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Yes, it is.
I'm excited.
This is part one of our two-part East Bay special.
Wow.
East Bay.
The legendary shoe company.
We've got
the two founders of East Bay that started it.
Art and Rick.
Art Edis and Rick Gehring.
Right.
And then they brought in Harry Colcord as a partner.
And a CEO to run it for nine or 10 years.
And Harry is going to join
us today on part one of
the
go.
New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Tokyo, and Wausau.
This is the Wausau Business Show with your hosts, Ryan and Paul.
I think we got Oregon on a couple times.
One person said, well, yeah, I know Wausau because of Wausau insurance.
Right.
But, you know, nine out of 10 people had never heard of Wausau.
Yeah.
If we would do that again and walk around in Brooklyn, New York and ask, have you ever heard of East Bay?
Oh, yeah, that
do it.
What does
it
take to run a successful business?
It takes incredible courage to start at the beginning.
Incredible grit to achieve success.
incredible determination to sustain results, and incredible perseverance to leave a legacy.
But most importantly, it takes an incredible local partner dedicated to helping you achieve your goals.
At Incredible Bank, we are that partner.
Let us help your business do the incredible.
Incredible Bank, member FDIC.
Hi,
I'm Jude, and I'm Jack.
And you're listening to our dad, Ryan.
And Mrs. James.
And I'm Emmy.
And you're listening to our dad, Paul.
Paul and the... No, you say the.
Okay.
The... Wassa Business Show!
The
Wassa Business Show.
All Teresa is trying to love and happy with her.
to your sons?
After all of your work is done, you have one final job, which is to take care of your body.
Amen.
And if you fail, it's just a very bad thing.
Well, and I'm planning, yeah, I'm hoping, I don't know if you can see the picture of the guy behind me, but he was my co-worker.
He was 82.
When I was 14 as a janitor at St.
Anne's grade school and he lived to be a hundred and four foot eleven fought fought for the Prussians in World War One, but born in 1883.
And I drew that picture in 1888.
It was even before my sons, it was the first one I hung in the gym because he always reminded me that if you talk about your health, you're probably not spending enough time taking care of it.
Yeah, and he drank every day, which I also do.
He's my hero.
He's a good Prussian.
What's his name?
His name was Mike Hartle.
He owned a farm in Fenwood near Stratford, and he retired at 82, and his wife was only 69, and she said, you're still a little too frisky.
Can you go get a job?
So we were janitors together at St.
Anne's in an era where, by the way, when the lead janitor showed me how you clean the toilets in the elementary school, he stuck my hand in the somewhat disgusting toilet and said, when you're done, I should be able to eat out of it.
So I've also always said, if I ever have to go back to any job, you know, with that as my first, I think I can handle most things.
But I mean, I stayed active.
You know, I ran the hundred two hundred thirty eight unit condo association for 20 years when it when it when it came time for us to make the decision to sell East Bay.
Yeah.
It really was we, none of us expected to have done as well as we did with the God given talent we had.
So it was, let's, you know, let's relax.
I did go down to Miami and I ran a dot com were in 2000, I was offered five million and a 10% stake to take the thing public.
it was worth, it was worth a hundred million dollars in early March.
And then a 27 year old banker from Wasserstein Pirella called from New York.
The Monday after the market crashed and said, it's not worth a million anymore.
And I said, well, since I'm no longer talking to a senior vice president, I assume that.
First of all, Mr. Harry Colecourt, everybody.
Yeah.
Welcome.
Live from Illinois, Wausau Business Legend, Harry Colecord.
Thanks for coming on the Wausau Business Show.
Pleasure to have you.
We're going to get into all sorts of stuff, but why don't we start at the beginning?
So you were born and raised in Wausau?
I was born and raised in Wausau on August 10th, 1951, which seems like yesterday.
It does,
it?
My dad was a furnace repairman, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom.
And I was the middle of...
five kids, which I've always said with the older brother, older sister, younger brother, younger sister, I had the only chance of coming out normal.
middle has the best shot.
Go Cardinals,
But I was not.
I always say to people that you still have a shot even though I think I finished 159 out of 161 in my class at Newman.
