The Comeback Chronicles Podcast
Welcome to The Comeback Chronicles, where raw truth meets unwavering resilience. Hosted by Terry L. Fossum, this podcast reveals the untold stories of remarkable individuals who’ve faced crushing defeats—only to rise stronger, wiser, and more determined.
Through candid interviews, you’ll hear about moments of failure, heartbreak, and doubt, as well as the transformational steps that led to victory. This isn’t just about inspiration—it’s about equipping you with actionable strategies, like Terry’s signature ‘Oxcart Technique,’ to overcome challenges and ignite your own comeback story.
If you’re ready to break free from fear, shame, or self-doubt and move boldly into your conquer zone, The Comeback Chronicles will empower you with the tools, mindset, and motivation to rise above and achieve your next great success.
Get ready to turn your setbacks into stepping stones and reclaim the life you’re destined to lead.
The Comeback Chronicles Podcast
Beyond the North Face: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Resilience with Hap Klopp
Hap Klopp, visionary founder of The North Face, shares his remarkable journey transforming a small retail operation into a $4 billion global brand while navigating significant business setbacks along the way. His insights on brand building, crisis management, and learning from failure offer a masterclass in entrepreneurial resilience that applies to business challenges in any era.
• Building The North Face from 14 people into a global brand focused on value rather than price
• Creating products that last forever with a lifetime warranty, keeping items out of landfills
• Understanding that a brand is "what you stand for" not just logos or taglines
• Turning a catastrophic roof collapse into a company-wide bonding experience
• Navigating the Silicon Valley startup world after selling The North Face
• Learning from a failed venture in portable power systems despite having strong technology
• Embracing failure as "the secret sauce" that creates more learning than success
• Recognizing that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) will drive business for the next 20 years
• Advice that you don't have to be perfect—you just need to outrun the competition
• Churchill's enduring wisdom: "Never give up, never, ever give up"
Head over to terrielfossum.com to pick up your free gifts and resources to help you break through your comfort zone and reach the pinnacle of success in every area of your life.
If you've been stuck in fear, self-doubt, your past failures and you're ready to break through your comfort zones to finally reach the pinnacle of success in every area of your life, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, Terry L Fossum.
Speaker 2:Hey, this is Terry L Fossum, and welcome back to the Comeback Chronicles podcast. My guest today. Because I do so much around the world in some of the harshest environments around. My guest today has a lot of my money, because my guest today is Hap Klopp, the visionary founder and former CEO of the North Face, where he transformed a small retail operation into a global leader in outdoor apparel and equipment. Now, beyond the North Face, he founded HK Consulting, advising startups and multinational corporations alike. He's an accomplished author and educator.
Speaker 2:Hap has penned several books on leadership and entrepreneurship, including Conquering the North Face, An Adventure in Leadership, One of my favorites, Almost 12 Electric Months, Chasing a Silicon Valley Dream and the Complete Idiot's Guide to Business Management. He also lectures at prestigious institutions, sharing his insight on brand building and evolving digital landscape, and it's a pleasure to have somebody that I consider a friend of mine on the show today. Thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate it Very good to see you again. Yeah, absolutely so. You just got through traveling in Greece and various places around there, having a great time, which, by God, you deserve to do. You've worked hard for it. Let's talk about the buildup of the North Face. When you started, it was just a couple of little retail outlets, right.
Speaker 3:That's correct. We started with 14 people and it's a little hard to believe. Today, I'm no longer directly involved in it, I've sold it and VF Corporation owns it. It's a public company, but it's a $4 billion company. But when you start with 14 people, you don't think about billions, you don't think about hundreds of millions. You think about survival, probably more than anything.
Speaker 2:Well, that's true, and of course, this podcast is all about Comeback Chronicles and we're going to talk about that. But that's what a lot of people don't understand that the successful people they see, they weren't always there. They were praying for survival and that's what you were hoping for at that point, right.
