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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, we were being, unfortunately, being sued. And so that combination of those premiums made the company obviously not profitable.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's insane. The premium was $300,000, over $300,000 for a $1 million policy with a $250,000 deductible. I mean, that just shows you how these insurance companies assess the risk. They were basically saying you are 100% likely to get sued.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this was one of the major issues. When I arrived at Chernobyl in 1982, we had $5 million worth of insurance. It cost, I think, $10,000 a year and had a $5,000 deductible. By the time that all these suits hit and what we were facing, the cost of an insurance policy for $1 million was $350,000 with $250,000 a year. A year with a quarter million dollar deductible”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd call them frivolous, but they were failure to warn with what you call them failure to warrant seats that we failed to have the appropriate instructional information warning language, whatever it was needed. And it also involved two fatalities. So the size of the potential judgments against a company were huge. And without any of the standards, the risk to the company was enormous.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, you guys were getting sued in what I guess you would argue were frivolous lawsuits, but still these were tying the company. I mean, a company making $7 million a year in revenue to deal with four or five lawsuits, that's a massive expense. I mean, that can not only slow things down, that can tank a company.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Safe enough. You might say, let's put it this way. At this era, you can probably remember that at some point in time, you go into a hardware store or now Home Depot and every step ladder began to have a sticker on the top step saying, do not step here. This could collapse. You could get hurt. In 1982, that wasn't the case. You didn't have to have warning stickers all over everything. And the same was true with climbing equipment. There were no climbing standards at this time. There was no quality assurance standards at this time. And there was no labeling standards at this time. But because of this rapid change in tort law, This became just the dream of plaintiff's attorneys going after companies when somebody got hurt.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So you had this issue of equipment, companies being sued literally out of existence. And that was happening at this point in time.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically, what I attempted to do, and I think I was successful at it, was bring the energy, the vision, and the products to the company that had originally made it successful in the late 50s, 60s, and early 70s before Yvonne's focus began to shift to Patagonia and the clothing. And the company really began to take off again and become the leader it had been, but had lost that leadership position.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Concerning, frustrating, and disconcerting. But that wasn't resolved. It was just a fundamental disagreement on this, but we continued to move forward.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that the direction that climbing was moving, the improving gear, the methods, the styles, it just wasn't his cup of tea. He didn't embrace it. He wasn't excited by it. And that really came clear in 1987 when we produced the 1987 Schenard Equipment Catalog, which was like a yearbook. I saw the catalog as a yearbook on climbing, a celebration of why do you climb, capturing the culture, the climbing styles, the image. And we gave him a copy and he called myself in my marketing director, who really was my partner in the business. And we said as he looked at the catalog that he was really ashamed of it, that it represented everything that he stood against in what was going on in the world of climbing. And as you can imagine, that was both very embarrassing.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's absolutely true. So much thanks and appreciation. Everything I learned about business are much of what I learned about business and how to operate one, the culture, the familial culture. So many things was through all of them. And they remain dear friends of mine. And then to your point regarding the tension, yes, that did happen. And I think that what was a little bit of an irony here was that Yvonne, who built Chernard equipment on innovative product in Patagonia then too. And to this day, when it came to climbing, at this point in time, he had been shifted his focus to the clothing and also a bit away from climbing. He was surfing, he was kayaking. And to him, I think the golden years were the 1950s and 60s. And maybe there are very early 70s. And I think that they were in the rearview mirror.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my expertise was I knew the equipment incredibly well what was right with it, what was wrong with it. I had a plethora of new ideas for products just based upon my using them all the time. And I had modified products and actually built a few things along the way with partners of mine. So that part I knew, what I didn't know was manufacturing the actual marketing, the R&D process there, but it was a little company. It was a small number of people.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chris McDivitt saying that Yvonne was looking for someone to become, to train and become the general manager of Sherrad Equipment, the Hill Climbing Equipment Company. And as soon as I saw that, I thought, wow, this is it.