YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Metcalf

lines on the record: 73
first: 2024-10-28
most recent: 2024-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Let's face it, Luck and Serendipity plays a huge role in everybody's life. But to the luck itself, I would equate it to it's probably 60% of hard work, tenacity, the teams that you put together, all of that and 40% is the serendipity and the luck. I think that Black Diamond certainly was emblematic of turning every disaster into an incredible opportunity, but it was understanding how to do that. And I think it's still that as nothing ventured, nothing gained. And alpinism, we try great things, and sometimes we fail. That's okay, so long as we don't die in the process.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When do you think about the journey you took and going from working for Shenard equipment to taking it over and building a new company and then taking it to where it got to? How much of that do you attribute to the work you put in? How much do you think has to do with just good fortune luck?”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. You know, it's, I don't have the, I can't dig as deep as I did in my 20s and 30s. You just don't have that ability. The key, if you're going to stay alive doing this activity when you're turning 70, is to make sure that You align your aspirations with an honest assessment of your abilities. I want to push, but I know my limitations. So I don't want to do it to the point where I kill myself and I don't want to dig as deep as I did. But I enjoyed immensely and I'm still climbing today. I'm blessed”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was done with the responsibility that comes with the daily, it's 24-7. It's not just daily. It's 24-7. That business was my life. And I had still my health, my passion for the sports was still very, very strong. And I wanted to do more to give back. I wanted to work to champion these last wild places where we ply our craft and to do the activities myself.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You step down from running the business in 2015, 2016, you transition out. It's a long time, 26 years running the business. And, I mean, I imagine at that point you were kind of done. I mean, you had put everything you had into”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, we had some ideas on what to do differently with apparel over what the North Face and Patagonia were doing, for example. Secondly, we really know the sports very well. So when it came down to things like alpine pants and ski pants, the materials you need, the detailing of what you want, we felt we really knew that. We also saw opportunities for different fabrics or hybrids of fabrics to have in the product. And so those were modest. I mean, they're not revolutionary the way many of our hardgood products have been, but we felt they were enough to launch the brand and to grow it out from that.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things, and by the way, it's still a publicly traded company, I think under the Claris name And this is 2009, and so you see Patagonia at this point is massive and north face is a huge brand, and Colombia, these huge outdoor brands, many of which did not begin as apparel brands, are just massive. You had done apparel earlier, but now you really, at this point, once this merger happened, really wanted to expand apparel to make that from what I gather, a very significant part of the business.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I made a commitment for at least three years. I signed a three-year contract that could be renewed to be the CEO of that company to move it forward.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would acquire us, and on the day the deal closed, we would be the successor organization. It would be Black Diamond. And then we would, those who wanted to leave their money in the business could swap it for public shares and those who wanted liquidity could get liquidity or a combination thereof. So it seemed like a great plan. And I think it was a great plan.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I recognize that I didn't own the company. I was a 10-11% owner of the company and I wanted this business to go on beyond me. And I felt it was a need for me to make a decision to change the ownership structure while I still had a number of years left in me to actually run it and not wait until I'm exhausted. Let's just figure out what to do. So I went to my board this time and said, I know numerous people have been asking about liquidity. Let's figure out. Give me a year. I'd like to take a year and figure out what kind of transaction to do, how to do it, private equity, sell it to another company, take it public. I don't know. But I want to really research this and the plan that we came across was to sell to a publicly traded balance sheet-rich company, Claris. And the deal we cut with. Claire's”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You guys, 20 years on your 20th sort of year in business, 2009, you hit about 86 million in revenue. And 2010, you close a deal with an investor who acquires Black Diamond for $90 million. A little lower.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the takeaway from that was, as a business person, you have two fears in life as a niche player. You won't be successful with your investment or you'll be too successful. If you're too successful, it becomes mainstream and bigger guys can get into it and outprice you.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within no time, these companies that are doing tens of millions in ski boots. Just look at this and realize this area is growing. We're going to get into this. So it became somewhat of what I'd call an arms race, meaning you're tooling for big plastic boots is expensive, let alone the R&D. And those ski companies could take what I call a medium expert boot, modify it with components, and turn it into a boot somewhat similar to ours at half the price. And so within a number of years, within a decade, less than a decade, we were being overwhelmed by the products that the big ski boo companies were coming out with. And it just became clear that we can't compete against this. We're not in the big leagues.