Speaker 3:Well, I think you're always, as an entrepreneur, on this razor's edge between changing the world and failure. Sometimes it's not even day-to-day, sometimes it's hour day to day, sometimes it's hour to hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it really is. It's important for people to know that, if you're feeling that way, you're on the right path, because that's the way all of us have felt or still feel at times, or everything. Now you are also focused, though, on providing good products, products that actually worked, that were affordable for not just the elite people. Is that right?
Speaker 3:That's correct. I always believed in making value rather than price. Value could be interpreted in a lot of ways, but the North Face, when we launched it, was an outdoor company. We made sleeping bags and tents and packs and a little bit of clothing. Now today it's primarily clothing, but it was all around the same thing of making a product, one that would last forever.
Speaker 3:I believed that the way you're going to change the world and I had that as an objective was to get people to go deep into the wilderness when they went there I mean, thoreau came up with that quote in the wilderness is the preservation of earth.
Speaker 3:But when you go out there and you know it from your own activities and things you've done all the urban problems and we have a few today, if anybody hasn't noticed but all the urban problems really go away and you're focused on some true values and things that really energize you. True values and things that really energize you. The pain point that I saw was the equipment that people had was too heavy and too fragile and as somebody who went deep into the wilderness myself, I knew you had to make a product that didn't fail. You know we always joked about do you want to buy a secondhand climbing rope? Don't think so. We made a product that lasted and we put a lifetime warranty on it, and that served a lot of things. One it told the customers where we're positioned for somebody who is going to put their life on the line, maybe by going out. You know, most of the time life isn't on the line, but it could be when you're out there.
Speaker 2:Often it is you bet.
Speaker 3:If it never fails, you're okay. And then the other one, of course, is I believed in the environment, and if your product never fails, it never ends up in a landfill. So all of that came together. So the idea was to make a great product to facilitate people to enjoy nature.
Speaker 2:And I could not agree with you more on so many counts of what you just said, not the least of which is getting out into the outdoors. And I want to encourage everybody, even if you're thinking, well, I don't do that, do that, do that. Get out there, because, just like Hap said, it's amazing what happens. Because all the things that seem to be important when you get out there, no, you know, shelter is important, water is important, food is important, safety is important, but politics is not, and so many things are not important out there. The things that are driving you crazy right now just don't matter when you're staring into wilderness TV, as we call a campfire, you know.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely. You couldn't have said it better, terry.
Speaker 2:But one of the things I also teach people is because they wonder how I do those sort of things. You got to have good gear and that's the bottom line. You'll enjoy yourself and I can get kids out there. I work with the scouting program a lot and I can get kids out there as long as they're comfortable. It's all down to good gear. So thank you for everything you did with that right there. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Well, it was self-serving. I wanted to get myself out there too.
Speaker 2:Well, I remember and we're kind of going back a bit, but I remember when Gore-Tex started, just to be a thing at that point, and of course you guys were some of the leaders in Gore-Tex at that point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we were one of the first to bring it to market. It was a great partnership with them and it really created a new product category. Our idea was always to create disruption, to create something new, not to make something a little bit better than it was before. We wanted to build a brand. That was my goal. Brand building was something I believe that was an annuity for the future. But brand is not a tagline, it's not a logo. Although you have all of those, A brand is what you stand for. It's like coral.
Speaker 2:Love that.
Speaker 3:Coral grows and grows. You don't see it changing day to day. But if you have guidelines and rules and adhere to them, all along it changes and changes and at some inflection point it is unlike anything else Also quite beautiful, but when it's unlike anything else, that's what you want when you're building a company and the reality is you don't want to make the best product, you want to make the only product. If you don't have the product, then that's what happens you bring people back to you. So the idea was to have those rules that were in place.
Speaker 3:And our rules were not quantitative, they were about qualitative. They were about what we stood for and that's what I believe a great brand is about. And we were about quality. We were about triple bottom line an equal commitment to the profits, to the people, to the planet, to be able to do that. And we were about disruption. And when we did all of those things and we did them consistently across the entire company we were omni, omnichannel from day one. That means we sold in our own stores, first in the catalog, then e-commerce, and then we sold to other people. We were wherever the people needed to be and we wanted the image to be the same wherever we were.
