Three-time duck-calling world champion John Stephens bought into Rich-N-Tone in the 1990s and is now its president. Photo courtesy of Jim Spencer.

Call it a rule of thumb: If you expect your company to succeed, you'd better have a deep and abiding interest in the thing that's the focal point of your business. If an insurance agent doesn't like people, he's going to fail. A farmer had better like dirt. And a duck call company? Well . . . quack, quack, quack.

To say that the folks at Rich-N-Tone Calls, Inc., have a deep and abiding interest in ducks is like saying that Dale Earnhardt Jr. can drive a race car: Both statements are true, and both fail to convey the essence of the enterprise. Junior doesn't just drive a car -- he masters it, bends it to his will, wrings every drop of performance out of it. Running in heavy traffic at 170 m.p.h., he does things that the rest of us can only dream about.

And when John Stephens, Butch Richenback and Jim Ronquest get their hands on a duck call, they, too, do things that the rest of us can only dream about.

Those are familiar names to serious duck hunters not just in Arkansas but from coast to coast and in Canada as well. The 62-year-old Butch Richenback, founder and senior member of Rich-N-Tone, was a protégé of duck-calling icon Chick Majors. He more or less grew up in Majors' Dixie Mallard call-making shop in Stuttgart in the 1950s and '60s and learned the dual crafts of making and blowing calls at the master's knee.

He learned well, too, winning the 1972 world-championship title and the coveted Champion of Champions crown in 1975 before retiring from competition calling and starting his own company in 1976.

John Stephens, a three-time world champion, was in his turn Richenback's protégé. Now 36, he more or less grew up in the RNT duck call shop, bought into the company in the 1990s and is now president. And Jim Ronquest, a two-time U.S. Open winner in the late 1990s and the 2006 world duck-calling champion, worked part-time for the company for more than a decade before joining the full-time RNT staff a few years ago as media director.

All three men are active in the company on a daily basis, each with his area of responsibility and expertise. Butch Richenback tunes all the custom calls -- every single one -- before they go out the door. He's an on-the-spot instructor for walk-in customers --"I won't sell somebody a call if they can't blow it," he said -- and conducts annual kids' duck-calling clinics at the store. He is also the company's unofficial but highly effective resident curmudgeon, dispensing earthy advice, keeping things grounded, minimizing nonsense and in general making sure that everyone keeps leaning into the traces. Once, he bopped the then-teenaged Stephens on top of the head with an acrylic wand after the youngster told him he couldn't perform some now-forgotten task.

Ronquest handles most of the media-relations chores for the company, taking outdoor writers, customers, sales reps and assorted other VIPs hunting. He is also the highly-talented producer of the company's video series and cable network outdoor show -- a fact that he finds vaguely surprising, and more than a little amusing.

"Man, 10 years ago I could barely operate a VCR, and I didn't even know how to turn on a computer," he said through his patented bushy-faced grin. "Now look at me: Of all the things I never dreamed I'd be, I'm a television producer." The company's award-winning show, RNT-V airs weekly on satellite TV, and the video series now boasts multiple titles.