KORE Outdoors Podcast

Christian and Tony
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the KORE Outdoors Podcast. My name is Christian Rawles. This show's mission is to deliver new perspectives and practical insights to entrepreneurs working in the outdoor industry. Today's conversation is with Tony McWilliam. Tony got his start in the industry as the founder of Faction Skis.

Today, Tony plays multiple roles within the outdoor and snow sports industries, working with different brands as a creative director, designer, mentor, and investor. Tony provides a wealth of knowledge for outdoor founders. He's transparent about his experience at Faction and willing to share what he learned with other founders so that they can avoid some of the same mistakes along the way.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Tony McWilliam.

[00:00:39] Christian: where I wanted to start it is 'cause you're a, i, I dunno if the word is classically trained designer, but you are a designer and I'm curious what lessons from your design background that you bring into and what has said helped you shape the brand building

[00:00:52] Tony: Yeah, so I did both. I, I have a product design degree or industrial design, some people call it. And then after product design, I [00:01:00] moved into graphic design and then I, I, I kind of. What's the word? Cut my fingernails. That's not the right word. Learn. That's the one. Thanks. Cut my teeth under a, a traditional graphic design agency, which back, this is 20 years ago.

So they did everything from copywriting, creative direction to finished art and everything from beer cans to uh, wayfinding for stadiums and things like that. So it gave me that side of things. Gave me a really good solid introduction to branding and the concept of branding, which we won't get into here 'cause that is way too complex for one conversation.

But identity work and actually fine tuning your, your skill, uh, to write copy, funnily enough. So that's one side of it. Design side. I loved product design because it gives you an insight into just how things are made and you go through this process. Uh, when you start product design, you walk into McDonald's or [00:02:00] something and you start looking under the table.

'cause you're like, well, how did they make this table? I'm like, what's this straw made of? This is amazing, and stuff like that. But the biggest thing I've found over the years is the ability to solve problems. And so graphic design is about communication and product design is about solving problems. So identifying something that isn't happening in the world or could be improved and then saying, okay, how can you sit down and try to improve this?

And so there's a, there's a a, a way of kind of approaching problems called design thinking. And I spent the last 20 years thinking everybody knew what design thinking was. And literally, it's only a few years ago where I realized that people haven't been trained to come up with, to assess their own solutions to problems, to come up with multiple solutions to one problem, and then.

To cut those down and then redo that process. And so design thinking is very much about identifying the problem properly, coming up with five ideas that [00:03:00] work to solve that problem, refining those down, going back to that process and doing it again. And what you tend to find, and what I tend to find with a lot of people who aren't trained in design thinking or haven't, don't really understand that approach, is they kind of, they come up with a solu, uh, a problem and they go, oh, I've got this great idea.

And you're like, well, coming from my background, sorry, but you have an idea. Time will tell. If it's great, go away and have five more and can then come back to me and then we can sit down and talk about it. And I, that you apply that to everything. You know, is this the right athlete to bring on board?

Is this the right product within our lineup? Is this the right staff member? Like absolutely everything. I, I just have. Over time, trained myself into kind of saying, okay, this is one solution. What's five more? Write the wall down, assess them, take it back, do it again. And it's really, I think it's actually really probably saved me from making a lot of bad mistakes quickly, because you tend to get passionate about your ideas.

If you're not comfortable with having ideas, [00:04:00] assessing them, removing them, like just saying no. That idea shit. People get very possessive about their ideas. And so being able to kind of remove yourself from the emotional attachment to creativity and the emotional attachment to having an idea and assessing it analytically, I find is quite unique and incredibly useful in my line of work anyway.

[00:04:23] Christian: That's great. That's a, that's a great connection and lots of, lots of ways we can go in that. Um, because the first part of this conversation's about kind of like that startup phase, uh, of, of a brand. I'm wondering kind of in that idea of, there's a lot of people who come up with the idea or the problem that they're gonna solve and it's literally a product and then it's hard sometimes it can be challenging to build a brand around a single product.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm curious what your perspective is on when you work with founders who have this one product and like, how long should they stay focused on that one product versus starting to think about other product [00:05:00] categories?

[00:05:00] Tony: a really good question. And there's a couple of brands that I mentor that are highly innovative products. But what's difficult for them is to then kind of think, how does that then relate to a broader line of products which actually fit complimentary categories and might increase.

Revenue to get to the stage where you can have a convincing argument for an investment team, um, or partners to come on board and actually put time and effort and energy into it. And I think this might be a little off topic, but I think people get too fixated on innovation as being a key to success.

Um, and I saw there were some notes on LinkedIn today about actually and very early on, if you get people who come from other industries, they kind of go, right, you know, why is your product different? What's unique about it? What, how, how are you showing innovation? How is this gonna, and I hate to use the word, how is this gonna [00:06:00] disrupt the incumbents?

And people get really fixated on that being, this is the reason why we are going to succeed. And in, in my experience, you kind of need three different things. You need a great product. Undeniably you need a great product, but it doesn't have to be. Instead, it doesn't have to be incredibly innovative. You don't have to rethink the wheel because what you also need is demand for that product.

Whether it's a niche which hasn't been opened, or you're able to raise awareness for it, and then you need distribution. So without those three things, it's kinda like three pillars. I call 'em, you know, it's like a three legged chair. Without each of those things, you really struggle to build a business, a business, a sustainable business.

And when you're talking about moving into other categories and why and when you would choose to move into other categories, I mean, we made the mistake early on at faction that we kind of thought, right, we need to raise some more money. [00:07:00] Skis is, it's gonna take us a long time to make skis. It, it, to make that into a, a, a large business.

That I was kind of convinced by my partner at the time to, uh, enter the world of outerwear. Because it was an investment, it was more attractive to investors at the time. It was seen as higher margin. It was seen as something that was easier to sell to a larger volume of people globally than skis was easier to buy online, uh, et cetera.

And frankly it was a category push too far, but at the time we didn't realize that at the time. What we didn't realize was, sure you can make a great product. Um, and I went from, as a product designer, it was relatively. Straightforward for, for me to actually go from hard goods into outerwear. We had good supply chains that was straightforward.

We could create demand because we already had awareness for faction as a ski brand. It was relatively straightforward [00:08:00] for us to kind of go, Hey, we've also got this outerwear brand. But what we didn't have was distribution. And what we didn't realize at the time was all our reps were hard, good reps. So a hard good rep goes in and builds a relationship with a hard goods buyer in a store, a specialty store, or wherever.

And the person who is the outerwear buyer or the soft goods buyer is a different person entirely. And just because a rep has a relationship with a hard goods buyer does not mean they've got a relationship with a soft goods buyer. And so you're starting from absolute scratch again. And the other thing is, if, if, in terms of building a brand, and when, when I say brand, I mean the relationship that someone has with your business, there's a couple of brands that have done it really well. Black Crows did it really well, uh, to combine, you know, hard goods and, and soft goods. And that was, you know, a great move by them. But they had a really particular niche and they had a really particular story that they pulled from. And, you know, it was all based around [00:09:00] Shaman and that kind of community there.

We didn't have that. We had from the start we had a kind of a, a global, kind of a, a global community, but not really a community that was fixed anywhere in particular. So there wasn't a relationship with a place, even though, you know, most of us were in to start off with EA doesn't have the same appeal globally that somewhere like Shaman does.

And so we kind of struggled with out aware for three to five years before we kind of realized that we would have to build an entirely new sales workforce. Uh, and that was at the point where we said we needed to put this on hold. For a while and then kind of reconsider that. But also you get, you get younger brands kind of saying, great, I've got this product and it's amazing.

It could be a helmet or something like that. And then they're gonna go, why don't we just move into like beanies and, and soft goods and all these other things. And what tends to happen is that if you're a product focused person, and I get this with factories [00:10:00] all the time, if you're a product focused person and that's your background and that's what you've learned your solution to a lot of problems is to build more products, I think this is what, you know, it's the easiest thing for you to do.

You're like, oh, well, uh, I haven't quite got the kind of the distribution under need with this product. Maybe I'll make more products so that way the distribution I do have can sell more things. But in reality, it doesn't really, it's not that straightforward in my experience.

[00:10:28] Christian: So do you think growth is the driver for these things? I'm just trying to think of like, what's the antidote to that then? You know, like if you were to say, okay, let's not come out with a new product category 'cause that doesn't make sense. Like skis is a tough one. So I don't know if that's the best example, but if you just got this one product category, you're nailing it.

Is it these ideas, you know, is what you're saying? Just, just continue to focus on that product category and don't. Get distracted by new products, simply double down on what you already have. Or is that just the growth [00:11:00] mindset of like, we need to be bigger to attract investment? Is that what kind of spills out into new product categories kind of

[00:11:06] Tony: That's a really good question. If I was mentoring a brand right now that was starting out, I had a great product, I would suggest that what they do is find ways to, to either. I mean, we're talking about, well my background is in winter sports. So for us it's really, as you said, it's really hard to find something that sells year round with winter sports.

So you're stuck with kind of saying, well, I can do Northern Hemisphere, maybe I need to do the Southern Hemisphere. But that has its own complications as well. But, so what tends to happen is you do complimentary things that a hard goods rep can sell. You go and brand your own bindings, which loses brand legitimacy.

You do polls and things like that, but they're very small additional add-ons to revenue. So, there's kind of two different questions there. One is, when should you consider moving [00:12:00] into additional products or additional lines or additional categories versus the whole story about investment? I think it's really easy to make an attractive investment story by saying, look, we're really good at this.

We, we, we, we rule this category, we're now gonna take that skillset and that that network and we're gonna go and make this. And I think there's a fine line between doing something like, you know, helmets. If you make winter sport helmets, you can move that into bike climbing, et cetera. But saying, we know how to make helmets, let's go make snowboards or something is just, I mean, that is like starting an entirely new business.