Speaker 2:I absolutely love that that it's about what you stand for, and it should be completely unique. I think that's important. We're a little off the Comeback Chronicles topic, but it's critical for everybody that's thinking about business any entrepreneur out there to understand. It's all about what you stand for, Not just from the customer standpoint, but from your employee standpoint as well. People will do only so much for X dollars an hour, but they will die for a cause, and if you want to bring everybody inspired to take action above and beyond what they would, you got to stand for something, and that's one of the many things I've loved about your concepts and, of course, the North Face.
Speaker 3:Well, the other part, which does tie more directly to the comeback issue, is that what you need to do is center yourself. If you're chasing the customer, if you're chasing the fad, if you're the flavor of the month, if you're reacting to the uncertainties in the environment today tariffs how do you respond to that? Then you're lost. But if you have that and you say, well, this is what we stand for, and those things may change and they're going to buffet us around and some are going to be good and some are going to be horrible, but the reality is we know where we stand when we come back to it. That's where it's there and if your brand is that, so the brand isn't what graphic designers do, although that's wonderful and I love good graphic design but that's only a representation of what you stand for.
Speaker 2:Absolutely love that, really, really do. So you built things up. Things are going amazing for the North Face and you reached the world with it. Let's talk about 12 electric months chasing a Silicon Valley dream, because that was the challenging time.
Speaker 3:For sure. I mean, there were challenging times at North Face too. We had a roof collapse and we were closed down for a bit and we didn't know how we were going to deliver product, because we came in and fried the computers and the fire department would let us get in to get any of the equipment or get anything. And we didn't know how we were in to get any of the equipment or get anything.
Speaker 3:We didn't know how to get in, but it actually turned out to be a great bonding experience for the entire team. But it required a real change in philosophy, because I was a for a while in terms of management philosophy, because I was a big believer in collegial management, was a big believer in collegial management, basically soliciting input from everybody, trying to have group making decisions. When you're in a crisis, you can't do that, and you know. So I had to become autocratic. We had to say we're going to do this and this and this, you're going to do this, you're going to do that. Some people went out and got the orders back from the customers. Some other people dealt with the insurance company. Some other people at night were a SWAT team going in to get product. I had to change that style of management, and not that I was going to do it forever, but during the crisis I did that, and so it was good training.
Speaker 3:For when I moved on, I sold the North Face and I set up a consulting company, an advising company, investing in some companies, and the one that the book almost is about was a company that made portable power systems.
Speaker 3:Basically, it started out with lithium ion batteries and then it also had lots of patent work going along with fuel cells, and fuel cells were the promise for the future, but the reality was when they asked me to come in and help them out were the promise for the future, but the reality was when they asked me to come in and help them out, I think they wanted me to find money more than anything else. It was could have, would have, should have company. It had some of the best engineers from Stanford, from Cal, from Vanderbilt. The CEO was an admiral in the Navy. We had the head of the mechanical engineering department at Stanford on the board and they had millions of dollars that they'd raised. But they pretty well gone through that and called Arctica and so when I came in I said, listen, what we've got to do effectively is create some traction, because innovation is not equal to invention. Innovation is equal to invention plus commercialization.
Speaker 2:You got to prove a concept.
Speaker 3:So the fuel cell, which had all this promise, also was not ready for prime time. It was too expensive. The form factor was larger than the lithium-ion battery one we did. On top of that, it was very volatile, so you couldn't fly it on airplanes yet the DOT had-.
Speaker 2:And tell everybody what you mean by fuel cell.
Speaker 3:A fuel cell is a way to generate electrical power, and you do it basically by using a couple of disparate materials, not that different conceptually than lithium-ion battery, but you have two different materials and those materials, when they interact, give off energy and give off electricity. This was a way to miniaturize it in the future, utilizing all sorts of technological things, and they had a lot of patents about it. But so my thinking was, giving my background, we could put this into jackets, or we could combine with somebody to put them in jackets, start with this lithium ion battery pack and then, when we'd solve some of the problems, like being able to fly it, the fact that the fuel was only coming from Russia and it was limited in terms of quantity, the fact that it was very larger in size, we could gravitate down that roadway. And that was a plan. And they were thinking Unicorn, you know this billion-dollar company. I said well, you know before you're a unicorn, you actually got to do something.
Speaker 3:I said okay let's start with the lithium-ion battery. And we did. It wasn't a unicorn, but the first year the sales team I brought in got $12 million in sales. The second year we had $25 million in sales. So we were doing okay, but we weren't a unicorn. Well, all was going great, except it didn't. What happened there?
Speaker 3:I won't go into all the depth on it, but the first problem that the company had was a clash between me and the CEO. He had worked as an admiral in the government. He believed top-down decision-making was the only way to work. You know, when you're an admiral, you make all the decisions. Nobody questions you. The second thing is he never worried about budgets because the government, when you're in the military, you spend it. In fact, you spend it all, because if you don't, you won't get the money the next year. Right right On top of that, he'd never looked at this idea that innovation is anything other than an invention. So we had this clash.
Speaker 3:I brought in some people who were selling these products and he wanted sort of an engineering mentality and I said listen, we've got to get together. I said I prefer my idea, you have your idea, but we've got to get together because small companies can't have a variety of cultures, you don't survive. Well, he would never do that. He finally had a meeting, but he said the engineers have to be in the afternoon and the sales and marketing have to be in the morning. I knew we were in bad shape, so, anyway, we went ahead and we got to a point where he thought everything was going great because we had a visit from Apple. And he said we're going to sell by the end of the year for 50 to a hundred million dollars. And I said well, dick, I don't think that's going to happen. I said you know? I said the first reason is these things don't happen overnight. So the second thing is, at that time Steve Jobs was alive and I said Steve hasn't visited the company and Steve makes all the decisions, so he isn't hear. We're not at the finish line, we're far from it. Right, we have no proof of concept. You know they're interested in the fuel cell. They're not very interested in lithium ion battery because they think maybe they can put it in some of their other products, but we haven't proved it can work. And he said but they have hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. And I said more reason to not buy us Right, rounding air whenever they could do it. Well, he was absolutely convinced that you know they were going to buy us.
Speaker 3:So he started spending like a drunken sailor which you know because he was an admiral he could be he didn't drink that much, to be honest but anyway, we were $2 million overspent. We owed $2 million and had no money in the bank. And so the landlord came in and said I'm going to close you down. Dick wasn't in there, but I called Dick and I said we've got to do something. We got to raise a little bit of money, so I don't want to dilute because we're going to sell. It's just taking away from ours. And I said well, we won't be around if they put a padlock on the door. It's kind of a bad look if Apple comes up here, bad luck on the door.
Speaker 3:And he said well, I don't want to dilute. And I said listen, we've got to get some money. If we raise enough money, we can have a runway till the end of the year. And one of two things is going to happen Either we're going to sell, like you think, which is great, or we'll have time for a sophisticated fundraise, because it takes six months to do a fundraise. So he said okay and I said let's, let's get everybody together, dick and everybody else, and figure out how much money we need to keep people happy. I said we can't get $2 million, but if we get enough we can keep a happy, and then we have this roadmap. Well, everybody got together. We understood that $147,000 would be enough. Now we needed more than that. So I went out quickly and in two weeks I raised $700,000, which is 147 plus what we're doing. That would get us to the end of the year for sure. Well, the money came in on Wednesday and on Thursday morning I went in and I looked at the computer and our bank balance was $46.
Speaker 2:Oh geez.
Speaker 3:And so I went to the CFO. I said what happened? And he said, well, I had to spend it. And I said, you know, we said we had a plan. And he said, well, the CEO said I had to spend it. Oh no, I said the CEO is part of the plan. And he said and I said, you know, on top of that, we don't have any money to pay payroll tomorrow. And he said, well, I left 80,000 in. I said, well, I'll go check it out, but banks don't make cares like that.
Speaker 3:I went there. I came back I said there's 80,000, that there's three checks, that kind of total 80,000, but you know they aren't in the check register. And he said, well, maybe he wrote them and didn't tell me. And I said you're CFO and he didn't tell you. And I said but listen, it's impossible that the money came in yesterday, that you wrote the checks, you mailed them, people got them and they took them to the bank. Those checks were written two weeks ago before I raised the money and you never told me. And I used all my credibility on your behalf, oh no. So anyway, long story short, my mailing list got a lot shorter.
Speaker 3:And I had to leave the company and they bobbled along for a while, got a couple of contracts, but they ultimately folded.
Speaker 1:Oh no.
Speaker 3:It was in Silicon Valley and, as you and I talked about prior to the podcast, one of the things in Silicon Valley is it's okay to fail Now. Failure doesn't necessarily mean you go bankrupt. Failure means you maybe don't hit your goals, maybe you have to sell out a low price, but in Silicon Valley, if you learn from your failure, you can go on. Everybody in the company has jobs, some of them now working at Apple, a couple of them are teaching, a couple of them are working at Facebook and others. In Silicon Valley, failure is the secret sauce, because failure is accepted if you learn. And if you look at all of these great names in Silicon Valley, all of them failed. You look at Steve Jobs. You look at Jack Dorsey at Twitter. You look at Mark Andreessen he was at Netscape. You look at these people. They all were kicked out of their business at the beginning because of differing reasons, and yet they came back. They were funded, they grew I mean jobs. Everybody knows what Apple did after he came back and Jack Dorsey left. Twitter came back, actually helped do Twitter, but he also founded some other Silicon Valley companies. Mark Andreessen runs the biggest or one of the biggest venture capital firms. Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaker 3:The nature of it is that it wasn't the end of the road. It didn't have to happen and when I wrote the book about it I wrote it as a cautionary tale. Hopefully it was enjoyable. It was not written. The seven habits of whatever. It's written as a story and you see the reasons why that company failed. I wrote it so that people less people would fail. Hopefully they would just enjoy it. They could either read it for the learning aspect or they could see this ridiculous dynamic of the train heading to there. Anyway, I don't like the answer to your question, jerry, but it was a learning experience.
Speaker 2:Well, it was and it always is if you get through it Was a learning experience. Well, it was and it always is if you get through it. But at the time it doesn't feel like it. At the time it's got to hurt. You had to be pissed. I mean, what were your emotions you were going through when there's no money left, we can't even make payroll? I was promised something. This is my reputation, my reputation line. There had to be some emotion going on then.
Speaker 3:Well, I wasn't quiet about it All right share, share come on share.
Speaker 3:But if you read the book, you'll also get it, because a lot is about the emotion and how people reacted to all of those things that were in there. But the reality is I mean, first of all, I think we're all competitive and we would like to succeed. When you have a clear path to a very nice success of what you're going to do, to have that end up on the rocks is more than frustrating. I mean, it isn't like, oh okay, I just care, you're invested in it. I was invested in it. It was my reputation.
Speaker 3:But I went out to some people and I told them what the plan was and then I felt like I was stabbed in the back. And you know, being stabbed in the back is one thing. You know I'm big, okay, I can do that. But being stabbed in the back when, in fact, it hurt some of the people in the company people I brought in to do that that hurt a lot. One it hurt the investors that I came in and hurt my reputation. One also it was one of those. When I looked at it, it was ridiculous because we had a plan that we were working. As I said, we'd got $25 million worth of orders in, which is nothing to sneeze at. I mean, as I said, it's not a unicorn, but that would give us a latitude to be able to grow.
