The Opening of this Show.

HATTIE: Starting and growing a business is a lot like climbing. You have to take a step at a time and be careful not to slip. We'll profile a business owner who turned his love of climbing itself into a profitable enterprise. If you want to make the climb or you're doing it already, this is the program for you. We'll visit with people in all kinds of businesses who have great information to help you make your own a success.

In this show, we'll walk you through how to do a mass mailing, give you tips on the law, marketing, running a smart practice and staying up with technology. As we do all this season, we feature a business basic. This time the subject is people. But, first, a small-business owner who's taken his love of the mountains to new heights.

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(Voiceover) It was a mountain, not an MBA, that taught Peter Metcalf how to take a business to the top. He grew up in New York, where as a boy he was first introduced to mountain climbing. Today, Metcalf heads up Black Diamond, the leading maker of high-end climbing equipment. Black Diamond's original 50 employees have now grown to over 200, and sales will top the $20 million mark this year. Peter believes the way you run a company is the way you climb a mountain.

PETER: You can't do it on your own. I mean, you are so dependent on the other people on your rope, and, you know, all the skills in the world and all are not going to be as important as putting together a team that feels like a team, that is as much sort of a team of equality as possible. And that's difficult to do.

(Voiceover) In 1989, Peter was working for Chouinard Equipment when they declared bankruptcy. Instead of looking for another job, he and several partners decided to create a new company by purchasing Chouinard's assets.

PETER: The more we got into it, the more grim it looked. And in all honesty, this is one of those cases where naivete is absolutely bliss, ignorance is bliss, because if I knew now what it was going to take then, there's no way I would have gotten into it.

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I was running Chouinard Equipment in the day with the other key players at Chouinard, and then in the afternoon, early mornings and evenings trying to figure out with them how to create a new company, how to raise the money, going around dialing for dollars, all those sort of things, learning on the job and trying to get an MBA by the seat of my pants.

It's one of those experiences that I equate sort of to climbing in that there's nothing in the world that I would trade not to have had that experience, and there's absolutely nothing in the world I would ever trade to have that experience again.

(Voiceover) But finding the money was just one foothold on a steep climb. They also had to find a better environment than Chouinard's coastal headquarters.

PETER: You know, Ventura is a wonderful place if you want to be a cutting-edge surfboard company, but if your goal in life is to be a cutting-edge climbing equipment, back-country ski company, you need an environment right outside your door where you can test that product, be inspired to design that product and attract the best climbers and ski mountaineers in the world, who want to come work for you. And we did a very comprehensive search of the West, and in the end it was clear that being nestled at the base of the Wasatch was the only place in the United States that you could be where you could have the accoutrements and the infrastructure of a major city, yet be literally 10 minutes from some of the best back-country skiing, waterfall ice climbing, rock climbing and mountain activities available anywhere in the United States.

(Voiceover) The place they chose was the resort town of Park City, Utah, but just as they were getting ready to move, the deal fell through. In a mad scramble, they found an abandoned shopping village at the base of the mountains in Salt Lake City that was perfect. These buildings now house their administrative offices, design area, manufacturing center, a retail outlet and an indoor climbing gym that's available to not only employees, but also the general public.

Once you guys got up and running, got over the hump and this thing took off, what do you think have been the greatest secrets of this phenomenal growth you've experienced?

PETER: I'm not going to lie. One of the things I have to say is if you're going to jump into a river and swim, if you're swimming down-current, it helps. We got started and, fortuitously, serendipitously, climbing just exploded. We never thought it would. We thought it was always going to be a very small business, so we were being at the right place at the right time. That's luck.

But the other things: I think the structure of the business, the fact that this is a heavily employee ownership, employees have a heavy stake in the business; the flat management structure; the fact that we hire like-minded individuals, people who believe in the vision, believe in the mission, love climbing and skiing.

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HOST: Peter, why was it important for you, for the company, to be employee owned?

PETER: I'm a firm believer that the success in most companies, though you do have these awesome leaders who really do make a huge difference to an organization, I also believe, to a great extent, that the myth of the CEO as perpetuated by Fortune magazine and Forbes is a crock of .... and that those guys look great because of the people behind them. And the best way to have a company succeed is to have a very strong group of people.

