Launch Magazine - Fall 2007 - (Page 27) 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 productfocused 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 dotcom 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. launch fall 27 http://Backcountry.com http://Backcountry.com http://Backcountry.com http://Backcountry.com http://Backcountry.com http://Backcountry.com http://Backcountry.com
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