Speaker 3:So when you have a plan and you have people come in and you put your reputation on the line and you commit yourself to doing it I was taking my time away from my other consulting activities because it was a full-time advisory role to be able to do it that hurts, and you know. You know, and you know you're going to bounce back. I mean, I had other things on the outside, but many of the people I brought in this is like their first job or whatever, and so you know they're going. You know listen, I left a good university to do this and you know it's hurting them and when the people around you get hurt, you feel it. You can't be isolated from it and that's one of the problems of running a company is very few successful people I've seen running companies are detached.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 3:They're involved, it's their emotion, it's their idea, it's their money, it's their dream, and so when it, hits their baby when it hits the rocks, it's personal yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how do people come back from that? How did you come back from it? How did you help other people come back from it? How would you help the listeners to come back from that? Because some of them that are listening are going through it right now or certainly will.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, first of all, I went and had a beer. Let's call it like it is. Yeah, I mean you might as well, and you go. What's going on? The second one is I did default. In my own case I had success, and it wasn't my only rodeo that I was working on, but I knew about many of these people in Silicon Valley. I'd read about them, I reflected on them, and so I brought some of the people together and said listen, you know, this one went down, but this is not unusual. This is just us. I mean, it seems unusual to us but it's not unusual. If we've learned from it, if we learn from these points, we can go out and market that to somebody else and people will like it, and I can tell you Now market what Market?
Speaker 2:the fact that they failed and learn from it is what you're saying, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I talked with one of the partners in Sequoia, a big capital venture capital firm, and I asked what do you think about the failure? And he said love it. He said we probably wouldn't invest in a firm unless some of the people in the management had some failure, because you learn more from failure than you do from success. Success you attribute to genius, hard work, a little bit of luck and timing or whatever. When you fail, you can't sleep. You're thinking, well, how could I have done it differently? What did I do wrong?
Speaker 3:All of that is a learning. I mean, there's a great quote from Thomas Edison who tried a number of times to make the light bulb work. He got a patent it was about incandescent bulbs, but the filament was wrong. So he took all the table of elements and kept testing and testing until he found tungsten, the right one. But his comment was I've never failed, I've just found 10,000 ways. Something didn't work.
Speaker 3:And that's really the attitude you have to have. But if you learn from that, if you learn that we have to have a team, if you learn that you constantly have to have cash in the bank, if you learn that what you have to do is have a plan B when plan A doesn't work, because never have I seen and I've seen a lot because I have an MBA from Stanford I advise, I consult. I've seen a lot of business plans and I can say never have I seen the business actually play out like the original business plan, right, right. That doesn't mean that all of them cratered, but almost all of them had to pivot, narrowed down, not as grand as they want, changed, all those things. You have to be ready to do that.
Speaker 2:We say the same thing in the military All strategies are great till the first bullet flies and then they're all out the window, just like that. But I think it's great that people hear that and understand that you know what your plan. You need to have a plan. You need to be working that plan, but also understand that plan probably isn't going to work, so be ready to shift that plan. It's okay, that's what we do. I want to also go back and this is a fantastic direction but I also want to go back to the challenges you said you had at the North Face, because you said something I thought was fantastic that you had all of that fighting going on, but it was a bonding experience, as it turned out. Now that's important for people to hear. Why was it a bonding experience? Too many times people explode, they hate each other, the company dies and bad things happen. Why was that a bonding experience?
Speaker 3:Well, if you think about it, and we weren't devoid from it, but we had grown so much. We were growing 100% a year, 150% a year, and so we ended up we were in two or three buildings and we had silos. We had marketing, we had sales operation, manufacturing or whatever, and we had silos. We had marketing, we had sales operation, manufacturing or whatever, and over time, there's a general tendency for people to stay with their silo. If they go out for a beer after work or whatever, it's not the whole company doing it, it's an individual one, sure, and it's the people in the other building or the people on the second floor, like they're different. And we had some of that. We didn't have a lot of it.
Speaker 3:We kept working to try to overcome it, but inevitably, you have people who are almost more dedicated to their task than they are to the company, and when we had this crisis, everybody had to focus on the fact that we had to make the company survive, and so we had a common goal of the company surviving. We had different roles in that, but it was very clear. Now, in reality, we had that same situation when we were talking about how are we going to grow 150% a year. How's the sales going to bring it in? But there wasn't the tension, there wasn't the pressure, there wasn't the immediacy of what you're going to do, there wasn't the uncertainty. And for people to all put their backs against that same wall results in a camaraderie that people think that we were fighting an enemy.