You're still graduating.
The true comedy comes in the fact that there used to be these farcical votes every year and in my class I was voted least likely to succeed.
Oh, and the next year, 1969, Art Edis got the same award.
Oh, God, really?
Like we were destined to be together and we actually, our social security numbers are only one digit apart at the end.
And he was born, you know, a year after me.
At
Art was an athlete, a good baseball player.
I was a smoker, a drinker, and as I said, I earned the vote, at least like he was
Then, remember, this is the Vietnam era, the war.
And so going to college seemed like a good idea, even though the Newman counselor, Father McGinnis, said, stay in the factory.
And my dad, I had started working at Wasa Metals at age 16.
My dad also said, stay in the factory.
Maybe you'll be a foreman someday.
But when I got to point with the tuition being, I think 700 a year, I had to pay for it out of my factory earnings at wasa metals.
And after one kind of lousy semester, I hunkered down and did really well for the remaining three and a half years.
graduated with a degree in history and political science, planned to go to law school, was lousy at the LSAT, the law school aptitude test.
So I stayed in the factory for another year and a half.
So I worked in the factory at Wasam Metals for over five years.
Well, Wasam Metals was, when I was in the shop, Larry Niederhofer, who was the name most people in Wasam know,
Came over from Minneapolis and told us that the owner Glenn Straub had left the building and was not coming back He would stay with us for six months, and I thought this guy's a complete nerd.
I'm glad I'm getting the hell out of So he I stayed in the shop did all kinds of different factory jobs learned how to weld and
One day he came out and he said, you seem like a rabble rouser.
And I see that you've graduated with eye honors.
How would you like to try to learn to be an estimator?
And in my background, I got an aphet Newman in algebra as a sophomore.
And I only had one C and one D in college, and the C was in business math.
But keep in mind that back in this era in 1973, there were only four of us in the whole building out of 35 employees at Boston Metals.
We had college degrees.
Yeah, I was in sales and I cracked a couple of accounts that in Texas and Nebraska that made me a shining star with Niederhofer.
Okay.
And so when we started NANIC, the Wood Blind
Business,
that ends up being my most difficult job ever because I was 26 years old.
We started with 30 people.
We had no automation.
Every noon, we would, all of the people in the office would go out and stain slats and lacquer.
And so we had to automate a whole industry that had not existed since before the Civil War.
wood blinds, which I ran.
I ran that from 78 to 81.
And then I was offered the group president.
role for the uh for what was then wasa metals milko uh nannick in 82 we started line tech
yes and then uh we from with nannick we also then bought something called the shuddery of phoenix
The factory there, John Schaefer, who, if you don't know, has gone on to tremendous success, like Dick Johnson that worked for us at East Bay.
Dick Johnson
Chairman of the board, NCE.
I always remind him that in 1992, we hired him from Grable as a financial modeler for $52,000 a year.
What
a
deal.
Yeah, I won't share numbers, but he's worth more than that
Dave was a heck of a guy.
I actually interviewed with Dave once when he wanted to hire me to train his sons to run the business.
I said, what happened?
And what happens if I succeed?
And he said, well, I'll give you a 3% of the business, but then we'd have to let you go.
thing.
Real iconic at
point.
Yeah, I don't know.
About 11 years ago, my girlfriend and tree said I were at a...
a shop in Miami Beach.
And I tried them on just as kind of a gag.
And people said, those look really good on you.
And then someone said, and they match your hair and your shirt.
It's kind of a fun story.
who was willing to serve as one of the presidents had been approached by them because he was a part of a group that was a landlord for the 400 Black.
That East Bay, that East Bay was housing.
wasn't always a
No, no.
In fact, I have a, I have a coin that I've taken a picture of that I flipped when we couldn't, I couldn't get these two guys to agree because they were like oil and water.
I mean, I love them both, but they couldn't agree on anything.
And I finally said, I'm going to flip this quarter.
And if it's heads, we're buying the Prangie Way building.
And if it's tails, we're tearing down this whole block and building a corporate headquarters.
Yeah, and it's heads.
And on the bottom of this inscription, it says, art was still praying for an edge landing.
You won't find two better people in this world, but they grew up two days apart, two houses apart.
While we were partners at the end, I was a junior partner.
But I've now said,
They were a partner in a visceral sense that not many people could understand.
They are
like
brothers with their lives.
They are brothers, best friends.
And I was, I was a new business partner.
And when Neeter Hoffer said, you know, if you guys are in trouble, Harry runs the businesses as our group president, but he also is in charge of all of the planning.
He coordinates all the planning for each division each year, both operational and strategic.
So maybe you want to spend some time with them.
And Art knew me.
Yeah.
So we spent, we spent Saturdays in my basement off and on for a year.
1992.
Okay.
1991.
I'm sorry.
1991.
And I kept, I still have the original copy where I said to them, you guys are incredible entrepreneurs.
The reason that you're not making money while your sales are growing is that you're hiring too many consultants.
your cost of money is out of control, your personal guarantee, you need some professional management.
So for the next few months, this was September of 91.
For the next few months, I helped them.
We tried to interview people.
They wanted to have somebody come from within, but didn't know that that would work.
And then in I think April of 92, when they were still in the fence, Apigee said, you know, Harry, you've got
Nine companies, you're in over your head.
We've got to take one away.
So, Neeter Huffer took Wausau specialties away from me and I had created it
to
do a stainless steel and bronze.
So, I got pissed off and said to Rick and Art, I'll join you.
go.
But we had, we had 1200 employees, nine companies.
I don't remember the sales, but the classic was when I made the decision, I don't know if you guys remember the name John Ulrich from Whistley Ulrich.
When I, when I announced that I was leaving Apogee to join East Bay, John Ulrich came up to me at a meeting and said, Harry, what the hell happened?
You were a captain of industry.
And now they tell me that you're going to sell shoes.
Well, I told people that, you know, East Bay was doing 27 million a year.
Their sales were formidable.
But they had not made any amount over what they had made for previous years each year.
So Rick and Art said, if we can entice you to join us, we'll pay you 25% of everything over.
what we've made in the past, which was a couple million.
Well, the first year, we doubled the profit.
Wow.
The next year, we doubled it again.
And then based on our need for capital, we obviously had to extend our line of credit for inventory.
And then they said, is there any, we don't have the money to pay you.
And I said, well, I always thought that if we could convert that to equity.
be your junior partner.
And so at that juncture, it came up, we value the business.
I got 12.53% and said, I will never ask you for another percent, no matter what we do, because you put in 10 years of sweat equity to create an incredible company that now just needs a little tweaking.
So I'll be junior partner and I will never vote with one of you against the other.
And we say to this day that we never did.
Remember how long it took.
Then we expanded to different things.
Well, hang on a
no, no, no.
The founder of Apogee.
Russ Baumgartner was one of the original members of the NASDAQ board.
So I'm guessing he probably served with Bernie Madoff.
Madoff.
The company had gone public in 73 and they had purchased wasa metals in 69.
They were already formidable.
And Russ, I mean, if this was a guy who I've said I learned a lot because he would show you the ball,
And he'd throw it over his shoulder and never look back to see if you caught it.
I
like that move.
Russ, this is the most intimidating trust I could imagine.
Yeah.
How can I let you down?
And his classic was, I'll spend anything, Harry, that you tell me to spend money on.
As long as you can guess at how much I'll get back if it's a complete failure.
No, no, I belong to YPO young presidents.
And a guy named Fred Caston was the chairman of the board of Robert W. Baird and a good friend.
And Piper Jaffrey had followed Apogee.
So I as a as a group president with Niederhofer, we would host
you know, analysts who would come in.
So I got to feel, you understood that you had to run the business differently than if you were a private business.
So when I joined Rick and I, I said, we may never go public.
Nothing may come of this, but we're going to run this business like it's a public company.
Everything's going to be transparent.
And anyone who wants to know anything, we will tell because my belief is that we will do things so well that no matter what they understand us to be doing, they can't copy it.
They won't have our staff.
They won't have our commitment.
Yeah, they started out out of their car.
They had gone to a store in Milwaukee called East Bay and ended up buying the product through the East Bay Milwaukee store because no one would sell you if you didn't have.
you know, if you, if you weren't incorporated or an LLC.
So this guy they knew helped Rick and Art and Don Trevitowski, who was also the third partner.
And the comical part is the guy who brought the idea to them, decided that he would go on and work for a different company and didn't join the partnership.
So
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if he has regrets because I, I know that Don Trevitowski has no regrets about
ending his partnership, but he was very instrumental in the success of East Bay for the first 10 years, handled the operations, the banking relationships, just a really, really important and good guy.
So what were
You know, Rick, Rick, the Gehring family are sprinters of summer now.
And so is Don Trebotowski.
So Rick had been on a 10 year mission to get a degree and was still hanging around the track group at UW-Stevens Point.
Art, I said, had been a ball player and he was a teacher and coach down in Southern Wisconsin.
Okay.
So this was something that interested them.
But
You know, not something that you would say was a vision.
It was something to do.
called East Bay.
The business was called East Bay, and the guy who had started it was from the East Bay of Traverse City, Michigan.
Okay.
Though he named the store that, then he sold it to a family named Rodez, R-O-D-I-E-Z.
And when I got to East Bay and I said to Rick and Art,
Why don't we put trademark on our catalog?
Whereas your intellectual property
And they both looked at each other and if they were sitting next to you, they would be laughing because they said, Harry, we don't have an intellectual property file.
this guy?
No, they just used that store as a name so that they could buy from the shoe companies.
Okay.
The real misgiving in what they did is that
by ex-wife Deborah, the attorney, and I had to drive down to Milwaukee to meet the Rodez family and say, can we buy the trade name East Bay?
And the guys, when we walked in, the guy said, you son of a bitch, every time the phone rings, is somebody thinking they're going to order from our catalog, but we don't have a catalog.
And you can get the name East Bay one of two ways.
He was five foot seven in a former boxer.
He said, you, Harry, can go into the ring with me.
And whoever walks out gets the name exclusively or you can give me a million dollars.
Did you kick his ass?
I said.
We don't have a million dollars.
So I'm going to have to kick your ass.
No.
And the one thing I can assure you I'm not going to do is get into a box.
But let us get back to you.
Eventually we bought the name East Bay for $150,000.
connection.
They used East Bay to get product.
And because their purchase orders with Nike and Reebok and others said East Bay running store when they created first they went to the the fields of play and they had shoes in the trunk.
Well, then the coaches would say players aren't all here.
Can you leave any kind of a flyer?
OK, so then they left the
flyer with the name East Bay on it.
And then as other people wanted to get the same flyer.
It struck them that they might want to do a catalog.
A
area?
The first purchase was from the store in Milwaukee.
And then the guy in Milwaukee let them order with the name East Bay, but with a location which was eventually the Meerman
across from the Mirman furniture store.
Oh yeah, Mirman's in
hey
So that's where they had this little storefront and they would take turns.
In the storefront, one would go to the farmer's bar and have a couple drinks, and then come back, and then the other one would take turns, and that was their early beginnings.
Right.
How did they do that?
They were ingenious in that they ended up making things just typed.
with the name and the phone number.
And then they realized that they needed to have a couple operators in the store.
And with the word of mouth, the fact that kids were so unbelievably interested in seeing what was different in an array of products would end up being something that was illuminating to me later on.
But for them, that was they just kept getting phone calls.
So as they got phone calls, I mean, I once said to the president of Reebok,
we get three million unsolicited requests for a catalog every year.
Wow.
New kids.
Where
will you find these kids?
How will you find them?
And Rick and Art said that when I joined them, they were still dominantly Midwest.
basically.
No, that was that team.
The number of three million occurred about 1990.
three, if Shaq joined the league in 93, that was like a banner year for us because we got three million catalog requests.
We had Shaq on television telling the chairman of Reebok that thanks for offering me that above the rim shirt, but I bought that last week at East
When that's on the news, so and as the story went, Nike wouldn't sell them much of anything.
But as that Shaq story went,
We convinced Reebok to give us 200 of the Shack shoes and sold them.