And while it might be, might, you might be able to make an attractive story for investors, that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna be successful. And I would say it's much better to, yeah, think of all those scenarios. Map them all out, categorize them all, model them, assess them. Go back to the drawing board.

Think again. Because I think, [00:13:00] I think people, I. You can make a lot of mistakes by moving too far outside your core category too quickly. And we did, we definitely did cost a lot of money

[00:13:13] Christian: Well that's why you're here to, to, we can learn from your experiences,

[00:13:16] Tony: Wicked.

[00:13:17] Christian: not to make, not to make light of it. Let's shift back a little bit, uh, to, because all behind all these brands typically are, is a founder or a group of founders. And so I'm curious in your experience, what you believe to be the founder's key job in the first two to three years of the brand.

[00:13:35] Tony: I would say to learn, um, I know that's really simplistic, but I, I think, I think there's two stages in, in business. One is when you start and it's you or you and a group of friends and you're just trying to, you know, maybe you've had a product idea and maybe that product area is innovative, or maybe it's not.

Maybe there's just a niche which hasn't been filled. All of them are valid reasons to start a business, in my opinion. The first [00:14:00] thing you have to do is you tend to come from one particular skill set. And I, I personally deal a lot with creative founders 'cause that was my background. I didn't have any business background whatsoever.

Didn't even know what equity was unfortunately. But it meant that once you think, you know, something about this idea that you've had and how to make it and how to make it at volume, you then kind of go, oh, right, I have to learn how to market and I have to learn how to sell and I have to learn about things like trademark trademarks and company registration and all these things.

So I think what can happen in the first few years is you get distracted by a lot of these other elements, which you don't think are necessary. But if you don't take the time to learn those things, when your business grows, you're not able to have constructive, valid conversations with your greater team.

I'm a big believer in. If you're starting your own business, you should do everything in the first few years. You should sell it, you should market it, you should do all the trade shows, you should [00:15:00] run all the cash flow, you should run all the budgets purely because if you don't learn those things, you can't then assess someone else's work when those people are working for you.

And those people, regardless of whether it's five years in or 10 years in or 20 years in, they're still doing something based on your vision and your initial idea of, Hey, this is why I think this is a good idea and where it should go.

The secondary stage is that I think what then does actually become very difficult. Is when you do become into these managerial roles and you're like, oh, but I really used to like writing copy or, you know, I used to actually just, I just wanted to design skis.

And suddenly you're employing someone else to design skis. You're like, oh, but that was the thing that I loved doing. So you need to try and also have these ways of, of staying in touch with why, you know, that initial spark of why the business was created in the first place. And actually somehow retain that and retain that passion and retain that kind of dream. [00:16:00] 'cause that's why you were kind of there in the first place. I don't know. I, I think there's two different types of founders. There's founders who are just trying to start a business, whatever that is. They might have got an MBA or something. They're all in a co-working space in London with whiteboards and agile.

They're agile post-its and that's it. Uh, and that I, you can be attached to a business that you start that way, but I think if that's how you're starting a business, you're probably more focused on what can I get out of the business? Where I think creative founders tend to do something because they either see a niche in an industry that they're already part of that they can not take advantage of, but think, oh shit, why don't I do that? And it starts slowly and then kind of snowballs. At least that's how I kind of see the business world. There are creative founders who don't even know their founders, or dunno the word entrepreneurs or the word business, which is me. I didn't know any of those things. I'm like, what the hell's a founder? I dunno.

And then there are other people who are [00:17:00] fixated on, I am a founder. I'm gonna start my own business. I want to run a business first and foremost. I, those two worlds are, in my experience, quite at odds with each other.

[00:17:13] Christian: Can I add a third mission? The mission-driven people, the mission-driven founders who are just like, I need to see a change in the world, and the best way to do that is through a business. Do you think that's a third

[00:17:25] Tony: I think that's great. I think that's fantastic. I think I was probably like that frankly. But I didn't know how to do that, so I went skiing. I no, I, I mean, this might sound weird, but coming from Australia in the nineties, you don't have much of a perspective of the rest of the world or, or what's possible.

I mean, I wasn't brought up that way. I didn't do business. My dad was a applied chemist, so a research scientist. My mom was a writer. The thought of starting a business or something, starting something on your own, which is [00:18:00] not. What do you do in Australia? Carpentry, plumbing, things like that. You know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a building real estate country.

Uh, and it was only really coming to London and seeing, you know, a massive NGO kind of environment, a charities as well, that kind of environment. Actually getting to somewhere like London and going, oh my God, you can actually choose your life to be, I wanna work for the un, I want to solve famine. You know, like those are not actually ridiculous ideas to get involved in and to be part of.

But where when I was growing up in Australia, I, I just wasn't even something to consider. And I frankly, if you are the kind of person who is fixated on, as you say, kind of a mission driven business, I think that's fantastic. And I think that's incredible.

[00:18:52] Christian: I wonder if now that the bar, the bar to entry or the barrier to entry is much lower for entrepreneurship and it's more commonplace. The idea [00:19:00] is kind of thanks to all the different things, social media and Shopify and all these things. Now it's, it's easier than ever to become an entrepreneur and people are driven by it.

I, I think sometimes, like this whole why the mission driven thing comes up to me is that it seems like people are like, it shouldn't be this way. We can do things differently. And I'm gonna suggest this because creating a business can make a big difference, right? Like economically, but also environmentally.

And so it's like, oh, I'm just, I'm gonna prove this model works. I guess that also that probably fair bit of, not to distract us too much from the conversation, but that's a pretty fair overlap with the creative founder too. 'cause that's much more of the creative aligned

[00:19:38] Tony: I mean, empathy is something you find in.

You find in creatives and mission-driven things. And really, you're only gonna probably become a mission-driven founder if you are highly empathetic to looking at what's happening in the world and seeing greater sociological problems that you can fix.

[00:19:54] Christian: Yeah, I, yeah, so case in point, mission driven has to be creative. Maybe they're on, [00:20:00] they're on the same side of that coin. So, yeah. Bringing it back a little bit to the founders, one of the questions I was gonna ask is, what jobs should founders never outsource? And your answer

[00:20:11] Tony: their own.

[00:20:12] Christian: don't outsource any of 'em at the beginning.

Which is, which is a good, yeah, it's a given. So a follow up question to that is, where do you think it's easy for early stage founders to get off track in their company?

[00:20:23] Tony: I think it's easier for them to get bogged down in all the things that they're not good at. And what we did a lot of in faction was we hired a lot of juniors. We were stupid. We hired a lot of juniors. Instead of going, I really need a head of marketing who's got 10 years experience, I really need a head of sales who's got 20 years experience and has all the connections we need.

And in the end, we were like, no, we can manage the reps by ourselves. If I hire a junior, I can just tell them what to do. And we, what we ended up doing was spending all our time manage. I had a team of 15 people here. They were [00:21:00] all started as interns or juniors. And literally I would spend all my time answering questions, helping them learn their job, and rather than actually going.

Hey, why don't we actually hire a senior who knows more about something than we do, who can actually take our idea and our vision and, and amplify that and get that out to where it should be? I think maybe we were a little bit, not, egotistical isn't the right word. Precious, I guess maybe about our business and about that vision and that idea.

Because I think what happens is you tend to see other people at a senior level as competitors a lot in the early days, you kind of think, oh shit, I'm gonna get ahead of sales in here and this head of sales is gonna tell me what I should do, and I'm not gonna have the experience to create a constructive argument to say, well, no, I don't wanna do that.

I wanna do this. I mean, you know, we were, I, it's nerves, I guess insecurity or something. But what it meant was that I [00:22:00] spent 90% of my time helping juniors do jobs that actually we should have. Outsourced we should have hired a senior for, and it meant that I couldn't get the time to focus on things that I was actually best at designing skis, guiding brand writing copy, you know, creative direction for all our, the, uh, artwork that we needed, website content, workbooks, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, ended up at,

[00:22:33] Christian: Yeah, it's hard

[00:22:33] Tony: at one point I ended up hiring a ski designer. I'm like, why am I hiring a ski designer so I can sit here and just make sure that everyone's doing their job like that? That shouldn't be my role. But conversely, what I've seen a lot of now is founders get to the stage where they're kind of five to 10 years in.

I was talking to a brand the other day actually about this, and there's two guys who are doing what, eight to 10 million globally with a really small team. And they're like, [00:23:00] we think we need to hire a CEO. And I think, I think we had this, this conversation the other day and you're like, why are you hiring a C?

You know exactly what you're doing. You need to hire the guys around you who are senior enough to actually take the ball that you've started rolling and roll up faster, not tell you what you should do. You are already successful in anyone's terms. I mean, hitting those type of revenue targets, that's fantastic. Like, sorry, I dunno if I answer your

[00:23:27] Christian: So do you think it's, yeah, it's good. Do, I'm just curious, do you think it's like the, you, you touched on it a little bit, like the insecurity, is it the fear of losing the control or is it the, the thought of the lack of in revenue to drive those positions? Right, because it's sometimes can be challenging.

You know, just think, okay, I've gotta go pay for a senior role that's, you know, 50% to a hundred percent to 150% more that I'm gonna have to pay.

[00:23:54] Tony: weird.

[00:23:55] Christian: Which one do you think it is? Is it lack of control or

[00:23:58] Tony: This is interesting. [00:24:00] Uh. Ours was definitely, we don't have enough money to go and hire a senior salesperson. We're not paying ourselves. Like all we can afford now is maybe to get an added person in to help out and maybe I'll get an intern to do some PR for a while and if they're good enough, I'll see if they can handle like running our marketing.

And actually person who started out as an intern for me is now head of Global PR at Scott. And she's incredible. So, hey, they definitely, these people definitely have those talents. But I only, something I've realized in the last couple of years is people talk about imposter syndrome for founders a lot.

And I don't know if I had a, I don't know if I'd say it's imposter syndrome, but you definitely get to that point where you're like, Hey, I was a ski bum and I started this business and now I've got people putting in a couple of million and like. I really know what I'm doing? You know, I'm sitting in board meetings going, I have no idea what a convertible no is and I better learn fast because you guys are talking about it a lot and I don't really [00:25:00] know what it is and no one's asking me any questions about brand or product or marketing.

So either they're assuming that I know what I'm doing and they're just leaving me to it, or I'm so bad at it that it's irrelevant and all these other things are way more important and will obviously help the business grow. So I think in my case it was probably confidence. There was probably confidence that, that I don't, I, I guess that is imposter syndrome.

Sitting down in a board meeting and going, I don't know anything that these people are talking about. And if I put my hand up, am I gonna look like an idiot? Even though these, they've invested in my vision and I was the one that pitched to them and they went, yes Tony, we wanna support your vision. It quickly turns into Christ.

What are they talking about? I don't have anything constructive to put into this conversation 'cause it can only follow half of it.

[00:25:46] Christian: So what do you think is the best, what's your advice to founders then if, if they need to learn all the jobs and do all the things and learn? You know, that's step number one is your, is. Early stages. Learn as much as you can. Where do they [00:26:00] turn to get this education? Where do they turn to because they're not getting it from

[00:26:04] Tony: No mentors and coaches. I, I think it's fantastic to have an outside perspective of someone who knows your industry but is not financially involved. Or if they are financially involved, it's, you're giving them some hard goods every year, you're giving them some jackets and stuff like that, and they just want to help, and they're friendly.

And frankly, you know, people like you and me, I, I mentor for free. I don't do it for money. I do it because I really want to see these people's vision made real and not make the same mistakes I've made. And there's so many more options now. I mean, when I started Faction, there wasn't any social media. You know, Facebook didn't exist.

LinkedIn didn't, didn't exist. But nowadays you can go on and you can say, Hey, I need help with this. I am doing this. I need help. And if you ask people, they know other people, and I did I really wished there were one or two people I met [00:27:00] early on in my career with faction that I really wished I had gone.

Can I buy you a drink or a coffee or whatever, a lunch and sit down and just, can you tell me what I. Like your perspective on the industry from your experience? So, uh, the guy started movement skis. Sge B is amazing and we had Stan's opposite each other at Hisco every year. And I'd go to, and I met him the first year and he's this, just this cool looking guy with great glasses and great style.

But he went, Hey, you know, we got started kind of talking and he went, oh, Tony, look, I can tell you where you're gonna be in two years time. I can tell you where you're gonna be in five years time. I can tell you where you're gonna be in 10 years time. And I was like, I was so new to this whole thing.

And I was so like, surely these people are my competitors. What the hell that I didn't, I should have gone. Wow, really? Can you, can we, can we sit there and go and have a talk? But I wasn't, I was as, as what happens very, very often, you see your the businesses that are doing a similar thing to you, you see them as [00:28:00] competitors, which you shouldn't.

We can get into that later. But I only got really friendly with him probably after I left faction and that was kind of what. Oh shit, seven years ago. And now we have lunch every six months or so, and we talk about the industry and I'm like, God, I wish I, I wish I had listened to you, you know, 15 years ago.

Things like that, because you can now.

[00:28:21] Christian: If that's one thing, that's one thing about the snow sports outdoor bike industry, it's small and people wanna help and, and that idea of competitors, it's uh,

[00:28:32] Tony: There's a caveat,

[00:28:33] Christian: Rising tide lifts all boats.

[00:28:34] Tony: that though. If someone's offering you advice for free, it's probably worthless in my mind. If you sit down somewhere and someone goes, what do you do? And start what you should do, then you should probably not. Listen whose advice you want, don't

[00:28:49] Christian: Hmm.

[00:28:50] Tony: hand it out to you. My, my experience anyway, today,

[00:28:56] Christian: What does that look like as a mentor then?

[00:28:59] Tony: it's [00:29:00] interesting because from this side of things, I, I now understand that. As a founder, even when you have someone in a mentor position, you still not might, you still might not take their advice. You're still like, well that's good. I understand that perspective, but I want to go out and make the same mistake as well.

Which can be frustrating at times. You know, there is one, there is one business I'm mentoring where I've literally said, this idea is great, this product is great. You've got a certain amount of product market fit, but you need to walk into a store with your product and you need to find the buyer and go, can you sell this?

Will you buy this off me? And for whatever reason, and I've been telling you for two years, he still owns none. It, you're like, okay, okay. We'll see how it goes. There's gonna be a point where it's gonna have to happen. And I think, I think sometimes taking advice can be scary for sure.

[00:29:54] Christian: Certainly. That's a good point. I, I like that you brought that up 'cause that was one of the questions I was gonna ask is, one of your pillars is distribution. [00:30:00] And a conversation that comes up a lot on this podcast and elsewhere is the idea of direct to consumer and specialty retail, direct to consumer has lost a bit of its luster.

Certainly lately there's been some, you know, some of the smoke and mirrors have been removed and now there's a little bit more truth behind it. So in your perspective of specialty retail, what's the role that specialty retail plays, like literally the brick and mortar, what role do they play in those early stage brands and how do you approach them as

[00:30:31] Tony: I think I, I think I saw this question and I wrote down my answer to it. Their role is everything in the early stage. Like literally when I started faction it, it was, it was D to C techn, technically it for the first couple of years, but it was through word of mouth. So I was emailing my friends and my friends were emailing their other friends and we thought, yeah, hey, I can, we can sell this online.

And you put it online thinking it's gonna be great. And now at least you have the added [00:31:00] benefit of, you know, digital advertising, which didn't exist 20 years ago. But I think there's a bit of a misconception about, Hey, I've got this great brand and it looks cool and I can put some money in D two C. Pay, click ads, et cetera, and it's gonna drive enough revenue to create a long term business. And the problem with D two C, okay, apart from the fact that now the cost for advertising is just phenomenally expensive, and I'm literally, literally seeing brands who, they might be doing 10 million, 15 million in revenue, but their cost of advertising for D two C is over 45% of their revenue, which is not sustainable.

It just is not sustainable. But the thing that people forget about specialty retail and building a business is community and sell through not just selling and repeat customers. People tend to forget there was, for the last few years or [00:32:00] the last decade, there's been this real kind of push and pull between brands and retailers, and it's been a lot of, and you see what Nike did last year about actually saying, we're not gonna work with specialty retailer, we're gonna go direct to customer.

And then pulling that back completely, because you need reliability to make a business sustainable, you need to be able to plan cashflow, you need to be able to go get bank loans based on revenue that you know is coming in. And you can't do any of that with D two C. So for me, I, when I'm rebuilding, so I'm, now I'm rebuilding candid skis and forward outdoor.

My focus here, and it, it's actually interesting with Candid, because Candid, for example, has such a massive social media following over a million, you know, followers on Instagram that you think you should just go D two C because it'd be really simple to leverage those, but it's not. It's really hard to build loyalty and repeat custom.

And you can't go to a [00:33:00] manufacturer and go, Hey, let's make 5,000 pairs of skis. And I don't actually have a buyer for those skis. People might buy them, people might not buy them. I won't really know until actually the money starts coming in in November and the sales work and maybe the sales work, maybe the sales don't.

So for me, starting that groundwork again, literally from zero and going, right, we need to be in the best retailers within each area, each kind of key resort that we see. And we need to grow this the old way, which is based on community, word of mouth, specialty, retailer. Because for me, I've worked in stores since I was. They are so much more, and I think brands forget this, that stores are so much more than just a place to buy something. They tend to be a nexus for where entire culture and entire community come for, come together. You, you go in for advice, you go in, you know, you end up being really good friends with your ski tech and you can go in there every couple of weeks and go, oh, have you seen this?

Have you seen this? Have you seen this? Like for me, specialty retail is so much [00:34:00] more than just a place that you buy something. And so for me it's kind of the key to the industry and it's the key to businesses as a whole, and that's applicable, whether it's the us whether it's Japan, whether it's Norway, wherever it's, it's the same.

One thing we did talk about earlier is that D two C is a very different beast in different parts of the world. Uh, a lot because of language. You know, DI have seen some very successful D two C brands in the us and in the uk, but outside of those kind of areas and regions which are focused on English speaking languages, it's really hard to get the traction. In other, in, in other places. And you need so much money, you need to put so much money into marketing.

[00:34:43] Christian: Yeah, there are definitely outliers who are exceptions to this rule for sure. Uh, you know, one of the core members that we talk about a lot is Durst and gear based here in bc who's just completely D two C and a behemoth of a company now. But that's [00:35:00] like, it's easy to see that and be like, oh, that's the formula.

But there are a million different ways for every company to kind of get to where they need to be. And just because it works in one place doesn't necessarily mean it

[00:35:10] Tony: Yeah. There was a time I, I don't know if you guys got dope snow over in the us but so dope Snow was set up by a Swedish store and they were just a retailer who went, Hey, there's this D two C thing and as a cheap, let's make her a gear. Let's improve the margin and let's just saturate and get it out there.

And they were in the right, at the right. If someone was coming to me first and foremost about going, I'm gonna start this business and I'm gonna go D to CI, I tend to close that deck and move on. It's just so hard.

[00:35:43] Christian: Yeah, it's, I mean, I also think about specialty retail specifically. I mean, this could be true for big box retailers that we have way more of in North America than you do in Europe. But to have, I mean, it's something about surround sound marketing too, right? So that if your customers [00:36:00] seeing, yeah, seeing it online and getting to serve digital ads or seeing it on your own website, but then they're also seeing it in those other places is just another touch point, right?

And so one can serve the other. That sometimes it's, it's, we, we look at the margin on the, in the Excel sheet and like, Ooh, I don't know. But there's a lot that goes, there's a lot that goes into that margin that's more than just, um, just more than revenue.

[00:36:23] Tony: a lot that that sale means for you, the structure of your business and the money you have to raise as well. It goes a long way.

[00:36:31] Christian: So we'll shift a little bit. ' You do a lot of work with brands right now on supply chain and, and you know that that's kind of your specialty from back in the faction days, but you're also working on hard goods and soft goods. What, what is your advice to new brands regarding their supply chain?

We've, you've already mentioned about the idea of kind of reshoring and that desire to do that. Hopefully that's something that's more attainable in the future. But in the early stages, like what do, when it's kind of like the fundamentals of setting up a new supply chain, like what are kind of the golden rules [00:37:00] that you want to

[00:37:01] Tony: Yeah. Find one and stick to it would be my golden rule. It's easy. It's easy in the early days to think, oh, I've got this, I've got this supplier and, and, and I've done a prototype with them or I've done one new production with them, but ah, there's this one over here that are just down the road that can do it cheaper or they've promised me this or something like that.

And it doesn't work that way. The relationship that you have with your supplier, and I've been working with some suppliers for over 15 years, 17 years. The ski factory I work with, I've been working with the gm, was the assistant graphic designer when I started working with them. And so, you know, I've got a relationship there where now I can just call up the GM and go, can you just slot this production in?

And they're like, yeah, sure, of course you can. And yet, no, no one else will get that kind of service just because I've been working with them for so long. And you do tend to get companies, and we talked about this earlier. I worked with a developer or a product developer, so someone who takes [00:38:00] designs and then goes and selects a factory and places the production order within that factory.

That's their role. Uh, and so their work for a, you know, a massive international brand and their regular practice was to take, was for that developer to go out to three different factories, cost up each of those factories, and then just order from whichever factory was cheaper. And what they found year by year is that the quality goes down.

They, the MQs go up because the factories just get so tired of it. And that over time they run out of factories to go to the next year because there's only a finite amount of people that you could work with before. How you get out, sorry. How you work gets out to everyone else. The, in the outdoor world, even though, you know, there's thousands of apparel, factories, they all talk to each other to think that they don't, even across Vietnam, Cambodia, you know, China, to think that they don't talk to each other, they all talk to each other.

They're all buying from the same trim supplies. They're all buying from the same fabric suppliers. They all meet [00:39:00] at the same trade shows. They travel, they talk to each other. And so building a solid relationship with one factory, even if the price is slightly more expensive than one other, you are looking at, if you have a, if you have a solid relationship with them, that's more important than price.

In my, in my book, you know, building a relationship and being able to get flexibility down the line, knowing that they'll deliver on time and that they'll do what they say, and you've spent two years working through all those little niggles that you have when you start developing a product or developing a line means that over time everything gets easier.

[00:39:36] Christian: Because inevitably those things are gonna happen. And so you wanna have that relationship. Yeah. You want that relationship to be able to fall

[00:39:42] Tony: And the thing is, well, things will go wrong, which you don't know about. The unknown unknowns. Not the known unknowns. Yeah. Things will always go wrong. Every year. Something will happen every year. Something will stop up. Delivery. Every year something in a product will be wrong.

It it just, it always, something [00:40:00] always happens. But you know, the more communication and the tighter relationship you can have, the less that happens is what I would say in general.

[00:40:08] Christian: Yeah, I think there's a really interesting correlation between how like long-term relationships with customers, specifically specialty retail and long-term relationships with factories. And if we're always just looking at the sheet and saying, well, what's the margin? And I'm gonna chase some margin, we're we're really chasing a real short-term victory as opposed to like this long-term growth trajectory.

And the growth trajectory may just mean lower margin now, but larger consistency and revenue in the future. But it's hard to, like when you're early starting out, like all you're just thinking about is, how do I make that number go

[00:40:43] Tony: That's, no, actually, I'm not sure if you saw my body language. All I'm think of is like, oh, can we have a talk about margin? Please.

[00:40:50] Christian: let's do it. Here we are margin,

[00:40:53] Tony: I hate people who try and assess businesses on margin. We used to do in board meetings every year. Every single year it's like, wow, [00:41:00] your margin is 43%. How are you gonna get it that up to 44%?

You're like, I don't give a shit. Like, I literally, it. That's just, it's just so unimportant in the big scale of can you deliver on time? Are you actually, you know, are you seeing sell through? Are you seeing. Is your, is your top line revenue growing? I'm way more interested in, in whether you are actually growing as a business, whether you are improving your margin, your own year, as long as it's within.

Obviously there are relatives, there is healthy margin and there is non-healthy margin. But you get to a point where I got to a point with a lot of meetings with my board for example, where literally they would fix our margin. How are you gonna improve this margin? How are you gonna improve that margin?

And okay, finding half a point in margin or negotiating your supplier down a percent or two across every product might make you feel better and it might make the board feel better if that's how you are [00:42:00] looking at things. Always. How do you find that one or two extra points of margin? For me, the negative impact of that quest has greater far reaching impacts than the positive outcome of it. But I'd love to hear your perspective because that's, that's just been mine.

[00:42:19] Christian: Yeah, , I don't know if I disagree. I mean, the caveat about the healthy margin versus unhealthy margin, I think that's a, that's a very important one. Certainly. Sustainability , it's not just an environmental term, you know, it's an economic term and so it margin can create sustainability. So I think it's really important to think about margin and to know your margin and to calculate it correctly, because there's a lot of people who are actually.

When I look at the math, the math doesn't math. And so, you know, getting, getting clear on what your margin actually is

[00:42:53] Tony: things around too, you know, it depends, depending who you work with and on the business. Some people, what they put in gross margin and net [00:43:00] margin can vary a lot. You know, some people could cost a sales in it, some people don't. Some people got logistics in, some people don't. Some people put warranties in, some people don't.

So it's, it is, it is definitely relative.

[00:43:11] Christian: Yeah. But it is a, it, it's an important metric because it's the, , it's taking the temperature, it's necessary. I really, I do appreciate your point though in that the effort to win that extra point is not, is not doing what you like, it's, it's doing a disservice more than it's a service. Because if, going back to relationship with the ma, uh, with the factory, going back to relationship with the.

Specialty retailer or retailers in general. Like if, if you're on the quest to increase margin, you will make sacrifices in the near term that affect the long term in those relationships that are so important. So that's why I think your, your point is very clear and makes sense is that like, yeah, it's not a, it's not a quest to increase margin constantly at the [00:44:00] cost of your relationship with your long-term relationship with those factories.

'cause that's the

[00:44:05] Tony: I just like.

[00:44:06] Christian: That being said, don't be afraid of. Don't be, don't be afraid of having a long-term relationship. 'cause I mean I had, I worked with the same factories for the entire, I own a business for 15 years, worked for the exact same factories and every year we had have a conversation about the margin.

'cause they're having a con, they're having the internal conversation about it. We're having the internal conversation about it. The nice thing is when you have a good relationship with them, you can start to be really transparent about, Hey, this is what I need. Okay, hey, this is what I need. Perfect. Let's find a place.

Where does it work? I can give

[00:44:34] Tony: That's a great point actually. Uh, and I completely agree with what you're saying. You, you can tell the health of a business, well, one indicator of the health of a business is its what area is margin is in. And, and if that margin is correct or in the right ballpark for the category of business and for the area that it works in, that, that's really key.

And over time, your margin should increase. No doubt. You, you find efficiencies of scale, et cetera. [00:45:00] But if, as you say, if, if you are just focusing on margin and trying to work out how that can be better. That's, that couldn't, yeah. Not be beneficial. But one of, one of the things I always had is that all, every time we produce skis every year we'd kind of go, okay, if we just get to X thousand next year, you know, will we get a, a discount, a volume discount?

And the factory would be like, like, yeah, sure. And then every year we'd go back to negotiate again and they go, well, cost of goods has gone up. This inflation's gone up this. And you're like, wow. So it's just the same price as it was last year. Great. Anyway.

[00:45:35] Christian: Yeah. Yeah, on on that point, I. Re the, the margin conversation's important. I'd like to have more conversations with retailers about margin. That's something that I've dealt with on the brand side, but not on the retailer side. And that's a whole, it's, yeah, I'd love to get their perspective. So maybe we need to three-way call somebody

[00:45:51] Tony: Well actually

[00:45:52] Christian: retail margin.

[00:45:53] Tony: things I learned very early on was you can be. Completely transparent with everybody [00:46:00] about what you are getting. I'm completely transparent with my dear distributors as to the cost of my product. I'm completely transparent with my reps to the cost of the product, completely transparent with retailers, what the cost of my product is, because then we just have open conversations otherwise, and they kind of go, okay, I understand why you can only gimme a two rather than a 2.1 or a 2.2.

Uh, sorry, thing about markup for skis, for example. Because they kind of go, all right, you're only making that fine. Okay, we'll stick with that then let's just try and sell it. Pricing's fair, let's just do it kind of thing. And it, it goes a long way. But, but the tendency when you're a young business is to just hide everything you know, when you're not, it's not that you're not confident.

It's like you don't know what information you can be transparent about and what things are actually your secrets, your things that make you special and make you unique. Unique. And so.

[00:46:49] Christian: Yeah, I would say if you can't put a patent on it, you can share it. So you can't put a patent on your pricing.

[00:46:55] Tony: Yeah, no, exactly, because they're, you know, they're getting your price list and they're [00:47:00] going and they're comparing it with the next person. It's, and so the factory,

[00:47:04] Christian: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good point. I mean, I think transparency goes a long way. Like it is in a, let's call it a relationship with a, whether a significant other, whether you don't just first date, let 'em know

[00:47:16] Tony: no. Exactly.

[00:47:17] Christian: you know, you warm up to it and then you become transparent over time.

But I think it's really important to eventually get to that point where you're transparent, so maybe don't stray out on the first date. Brings up a good point. We're talking margin and money. Um, something that comes up in the early stage brands is definitely how do you raise capital? So I'm curious what your perspective is on, and you've had a bunch of different experience personally, but also working with other brands.

What the best ways to raise capital early on, you know, crowdfunding has become a very, uh, common thing. It's really interesting to see brands like peak design. I dunno if you know the. Photography bag company pick design. They're, I think they, they go, they go to the crowdfunding well every year. I mean, they just launched a, a tripod last week and it's already like, [00:48:00] whatever, multiple millions of dollars.

And you're like, what? You're a successful business. Why are you going back to the crowdfunding? Anyways, I digress. So there's inventory, financing, and grants and friends and family rounds. What do you think the real pros and cons are for those early stage brands to raise capital?

[00:48:15] Tony: Wow. Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think it depends on, you have a lot of options now, which we didn't have before. And. They all have different pros and cons. So like peak design started similarly, and I've done a project on Kickstarter as well. I did that in 2017. Um, and things like Kickstarter, Indiegogo are really good to kind of test the waters, find the right product, market fit, and there's some brands who do things repeatedly.

There's an a power brand, I can't remember what they're called, Cortes or something like that, who literally every year do 400,000, 500,000 on Kickstarter, Indigogo, which is phenomenal. And it's a great way to bring in [00:49:00] capital to then pay for production because that's generally your biggest challenge.

And when you're a young business, your biggest outlay, unless you're doing something really unique and you need to go and spend half a million on tooling, you know, actually being able to sup to support that first production run in the first couple of years. That's the big outlay. You know, because at that point you tend to be bootstrapping, you tend to not being paying yourself much.

You, you, you tend to kind of have relatively small outgoings and your production can be the biggest one. And if you're a new business, it's hard to get bank loans or if you get bank loans, there are, there's a lot more facilities out there to get in loans, but they tend to be, in my experience, they tend to be very dangerous.

My brother-in-law's business actually in the uk, he made cider. It's really good cider. [00:50:00] Uh, but he took one of these kind of online loans and he didn't realize it had a cliff to it. So at any time that that loan, it wasn't a bank, it was just a, a corporate structure. At any time, they could call that loan in, in its entirety.

That literally put his business under. And you don't know these things. You don't read about these things. You don't kind of, you just think, oh God, this person's seen, like in his example, he is seen my monthly sales online, like Wicked. He'll give me like 50,000, okay, I'll go take that. And you don't realize what may happen.

Crowdfunding, if we're talking about things like crowdcube, cedars, I dunno what the US equivalents, we, we funder or something like that.

[00:50:44] Christian: Oh,

[00:50:44] Tony: basically you're not buying a product, you are actually, you're actually putting money into the business itself. So it's, it's very different from Kickstarter.

Indeed, Gogo. When you're actually committing to buy a product, you're basically putting a down payment on. That [00:51:00] has, in my experience, and I've done a couple of those. First one, we raised about one half million or so. But generally what we use those for and what they're good for is getting additional capital to come in and to build publicity and general awareness of your business.

When you already have a base committed. So for example, when we raised about one and a half million pounds, I think it was, we already had about four or 500,000 committed because there's, in the algorithm, in the way that they get promoted on those sites, et cetera, you need to ensure that you hit a solid amount of your target early on, or you then just kind of get pushed down the rankings and it kind of gets lost.

And there are pros and cons to crowdfunding. And I'm not sure people are aware of this, and I was only aware of this later on, if you are a brand. Crowdfunding is great because what happens, or this is through the UK versions, [00:52:00] uh, anyway, you get one shareholder, the group, whoever, it can be 500 people who decide to invest, and it comes in and it comes in under one shareholder.

So what that means, a one shareholder entity. So what that means is they only have one vote. They don't get. Just because you buy some shares in that company, through crowd or whoever, doesn't mean you get voting rights. Doesn't mean you actually hold equity in that company. It's all held under a parent group.

So that is great for the brand. I hate to say it, but it's less good for you as an individual if you invest in a business through a crowdfunding. Source. Inventory financing is something I, sorry, I'm going through your list here. Inventory financing is something I have only really come into in the last couple of years because in the hard goods industry, it wasn't common practice at all.

In the apparel [00:53:00] industry, it was very common. And this is 15 years ago, it was very common to be able to take pre-orders for apparel to a bank and they would give you a loan against that order in the hard goods industry for whatever reason, maybe it's just smaller and non knows what the hell the ski is.

They were like, skis, what? Why would I, why would I loan you money? And you're like, look, I've got like two and a half million of orders. Can you gimme a loan? They're like, no. So early on we didn't have much luck with anything like in bedroom financing. Um, and stupidly what we used to do was raise. Sell equity for stock.

We went out and we, we were like, shit, we need half a million. What are we gonna do? Uh, I guess we have to raise some cash. And those people got equity because we didn't know about inventory financing or anything like that. And finally, enough, now I help brands organize inventory financing because there's a much [00:54:00] greater group of private individuals now who want to do something constructive with their money, who love the outdoors, who understand the businesses that I work with.

You know, we have history. I have history within the industry. The, I have solid relationships with factories. It's easy for me now to turn around and kind of go, right, do you wanna put in X amount of money? It's secured against this product. Here's the factory. You guys can connect, you can talk, you know, are you willing just to put some in and, and agree a percentage rate for return on that infant financing. it's private.

[00:54:34] Christian: most of the inventory financing you're seeing now is private.

[00:54:37] Tony: Yeah, for sure.

[00:54:38] Christian: Oh, okay.

[00:54:39] Tony: I dunno what it's like in the States, but over here it tends to be private individuals. I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't go to an institution, or at least I don't have those networks to go to an institution to get a private, and I, I've dealt with things,

[00:54:54] Christian: My experience in North America, they, I was just gonna say, my experience in North America, I have never, [00:55:00] uh, I've, I've been approached, but I've never accepted it. They are institutions, but they're more like the aquarium as opposed to the ocean itself. You know what I mean? If the big banks of the ocean, these guys are more like the aquarium, uh, sharks,

[00:55:15] Tony: Ah, really interesting.

[00:55:16] Christian: I think they're more of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, it's not dirty, it's just like, you know, sometimes the, the, the, the, the rates are tough.

[00:55:24] Tony: Yeah. Well, there are laws here against that. There are, yeah, yeah, yeah. Switzerland, there are laws against, you can't do a private loan over 12%. It used to be. I dunno if that's changed, but Yeah, when we started out, we were doing loans way higher than that. We didn't even know to our accounts like, the hell are you doing?

You can't do that. That's illegal. Like what? Huh? Okay.

[00:55:45] Christian: Did you, did you get this in an alley?

[00:55:47] Tony: Exactly. Where did you find this? No, but the, the interesting thing, and I, I myself do inventory financing loans to other brands. Some of the brands I mentor, I do inventory, financing loans to or I connect them, they're small [00:56:00] or I connect them with, you know, guys who just have more liquidity if they're looking, you know, for something bigger.

But the thing is, we've, I mean, I, I mentor one brand that has a bank loan in France and Jesus Christ, like they will take every single dollar that comes into your bank account. Like if you can't pay them back on time, you are screwed. You are, they don't care. Which is fine that, I mean, that's their business model.

But you know, with private investors. If it's the 12th of the month and you owe them on the 12th of the month and you call 'em and go for whatever reason, your cash flow is down that week or that month, and you have to ask for a a week's extension, you know, generally if you have a good relationship with that person, I, I don't want to say you can take that for granted, but you know, generally they're more flexible with banks and they'll say, sure, if it comes in on Monday rather Friday, that's fine.

Like, you know, they're not gonna shut the business because of it. But you need to [00:57:00] have

[00:57:00] Christian: I would say

[00:57:01] Tony: you need to have

[00:57:02] Christian: Go ahead.

[00:57:02] Tony: reliability and stability to be able to do that. You couldn't just go out, out, out of the gates as a business and go, I've got this great idea for a product and it's gonna be the best thing in the world, and can I just borrow 500,000?

Like, well, against what,

[00:57:16] Christian: Yeah.

[00:57:17] Tony: you've got no distribution, you've got no demand. No, that's not gonna happen. And that's, that's the hardest

[00:57:22] Christian: An interesting word.

[00:57:23] Tony: Sorry, go.

[00:57:24] Christian: Yeah, I was gonna say an interesting word of award similar to your brother's situation with the loan that gets called back on a whim. , I heard about a brand recently here in bc I guess this was last year, but still 2024. The Shopify finance element now, right? Where you can, which the terms are still pretty high, is what they're gonna charge you, whatever it's a thing.

And you know, inventories are, and ca cash flow is important anyway. They had a bank loan and in their, so the, the moral of the story before I tell the story is, read the documents [00:58:00] very closely and know what you're into. And anyway, they had a bank line of credit that they had drawn on and one of the terms in that line is that they cannot take additional financing from any other source.

And they, they took a, a. 10% or whatever they took the 10 grand or some, some small number off Shopify financing. It showed up in the monthly statement. And, the bank said, okay, you've got whatever, 15, whatever the number is, you've got that many days to like, solve this and get this off, or, you know, the bank.

And they couldn't. And they literally lost that lost access line of credit business goes bankrupt simply because they did not read their documents closely enough and didn't follow the rules, which we're, would've been an easily thing, easy thing to avoid. Long story short, Chad TPT can help you read the rules and, uh,

[00:58:54] Tony: Can,

[00:58:55] Christian: remind, remind you and you know, as can a lawyer.

But, uh, it's important. [00:59:00] It's important to know what you're up against when you do borrow money, whomever

[00:59:03] Tony: really key. And the, actually, for D two C brands, there's Shopify loans. It could really help. It can really help. I've, I've used one or two. I, I know people have used them, but you're right, like you need to understand what could go wrong because you, you can lose everything.

[00:59:20] Christian: The known unknowns. Okay. As we we're, we're turning the corner here. We're gonna move. This first part of the conversation has all been about this kind of the early stage. We're gonna start moving into that growth stage, that sec, you know, another stage in the life of a brand. So in that transition, what advice do you give brands when they're deciding if they're ready to grow?

[00:59:40] Tony: I think they need to have those three pillars in place. There's, there's, there's a difference between investing to scale and investing to, uh, growth is not the right word. I, I kind of, there's kind of three different areas that I say in terms of business. There's startup growth and then scale up. And for me, the growth area is like this gray area [01:00:00] between, we're a startup, we've got a great product, that transition between, okay, we've got a great idea, we've got product market fit, we've got some awareness. We're in one or two stores to, okay, how do I actually now turn this into a structure where things are ready to accelerate?

And for me, I think you have to have that structure in place that can scale. IE you need to have, this is getting very micro. You need to have basically all the staff in place who might only be part-time or casual or freelancers or something who are ready to go, right? If we commit, we're gonna commit, and tomorrow you're gonna move in here to this office and you're gonna start working full time.

Like if you don't, if you are raising cash to kind of say, oh, if I raise this amount of cash, I'm gonna bring on a marketing person. It's like, oh, how are you doing that already? Like. For me, where I look at the point where a business is ready to invest into scale, they need to [01:01:00] have all that structure ready to go.

They need to have logistics down pat. They need to have returns and warranty processes in place. They need to have a reliable manufacturers manufacturer that've been working with for more than two years. Because otherwise they can't scale. Like if they have to kind of go, if they have to go, well, if I get this investment, I'm then gonna move to another factory and retool to something that's just, that's two years away.

It's not, yes, this product is gonna make it overnight. I don't know. I don't think it's necessary to have, and when we talk about distribution, I don't think it's necessary to have global distribution. People get carried away with this idea that if I can put more countries on my investor sheet, it's gonna be more interesting.

People are gonna be more attracted by it. And there is something internally saying, Hey, I've got 27 countries now. We're in 50 countries now. But if you look at some of the brands who were doing things really well in the early days, and for good examples, black Crows in the early days, [01:02:00] douche bags, who now called DB Journey in the early days, what they were fantastic at and what I wish I could listen to when I, you know, met you guys, I know those guys really well.

And in the first few years, you know, Cammi, Cammi and Bruno in Black Rose, we'd sit down with them at ISPO every year and, and we'd go, so where, where are you selling? And they're like, France. And I'd go, huh? It's like, where in Lithuania and Croatia and Japan and stuff like that. And they'd go, whatever. And you know, 10 years later you're like.

How the hell have you got to this volume of skis with such a small team of people? And they're like, well, 'cause we focused and we went, no, we're just gonna make sure that, you know, one market is firmly established, is killing it. That we are, you know, that we have a reputation and a legitimacy in that market before we then move on to another market.

They didn't even, they didn't move into the states for something like seven years, 10 years or something like that. We were in the [01:03:00] states in second year out and like, we just made so many mistakes. We didn't realize that, you know, we thought by expanding into a new region or a new country or having more points of sale, that would mean that revenue would come and it doesn't.

For example, we opened something like 35 stores in the first year in the us, 35 or 50 stores. And we spent so much time in the second year trying to open up new stores that we didn't support those stores we were in. And we lost 15 of them in the second year and didn't open up any new stores. And, you know, I remember spending, I remember spending time with a lovely guy who was a Croatian ski distributor, and I would spend more time on the phone with him than I would spend with my French sales reps.

And my French sales reps were 10 times the size of volume. And, uh, it took me years to realize I was an idiot. Sorry. This, I just realized we've, we've

[01:03:59] Christian: No, it's good. [01:04:00] I,

[01:04:00] Tony: startup to growth and I mean, even douche bags,

[01:04:04] Christian: the black, the, I was gonna say the Black Crows one's interesting. I just wanted to jump back to Black Crows because I think that's such an interesting, I'm glad you pointed that out, is like, I love, I used to wear this t-shirt from day one of, or every year I went to, or it said slow and steady wins.

'cause that was just like a reminder to myself that it's like in the, and classically it took me 12 years to reach my five year, , revenue goal. But whatever, I, I hit it slow and steady wins. And I, I think it's really important because I'm also of the mindset of like, if you don't need to take on investment, don't take on investment.

Don't, don't,

[01:04:33] Tony: yeah. No, do

[01:04:34] Christian: maintain Bootstrap. Do whatever you gotta do. Do you know if Black Crows took on investment or like, what's their story around that? You know, do they have a different mindset to, I mean, obviously they're, they wanted to focus on France, but do they have a different mindset or did they just kind of delay it until they were ready for it?

'cause I think that's the same thing with DB Journey. They kind of delete it

[01:04:52] Tony: They delete it.

[01:04:53] Christian: took it on later on life just so they get

[01:04:54] Tony: Yeah, exactly. They did. I mean, DB for example, uh, and tools for DB is a good [01:05:00] friend of mine and they, I mean, they were only focusing on Europe for something like the first 15 years. They only recently, and by recently, I mean within the last five years, decided, oh, we should probably get into North America. And by that stage they're doing multiples of. 10 multiples of 10 millions of revenue. I, I obviously don't wanna say exactly what their figures are, but like they're doing big revenue just in mainland Europe and Scandinavia and it's phenomenal. Black guys were a little bit different, and I dunno the exact story, Deb, but they had, they had some strong backers early on, but they weren't, we went the other way.

We had, we did crowdfunding after crowdfunding, we got investors on every year, you know, to the point where our, our cap table has over 500 people, over 500 individual investors. And it was a mess, frankly. And it's just a different way of looking at, at growth as a [01:06:00] business. And I think it also comes down to how you learn about how to grow a business.

And I had no idea. I. So I didn't, I didn't know whether there was a good way or a bad way. Or a right way. Or a wrong way. But now, exactly. I, my philosophy is, is if you are starting a business, keep the investment pool as small as possible for as long as possible, and then know that, okay, if I bring this investment on, I need to raise a lot of money to see me through the next five years.

Not just, I need this to get through the next six months. 'cause I can't pay cashflow, I can't pay salaries in two months, whatever. Like, and I think that's the danger is that you raise cash when you're desperate and you shouldn't. You should raise cash when you're comfortable. 'cause then you're raising it for the right reason.

You're not raising it for the wrong reason. Because when you raise cash, when you're desperate, you'll take it from anybody.

[01:06:55] Christian: yeah, somebody told me early on, it was great advice. , When you're doing well, go ask for a, a line of credit [01:07:00] from the bank 'cause you don't need it and they'll give it to you. When you need it, they won't give it to you. And so that's always same. I guess same thing with investment, right? I mean, obviously you, you wanna be strategic and careful about it too.

I will link to, in the show notes, there's a really good episode of The Looking Sideways podcast he has a couple with the guys from DB and they tell their story and it's an excellent, I'll, I'll link to it 'cause it's an excellent listen. 'cause,

[01:07:23] Tony: That's

[01:07:24] Christian: Again, another similar to you, another product design focused founder, um, who's going about things a

[01:07:28] Tony: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's fantastic.

[01:07:32] Christian: Yeah. So we've seen what it looks like or you've talked a little bit about what it looks like when a brand scales too early. How do you coach founders through that shift? When they're starting to build a team. Right? We, you talked about it earlier about

[01:07:45] Tony: Yeah.

[01:07:46] Christian: Bringing on the right people and those things, but there is a real, well, it's funny, before we hit record, you and I were talking about this, how this, this idea of like, that kind of low grade anxiety that's always going as when you're a founder, it's like, uh, the emails are always [01:08:00] coming in.

That the to-do list of the treadmill, things really start to ramp up as a founder, as you grow a team and you know, what advice do you give to them and maybe to yourself about how to go about that in a

[01:08:11] Tony: no, it's a really good thing. 'cause I had the notes on this question and I was like, people don't realize that investment is when the hard work begins. People think that, oh shit. I mean, I did it. I, we raised money. The first time we raised money, decent money was 2012. It was my 40th birthday. I was broke.

I'm like, how the hell I've gotta give this up? How the hell am I gonna get through this? And I'm taking calls. Okay, this is a bit, this is what happens in ski towns. I was taking calls on a bus trip down to see foo Fighters in a festival. When I was on a group call with lawyers talking about finalizing the shareholder agreements on a stag due of one of my friends.

And I'm like, they, they going, going, so how many weeks a year holiday do you think you should get? I'm like, A shit, just fucking [01:09:00] sign the deal to gimme the money. And we got a million dollars in the bank and I went to the bank and I put in my card and got a little printout of the thing that said A million dollars.

And I put it and I framed it and I put it on my bedside table. Uh, 'cause I was like, I've done it. We've fucking done it. We're said. And you know, admittedly, that's the first time that I've ever had financial security salary security in the form of a monthly paycheck at 40 years old. That says a lot.

But I, what I didn't realize was that that was the point where, where, you know, just to use, saying the shit gets real. That is the point where suddenly you have to do monthly reports and you have to go through your figures every month and you have to. Talk about what went wrong to a group of people and they want to analyze every little thing in your business because they need to see that everything is going in the right direction.

And that's the thing that I didn't realize as well as that point about, okay, we already had a team of juniors on board, you know, that, [01:10:00] that we kind of didn't get quite enough money to maybe hire the seniors we wanted to hire. So you're kind of juggling all these things. But what I didn't realize is just the amount of extra pressure on you when you have someone else who you've taken their money from them.

And I remember one of the, one of the first people to invest because, you know, you could use, one of the ways to protect money is to put it into a trust for your children. And one of the, one of the investment groups that came in was blah, blah, blah's Children's trust. And I was freaking out. I'm like, oh my God, this person's like risked their, like their children's education on my ski brand.

What the hell? Why have they done that? And I didn't realize at the time that, you know, people invest, well, I should say this with a caveat, but people invest what they can afford to lose. They don't invest. If it's their life saving, they're not putting it into your business. They're putting a 20th, you know, 50th of what they have into your business.

They, they're not stupid. They're not [01:11:00] putting everything into, into your one in a million chance that you are gonna become the next BF call. They're like, no, I like you. I like what you're doing. I, I wanna support you and I wanna, I want to try and make sure that for whatever reason that you have to do this business, I wanna support that and I wanna make it happen.

But that comes with an immense amount of responsibility and immense amount of pressure, which I don't think you realize at the time.

[01:11:28] Christian: As a creative entrepreneur, how do you balance the, the time and attention that's required to also be a financially responsible? Entrepreneur, not that you're ir, not that a creative entrepreneur would be irresponsible,

[01:11:41] Tony: but you tend to have

[01:11:42] Christian: there's two different mindsets and modes, you know what I mean?

Here, you're creating, you're developing, you're designing, you're doing this stuff, and then you also, especially in a small team, you are required to run the reports and review the reports and have the meetings and be a manager. What's kinda the best practices in, in managing time and attention and [01:12:00] bandwidth and

[01:12:00] Tony: We talked about, uh, on the, the, the precall to this. We talked about, uh, what's your superpower? And at the time I said listening because I was like, I just, I'd learn to listen, I'd learn to understand, I'd learn to analyze problems and things like that. But actually I think my superpower is. I've learned to combine the creative side of my personality and the analytical side.

And I've now, I now default for the analytical if I can't understand a structure and a financial structure. And I do a lot of due diligence and I go through with CFOs and I do a lot of due diligence on companies that come to me, either looking for investment or that I'm mentoring, et cetera. And now I don't even look at the brand.

I don't look at the creative side of it. I don't even look at what they're doing in marketing, et cetera, until I've been through the financials and I understand that they have a solid financial structure or solid operational distributional, supply chain, legal structure in place. Only then I'll go, right, okay, now let's look at the creative and look at, look at how, [01:13:00] look at whether that has the opportunity to actually engage an audience and to convince them to buy the product, whatever the product is.

But I think I'm very, I think I'm very lucky, uh, 'cause I meet a lot of creative founders who. Get into their own world and can't step out of it to be able to assess their own idea from a financial standpoint. So they either need a partner. And I did, I was lucky enough early on, uh, in faction to actually meet someone who had a business background.

And so I spent a lot of time listening to them trying to understand, you know, how businesses work. I didn't have an MBAI, I wasn't in a area where I could find mentors or anything like that. I just have to randomly beat this person. And their background was business. And so I spent a lot of time trying to learn and trying to listen and trying to make sure that I did understand that.

Unfortunately, I [01:14:00] didn't learn enough, quickly enough to be able to protect my ownership of the business and the business itself in the long run. So I don't, I don't really know how you advise creative founders in that way, because I appreciate that if, if a creative founder is really, truly brilliant, it's because their mind is a certain shape and they think in a certain way.

And often with the creatives I made, if they're truly brilliant creatives, they probably, I might get a lot trouble here. They're probably really not very good at things like numbers, stuff like that. I dunno, I, I've, I've met a handful who can combine the creative side of the analytical side, but not a lot. I dunno what your

[01:14:46] Christian: Right. So then in that, in that case, you know,

[01:14:49] Tony: do I tell 'em? Get

[01:14:50] Christian: spoken openly,

[01:14:52] Tony: put an advisory board together. Get a CFO. The other day I put someone in touch. I'm like, dude, you, I need to get, I need to get you the CFOI work with and I need to [01:15:00] get in with you because you are going, your business is going to fall apart if you don't get this person's structure in place, like as soon as possible.

[01:15:07] Christian: Yeah. Yeah. Um, you've open, you've spoken openly about your, um, partnership with, that you had there at Faction. So, in, in light of that, what advice do you give to people who, founders who are bringing on a partner, or when you're working with a couple of founders who are in partnership, what are the best practices from your experience on how to form a healthy partnership that supports both each individual and founder, but also the brand in general?

[01:15:33] Tony: I think when you're bringing partners on board, I think what's really key is that you both, you need to share the same basic values, you know, how you treat people, things like that. But I think the, the most important thing is being aligned on what you want to get out of the experience and the journey together.

IE where do you wanna be in five years time? Where do you wanna be in 20 years time? [01:16:00] I had no idea I was a ski bomb. I was like, I just wanna get enough money so I can go to the bar and go skiing again tomorrow. You know? I was like, you what you mean? I can get paid to create design skis. This is amazing.

But I think one thing that I didn't do, and this is why, what I kind of advise other people on is exactly that. If you are gonna bring a partner on board at any stage in the business, it is really key to know what the exit plan is. I didn't even know what an exit plan was. I didn't know you could sell a business.

I didn't, I didn't understand, you know, how you value a business. When I bought a partner on board, I had no idea what the value of the, I, the, the vision I had was. That's, it's, it's very hard to know the value in the early days. But what I disagreed with very strongly, I. About with my business partner was where we wanted to be in the long term.

For me, I just wanted a healthy business. I wanted a healthy business that employed a few [01:17:00] people. That was sustainable from a financial point of view. That got me the freedom to be able to create products which bought other people joy. That literally was all I wanted, but for my business part there, he was like, I wanna be the next VF Corps.

That's it. That's anything less is failure in, in his eyes. And that was something where I was like, I mean, you know, for the first couple years I was happy for him to go. He's gonna go out and raise cash. He's gonna go and work with the CFO and he's gonna put all his investment techs together and stuff like that.

Great. Okay. Yeah, you do that. I need to focus on brand and product and marketing and everything else. But 10 years in, suddenly you're like, why are we in so much debt and why are we telling investors that we're gonna scale? 60% next year when we haven't ever been able to do that, why would that just miraculously happen out of the blue?

You know? And at that point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not in a good way, in a bad way. If you are constantly, [01:18:00] if you're constantly judging your own performance, and if other people are judging your performance by what you are going up to market and claiming you can achieve, then you better achieve that, or your business is in trouble.

And I think, you know, you said something early on about slow and steady. Slow and steady. And my partner's philosophy was very much the whole Facebook, you know, move fast and break things. And I was spending my life fixing things because I'd wanted stability and I wanted gradual sustainable growth. And he wanted something very different.

And that has impact not just in your relationship, it has impacts on the business. You know, we talk about overstock being a massive problem at the moment. And generally as a rule, if you are a. Traditional type of B2B business. If you're making a production order based on your pre-orders, you might make an extra 10% or 20% or something to cater for reorders and maybe some d to sale D two C, et cetera.

We were consistently going, here's our [01:19:00] pre-orders. Shit we've told our investors, we're gonna get to hear. We need to double that for production, and that's why Overstock exists. Overstock doesn't exist because people think clearance is a sales channel. It exists because people go, fuck, I'm not gonna hit my sales target.

If I just make what I've got orders for, I need to make more. Then I might hit my sales targets, then I might survive another year. Then the investors might be happy. It, it's, it's this self, well, not self, self-defeating prophecy, I guess.

[01:19:29] Christian: Yeah, , don't do that.

[01:19:31] Tony: don't do that. That's why Sierra trading is so fucking big.

TK Max

[01:19:37] Christian: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's also people who are using it as a channel, right? They're

[01:19:42] Tony: oh, you're gonna raise that point as a channel, as a, that's the, that's a theory, isn't it? I don't know. You can't, you can't, you, you're selling to Sierra trading at 70% of wholesale that, that you're losing money in every single product. I don't understand how people use that as a growth channel. I don't [01:20:00] know.

[01:20:01] Christian: yeah. Hit their MQs. So they do the math on what their MOQ is, and they know they got pre-orders for this amount, so they're gonna make this amount at full margin. And they're gonna, we're, we're gonna reduce that, and they're gonna hit their MOQ and they're gonna blow the rest out to Sierra on a and they're gonna get them to promise to don't put it on the shelves until X number of months out and

[01:20:21] Tony: Yeah.

[01:20:21] Christian: So nuts. That's another really bad decision.

[01:20:24] Tony: really good topic, though.

[01:20:26] Christian: Yeah, I mean it, yeah. We'll see. It's, , they're growing like

[01:20:31] Tony: They are.

[01:20:31] Christian: for sure. Yeah. And so, yeah. Changing gears a little bit, what will separate the brands that thrive in the next decade from the ones that fade away?

[01:20:41] Tony: and community, in my opinion. Like for me, the brands that will succeed are the brands that have real, real relationships with their end customer. And I was watching something that was really interesting the other day about that, you know, the proliferation of AI and you can do so much to create [01:21:00] content now with AI that you can the other day.

So I, I got a, one of my best friends here is a filmer who's been in this industry for 30 plus years. And he was going, well, thank God that they can't AI film ski videos yet. And then I was on Instagram like two hours later and they're like, oh, this is this AI tool, ski videos. And he went but the proliferation of AI is gonna mean that it's gonna have two things.