Speaker 3:It wasn't a competitor, it wasn't a new design, it wasn't just the clock we were working against. It was the survival of the company and in doing that, people were allocated duties. Everybody was reporting in every day. We had to do that and even though I had to shift to this sort of dogmatic management style, they were willing to do that, even though they saw me as more of a delegator in the way I managed, because they saw we were there and we kept telling them we were going to do it. Now the reality was at the outset. When it happened, I'm sure a few people thought this is the end of our business. When the roof collapsed, how are we going to do it? It was just the time we were supposed to deliver to everybody at the beginning of the season.
Speaker 3:And we couldn't even get product out of there. People didn't know what we're doing. Well, when we talked about it and we solved it I mean we did a mix of a number of things we went to the insurance company for money and of course they battled back because, frankly, when they tell you you have business interruption insurance, it doesn't oftentimes work out quite that way. And the insurance company knows that you're under pressure, so they think you'll take a lowball payment. Right, you don't want to do that. But if you don't have that, then you need more money. If you bought more materials, the vendors didn't have materials for us. But we said, listen, we're a good customer. We had this problem. The vendors didn't have materials for us, but we said, listen, we're a good customer. We had this problem. We had somebody go to the customers and calling on the customers and that was our salesman. We said we didn't tell them we didn't have their orders because the computers had been fried, because at that time we just had a central computer, didn't?
Speaker 2:have it, oh geez yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so what we said is we sent you a confirmation. Would you send that copy back to us? And so we were hand planning what we were doing there. So the salesmen are doing something. We had SWAT teams of people who worked in the factories going in either getting equipment out or getting the product out that they could get. We had other people buying new materials. We were convincing people. You don't need all of that order right away. So we did a glitch of what we're doing.
Speaker 3:But everybody was working towards that common goal of how do we survive? And we get there when we did, you know, and on all of these fronts finances, talking with the bank, telling the bank don't worry, the insurance company is going to do it, you just need to load us more money so we can buy product. You know, we're telling the vendors, we're going to be telling the customers one thing, but we're all had a shared goal and a shared goal. If you can do that, it's wonderful to do it anytime in a business and I would advocate it. But if it's in a crisis and you do it and you come out at the end, you're stronger than you were going in.
Speaker 2:And I think that's absolutely critical. You had everybody working towards a share goal. Everybody wasn't fighting against each other. They weren't the enemy. The other team wasn't the enemy, but rather, like you said, there was an enemy and you needed to work together to conquer that enemy. That enemy in this case was the failure of the company, but you got them all working together and all leadership is situational. So you shifting over to that. That leadership style makes perfect sense. So you've got consulting going on. I know you're speaking at several universities. What is the biggest topic that you like to share with people today, with entrepreneurs especially today, to help them on their journey?
Speaker 3:Well, I believe and this is not proven, but I believe that you always have a better chance if you catch the megatrends that exist out there, rather than create something that's like anything else or create something that copies what people were successful with five years ago. If you know what the future is going to be and you make that, then you don't have to be perfect. You get the tailwinds and they help you out. I believe price, particularly in consumer goods price, has been the big driver for the last few years 50 years or so A result, I believe, of a lack of information that existed out there. If people realize that the impact of the climate, the labor abuses that happen with some of these products, when you ship in the things from a distance, or whatever, they might have made different decisions, but they didn't know that and so they were making the best decisions they had. At the time. We developed online tools to do price comparisons. So if you don't have a lot of information about what makes the product different or what makes the process of it different, you probably default to price.