They were uglier than hell.
We sold all 125 in our 200 pairing one day at $125.
And the president of Nike, who was actually, he was the global vice president of sales, Gary DeStefano, called me and said, why did you put that ugly shoe on page three?
And I said, because
It's the best product we've had and you won't give us air products.
You won't give us anything.
You won't give us Jordan.
Yeah.
And so from that point, we had set the hook, found Nike in and ended up creating.
We produced Nike's catalog for them and became the, we became the exclusive marketer of Nike products through catalog.
And did
point.
Oh my goodness.
They offered us $70 million to buy us out in about 93.
And we had done a few of their catalogs.
So when we met with him, he said,
Knight said, what's the response rate on the Nike catalog?
We said two and a half percent.
What's the response rate on the East Bay catalog?
We said three percent.
He said, what does that tell you?
He said, it tells me that if you buy us and Adidas and Fila and
You're going to have a 2.5% response rate, but you will have blown $70
million.
And he said, guys, we don't want to buy East Bay.
He said, Harry, I'll tell you this.
You guys do a catalog for us in two months.
It takes my staff six months to approve a picture.
said, we need you for what you are, not for what we want.
It was about a year and a half.
Yeah, and then we saw, I mean, if you keep your eyes open in the world, there are lots of opportunities that you think are not available.
But when we looked at the sports illustrated catalog called the NFL, they were selling key chains.
And so I called Time Warner Building and talked to the guy who was running the NFL shop.
And I said, you have 19 teams, not 30, which there were at the time.
You're selling key chains.
If you understand the business as well as I hope you do, the bill and sale is $9.
And you're selling this for $3?
Yeah,
right.
You're taking the
loss.
Right.
So I said to Rick and I, I'm going to fly out there.
And we bought all the inventory from Sports Illustrated and then created 30 NFL catalogs for all 30 teams.
So that was a part of East Bay and Footlocker until Dick Johnson and crew ended the relationship a few years
I have the original note from our meeting.
I think it's in August of 1995 that says, if we follow this route, we should be able to start selling something online in six months.
Yeah.
And yet, you know, there was no interactive inventory.
All we could do is take an order and then batch process it in the middle of the night if we actually found that we had the products because we had, in that era, we had eight different warehouses.
And Don Trebotowski ran that.
So he, we know where things were, but it was not as seamless as today where, you know, I wrote in 1997, somebody's going to have a gotcha button on your TV remote and you're going to point at a pair of shoes on TV.
and you'll get them.
Yeah, well, we're
here.
We hadn't envisioned the QR, the quick response had not yet been created.
From the beginning.
that was always the plan.
We also looked at private equity, but the private equity players, you know, if you venture capitalists want a big say in what you're doing.
Yeah.
And
The prospect of, you know, we needed, we had 20 million dollars in debt that we would get every year and we'd have to occasionally get out of the bank.
I ended up firing M&I and went with a different bank that gave us better, gave us a LIBOR ratings instead of-
We went with, what was then First Wisconsin?
Oh, didn't
Wisconsin became
It all worked for them, and it all worked for us.
No, never.
We had no exit strategy.
When I hired John Schaefer,
He had been my accountant at Apigee.
And what I said to him is, you're used to all of the strict requirements that make things transparent.
And so we're going to slice and dice this thing analytically every way possible.
And the algorithms are going to tell us where we mail, when we mail, when we've reached saturation, what we do for new products and new markets, what we do for
going to new markets, which Japan, at one point, was 10% of our business.
Yeah.
And we made the arrangement through Sony's headquarters in Tokyo.
And a woman, Chikako Massey, whose husband, Dennis, used to be the dean at the school, was one of the only two of the Japanese people in Wasa.
So we made her our international marketing manager.
We ended up with 10% of our business.
coming out of Sony and Tokyo.
this company public
work?
No, we had three interviews with bankers.
As the story, Rick and I had always been very close to the bell with every bit.
They didn't want to have anybody know anything about East Bay because they were afraid that it was going to cause too much scrutiny, too much involvement, too many people asking for things.
And like I said, they're just good guys who didn't think of the business as anything else, but this is what we do.
