e2e Interview

 

Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur Interview

 

Jim Holland, CEO, Backcountry.com and Chris Grover, Director of Sales & Marketing, Black Diamond Equipment

 

The following is a condensed transcript of a peer-to-peer conversation between two of Utah's entrepreneurs. Visit www.luminpublishing.com/GUV_podcasts/index.html to listen to or download an audio file of the interview as a podcast to your computer.

 

Jim Holland: I'm the CEO of Backcountry.com, we have been in business for about 10 and a half years. We started very humbly in an apartment in Park City. We evolved from there into Heber and back to Park City and then to Salt Lake City. We sell outdoor gear over the Internet. We are in essence a specialty front-end retailer. We are supported by a big-box back end so we leverage the economies of scale of the bigger machine on the back end to crank the gear out the back door, but to very targeted focused niches. We focus towards skiers and snowboarders who are hard core.

 

Chris Grover: I'm the director of sales and marketing for a company called Black Diamond Equipment. Black Diamond is a designer, manufacturer and distributor of gear for rock climbing, ice climbing, mountaineering, alpinism, back country skiing, telemark skiing, free ride gear and general equipment for anybody who is into spending a fair bit of time in the mountains in challenging situations. We have been doing it for over 20 years as Black Diamond and if you trace the company DNA we are the phoenix of Chouinard Equipment so from that perspective we have been doing this for 50 years.

We started in business in Ventura, Calif., buying out the assets of Chouinard and it very quickly became apparent that being a mountain company at the beach wasn't going to fly. After a pretty exhaustive search and some lucky happenstance we wound up in Salt Lake City, which has been a wonderful place for our business for the last 20 years.

Jim, one thing you said caught me a little bit by surprise when you were describing Backcountry.com. You talked about you are in an operation that leverages a big-box back end and I am sure that is true, I know you guys are super good distributors but I have always thought of Backcountry.com as a user-based product-focused business with this full-on mastery of the black arts of attracting traffic on the Internet. I am surprised that you didn't say anything about that because to me that has always seemed to be the magic ingredient behind Backcountry.com.

 

Jim Holland: I think I would agree with that. That is definitely our core competency. It is mastering the world of Internet marketing and just bringing in smart people. We try to piece together the puzzle to drive traffic to our Web sites. I am with you there, but I am also very financially oriented and I always think in terms of economies of scale and efficiencies.

 

Chris Grover: Black Diamond is a vendor partner with Backcountry.com. I would like to say how much respect and admiration we have for Jim, John and the whole organization and you know and they have earned that respect and admiration in spades for sure. Jim knows me well enough that I don't say stuff like that very easily.

 

Jim Holland: I appreciate that and likewise we have obviously followed in your footsteps.

 

Chris Grover: Backcountry.com is an outstanding organization and they have done a really good job. Somehow or another they always managed to stay at least a step and a half to two steps ahead. In today's environment that is hard to do. From my perspective the thing that is most important to me in the work that I do is enjoying and being proud to stand next to the people that I work with and Black Diamond has been a pleasure and an honor to work with. It has been very inspirational, interesting and always entertaining to see how the company has evolved over the years.

Chris, you couldn't have timed the launch of Backcountry.com any worse – in the middle of the dot-com boom to bust. How did you compete and survive?

 

Jim Holland: The big e-commerce Web operations that were heavily funded back then were formidable competitors for us. Interestingly, we had a very different approach to those guys in that we didn't have the high burn rate. We hadn't raised any money, which in truth, was in the end, a huge blessing for us. We had to learn our lessons in small doses and we had to make things add up. We had interwoven this discipline into our culture since the very beginning. What we were doing had to work. It had to add up a month from now. We had to have positive cash flow a month from now whereas all of these other guys were charting a course that had them harmonically converging in five years in a big, expensive model.

 

Chris Grover: It's funny that you use the word discipline because that is what I was thinking of. I think back to those early days to the beginning of our relationship and you had a very bootstrapy nature of how you guys ran that business with discipline. I will just connect that right back to the activities that both our companies serve because I think that if you are not pretty good at a healthy dose of realism as a skier or a climber putting yourself in situations of consequence, you wind up dinged up or dead.

I think that is a fantastic mindset to bring to whatever business model you are associated with. It is so important to see reality for what it is as opposed to what you would like it to be. You guys were very disciplined about that. At the end of the day, we figured we need to do business with these people and they will be good partners for Black Diamond, and as they say, the rest is history.

