I realized [this] by having kids,” he told me. “Having kids was the greatest R and D department there was.”

Thus the company continued to proliferate while remaining instantly recognizable. Still, laurels were never rested upon. “As a company, you’re doing two things to your brand,” Sterling said. “You’re either building it or you’re eating it…and the problem with brand equity is, you don’t know it’s gone until you have one of the last bites.”

To avoid devouring his brand, Sterling utilizes untraditional philosophies to this day. “One of the things I always get asked about is focus, and how important focus is in business,” Sterling told me. Usually, someone’s “going to tell you that focus is the most important thing, that you got to make sure you’re focused—and I think it’s one of the worst things to do.

“I think you’re using the wrong words,” he continued. “I think business is about an emersion and a commitment. Once you’re in that commitment and that emersion, it’s about peripheral vision; nothing’s ever right in front of you.”

Indeed, as Sterling’s interests fall across many disciplines (in addition his day job, he runs a barbecue supply business, raises money for children’s charities, and has just released his debut album), his manner of speech is likewise peppered with forays into the peripheral. “Here’s the greatest thing about talking to me,” he remarked. “You can fall asleep during one of my answers and if you wake up, I might be finishing another question that you asked and you might have missed four partials.”

I found this to be particularly true in trying to wrangle his words down to quotable morsels—he tends to give you a string of tenuously related gold nuggets at any one time. However, his manner of holding court does allow one to see how elastic his thought processes are, and furthermore, how he’s capitalized on an increasingly less focused (i.e., more niche) musical economy.

Take how he explains the value of the Music Man guitar line through one if its most successful ambassadors, Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci (as president Brian Ball put it, Petrucci’s signature axe is “the number two selling signature guitar on the planet—and that’s only behind Les Paul, which is still considered a signature guitar.”)

“This man has massive pull,” Sterling told me. “I’m in the barbecue business, and I taught Petrucci how to cook.” A while ago, John “posted a picture of his prime rib on my barbecue site that normally gets about 2000 people when I post something.” However, when Petrucci posted his prime rib, “in 24 hours, I got three hundred thousand hits. That’s a guitar player showing food he cooked.”

Put in more applicable terms, “We had a picture of him today as part of our Music Man rebranding…it has 700,000 hits right now.” To Sterling, this demonstrates that “people are playing guitar—you just can’t go to the same places to find them. You can’t go to the same places to interact with them.”

When I put my question of, “How do you sell so many strings when there’s nary a guitar on pop radio,” he fired right back with, “We have Andy McKee playing our acoustic guitar strings making 25 million hits on YouTube,” which is a canny answer: it shows a mind understanding a music business in transition—cognizant of how “there’s a different way of getting the music,” a key viewpoint in garnering success in this market.

Sterling also credits his company’s growth to three passionate commitments: constantly bettering his products, fostering trust with his customers, and lastly, never letting the message leave the house of the messenger. “If you think marketing is paying somebody else to do a print ad for you every month,” Sterling said, “you’re going to become less relevant with your customers.” These three commitments are deeply intertwined and passionately felt—indeed, they are reflected in how Sterling chooses to run his company:

“I don’t answer my phone at Ernie Ball anymore because it’s just second level VCs telling me that I can take some money off the table,” said the CEO. “The way I look at that is that they’re turning my life’s work into a piece of furniture.” However, if a customer tries to reach him electronically, he says he’ll answer back within a couple hours.

“I’m big poppa on the Ernie Ball forum,” Sterling told me. “If a customer wants to talk to me, they know how to find me.”

Earlier this year, his son, Brian Ball, was appointed president of the company, and it seems some of Sterling’s unorthodox streak rubbed off on him.

“Product Development—that’s kind of where I feel I’ve made my biggest impact,” Brian Ball told me. “Starting in 2004, I kind of had this feeling in the back of my head that I could probably be okay—and my kids could be okay—if we just made Slinkys for a long time.”

But like his father, Brian didn’t want to rest on his laurels. He realized that if he didn’t develop emerging technologies for guitar strings, “someone else will, and it [will be] a threat to the future of the business,” Brian told me. “So alongside our talented group of engineers, I’ve been on this pursuit and quest for tone—new voices for guitarists and bassists.”

Brian explained his quest, and be forewarned, it gets a little technical:

In order to respond to the pickups, electric guitar strings have to be magnetic—made from materials such as iron or nickel.

There’s also cobalt, which “attracts the magnets in your guitar’s pickups more than any other alloy out there,” as Brian told me. However, for the longest time, crafting wire out of cobalt was impractical for guitar strings. Under Brian’s supervision, Ernie Ball became “the first company that was able to draw cobalt into guitar strings.” The results were a success: “the tone immediately was more vibrant, it had more clarity, there was more output, and I new we finally landed on something.” After 2012, their cobalt strings became “a huge tent-pole in our product category.”

Innovations such as this—combined with the name recognition Sterling and his father before him had fostered—allow the company to “sell product in a higher price point than we ever were before,” as Sterling told me.

“We’re also not discounting to fuel our growth. And that’s the real thing: we’re actually getting more money for our product in a slower time.” It also affords him the opportunity to keep growing his brand despite untraditional methods rooted in his father’s day:

“No bank would give my dad a dollar,” Sterling told me. So Ernie Ball “bumped the price a little bit” and told customers, “If you take a COD we’ll give you 6%. Now it’s 8%, but most of our domestic business is COD still.

“I don’t even have a line of credit,” Sterling stated proudly. “So when you talk about when things get tougher, I’m not leveraged. I’m in great shape when things are a little tough.”

In my conversations with Sterling, one tactic became quite clear: “Usually,” he said,  “do the opposite of what you think a big company would do.”

He left me with the problems commercial shaving companies currently face in their advertising. The standard razor advert, as Sterling put it, consists of “a guy with no hair on his body with sculpted pecs and a towel wrapped around his back.” The man goes about his shave, and by the end of the commercial, either he has the stereotypical supermodel “under his arm, or [he’s] climbing a glacier.”

But here’s the fundamental problem behind that method of advertising, at least, as Sterling sees it: “Guys don’t shave anymore.” As such, a company like Harry’s—which positions itself more like a grooming company than a traditional shaving enterprise—“is making a fortune,” Sterling told me. Indeed, “Harry’s is growing.”

This kind of analytical insight is what allows Ernie Ball to continue its ascension. Seeing where trends actually lie, instead of where they are perceived to lie, is what gives any company its edge. Such tactics have allowed an historically countercultural institution like Ernie Ball to grow, even as the music industry—or, rather, the traditional ways in which we think of the music industry—is shrinking. [Forbes]