Black Diamond Equipment

“At the time that I looked at Salt Lake, Park City, there was no other outdoor outdoor North ski company here. We would be the first”

“There was no LED headlamps, but they were appearing in electronic devices.”

“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%.”

“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 e…”

“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 l…”

“For the effort that we're 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 was like, let's walk away from it. It would be a brilliant failure. We're only go…”

“I raised just under 900,000 dollars of equity another like 150,000 dollars worth of sub debt, and then went to a commercial finance company and got the debt we needed at nearly 15% interest, 14%.”

“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.”

“I engineered my life to be, 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 roughneck on wildcat drilling rigs in Wyoming and Utah.”

“I had personally guaranteed the loan, even though I only owned 10% of the business, and it was my job and career. So had it gone down, I would have lost everything. Our house my job, my savings, everything.”

“We were profitable on day one.”