Merrill Lynch sent a proposal saying, you know, we'll dress you up.
We'll dress you up in a manner that the world will love you.
And we said, the three of us said, we don't want to be dressed up for the world to love us.
We're just walsa guys.
But yeah, we want to be, you know, we want to be transparent.
My oldest, my oldest adage in business was you sell your BS.
You never buy your own BS.
Only a free of that.
Yeah.
Then the guys from Barrett and the women from Piper Jaffrey made their pitches.
And because of the closeness with Fred Kaston, who was an absolutely wonderful chairman and president of Barrett, we chose Barrett and then they dress you up.
But they dress you up in a way that is in a manner that you would say a midwesterner in business.
Consistent with your
Yeah.
And then we did, we traveled to 57 different roadshows where we talked about the company.
And in hindsight, I can tell you this, we went public in September of 1995.
We didn't get one question about selling on the internet.
Nobody cared.
We brought it up.
And the thing that they were most fascinated by was that we would hold up one of the shack shoes size 21.
Yeah.
And then we would hold up an infant shoe and say,
We cover both ends of the spectrum, but the thing that makes us unique is that unlike any store that can only house so much inventory, we sell 200,000 per choose size 13 to 18 every year.
right?
And if you consider the marketing value of that, what we said to Nike and Reebok is if we know who wears size 15, we know who the next basketball star is.
tell you, I mean, the implications for knowledge at that level.
Wow.
No one imagined AI.
these were things that we could dice and slice in a manner that would say to them, you know, this part of this inner city that calls us the Bible, the book, which is what they...
The East Bay catalog was known as, yeah.
The book.
And when when Sheila wouldn't sell to us, they did a survey in Washington DC and the president called us afterwards and said, you know that you're known as the Bible, the book of sports.
And we said, no, but we have a great following.
And so again, if you're if you're Nike, if you're Reebok or if you're a fashion brand,
You want to hit that segment of the audience that you don't know where they live.
We know where they live because they sent us a catalog request or they called us.
14 to 24.
If you're 14 to 18, how many pieces of mail do you get?
Not many.
Right, but time out.
We were not planning on selling to anybody.
Nike had made it clear starting in about 97 that they wanted to sell direct to consumers.
Phil Knight once screened in a meeting, my worst problem is not my suppliers, not my staff, it's my customers, retailers.
We'll take and he screamed that Roger Farah, who was at that point chairman of Woolworth of Footlocker, he screamed at him in a manner that Roger said, you know, I used to be the CEO of Bloomingdale's and normally when I talk to suppliers, they kiss my ass.
They don't yell at me.
Right.
And but Phil said, the only way for us to gain control is for us to be able to sell the product direct.
So that was a threat.
And a guy named Hegel wrote a book called NetGain.
And NetGain said to manufacturers, basically, to survive, you need to control your own destiny.
You need to see how you will do that.
OK.
Right.
And then we had heard about this little company called Amazon.
Startup.
The rumor was that they were going to start giving free freight.
And we said, OK.
Freight is one third of our profit.
If we give away free freight as a public company, our stock price will plummet because you don't lose one third of your profits without having a really big adverse effect in the market.
And then the guys from Footlocker, I had met at other meetings and a guy named Bill DeVries, who was the president of Footlocker said, Harry, we'd either like to buy you or bury you.
And I thought of Nikita Khrushchev and said, it didn't work for Khrushchev.
I think we're okay.
So they courted us.
In fact, right before we went public, Rick and Art and I, and I think John Shaffer and Dick Johnson had dinner at Sparks Steakhouse in New York.
I was
York.
You guys should buy the wagon.
All right, now there's time.
Let's move on.
The reality was that
It was clear that every manufacturer, every retailer saw that this direct-to-consumer business had big margin prospects, especially the manufacturer, because now you're cutting out the 50% that the retailer is
taking.
And as we did the analysis, and I have a separate booklet that I'm writing on, Rick and Art are doing a beautiful kind of
memorial.
And Harvard's doing it.
Yeah, Harvard is.
I've heard
of it.
Coming out.
And they've said nice things, and I appreciate that.