 

Jim Holland: Another obvious parallel between our businesses and good advice for any would-be entrepreneur is to follow your passions. That is an undertone of what has worked at both of our companies. Speaking for myself I know that I have followed what I have really connected with in my head and I was fired up about the Internet and technology and into recreating in the backcountry and the outdoors. Entrepreneurship obviously involves lots of long hours and lots of hard work but if you connect with what you are doing it is a lot easier to do that.

Again, probably some more good advice for would-be entrepreneurs is focus. Throughout our evolution there have been so many tempting tributaries that we might have taken. We sort of lifted up our head as we really started to figure out all of the different Internet marketing channels and put together the teams to drive traffic to Web sites. We could be selling toilet paper over the Internet. We probably could be successful at it, but lets face it. You focus on something that you really connect with and you are much more likely to be successful. At the same time focus on being the best at what you do. Why in the heck would you aspire to do anything else?

 

Chris Grover: Who defined the culture and the attitude during the early days at Backcountry.com? Is that something that you consciously tried to instill in the organization or was it just organic?

 

Jim Holland: I think it was organic. I think we are a little more conscious of it now and we try to do things to make sure that we try to spur it on as it gets harder to maintain that culture when you go from 20 people to 400 people as we have. I think our culture just sort of arose because we were following our passions.

What kind of things do you guys do to try and maintain your culture as you have grown? Isn't that a challenge? As you keep bringing on new people that knew nothing about Black Diamond or very little when they came through the door, how do you instill those values and get them thinking and aligned with the way you guys think?

 

Chris Grover: Yes. I totally agree with you, it is job No. 1 and certainly at Black Diamond it is our biggest challenge. How do we generate the focus and the discipline and the dogged determination and the appropriate values and attitudes? How do you stay connected to that and evolve forward knowing that if you are going to be successful in five years as you are today, you are going to be different? It is not about staying the same. If you stay the same you are done. At Black Diamond, back in the day it was a very homogenous organization and you could get 20 people in a room and it took little or no energy to get everyone on the same page. Everyone would walk away with a relatively clear understanding of what we were doing and how we were going to do it. That is certainly not the case anymore and to get to that same level of that unification in terms of a point of view takes a lot more energy and time.

 

Jim Holland: You guys have been very successful. What do you think are some of the things that are at the root of that? What are some of the things that have worked in Black Diamond?

 

Chris Grover: We've been good at finding a way to hook our passion to some sort of commercial activity and being totally in love and obsessed. You spend way too much time at work to have it any other way. We're opened minded, thoughtful and try to think of things in a strategic manner. We recognize that the worst reason for doing anything is that "we have always done it that way" or "it worked last time." You have to be willing to always tear everything down to the floor and go, OK how do we want to deal with it this time around? I think it is really important to not get too rooted in anything. Sure you need values, you need belief, but when you get to the point where you are not pulling your head up out of the trench and looking around and assessing the situation as objectively and as realistically as you can and then taking that back down into our hole and figuring out how you are going to change your approach to things.

I've seen certain types of people who are very skilled and have good experience come into Black Diamond and just fall flat on their face because the environment just isn't right for them. I wonder if you have seen the same thing at Backcountry.com?

 

Jim Holland: Here and there definitely. Obviously we try to filter people — one of the most important things about being an entrepreneur is finding the right people. We are super patient. If we have a position that opens we never panic into filling it.

We have a new hire boot camp where we try to fill them in on the culture and try to fill then in on how different things work. We start every employee out in customer service and they actually spend one week in customer service on the phones so they are in touch with our customer. Some people do fall flat. That is true. It is often people who maybe come from bigger organizations where they are used to more or used to having someone constantly telling them what to do. We try to give people high-level goals and let them figure it out.

Chris, how do you guys incentivize people? Sometimes that gets a little tricky. Is there an incentive for people just being in this industry?

 

Chris Grover: Yes, but that is not enough. You get to be in the industry. You get to be in a good environment if it is the right environment for you. You get to be part of something you are passionate about. There is a lot that comes with working at companies like ours but you are absolutely right, at some point the answer to, "Where is the rest of my paycheck?" can't be, "Look at the view out the window."

No matter how magnificent the view is, you have got to be competitive because you have to have the skill set and you have to have the right people because people are everything. It is hard to do. We constantly re-evaluate. We are always surveying our salary windows. We try and go through those salary windows within the context of how they impact the quality of life at Black Diamond the performance of Black Diamond. We are always trying to rank that stuff and make sure that we are appropriate within the organization.

 

Launch - Fall 2007