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had some really good innovative ideas for those products in both fit and performance and flexibility and came up with three brilliant boots and brought them forth. And I thought that, okay, we're in this niche. The big outlying companies don't seem to be very interested in this niche. It's growing nicely, slowly, but steadily. This is going to be our niche. And let's do it. Big tooling cost, but we'll get a long lifespan out of this tooling. So we enter it, launch the product. It gets amazing press, well received. We do initially very well. We go to the big European trade show where the booze are open. We have the product out there. The word's all over the place. And nonstop, we couldn't stop. And there come the guys from Solomon, Atomic, all the competitors, the R&D guys, immediately come in with their cameras, putting the cameras inside the boots, looking at them, and just copying them.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it took off initially. It was a huge success initially, but there was a fundamental mistake made. Rough necks in Red Desert and the driller, my boss, walks up to the first guy at the bar and fix his hat. And a bunch of guys get up and one of them swings. And you realize it's my metaphor is that if you're going to flick the hats of a bunch of big guys, they're not going to take it without swinging back at you.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Read about a project that was less of a success. This was, I guess it would be a new line, a backcountry ski boots. And you guys put about $5 million into developing this product four years, huge project, but it didn't quite take off in the way you expected, if I'm not mistaken.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then we went on to do the same thing with trekking poles, which is a little bit more limited than, say, lighting, and also gloves and mittens”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The leading producer was coasting on its laurels, and right at this moment was when the first LEDs were being introduced to the market. There was no LED headlamps, but they were appearing in electronic devices. They were appearing as Christmas lights. And we looked at that at the low energy consumption and thought there was a potential future here. Secondly, No one was using at the moment chips to control the power usage. No one was taking the reflector and engineering the reflector to better focus the light or using higher quality bulbs. Those were the key ingredients and put together in a very intuitive, beautiful lighter package.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a game changer. Wow. I mean, that category became a huge category. It proved to be far, far greater than we ever anticipated.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe. Hikers, backpackers, mechanics. I mean, the number of people who can use a headlamp is unlimited. Just didn't know it”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite. For the first five years, we really didn't need to do a lot of planning, meaning strategic planning. And it was after five or six years that we had our first very slow year. And it was at that point I organized company-wide strategic planning to talk exactly about this issue. And the first tier of this was really to look at, okay, We are focused on climbers, skiers, alpinists, but there's a larger swath of people who these products really appeal to, people who are not necessarily the hardcore climber, alpinist off-pier, but need the benefits of these products of a quality headlamp, gloves, headlamps.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I wonder whether by the time you start to hit 20 million in revenue, are you thinking about expanding the appeal of what you do? I mean, in other words, are you starting to think, well, maybe we need to think about reaching a community just beyond climbers and skiers, maybe more of a sort of general outdoor enthusiasts.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if you took a fall, it'd be a very short fall, right? Right. So you knew that every six feet, every eight feet, there would be something to clip your rope through. So it really made it much more accessible to people And then, and just right behind that, by a few years was the advent of climbing gyms, which were slow to first take off. The first one was in the very late 80s. And now today, climbing gyms are absolutely everywhere. So we were at the right place at the right time. And our first five years in business, after that first five plus million, we grew for our first five years, we were growing at a compounded rate of over 35%.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to explain this to me and to people who are not climbers, these were permanent screws, these were permanent anchors that were screwed into the rock, and now you can see them all over the world. And this enabled other people months, even years later, to use those same anchor points to safely climb a rock.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, fundamentally, it was the advent of what is called sport climbing. Up until the late 1980s, the only climbing out there was what we call traditional climbing, where you place your own protection, meaning a piton and not a spring-loaded camming device, an ice screw into ice rock, et cetera. And so if you didn't do that or you didn't do it correctly and you fell, you could get killed or badly hurt. Sport climbing developed in Europe in the 1980s where there's so much limestone, difference about limestone is very compact and they just decided that they were going to take industrial bosch drills, battery operated drills, drill into the rock, and place expansion bolts. The risk factors greatly reduced.