But there's also, there's like 14 reasons why when it came time to sell, it was compelling.
And I went back to 1991 when I handed them my review of their business, and I said, you will ultimately fail.
Because at some juncture, manufacturers don't need a conduit called
And in life, if you don't need a conduit, if you can connect the source to whatever is required and eliminate that conduit, you've just saved a big chunk of
You always get rid of the middleman.
And because I had said to them in 1991, while this is a foregone conclusion, we don't know
how the timing will work because we don't know how the technologies might develop.
But Dick Johnson called me 20 years after I retired and said, you know, Harry, everything that you predicted in 2000 is now coming to reality.
I said, then I was a fool because I asked that we depart the party way too soon.
And Rick and I,
I hope that you'll talk to them because, as I say, they're two of the best people you'll ever meet.
And they did all of the yeoman's work for the entrepreneurial phase.
And Drucker always defined an entrepreneur as a monomaniac on a mission.
Well, they were two monomaniacs.
And they accomplished their mission.
But it was a sad day that we sold.
If you do what you love, your work isn't the job.
It is your vacation.
It is.
You enjoy going there every day.
And I think while Art will tell you that he was a little nervous, Rick would tell you that basically we sold his baby.
Yeah,
yeah.
Yeah.
And we all, everyone that worked there, I think, I can't say everyone because we did have to career adjust some people, but.
term.
Everyone liked East Bay because Rick and I had created this tremendous story and we had added staff and we had added programs that made it fun every year.
I think when we went public, the revenue was $150 million, and we probably had 1,500 to 2,000 employees.
We had call centers in Wausau, Oshkosh, and Green Bay.
Part of the contract was to stay three years as CEO, and then the group that we developed.
was so much better than we were that at the end of three years, it was easy to say, it's time to do something else.
I don't do anything here anymore.
Rick and I would say the same thing.
We don't
around.
When you have such good people doing so many good things, you get bored.
They left there.
Their contracts were a little shorter, but they stayed on.
And we all admitted that we really didn't have much to do anymore.
We were part of...
creating something good.
But you know, like in everything in life, including life, things go in cycles.
And it's when you know that it's time to move on, that you'll probably use your creative juices to the maximum of your ability.
Then you just fold shop and maybe try something
speaking.
It
Well, it just, it wouldn't pay.
It's, you know, it's things, when the, the catalog was, you know, when, when, when Spiegel catalog, and I studied a lot about catalogs, but when Spiegel catalog was run by Hank Johnson, Hank said, we'll create a couple of different women's fashions a year that are exclusive to us and make women in business feel special.
But what we did, and, and, you know, to this day, it's embarrassing when you see, because people will refer to us as
you know, something that was really special in their life.
We still think of it as, you know, we did things well, but by no means did we really know what we were doing.
One of the guys who runs a billion-dollar sports agency, and tell me when times up, because this was kind of a cute
But we've got all day.
don't have anything to do.
We just walk around all
Teresa, Terry and I, Terry sees cats down in South Beach, feral cats.
So we're sitting at a bar.
Yeah.
Terry Deers.
Yeah.
And so we're sitting at a bar and a guy walks by with his dog and she says, hi, Oreo.
And the guy, the owner, said, how do you know my dog?
And she said, well, I see the feral cats in the morning.
And he said, oh my god, I thought you were homeless.
And he said, you are absolutely gorgeous.
You look like Audrey Hepburn.
And then he looked at me and said, what's a guy like you doing with a girl like that?
And
said, I'm very lucky.
And he said,
What did you do for a living?
And I said, I was, I ran a catalog called East Bay and he stopped and shouted in this bar, we have fame in our present.
True.
And then later on I learned that he runs this, he started like this billion dollar sports business.
So he's friends with Shaq, with Michael Jordan.
And we're hoping maybe to do something at some point.
But the point is nobody in Washington that was involved in East Bay.
ever.
We never, no one ever bought our own bullshit.
We never would have thought that somebody who was a big deal would think you're a big deal because we're from Wassa.
And if Art and Rick and I were voted least likely to succeed, Rick wouldn't have even been on the ballot.