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so by the early 80s, I was realizing this itinerant life I was having focused on climbing. I didn't think it had a future. I wanted to have more in my life than climbing. And at this point in time, the embryonic American outdoor... Industry was just beginning to get large enough that it was beginning to hire sales reps, which was brand new to the outdoor industry. And I thought this is intriguing. I'm outgoing. I know people in the industry. I know retailers. So I wrote a bunch of letters. And the Patagonia Chenard was one of them. I had met Ivan, but I didn't really know him. And in the spring of 82, I just got back from Alaska again. And there was a letter from...”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can do a lot more than you really thought possible if you just break it down into the component. It also showed me the importance, all of us, of being brutally honest with one another, because in a situation like this, we were out now almost 14 days. It was 13 and a half days with six days worth of rations, just enough gear to keep us alive. And there were some days where somebody didn't feel like leading and other day where somebody felt weak and scared. And we just had to be able to say to your partners, man, I just don't feel like leading this today. Can you lead? And it's like, yeah, I'm up to it today. I can lead this. Everybody is dependent on one another. So you better be really aware and cognizant of the well-being of your partners along the way mentally, physically, you name it.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And energy is going is going to be focused on getting up this route. However, we can do it. And so was each day let's break it down into what are we going to do today? How far up this route are we going to get? One of the things that really taught me was that”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get in there and realize that we are fully committed at this point in time. There's no way that we could safely descend what we had just climbed that day, let alone the previous days, and that if we were going to live, let alone to succeed on the route, the only way was up. And that was quite a both sobering revelation at that moment, but it was also an absolutely inspiring revelation because as a climber, when you're doing big new routes, what you're constantly thinking about with part of your brain is analyzing how am I going to get down? Do I have the gear to get down? How long will it take? So you're using a certain amount of your energy to make sure that you can retreat from something if you have to. You know, it was very liberating. So it's like 100% of our mental thought.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. This Mount Hunter climb, I had done now two major new routes in Alaska. But as it turned out, it was the most significant failure of my climbing career. Nobody got hurt. It just was clear we're not going to, it wasn't going to work. The weather was just horrendous. Just absolutely horrific. We did not bring tents because I didn't believe in a route that steep that one could actually find places always to place tents and where the slopes got low enough angle, I thought we could find snow and we could dig snow caves. We had climbed through a long day of storms up these very steep fluted ice ridges that were very hollow had a lot of air in them, very dangerous to climb. But you could climb them and that night we finally were able to dig a cave in for the first time.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arrived at the Alaskan bush pilot's little hangar there right on the water because it's a water plane, walked into the office, introduced themselves and the first thing the receptionists said to us, you're the expedition, you kids. Do your parents know you're here? Anyway, they flew us in and we were on the mountain for just under 30 days, succeeded in doing this new route on this major Alaskan peak. And it was a game changer.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So by the time I was 16 and beginning to plan this expedition to Alaska, I had already gone on my own out to the Canadian Rockies and doing some technical routes out there. Let's find a big peak in Alaska that we can do a technical new route on doing expedition and let's go do it. And the combination of the research led us to a peak that only been climbed a few times, had a beautiful unclimbed ridge on it. We started the planning”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me say, you know, I think one of the blessings of being the child of Immigrants to America who came to the country after a horrific period of time, for them every day life was an adventure and just living, surviving was a true adventure. And I think in my youth, I got instilled with that sense of adventure. And I engineered my life to work as little as possible and climb as much as possible. So I didn't own a car. I did odd jobs. I worked two winters on as a rough neck on Wallacat drilling rigs in Wyoming, Utah Chain Hand.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just magnetically attracted to these people immediately, this rather bohemian nomadic, iconoclastic group of outsiders that were made up of everything from young people to older people, physicists, scientists, mathematicians, professors, factory line workers, just a mishmash of eclectic people, people who really enjoyed and loved the outdoors, and also people who, I think, felt This desire and need to sort of push themselves doing something a little bit unusual, somewhat adventurous. And also there was, especially back at that time, not the mainstream. And it was certainly a bit risky.”
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 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. 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 straight in the eye and said, yes, I am.”
2024-10-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Black Diamond Equipment: Peter Metcalf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT