I had always avoided thinking of myself as a businessman.
I was a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier, and a blacksmith.
We simply enjoyed making good tools and functional clothes that we and our friends wanted.
Melinda and my only personal assets were a beat-up
Ford van and a heavily mortgaged soon-to-be-condemned cabin on the beach.
Now we had a heavily leveraged company with employees with families of their own, all depending on our being successful.
After we had pondered our responsibilities and financial liabilities, one day it dawned on me that I was a businessman
and would probably be one for a long time.
It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious.
I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business.
I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads.
If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.
One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is, if you want to understand the entrepreneur,
study the juvenile delinquent.
The delinquent is saying with his actions, this sucks, I'm going to do my own thing.
Since I had never wanted to be a businessman, I needed a few good reasons to be one.
One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious, work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis.
We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet
and go up the stairs two steps at a time.
We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever the way they wanted, even be barefoot.