Notes on Backcountry.com CEO John Bresee
John Bresee, CEO of Backcountry.com spoke in class yesterday. He’s a revolutionary and pretty fun to listen to. His audience of mostly college students appreciated his take. Quit your MBA. Use the money to hire a programmer from the Phillipines for $750 a month (he used a service, anyone know of one to refer me to?).
Start your own business. His rules for the most profitable way to begin (not a complete list, I was late and didn’t get all of it):
- Build a system not a business
- Have no employees (contract out everything)
- Digital products (no inventory)
- Use a subscription model
- customers should create your content
- customers should market your site
- don’t do any offline marketing
Turn strangers into customers and customers into evangelists. Let your customers create the content. Hire people to manage it.
I liked how he has backcountry.com that is a catchall for outdoor products (for generalists). He also has specialty sites for subgroups of that site. If you’re a diehard snowboarder, go to their site DogFunk.com, not backcounty.com. I’ve been wondering how to handle what I call our “rogue sites”. Let them live, give them their own identity. Create a way to incorporate user-generated content.
He has at least 3 other businesses on the side at one time. He reads like mad and from that reading ideas come to him all the time. Sometimes he worries when he’s not getting ideas, but the gift returns (actually I think anyone who fills their minds with ideas from great minds will make connections and get great ideas themselves). He also talked about ADD. He emphasized that he’s completely aware of his faults but his strengths far outweigh them. You can partner or hire out the things you suck at.
This is good perspective generally at least for business. In your personal life though, I still think there is an obligation to improve what you’re defficient in…even if it’s tough. It’s one thing if you know how to do things but hire it out to save time. We can get so idea-based that we live too much inside ourselves and our relationships with people suffer.
His talk about hiring philosophy is hire for aptitude and altitude not for education and experience. Makes me want to work for him.
I also loved the idea about how the US needs to faciliate quick adaptation to economic changes. Pass laws to make it easier to re-educate and retrain people depending on what the market needs. I think companies should take that approach too, encourage their employees to be agile, track what is happening, and have people on your team who can quickly react to it. Being somewhat ADD myself that sounds a lot more fun than just doing the same sorts of things each day and year.
One last quote: “A sense of humor is the greatest sign of intelligence”. Too bad I’m not that funny!
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2 Responses to “Notes on Backcountry.com CEO John Bresee”
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October 12th, 2005 at 2:48 pm
excellent article. your a great writer. i wish i could have been at that class!
October 13th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
thanks for the kind words…it’s fun to get a few comments!