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a combination of a very steady stream of truly innovative products in all of the categories that a climber, alpinisto, off piskia would need. And then I should also add that life is serendipitous as well, that at this moment climbing for a variety of reasons, including gear, just began to take off and grow very quickly.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they were very low. Though I think this is where having employee owners makes a difference, where people who are working for you in low salaries also have a piece of the action knowing that at some point in time that stock will hopefully appreciate and be worth something more.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mall, big box building, bank owned old industrial building, whatever you have on the east side of town. And as we started going around, I looked at one property after another and came across a property, a bank repode non-operating Scandinavian shopping village on the backside, on the east side of town that was owned by the bank. And thought, okay, this could be it. This place could be transformed into a cross between Toyota City and at Disneyland for climbers with our home, a place for climbing gym, a retail store, a guide service, a restaurant for climbers. I turned it into the center of climbing for Utah.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I went down to Salt Lake, contracted with an industrial commercial broker, and said to him, this is who we are, this is what we need. Start showing me properties. Show me a few of the possible likely candidates that an industrial company would run out by the airport met with the owners of those buildings that took one look at our balance sheet, what our history was, a one-year-old highly leveraged company, and said, no way, I'm going to do any tenant improvements for you to move into these buildings. You're too risky. And so at that moment, I decided, well, we don't really want to be out in an industrial park. I want to be up against the mountains on the east side of town anyway. And told the broker, I said, you know what? Everything I've read is that Salt Lake City is on its knees economically. There's tons of bank repoed properties. Let's spend the day and show me every bank repo.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we did a true systematic search of the West. It's a time that I looked at Salt Lake Park City, there was no other outdoor nor ski company here. We would be the first, which made it a little bit created some anxiety for people to come here. But from the standpoint of what these environments had to offer, it was absolutely outstanding”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Create standards and find affordable insurance, but changed the industry, created the first industry group standards, everything was needed before I could open the doors of Black Diamond and secure my investors”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a very good question. So one of the things I did was research this very carefully and during the process of negotiation and brought together the small climbing industry of America, our competitors in the United States and our largest retailer, REI at the time, held a series of meetings, found insurance experts, and realized that if we as an industry got together and decided that let's have standards for quality assurance, standards for quality control, labeling standards, performance standards. If we do all that together, if we come together, we can survive. But if we don't do this, none of you guys are going to survive. We're not going to get insurance. You guys are all going to disappear. And through a series of meetings and work, the industry organized at a self-preservation and caring about the customer too. And we found a way to pool, have an insurance pool.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self sustaining in five or six million could give a small dividend to the shareholders and make a difference for the community. If we could be employed, make a difference to this community at 5 to 10 million, hey, that would be great.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no question it was risky. I mean, and at the same time, we were true believers. And I wouldn't have, you know, for myself, I had my life savings in it. I had personally guaranteed the loan, even though I only owned 10% of the business. And it was my job and career. So I had gone down. I would have lost everything. Our house, my job, my savings, everything. And one of the largest outside investors said to me when he heard that He looked at me and said, I'm sorry to hear that, but that's very reassuring. That means to me that you're going to do everything in your power not to let this company go down. And I looked at him straight in the eye and said, yes, I am. And, you know, the goal at the time when you talk about how big it could be, no, we didn't envision it being a $25 or $50 million company. We were going to be very satisfied if it was...”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was still a risky venture because in order to make that an attractive investment, everybody involved had to imagine that this could be seven to ten times bigger, which of course it would get to, but at that time it was kind of hard for a lot of people to see that happening.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the investors we got were all people who were very willing to invest in the long term. When I was asked about a liquidity strategy, I said, look, I don't have a liquidity strategy in the short term. This is not philanthropy. We will have one. But this is a long-term investment. I can't tell you how long, but we're going to build a successful business. And at the appropriate time, we will find due liquidity.