Speaker 3:Well, now we have new tools. We have cameras that show what happens everywhere. We have blockchain, which verifies anything, the way it happens. We have the internet that shows you what's happening. People have information about what's happened to the plastics in the ocean, about climate change, about labor abuses in foreign countries, and we have a new generation of people coming in Gen Z and Alpha. Those are people that have to live with the planet we have and they care about it a lot. So you have a group of people coming in that really care about the planet and what they're doing. You have information now to tell you, inform you better about what you buy and what impact that's going to have as a result, and it's called ESG.
Speaker 3:It's about environment, sustainability and governance. That, I believe, is going to be the driver for the next 20 years or so. That's a primary thing If you have it at your back. So how you run your business, your governance, how you treat people ethically, how you treat your customers or whatever about sustainability like North Face, we had a lifetime warranty on our product. That's going to be big going forward when you talk about the environment the idea that you, in fact, are giving something back in doing that. So what I would say is look at your product or your service. Look at how that's going to be impacting sustainability, environment governance, so that you, your brand, is built around those characteristics. And when you do that, if you have the tailwinds behind you, you don't have to be perfect, and I think that's the biggest thing, that out of all of that, actually fantastic stuff.
Speaker 2:But you don't have to be perfect. You'll find the tailwind and just do it. Ready fire, aim, almost not ready, aim fire. Just get out there and start making something happen. Is that about right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's an old joke and I'm sure you've heard it, but I'll share it with Because.
Speaker 2:I'm an old guy.
Speaker 3:And it's about two guys that are walking in the wilderness and they're walking along a path and suddenly they hear this crash and out of the woods comes a bear. And one person sits down and starts putting on their sneakers, getting ready to run, and the other one says what are you doing? He said you can't outrun the bear. He said I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you. And that's kind of the way it is in business. You know you don't have to be perfect. If you're good enough and the competition isn't doing it, if the competition isn't embracing ESG and you are, the market's going to recognize you and that's good enough to succeed the market's going to recognize you and that's good enough to succeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's it. It's about just get out there and run man, get out there and run you. And I love many things about what you said, but you don't necessarily have to be the best, you don't have to be the smartest, you don't have to maybe even have the perfect idea or even maybe the best idea, but run, get out there and run For sure.
Speaker 3:That's well said.
Speaker 2:So we're running out of time and I appreciate your time. What would you like to leave people with who are on their journey and they're going through the challenges that you went through as you were building these companies and continue to build these companies. What would you like to leave them with these?
Speaker 3:companies and continue to build these companies. What would you like to leave them with? Well, there's a great quote from Winston Churchill, and he was, you know he. After the war they actually kicked him out of his government in England and you know, here he was. He'd done all these things which caused great success, and they no longer wanted him and they brought him back to his I think it was prep school and they had him speak and they asked him to give the speech and he did. It was in just three sentences. He said never give up, never, ever give up, never give up.
Speaker 3:That doesn't mean that you don't pivot and change, but what it means is, when it all hits the fan, don't just fold. If you battle, you can battle through it. And if you see the better day, if you can just see over the hill, if you can see, maybe I have to change, but I'm going to win. I'm not going to, as you said, I'm going to continue running. I'm not just going to fold because it's difficult times, because every one of us and every one of your listeners is going to encounter difficult times in their business. I don't care what business it is. I mean, we look at them from a distance and we say you know Microsoft, it must have all been easy. Well, read some of Bill Gates' books, or whatever you look at it. I mean, it's all easy when you look at it in the big view, but it's a sawtooth edge as you grow a company and when you have those downs, persevere.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic, and I think that's not just in business but in all of life, in relationships, in every aspect of your being Never give up. Well, hap, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. My friend, we'll look forward to talking with you again very soon. And, for everybody listening, take what you learned here, re-listen to this again, share this and do exactly what Hap said Run, run, run. Never give up, no matter what, and you can have your own Comeback Chronicle.
Speaker 1:So that's it for today's episode of the Comeback Chronicles. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and subscribe to the show. If you're ready to get over your fears, self-doubts and past failures and break through your comfort zone to reach the pinnacle of success in every area of your life, head over to terrielfawesomecom to pick up your free gifts and so much more. We'll see you next week on the Comeback Chronicles podcast. You.