It's gonna amplify the reach of, of small brands, which is great, but it's also in the wrong hands. It's gonna make people, uh. What's the word? Mistrust the content that they're seeing. And so the thing that that successful broer, my belief and the thing that successful brands are going to need to have to survive over the next 10 to 20 years is real relationships with their customer.

Whether that's D to C and you're engaging with them and you're talking to them and you're chatting with them, or not great, or [01:22:00] B2B, and you are hosting events at retailers, you are going in there once a week, you're talking to the people on the shop floor. You know, like for me, I mean for me, snow sports has always been about culture and community, because that's where I started at.

I started it in a ski resort with a group of friends who supported me and helped, helped me through it. And every year, no matter where I go, I run into people and they're like, oh my God, I got a pair of your skis from 15 years ago. And this is, I mean, this could be in Japan, it could be Jackson, it could be anywhere.

And for me, that bond and that can connection with people is why. I did it in the first place. You know, I'm an introvert. I don't go out out and kind of go, Hey, this is what I do. It's like just like meeting these random people who I could talk to, who I know that the product I've produced has made a change in their life.

That's how I connect with people, how I bond with people. And for me, it's the same with brands. If you don't have a connection with someone, they're not gonna buy your product again and again. You're never gonna get loyalty. You're not gonna get [01:23:00] advocacy where they're going out and actually telling their friends about your brand.

And I think a lot of D two C brands are probably going to fail at that aspect because if someone's buying D two C in general, they can go and find a price. They can search for a price, they can find it cheaper somewhere else. Or if you are that cheapest purchase, then they're just buying on price.

They're not actually buying on a relationship with you. And I think I'm seeing that in a lot of brands and I need to do in my brands too, is actually. Communicate more about who we are, why we're doing it, why we exist, and the the lives, the, the lives that we lead. Because at the end of the day, like I aspire to things that I see, I, I meet up, I mean, there are people here who, you know, they'll go skiing in Georgia, they'll go ski in Kazakhstan, they're out at and stuff like that.

And that's like, fuck, I wanna do that. Like, it's that relationship that you get [01:24:00] from being in a small community. And I'm just lucky enough that I've, that I live in a town which is small enough, but has a global audience that kind of comes here that I can meet and share experiences with, who then go to other places and kind of help me grow and help the brands grow. Sorry, that was very long-winded.

[01:24:19] Christian: great advice. No, it was great. I agree with you a hundred percent. It, it's, it's great advice. Speaking of advice, what's the best unsolicited advice that you've received in your career?

[01:24:30] Tony: Oh, that's unsolicited advice. What did I say? If it's free, it's probably not worth it.

[01:24:37] Christian: Exactly.

[01:24:39] Tony: Unsolicited advice. I don't, God, I dunno. I probably, I can't remember everything off the top of my head. Sorry. I don't

[01:24:46] Christian: Okay. What's the best advice that you've gotten solicited or not?

[01:24:49] Tony: Why would you wanna do that?

[01:24:51] Christian: I've heard, actually, it's so funny. I've heard about four people say that to me. Or not to me, but I've heard four people say that in life.

[01:24:56] Tony: Uh, geez. I need to [01:25:00] think about that.

[01:25:02] Christian: All right, we'll do that in part two then. Don't worry about it. You know what you should follow Tony on, on LinkedIn. 'cause then that'll be one of the things you're gonna talk about in a future post. What's the best advice you've received? There you go. There's your prompt.

[01:25:15] Tony: Best advice. Write that one down.

[01:25:18] Christian: Okay. What's, what's one story from your. Founder's journey that you wish more people understood.

[01:25:28] Tony: I think the probably thing that I wish, and when I say I wish more people understood, I don't mean wish they understood about me. I think wish they understood about the founder journey. I, for whatever reason, when people started investing in, in the business because they had money and because they had money to invest in something like this, I assumed they knew. Maybe one of them had a little bit of retail experience or something like that. And I was like, oh, okay. This person knows more about me. [01:26:00] And so I, I don't know why, I don't know why because they were older than me. 'cause they'd made it in terms of financial success and I was broken, a ski bump. I assumed they knew more about what I was doing than I knew myself.

And that's probably the thing I, I, I wish I understood is that no, they were investing in me because what was valuable was the vision I had and the drive I had, and that I turned up every day. And I, and I did it consistently and I had strong values. And I, I, yeah, I, I wish that that founders understand when you go on this journey and when people invest in you, that just because they invest in you, it doesn't mean that suddenly you have to turn around and go.

Shit, I need to do what this person says. Like, it's a relationship. It's a relationship. They know one thing, you know one thing you need, you are equals and you're both putting something into the relationship and [01:27:00] it's normal to push back. And it's normal to have discussions and disagreements, and that's part of the process.

You need to have those discussions. You need to have these disagreements because only through doing that can you then work out what the best decision is. But I, yeah, for whatever reason, when we talked about imposter syndrome, uh, you know, maybe I was just, I don't know, immature or, or lacked confidence or something, but I, I wish that I hadn't listened to as many people as I did. That's advice. Yeah.

[01:27:31] Christian: It, it, it makes sense. It makes sense, right. , Well, first of all, business is hard,

[01:27:36] Tony: Business is so hard.

[01:27:37] Christian: And as a founder or entrepreneur, you can feel like you're wandering in the woods and you have no idea. So when somebody gives you some direction, , the natural inclination is really get curious about it because it's like, at least it's something, but it is hard to have that confidence and that internal compass to say, Hey, that's, that's good advice, but it's not good advice for me.

[01:27:57] Tony: exactly.

[01:27:58] Christian: And that takes a [01:28:00] lot of self-awareness. Confidence. Yeah. And , those things are, don't, don't necessarily come

[01:28:05] Tony: Because the flip side to that is there's actually a lot of people who I meet as founders who actually won't take advice. And that's super dangerous as well. But how you balance that, that's, that's tricky. But you know, there, there are a lot of people that I here who are so focused on, they've had this one idea and they think it's great because they can see a way that it can work.

But when you dive into it and you look at it, you've also as a founder, need the ability to sometimes listen to other people and actually say, I. Maybe I should reassess that assumption, or I should find another perspective on that, or I should find someone with relevant experience who can actually have some input in that from having done it before, done, done something similar before to actually give me a bit of, bit of advice.

[01:28:57] Christian: Yeah, I would say ask for help.[01:29:00]

[01:29:00] Tony: Yeah, ask for help.

[01:29:02] Christian: Question I always end with is how do you define success for yourself?

[01:29:06] Tony: that, how do you define success for yourself? You know, funnily enough, I have worked with a lot of people who have worked for big corporations, Quicksilver or Rafa, et cetera, bf, et cetera, and I. In the early days, I think I was probably convinced by, by my business partner that the only measure of success was being a global mal, multinational, massive business with a 500 person office.

But for me now, how I define success is having the chance the second time around to build great skis and build great outerwear and create products that people can enjoy. I like, I realized I was kind of successful earlier on the first time around without a paycheck, know, when we just had a group of people who [01:30:00] were passionate what they were doing.

And, you know, in, we used to have, our office was a floor above a bar and we had a second floor with bunk beds in, and the interns used to stay there. We had, you know, journalists that come out, come over from free skier and we'd have retailers come over from the States, you know, retailers from Tahoe stuff would come over and we'd clear out a room and they'd stay in that room.

And I was playing in a band. I'd play in the Apre ski band. We'd all have a good time. We'd go skiing. You know, I, I was, I couldn't employ my friends. And now my friends are like creative advisor to groups like North Face and stuff like that. Like, I didn't realize at the time, 'cause I was so focused on how like working, but for me actually that is success.

Like a small group of people are just able to be financially secure, making great products and getting into the world. For me, that's, that's kind of enough. I don't need anything more. It's, it's, other people have different measures of success and I get that. [01:31:00] But for me, I've kind of got everything I want.

I've got two young girls, I've got an amazing wife who supported me through, I met my wife just after I started faction. And I dunno how she supported me through. The shit that I went through as a startup founder, you know, for sleepless nights. I worked on a honeymoon. I worked next to our five hour old baby girl.

Like I had no choice. And she stuck with me through all that, which is phenomenal. And you know, I've kind of got everything I want now. That's success for me.

[01:31:35] Christian: That's wonderful. Good for you, Tony.

[01:31:37] Tony: I'm sure there's another challenge

[01:31:39] Christian: Okay. Where can people find you and

[01:31:40] Tony: where can people find me?

[01:31:41] Christian: Well, there's always gonna be another challenge. Yeah. Where can people find you? Where can people learn more about you? The work, if they wanna reach out, um, if they wanna get, if they wanna get a, a inventory loan from you, if they want, if they wanna hire you as a mentor, what, what does that look like?

Where, where should they go?

[01:31:55] Tony: www.thewoods.agency. Or on[01:32:00]

[01:32:00] Christian: The Woods Agency.

[01:32:01] Tony: Um, and so I do, I do a few things now. So I run two brands. I run candid skis and forward outdoor. I mentor a handful of brands. And I also act as a partner in terms of doing due diligence for a VC group in the us You look at larger scale investments, so I, I help them dive into businesses and actually really assess how good, not the quality of the idea, the quality of the structure that's in place as we were talking about earlier, like how to get to that point to grow. Yeah, no, nice.

[01:32:34] Christian: Very cool. Well, I really appreciate , the work that you put out there and, that you're using your experience to, to help others and to Yeah. Lift other people with what, with what you're doing and, and work along the way and not get greedy with, uh, what you've learned along the way. And, and you're sharing it openly and honestly.

And it is, it's wonderful. So it is been good to be able to

[01:32:52] Tony: Thanks so much Christian. Uh, it's been a pleasure to talk to you and I'm sure.

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