So it's a, I mean, we were, we, we were kind of the losers who,
Make good.
Yeah.
And again, and again, we looked at that.
We were lucky enough in Wausau, Wisconsin to hire people that, unlike I use the example of a factory we bought in Phoenix, Arizona, called the Shuddery.
And John Schaefer was the president.
And he called me one day and just said, Harry, people in Phoenix will spend more time interviewing for a job in an air-conditioned office than they will working.
Once I hire them, we got to move this factory.
And so we moved it to Wausau, Wisconsin, because Wausau, Wisconsin has people who see work as something that's normal, that they can enjoy, that they can communicate with each other over, that they can give recommendations and they'll be heard.
Wausau?
I will always be part of us.
I still have great friends, you know, and I, and if you guys know, Lauren George said, yeah, channel nine, they came down.
They should
All right.
Well, and Lauren, Lauren, Lauren ran it, you know, to the heights that I think at one point.
Lauren was running like nine stations, including Honolulu.
did.
He did hire Melissa Langbin.
And it's a, that was a great story.
But as I say, I mean, if you want to talk about somebody who says, I'm just a little guy from the hollow.
Laura and George said is no different than most of us from East Bay where, you know, it's cold in the winter, so you're not afraid to work hard.
Right.
And the people, there's enough of a pool to draw from so that you can get really great talent without searching beyond the community.
Yeah.
And the number of success stories, when we started Leadership Wassa, which I co-chaired with Barney Vissy, Jerry Viste's wife.
Yeah, that was through the Chamber of Commerce, was it?
I was, yeah, I was president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1987.
Yeah.
And Linda, Linda Prane, the Dr. Prane's wife, brought this concept from Michigan.
And when we started it, we all said.
It
It is so important that we tell all of the stories of all of the people that came before us, because what it says is, this is a real good breeding ground for success.
Angelo was one of probably my three best friends of all time.
Yeah.
And we did everything together for years.
And I, and I loved them.
And there was nothing more insulting than I could have done than take a Sam's pizza to his house.
that answer that question?
the answer?
When I was a welder at Wasa Metals, Tony Perella would give me two large pizza gift certificates if I would weld colons for him to stuff sausage.
Tony Perella, the
But his brother, Sam, was the founder.
Tony would show me that the real key to the sausage is you use fennel, not anise.
Oh, OK.
Hot tea.
And by the way,
I mean, I'll toot my horn one further because I hung around with these Italian guys.
I was published as a chef in Bon Appetit.
Yes, I have to
Including their yearbook.
So here it was.
It was
Eric
including the yearbook.
And and and because that was my friends that taught me were like Carmi Oliva, virtual Land Ready.
Jimmy Ioso, Jimmy Lombardo.
Legends,
legends.
Angelo Volpe and Tony Perrella early on, but they were so insulted that Angelo had t-shirts made.
that were distributed around wasa that, say, breed cheese causes
I've been looking real hard, and I'm trying to find a job.
And it just gets getting tougher every day But I've got to do my part, cause I know in my heart I've got to please my sweetened baby, yeah Well, I ain't superstitious and I don't get suspicious But my woman is a friend of mine And I know that it's true that all the things that I do Will come back to me in my sweetened time
Yeah.
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It's the Wausau Business Show with Ryan and
Paul.
It's
I'm Ryan Paul.
And this is the Warsaw business show.
Paul, we forgot to ask Harry the obvious question.
I got to come here.
I'm just
going to call him up here quick.
Get him on the
horn, then.
Harry?
I know what you're thinking.
Yeah.
Harry, hey, how you doing?
Life is still good.
OK, good.
We forgot to ask you a question when you were on the horn with us.
Go ahead.
What's your favorite shoe of all time?
Wow, you know, that's actually very political.
Oh, OK.
I didn't know that.
I could say I could say my favorite owner is Jim Davis, who owns New Balance, still as a private company.
I used to try to run in everything, you know, Rick and Art and I and about Dick Johnson and half a dozen or so others.
We would run
at noon every day and we would we would try out different things but to ever say you know we don't like ASICs even though it's probably the best running shoe because they mistreated
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