Uphill climb: Black Diamond's path to becoming a publicly traded company.

• Author: Haraldsen, Tom
• Position: Lessons Learned

By definition, the word serendipity means "making happy discoveries by accident." It's a term that's been romanticized in film and in novels, but seldom used to describe business decisions.

Don't tell that to Peter Metcalf. As the co-founder and now chairman of Black Diamond Equipment, Ltd., he believes most of the company's decisions since coming to Utah in 1991 have proven both "serendipitous and fortunate." Unlike the definition, however, many of the company's "discoveries" have been no accident at all.

Now, almost a year since the company became publicly traded (on May 29, 2010), Black Diamond is again making new tracks across the mountain climbing and skiing industry.

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On the Right Track

Metcalf's life has been "forged by the sports of climbing and skiing. I've always been a climbing bum. For about six to seven years, my goal was to work as little as possible. I lived by the credo that says 'at either end of the economic spectrum lies the leisure class.'"

For Metcalf, that meant living as frugally as possible--no car, no house, no permanent job. "I never worked anywhere for longer than six months at a time," he recalls. "I lived as a roughneck, did some commissioned sales work in clothing, but my passion was to climb."

That passion drew him to Chouinard Equipment, a Ventura, California-based company founded in 1957 by then 18-year-old Yvon Chouinard. The company introduced many new climbing products and became a leading player in telemark skiing by the early 1980s. Bui during that decade, a depressed economy and litigation issues led to a restructuring of the manufacturing chain. Metcalf and several other former Chouinard employees signed the paperwork that created a new company--Black Diamond.

"We didn't want a large majority owner or private equity," he says. "We had 50 different investors to fund it, lots of life savings were poured in, and we were highly leveraged. The goal was not to get to any one particular size. I wanted to have a company committed to the sports we served, to make a difference for our community of users."

Among the most important issues for Metcalf and the new company were liability, access to equipment and bringing forth innovative gear. "It needed to be a built-to-last business," he says.

Metcalf also sensed another important decision that needed to be made: moving out of Ventura.

"I told people we'd relocate to a place of the source of our passion, our motivation, and we began a...