Give people as much responsibility and authority as possible, and let them go for it. Let them do it because, ultimately, if you give them that, they're going to have more energy than you can ever possibly have, and they will know more than you can ever possibly know. And I think that's part of it. It's just the amount of motivation people here have, because I think they feel like they really do have responsibility, authority and it's fairly decentralized.

(Voiceover) From management to manufacturing, the dress code reflects their teamwork philosophy.

PETER: The idea is that, `Hey, we're all equal in here. We've all got a job to do.' And the clothing sort of creates a hierarchy that doesn't need to exist.

HOST: And let's face it, you're in the rock climbing business.

PETER: Yeah, and we are our customers. Our customers come in here, whether it's Rick Gottlieb, one of the owners of Rock 'n' Snow there--we ourselves use the gear, and we want to dress like our customers. We don't want to be more pretentious. And it makes our customers, when they come in here, feel like we're very approachable and we're one of them, which we are.

(Voiceover) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's this meeting going on over here?

PETER: They're working on one of several new products that are in the works.

Unidentified Employee #1: Did David get the geometry?

Unidentified Employee #2: We should hopefully have that spring by this weekend. If we don't have...

PETER: It's a cross-functional team. That's how we develop all products. And it consists of the head of R&D, the head of the ski line, the manager of the tool and die room, one of our senior process engineers.

The success is that all these departments integrate. You know, they have to look at it as a cross-functional project.

(Voiceover) Yeah. These are the top guys in the company right here. Not a navy pinstripe suit in the group, huh?

PETER: No. No. Probably some of them were out climbing or skiing or something this morning. One of the neat things about this machine is that David, Frank and George designed it.

(Voiceover) Today teamwork is a popular buzzword, but in this organization it's their secret.

Unidentified Employee #3: We think we can make this really sculpted and beautiful...

(Voiceover) Maybe it's because they're all stockholders or maybe it's because most of them use the products they make, but they all seem to be totally committed to this business, no matter what job they're doing.

PETER: Blang, how many have you done of these in one shift?

BLANG (Employee): Ten thousand; 10,250, to be correct.

PETER: Now that's got to be a world record, as Blang's proud to say. I mean, you probably make--Right?--more carabiners than anybody in the world?

BLANG: Anybody in the world, right.

PETER: The king of carabiners.

BLANG: Yes.

HOST: But you're a user of the product, right?

BLANG: Right. Right. I climb on it. Makes you feel good to go out and see a lot of people really happy.

That's interesting to sort of have a job where you say, `What do you do for a living?' `I tear up stuff.'

Unidentified Employee #4: Right. Yeah, I destroy things all day long.

(Voiceover) His job is to test the strength of every product...

Employee #4: Right there, 4253.

(Voiceover) ...because climbers' lives depend on it.

Employee #4: I love my job. It's a lot of fun.

PETER: (Voiceover) As an entrepreneur, you don't have the backstop of a large corporation; you don't have an array of assets.

You don't have this big base camp. As an entrepreneur, you have a very limited amount of resources. You put together a team, and you basically go for it, and you are dependent upon yourself and your partners. It's not just you. It's you and your partners as a team.

Unidentified Man #5: That's right.

PETER: (Voiceover) I don't think, as an entrepreneur, you or you and your partners can succeed if you're constantly looking for a safety net. At times you have to say, `This vision of what we're going to do, this project, is important enough and meaningful enough and that we are capable enough, that if we focus and give it everything and we can't afford to fail, we're gonna succeed.'

Here are some of the things we learn from Peter.

Ignorance can be BLISS! You can never know all the perils you'll face as you climb the mountain of success, and besides, if you did know, you'd probably stay on the ground.

When you can't turn back, go forward. When you've gone too far up the mountain to turn back, you do the only thing you can, you go forward.

To climb the BIG mountains you need a great team! And it's easier to make the climb to the top if you have a great team of people climbing with you.

Peter Metcalf knows the value of building teamwork in an organization.