|
Forging a Company
In 1957, an 18-year-old rock climber named Yvon Chouinard began banging out handmade pitons, steel wedges that mountaineers pound into cracks and clip to ropes to catch themselves if they fall. He used them to scale pioneering routes on the steep walls of Yosemite Valley. Soon Chouinard was selling hardware from the back of his car. Thus was born Chouinard Equipment, based in Ventura, Calif.
Chouinard also revolutionized the nascent sport of ice climbing with innovative designs of ice tools, crampons and screws. Along the way he also started creating climbing clothing. The clothing led to the creation of apparel maker Patagonia, which eventually became the corporate parent of Chouinard Equipment.
But by the late 1980s, Chouinard Equipment was forced to file for bankruptcy, seeking protection from liability suits that accused the company of failing to adequately warn customers that climbing is dangerous. Chouinard asked Peter Metcalf, a marketing executive at Patagonia, to liquidate the equipment company's assets. Instead Metcalf came up with the idea of having the employees buy the company out of bankruptcy, thereby shedding the liability issues.
"I went to Yvon and said, 'Give me three months,'" Metcalf recalls. "It took nine."
Thus Black Diamond Equipment Ltd. was born, with Metcalf as CEO. It was 1989. Before long, the company moved from California to the edge of Salt Lake City, a location more conducive to testing rock, ice and ski gear than Ventura had been.
Patagonia kept the IT systems and Black Diamond had to start over with its back-office systems. The CFO, who also ran IT, installed Paragon's enterprise system for inventory management and fulfillment, but IT was not a priority.
"It was a pretty stressful couple of years," Metcalf says. "The best analogy is a Bataan Death March. When the choice was between a half-million-dollar laser cutter for manufacturing or computers and servers, IT got the short end of the stick." So much so, that when Metcalf gave a presentation to BD's board a few years ago, a member who had just joined from a large ski company remarked that the annual IT spend sounded about right for a company the size of BD.
|
