Al Tabor - First Days at Mountain Hardwear

Transcript:

Al: So, the very first day, Clairann and I loaded up her truck or got in her truck and went to Office Depot and got chairs and tables and staples and tape dispensers and just filled the back of her truck and came back and outfitted the office.

And I had worked in community organizations and I knew one of the best ways to keep everybody on the same page was get stuff up on the walls where you can see it, so it wasn’t like the full business plan but it was components of it, so that everybody could kind of see, and then the process of putting it up there, so when Jack put it up there that also communicated because we can see what was going on and we all would be sitting there at that table and you can kind of see here is the plan and here is what we are trying to do, and they make a great wallpaper. And, I think it was on old tent pattern pieces.

So Roberta alluded to this already but if you have 6 or 8 people starting a company, you have the whole pie so very few places is like HR and customer service a department or sourcing and design a department or sales and marketing a department, so my part of the pie was computers and everything that happened on computers. So I had bunch to do getting the accounting system helping Chris set it up. The any given day since we forecasted product on computers, I would either be buying Gore-Tex coats or I would be trying to fix the printer and whether I fix the printer before buying the coats depended on what you were trying to print. If Jack was trying to send a letter to the bank then maybe we fix the printer first but if you are trying to write a letter to your mom, it was clearly in line behind buying the coats. So it was business processes primarily on computers, because it was crunching numbers. But a lot of it was sort of trying to engineer a forecasting process. So, that that’s Lizard King. I wanted to make sure I could take from Sierra Designs to Mountain Hardwear.