Let It Be Company is a veteran owned business in Farmersville, Texas, founded by Roger Russell after a Navy career that began in 1975 aboard the USS America and continued through the commissioning of the USS Nimitz. Forty-five years of printing, pre-sales engineering, and IT work followed before the workshop opened. This is the story of how that arc turned into a custom laser-crafting business.
Roger works just off the same brick-street square in Farmersville where, on June 15, 1945, a crowd of 5,000 turned out to welcome home Audie Murphy — the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II. Life Magazine sent a photographer. The town has never quite gotten over it, and it shouldn't. The shadow of that homecoming is the shadow our shop works in, and it shapes what "veteran-owned" means here.
Why Farmersville matters to this story
Some numbers, because they anchor the rest. Audie Murphy received 33 U.S. and international military awards and earned the Medal of Honor at age 19, on January 26, 1945, when he climbed onto a burning M10 tank destroyer at the Colmar Pocket and held off a German company with its.50-cal while wounded. He came home to a town of farmers and onion shippers — Farmersville was the "Onion Capital of North Texas" in the 1930s, shipping 1,000+ carloads a year out of the Historic Onion Shed that still stands on the square. Today Collin County is home to roughly 1.34 million people, and DFW as a whole carries 386,358 veterans — about one in four of Texas's 1.6 million. Roger is one of them. So are a lot of the people he serves.
The town honors Murphy every June with Audie Murphy Day. US-380 through town is Audie Murphy Parkway. VFW Post 7426 sits on it. There's a permanent exhibit at the Farmersville Heritage Museum and a Path of Remembrance at Freedom Plaza. None of that is decoration. It's the local definition of how you treat a veteran's name.
Service at sea, 1975
Roger served aboard the USS America during the closing chapter of the Vietnam era. That same year his squadron was told to expect a couple of months in port transitioning from the A-7 Corsair "Charlie" to the "Echo" model. Two weeks in, the call came to go commission the USS Nimitz instead.
Roger didn't fly the aircraft or drop the ordnance. He'll tell you that straight. His work supported the mission that did, and any honest sailor will say the same thing — every job on a carrier exists to keep the people at the tip of the spear in the air and back on deck. That's where the habits came from: precision under pressure, the quiet pride of doing a job right the first time, and a complete intolerance for "close enough."
What "veteran-owned" actually means at Let It Be
A lot of companies print "veteran-owned" on the label and call it a marketing position. That gets it backwards. Stamping the words on a tumbler doesn't change how the tumbler was made, who it's for, or what happens to the money after the sale.
Here's the metaphor we keep coming back to. When Audie Murphy was buried at Arlington in 1971, he was authorized the gold leaf the regulations grant Medal of Honor recipients on their headstones. He turned it down. He asked for the same plain GI marker every other soldier gets. His grave is the second-most-visited at Arlington, after JFK, and it looks like all the others around it.
That refusal is the shop's whole philosophy. No frills, no flourishes the work didn't earn. Every piece gets the same care whether it's a $40 tumbler for a retirement or a memorial keepsake for a Gold Star family. Veteran-owned, at our bench, is a verb. It shows up in how the parts are squared, how the file is registered, how the second pass is dialed in, and where the money goes — back into training other veterans through our work with Collin College.
A career that built a craftsman
The path from the flight deck to the workshop wasn't a straight line, and that's the point. Each phase taught Roger something the next one needed.
| Career phase | What it brought to the shop |
|---|---|
| U.S. Navy (USS America, USS Nimitz) | Precision under pressure. Checklists. Doing it right the first time. |
| Commercial printing | Color, registration, and the discipline of getting a job onto a substrate dead-on. |
| Pre-sales engineering | Learning to actually listen — start with a blank sheet, not a canned pitch. |
| IT and modern tech | Comfort with new tools, including AI, without being intimidated by them. |
The pre-sales engineering chapter is the one customers feel most. Roger learned to start a conversation with a blank sheet instead of a template — listen to what someone actually needs, then match real capability to it. That's why a custom project at Let It Be starts with a conversation, not a catalog page. The IT years are the reason a laser file gets prepped properly and the reason we adopted modern fabrication tools — including a four-in-one cutting, engraving, welding, and cleaning platform — without a six-month panic.
Three things Navy discipline taught us about craftsmanship
- The job is the job, regardless of who's watching. A weld inspected at 2 a.m. on a quiet flight deck has to be as clean as one inspected at noon. Same goes for the back of an engraved sign nobody will see.
- Listen before you cut. The customer knows what the piece is for; we know what the machine can do. Both halves matter, and skipping the first half wastes the second.
- Quiet competence beats loud claims. If the work is good, you don't need to oversell it. If it isn't, no amount of "premium" on the label will fix it.
Why "Let It Be" — and "We Create Imagination"
The name is a philosophy borrowed honestly: take what life hands you and make something good out of it. The tagline — "We Create Imagination" — is the promise that follows. A retirement award, a set of branded tumblers, a memorial keepsake, a one-of-a-kind sign for a ranch gate out on FM-1377: the goal is to turn an idea in someone's head into something they can hold in their hand.
That covers a lot of ground. We engrave for families in Farmersville and Princeton, for businesses in McKinney and Plano, for ranchers out toward Hunt County, and for plenty of customers we'll never meet in person across the DFW Metroplex. The work travels. The standards don't change.
Built in North Texas, made to last
Let It Be Company makes custom laser-crafted awards, drinkware, cutting boards, wood boxes, signs, and personalized gifts for families and businesses across North Texas — Farmersville, Collin County, Hunt County, Rockwall County, and the greater DFW Metroplex. Every piece is made to order. Every order supports a veteran owned small business with a mission to train and mentor other veterans, including through hands-on work with newer trades like laser welding and metal fabrication.
If you want to see what comes off the bench, browse the gallery. If you know what you want, look at the product categories. If you're not sure yet, reach out and start a conversation. More about Roger and the shop is here. However you found us — welcome. You're part of the story now.