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, so now you've got black diamond equipment end of 89, you own you and your team, your employees. It's now an employee-owned business. And just to clarify, you guys controlled it. You guys had you and the employees owned more than 50% of it, or you had 50% voting power? 51%.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you had to do a minimum of 5 million a year, which was realistic, but that was just, I mean, that would be like barely paying anybody anything, I guess, really, and really being lean and still having to figure out how to innovate to grow in the subsequent years.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I figured that the numbers showed we had to hit $5 million. I mean, the company had been about $7 million almost, or right about seven when it went down your own equipment. So that Black Diamond, my numbers showed that we had to not go decline less than five.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raise just under 900,000 dollars of equity, another like $150,000 worth of sub-debt. And got the debt we needed at a nearly 15% interest, 14%. Wow.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. End of November, we closed on it. In December 1st, we completed remarking everything and opened our doors in 1989, December 1st, 1989 is the highly leveraged young black diamond equipment company.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is back before the internet and all that. And I just said, I want you to print out a list of everybody who's bought from you multiple times in the last year and that you've talked to multiple times and you think has money. They're rabid consumers of our product and they seem like from your conversations that they're wealthy people. I got a list of about 15 people and I just started calling and saying, here's who I am. Hey, I'm the general manager of short equipment. As you heard, it's in bankruptcy. It's going to be liquidated, but I'm starting a brand new company. Here's the vision behind it. I'm trying to raise money. And we do be interested in investing. And some people immediately hung up and said, absolutely not. Some it went away. And a couple of those people ultimately became the most significant investors in the company and advisors and board members.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shiran equipment had a mail order business. And I thought, okay, I wonder if there's any wealthy people who are regular customers of Sherman equipment. So I sat down with my, I had two people running my mail order business.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, it's a good point. And so that didn't, and for the effort that we were going to put into this, I did not want myself and the employee group to lose control of this business. It wasn't worth doing. If that was going to be it, it was like, let's walk away from it. It would be a brilliant failure. Only going to do this if we can do it our way.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, all good, very good questions. So immediately I dug into this, just fortunately, you know, climbing, as I mentioned earlier, I had a lot of friends who were in finance, attorneys, and myriad of different places, who are all climbers and friends of mine. And I just started calling anybody I knew who I thought could give me advice and how you would do something like this. And the amount of free advice I got was phenomenal. I mean, this company would never have gotten off the ground if it wasn't for people like that. And then I got introduced to some significant investors. And somewhere intrigued and interested, we went ways. And each of them then said, I'll only do it if I have 51%. Right.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, as a climber you're a risk taker within reason, you understand what you're up against. And if we could do this, it was quixotic. I mean, it was romantic. And a quote I once read way back in the early 80s was from Peter Drucker, who talked about how the true opportunities for entrepreneurship, which is based upon innovation, lies in the gap that opens up between we're a market is and where it's going. And I thought that was the genius we were applying at Shernard equipment. It's what Yvonne had done in the 50s and 60s. He'd never articulated like that, but that's what I saw. And I thought, that's what we can continue to do.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no. I mean, the plan was never to raise $4 million in equity. It was, I thought maybe if we could put together somewhere around a million, we could borrow three to four million more leverage it.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And from what I understand, you decide that you want to see, I guess if you can gather the employees and all together figure out how to buy these assets and basically start your own company altogether. Is that right?”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this was Yeah, so no one was interested in buying those assets. I interviewed several different people, companies. There was no interest. So that moment after two weeks, Yvonne just said, give me a plan on how to liquidate the assets, lay people off as quickly as possible with the least loss possible. And that is when I had the... The epiphany and thought, wait a minute here, there is an opportunity here. There's both an opportunity, and I don't want to make a mockery of the past seven years where I rebuilt this Sherred equipment company from where I had been in 1982, going down and made it, once again, a market leader, a little leading American climbing equipment company doing really good work.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was the existing inventory. There's tooling. We were a manufacturer of that, so we made it. So we had tooling. And it was also a very tired manufacturing base, meaning most of the presses and equipment was very, very old. I wouldn't call it state-of-the-art.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT