Ed Stack: Lessons from Dick’s Sporting Goods [Outliers]

0:00:05 We’re going to be out of money next month. Ed Stack stared at his CFO who just uttered those
0:00:13 words. It was 1996 and they were $13 million in debt. 40 stores bleeding cash that banks wouldn’t
0:00:18 restructure unless the venture capitalists put in more money. The VCs wouldn’t invest unless the
0:00:25 banks restructured. Someone suggested bankruptcy. Ed felt physically ill. His father had lost
0:00:31 everything when the second store failed, but he’d sold his house, his car, everything he owned to pay
0:00:38 back his creditors. He refused bankruptcy on sheer determination and principle. Now Dicks had gotten
0:00:44 over its skis again. This time they had over 40 stores. They were in markets they didn’t understand.
0:00:50 They had outdated inventory systems. He had made every mistake his father warned him about. That
0:00:56 night, lying awake, Ed Stack faced the truth. He was about to lose the company his father started
0:01:03 with $300 from a grandmother’s cookie jar. He had one last meeting, one shot. What happened in that room
0:01:09 would determine whether Dick’s Sporting Goods died in 1996 or became an 800 store empire that would one
0:01:15 day have to choose between keeping every customer happy and doing what the Stack family believed was
0:01:21 right. This is the story of two generations who learned that in business, like in sports, how you
0:01:28 play the game matters more than the final score. Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I’m your host,
0:01:34 Shane Parrish. In a world where knowledge is power, this show is your toolkit for mastering the best
0:01:41 of what other people have already figured out. Today, we’re going to talk about the incredible story
0:01:48 behind Dick’s Sporting Goods. In 1948, an 18-year-old named Dick Stack took $300 from his grandmother’s
0:01:55 cookie jar and opened a bait shop so small that it was addressed as 453 and a half Court Street. His son,
0:02:03 Ed, would later build it into an over 800 store empire worth over $16 billion. Along the way, they’d avoid
0:02:10 bankruptcy twice, discover Nike before anyone else, fight off hostile takeovers, and make every mistake in the
0:02:14 book and learn from them every time. And they ultimately made decisions that would cost them
0:02:19 hundreds of millions, but define who they were as people. This is the story of a father and son who
0:02:24 couldn’t stand each other, but built something extraordinary together. It’s also a story about
0:02:29 how sometimes the most successful businesses aren’t built on strategy, but on who you are when
0:02:37 everything falls apart. This is the story of Ed Stack and Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s time to listen and learn.
0:02:54 In July 1948, Dick Stack stayed up all night working on a list. His boss at the Army Store wanted to
0:02:59 expand into sporting goods, and since Dick was known around Binghampton as the best fisherman in town,
0:03:06 the boss asked him to figure out what inventory they’d need. Well, Dick was only 18, but he knew fishing gear
0:03:12 inside and out. So he carefully wrote down on two pages equipment and every item that you would need.
0:03:18 The next morning, he brought the list to his boss, eager to impress. His boss looked it over, pulled out
0:03:23 a pen, and started crossing things out while muttering, dumb kid, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
0:03:29 Dick snatched the papers from his boss and walked out of the store, never to return. It’s not like Dick had a
0:03:35 backup plan. He’d barely graduated high school six months earlier and only made it because an English teacher
0:03:41 gave him a gift grade and told him, I don’t know what will become of you, Dick, but somehow I know you’ll
0:03:47 be a success. Walking home with these torn papers, Dick stopped at his grandparents’ house. He told his
0:03:52 grandmother what happened. She listened quietly, carefully, then asked him a simple question.
0:03:57 How much would it cost you to do this yourself? Dick thought for a moment, $300.
0:04:04 His grandmother slowly got up, walked across the kitchen to a corner cupboard, reached for an old
0:04:11 cookie jar, and pulled out $300. Years of her savings. She put the money in Dick’s hands and said,
0:04:17 go start this business yourself. Most businesses start with bank loans or investors. Dick’s sporting goods
0:04:23 started because the grandmother believed in her grandson. That cookie jar becomes so important to the
0:04:29 stack family that today, when employees hit 25 years with the company, they receive a replica with $300
0:04:35 tucked inside. It’s powerful to believe in yourself, even when there’s no evidence, but it’s even more
0:04:42 powerful when someone gives you the gift of believing in you. To understand what drives Dick Stack, you need
0:04:47 to know what shaped him. When Dick was seven years old, his father was killed in a car accident. Ed Stack
0:04:54 had been a bootlegger during Prohibition, and when that car crashed at a high speed, there was a woman
0:04:59 in the passenger seat who wasn’t Dick’s mother. She survived. The family’s beer distribution business
0:05:05 disappeared shortly after. It probably sold off to pay gambling debts. After that, Dick’s mother had to
0:05:10 take in boarders just to keep the house. His grandparents basically raised him, and his grandfather
0:05:16 became his lifeline. Every weekend, they’d go fishing. Those quiet hours on the water were the only time
0:05:23 that Dick felt any peace. School was absolute torture for him. He probably had dyslexia, although
0:05:30 nobody called it that at the time. Word swam on the page. He graduated from high school, as he’d say for
0:05:36 the rest of his life, by the skin of his teeth. So when Dick opened his store at 453 and a half Court
0:05:42 Street, and yes, the address was so small they actually gave it a half number, he had exactly one thing going
0:05:48 for him. He knew fishing better than anyone else in town. Those early days would have broken most people.
0:05:57 Dick would open at 9, close at 9, and some days take in only $5. Maybe $7 on a good day. His margins were
0:06:04 non-existent. He couldn’t afford wholesale prices. So here’s what he did do. Close the shop, drive 60 miles
0:06:11 to Scranton, buy inventory at retail from a drugstore, then drive all the way back and sell it at barely
0:06:17 enough markup to cover the gas. But Dick had a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. To that boss
0:06:22 who scratched up his list. To the kids from high school who went to college. To the ghost of his
0:06:28 bootlegger father. They were all whispering in his ear that he’d amount to nothing. So he kept going.
0:06:34 And slowly the fishing crowd started to notice. The skinny kid behind the counter knew every lure,
0:06:41 every technique, every secret spot on every river for 50 miles. When you asked Dick Stack about fishing,
0:06:47 you weren’t getting a sales pitch. You were getting years of wisdom earned in pre-dawn hours on cold
0:06:54 water. By 1952, he’d renamed the place Dick’s Army, Navy, and Sporting Goods and finally started buying
0:07:00 wholesale. He began sponsoring fishing contests and even wrote his own ads, including one hilarious
0:07:06 one that was disguised as a medical warning. It was called fishing pox, very contagious to adult males.
0:07:13 Symptoms include continual complaint as to the need for fresh air. Patient has blank expression,
0:07:19 sometimes deaf to wife and kids. Treatment, go fishing as often as possible with tackle from Dick’s.
0:07:25 The store was working. So Dick did what every entrepreneur does when things finally click.
0:07:32 He expanded a bit too fast. In 1954, Dick opened a second location at the new Hillcrest shopping center
0:07:39 north of town. Everything about it was wrong. The developer had no experience. The location had no
0:07:45 traffic. It was in the wrong part of town. And the perfect example of if you build it, they don’t always
0:07:50 come. But Dick didn’t know what he didn’t know. Well, he understood fishing like nobody else. Real
0:07:56 estate and traffic patterns were different water entirely. Soon, he found himself with two stores,
0:08:01 his original profitable store on Court Street, and his new larger location that was hemorrhaging money.
0:08:07 Now, the smart move would have been to close the failing store and retreat to what worked. But Dick had
0:08:12 signed a lease he couldn’t break. So he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
0:08:17 He closed the profitable Court Street location gambling that customers would follow him
0:08:24 to the out-of-the-way shopping center. They didn’t. Within months, he was advertising massive stock
0:08:31 reductions. Three weeks before Christmas in 1955, which is prime retail season, he was practically
0:08:40 giving merchandise away. The desperation leaked through every ad. On June 6, 1956, Dick Stack took out an ad
0:08:49 with the heading that said everything. We quit. He was 27 years old, married, with a one-year-old son
0:08:56 named Ed. His wife was pregnant with their second child, and he just lost everything. But here’s what
0:09:02 matters about Dick Stack. For all the things he wasn’t, educated, sophisticated, or patient, he was a man who
0:09:08 kept his word. He could have declared bankruptcy. Most would have. Nobody would have blamed him. Instead,
0:09:15 he sold everything he owned. The house, the car, anything worth a dollar. And he paid back every
0:09:22 creditor in full. His wife, Marianne, took their son, Ed, and moved in with her parents. Dick moved in with his
0:09:28 mother four houses away. He found a job at Montgomery Ward downtown selling sporting goods for someone else.
0:09:33 Now, this story could have ended here, but you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. Dick would
0:09:41 just be another casualty of American retail ambition. That’s what everybody expected. What he didn’t know
0:09:46 then was the reputation he earned in that moment of failure by paying back every supplier when he didn’t
0:09:54 have to would become the foundation of everything that followed. People say it takes years to build trust
0:10:00 trust and seconds to destroy it. But what they don’t tell you is that it’s even harder to build trust in
0:10:06 the ashes of failure. Six weeks later, when he walked back into the same supplier’s offices asking
0:10:12 for another chance, they remembered. This was a man who protected their interests even when his own
0:10:19 world was collapsing. But first, before he did that, a stranger had to appear. Dick was working the
0:10:24 Montgomery Ward sales floor when a stranger walked up. He’d never seen him before and would never see
0:10:29 him again. The man walked up to him and just said, I knew your father. Then he looked Dick straight in
0:10:34 the eye. If you had half the guts your father had, you’d be doing this for yourself. And then he walked
0:10:41 away. Two days later, Dick quit Montgomery Ward. Within six weeks, he’d convinced a bank to back him.
0:10:47 His suppliers, the same ones he’d paid back every penny, agreed to trust him again. He reopened at
0:10:54 389 Court Street with an ad featuring his picture under the heading, Dick is back. But this time was
0:10:59 different. He bought the lot next door, built an Acme supermarket and used the rent to cover his
0:11:05 mortgage. If the sporting goods store struggled, he’d have income. He expanded slowly this time, 5,000
0:11:13 square feet, then 10,000, then 13,500. Never again would he bet everything on one roll. In fact, as we’ll see,
0:11:20 this is a lesson he overlearns. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The deeper lesson at this point
0:11:25 isn’t about business strategy, but character. It’s about what you protect when everything’s falling
0:11:31 apart. Dick could have saved himself through bankruptcy and destroyed his reputation and said
0:11:36 he protected his name and earned something money can’t buy. The trust of people who’d seen him at his
0:11:43 worst. In 1965, Dick divorced his wife and married his bookkeeper, Donna. She was 21, 15 years younger.
0:11:49 She’d calm his volcanic temper, help him think clearly. And more importantly, she’d help him see
0:11:54 that his oldest son, Ed, might be the key to everything. Not that Ed wanted anything to do with
0:12:01 the store. In fact, Ed Stack would spend the next decades trying to escape the very business that had
0:12:07 consumed his father’s life. That battle between father and son, between past and future, between playing it
0:12:12 safe and risking everything, would determine whether Dick’s sporting goods remained a two-store operation
0:12:20 or became something neither of them could imagine. A $16 billion empire built on three things. A
0:12:27 grandmother’s belief in her grandson, a father and son who argued relentlessly, and the kind of chutzpah
0:12:33 that only comes from not knowing what you’re in for. Ed Stack hated everything about the store.
0:12:40 From age 13 onward, Ed spent every summer and weekend in the warehouse, unloading trucks and
0:12:46 suffocating heat while his friends played baseball at the park. His father would test him constantly.
0:12:52 They’d play catch in the yard, but don’t get the wrong idea, this wasn’t some Norman Rockwell moment
0:12:57 here. Dick would fire fastballs at his son harder and harder, and then start throwing them in the dirt.
0:13:03 If Ed missed one and had to chase it in the bushes, he’d turn his back to find his father gone.
0:13:09 The message was clear. If you can’t catch, we’re done here. At dinner, Dick would quiz him. You’re
0:13:14 playing second base, two oats, man on third, ground ball hit to you. What do you do? Ed was expected to
0:13:21 answer instantly. No thinking allowed. One wrong answer and Dick would explode. Ed dreamed of playing for the
0:13:26 Yankees, then the Giants. He was good enough to start a quarterback for his high school team,
0:13:34 good enough to catch for the varsity baseball team, but not good enough for the pros. At 5’10”, 160 pounds,
0:13:39 he was too small for football. And in baseball, he could field, but he couldn’t hit very well. So when
0:13:46 high school ended, Ed wanted college for one reason, escape. He’d had the family business shoved down his
0:13:51 throat for years. He’d sacrificed his summers and weekends to that store. But Dick wasn’t so eager
0:13:57 to let him go. In his mind, Ed didn’t need college. He could stay and learn the business from Dick.
0:14:03 They fought about it for months. Finally, Donna, Dick’s young wife, pulled her husband aside and said,
0:14:08 if you don’t let him go, you’re going to lose him forever. She was probably right. Fine, Dick said at
0:14:13 dinner one night, you can go to college, but I’m not paying for all of it. They struck a deal. Ed would
0:14:19 continue working holidays and summers, saving $1,000 per year towards expenses, and Dick would cover
0:14:27 the rest. It wasn’t generosity. It was a leash. Ed chose St. John Fisher College outside of Rochester,
0:14:33 not Notre Dame or Syracuse. His SAT scores weren’t that good. Years later, when his daughters asked him
0:14:39 whether he scored higher in math or verbal, he’d tell them the truth. Sports, honey. Fisher was a small
0:14:46 Catholic school with tree-shaded dorms and brown brick buildings. Ed fell in love with the place
0:14:52 immediately. He made friends with Mark Munch and Bill Colombo, who’d both become crucial to Dick’s
0:14:57 sporting goods later. But that first day, watching his dad’s car drive away after dropping him off,
0:15:05 Ed felt something he’d never felt before. He felt free. He was finally away from the store. Halfway through
0:15:10 freshman year, Ed had his whole future mapped out. Major in accounting, learn to manage the
0:15:15 company’s books, then go to law school. The combination of business and legal knowledge would
0:15:20 land him a corporate job someday. He’d finished his first year excited about the path ahead. He even
0:15:27 wrote to a local law firm asking for a summer job. They said yes. Ed recounts his father’s reaction to
0:15:33 the news this way. You’re not going to work there. Sure I am. I got the job. No, this business has put
0:15:38 food on the table since you were a kid. It’s what’s helping pay for college. You’re going to get your
0:15:44 ass down to the store and that’s all there is to it. Ed did what he was told. He swallowed his anger
0:15:50 and went back to the warehouse. But now his hatred for the store went deeper than before. This wasn’t just
0:15:56 giving up summer for baseball anymore. This was his father crushing his dream. The one bright spot that
0:16:01 summer was golf. His grandfather had been pushing him to try it for years and Ed finally gave in.
0:16:09 They’d played every Monday. Gramp was something else. Starting at age 71, he shot his age for 19 years
0:16:15 straight. When Ed complained his shots were going left, Gramp kept it simple. Well, Eddie, aim a little
0:16:20 more to the right. That summer and the ones that followed, those Monday golf games rescued Ed from
0:16:26 purgatory. While he stood about his stolen future, dreaming of law school and escape, at least he had
0:16:33 Mondays with Gramp. Meanwhile, the economy was falling apart. The college years coincided with brutal
0:16:41 interest rates, going up to 12% in 1974. Consumer spending tanked. Some mornings Dick Stack would lie in bed,
0:16:47 too depressed to get up, convinced his business was about to fail for the second time. Working at the store those
0:16:54 summers, Ed started to see the real problem. It wasn’t interest rates. It was his father. Dick had no buying
0:17:01 strategy, just hunches. Ed remembered the garage at home was always stuffed with overstocked merchandise. Dick would bet
0:17:08 big on some product. It wouldn’t sell and they’d have boxes of it for years. Eventually, they’d dump it at a loss just to
0:17:15 clear the space. The store had no financial discipline either. Once a year, every July, they’d do inventory, count
0:17:20 everything in the store, add it all up. And that’s when Dick would finally learn that he’d made money that
0:17:26 year or not. He had no idea up until that moment. He’d use the line of credit to buy merchandise and pay
0:17:33 salaries, flying blind for about 12 months. His hunches had worked out more often than not, but Ed wondered how long that
0:17:40 luck would last. During the school year, Ed worked part-time at Xerox, at Wegmans Grocery, at Oak Hill Country Club.
0:17:47 Even as the lowest employee at these places, he could see the difference. These businesses knew if they were making
0:17:55 money every single day. They had systems. They had data. They didn’t run on gut feelings and prayer. Seeing his dad’s
0:18:02 weaknesses only strengthened Ed’s resolve. He wanted no part of the family business. Soon as he graduated,
0:18:10 he’d be gone. Then Dick’s doctor spotted him dragging his leg up the stairs. Get to the hospital now. Dick’s
0:18:16 stack was only 47, but he’d smoked three packs a day since his teens. If you suggested he’d cut back,
0:18:22 he’d say, anybody can quit smoking. It takes a real man to die of lung cancer. That was the kind of guy
0:18:28 Dick’s stack was. He didn’t exercise. He drank Manhattan’s leg water. His breakfast was toast,
0:18:34 coffee, and cigarettes. Nothing for lunch and dinner late at night, and then a big bowl of ice cream in
0:18:42 bed. The double bypass was scheduled at Mass General in Boston. In 1976, that was pretty major surgery.
0:18:48 Plenty of people died on the table. Ed came home for winter break with the operation looming. When he
0:18:53 asked for Saturday off to see his girlfriend back in Rochester, his father exploded from his bed.
0:18:59 You’re not taking Saturday off. We’re open. You’re staying here. For maybe the first time in his life,
0:19:06 Ed stood his ground. Yeah, I am. A week later, leaving for the spring semester, Ed paused at his father’s
0:19:12 bedroom door. He knew he might never see him again. Dad, good luck with your operation, and I just want you
0:19:18 to know that I love you. Now, that was radical talk in the stack household. Dick had never once told Ed
0:19:24 that he loved him. Not once. Ed half expected he might say it now, with death knocking at his door.
0:19:31 Instead, Dick grumbled, if you love me, you wouldn’t have taken last Saturday off. During surgery,
0:19:36 Dick’s heart stopped. They brought him back, but he never really came all the way back, not emotionally and
0:19:42 not physically. 17 months later, Ed was three weeks from graduation. He’d lined up interviews with
0:19:48 accounting firms in Rochester. Everything he’d worked for was within reach. And then Donna called.
0:19:55 Your father can’t do it anymore. The business is dying. Ed could have let it fail. Nobody would blame
0:20:00 him. He was 22. He’d never wanted this door, and he owed his father nothing. But he thought about Bob
0:20:06 Aitken, who’d worked there for 20 years. The other employees with mortgages. The vendors who trusted
0:20:13 his father, his family. What would it do to Dick to watch his life’s work die? At 9 o’clock on Tuesday
0:20:20 morning after graduation, Ed Stack opened the store. The same lights he turned on as a 13-year-old forced to
0:20:26 work on weekends. The same cash register he’d stood behind instead of playing baseball. But something was
0:20:32 different this time. The employees looked at him for direction. Vendors called about orders. The bank
0:20:38 wanted to know about payments. For the first time, Ed wasn’t just working at the store. He was responsible
0:20:44 for it. Sometimes the thing that you’re running from becomes the thing you have to run. Ed Stack wanted
0:20:51 to be anywhere but behind that counter. But duty doesn’t care what you want. It doesn’t care what you feel.
0:20:58 His father couldn’t run the store anymore and so somebody had to. That somebody was Ed. The next
0:21:04 chapter of Dick’s Sporting Goods was about to begin. Not because Ed Stack chose it, but because life chose
0:21:13 it for him. Something shifted in 22-year-old Ed Stack when he stood behind the counter in 1977 after taking
0:21:19 over. The store that he’d hated his whole life now suddenly became interesting. Maybe it was because he’d
0:21:26 spent years watching from the outside and maybe it was because he’d worked at Xerox and Wegbins and now he saw how
0:21:31 real businesses operated. But standing there, running the store for the first time, Ed saw opportunities
0:21:40 everywhere. Sales that year hit just over 2 million, but profits were razor thin at 100,000. The store
0:21:47 needed better record keeping, smarter merchandising, different advertising. When Ed pointed this out to Bob Aiken,
0:21:52 his father’s longtime lieutenant, another man, might have bristled at the boss’s kid making all these
0:21:58 suggestions. Instead, Bob said, Youngblood, let’s do it. The word let’s changed everything. For the first
0:22:05 time, Ed wasn’t just following orders. He was making decisions. And the store he despised became a puzzle he
0:22:11 couldn’t wait to solve. He started thinking about it in his sleep and in the shower. He was obsessing over it.
0:22:17 Take the ammunition wars. Every year before hunting season, their competitors would drop prices on
0:22:23 ammo. Dicks would match them, starting a price war. One day, a guy from Kmart walked in dressed like a
0:22:29 New York lawyer in a suit and tie. Ed was behind the counter, 23, but baby-faced enough to pass for a
0:22:35 teenager. The Kmart guy figured he could intimidate this kid. He said, you people need to stop this price
0:22:41 war or we’ll put you out of business. Ed played dumb. What do you mean? You have to tell the boss
0:22:46 to stop this price war. Okay, said Ed. I’ll make sure he knows. The guy walked out, probably feeling
0:22:53 good about himself. In the next weekly ad, Dicks dropped the price another 10 cents. When Kmart matched
0:22:58 them, Ed sent his brother Marty over with cash from the register. Marty filled an entire shopping cart
0:23:05 with shotgun slugs case after case, buying Kmart’s entire inventory at their lost liter price, cheaper
0:23:11 than Dicks could buy them from Remington or Winchester. They held those slugs until hunting season started.
0:23:17 Then when hunters couldn’t find ammo at Kmart, guess where they came? Dicks had plenty, and they drove
0:23:23 massive traffic to the store. This is how Ed thought about competition, not as something to avoid, but as
0:23:28 something to exploit, something to have fun with, a game, a puzzle. He’d been reading business books,
0:23:35 especially about Sam Walton, the guy who owned one five and dime store in rural Arkansas, and he built
0:23:40 Walmart by growing quietly in concentric circles, staying under the radar, expanding outward from
0:23:47 Bentonville without attracting attention from bigger competitors. Ed started to dream, and he would adopt
0:23:52 the same strategy. From Binghampton, they’d expand in small steps, Syracuse, Rochester, then Buffalo.
0:23:58 Always cold weather markets, always hunting country, places where Dicks understood the customers because
0:24:04 they were customers. One truck could service multiple stores on principal highways, no need to attract
0:24:10 attention from big chains. For now, this worked, but Ed knew something his father refused to see. Retail
0:24:15 never stands still. The moment you think you’ve figured it out, that’s when someone figures out
0:24:20 how to destroy you. Dick spent more than half the year in Florida recovering from his surgery, but he
0:24:27 still reminded everyone who was boss. When 16-year-old Jay Minninger applied for a job, Ed took him under
0:24:32 his wing. Together, they studied the market and decided Dick should enter the cross-country ski
0:24:39 business. Snow covered Binghampton for months. The sport was exploding. The timing was perfect. They built this
0:24:45 beautiful display stretching 30 feet all across the back wall. Skis, boots, poles, everything
0:24:50 a customer would need. They stood back admiring their work when Dick Stack walked in. He was
0:24:56 leaving for Florida the next morning for his six-month winter stay. Dick stared at the display for a
0:25:03 moment, and then he walked to one end and shoved the first set of skis. The entire display crashed
0:25:10 down like dominoes. Get these the hell out of here, he said, and walked out. Jay went pale. Oh my god,
0:25:16 what are we going to do? Let’s pick up the skis and put them back, Ed said. He’s leaving tomorrow and
0:25:21 we’ll sell them all before he gets home. Which is exactly what happened. They sold every piece of ski
0:25:27 equipment, plus all the coats, hats, and gloves to go with them. From then on, Ed’s strategy was simple.
0:25:33 Wait until his father left town to make changes. Well, it might not have been so easy to see in the
0:25:38 moment. Looking back later in life, Ed says his father’s resistance actually helped him because it
0:25:45 forced him to think through every proposal, every action, analyze every angle, and make his ideas
0:25:51 bulletproof. If he wanted Dick’s support, he’d have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that an idea would
0:25:56 work. This taught Ed a fundamental truth about retail his father couldn’t see. The moment you think you’ve got
0:26:02 it figured out, that’s the moment you start to die. In retail, there’s no standing still. You’re either
0:26:07 getting better or you’re getting worse. Herman’s world of sporting goods was expanding from New Jersey.
0:26:13 Models was growing. New chains were forming that Ed hadn’t even heard of yet. The comfortable little
0:26:20 sporting goods store in Binghamton Dick built, that model was already extinct. It just wasn’t obvious yet.
0:26:26 Dick couldn’t see it. Hillcrest had broken something inside him. That second store failure in 1956
0:26:34 2006 had taught him the wrong lesson. Instead of learning how to expand smartly, he learned not to
0:26:40 expand at all. Instead of learning how to adapt to customers, he learned not to change anything. He’d gone
0:26:49 from reckless to paralyzed. And in retail, paralysis is just death in slow motion. There were limits to what
0:26:55 Ed could tolerate. In the summer of 1978, his best friend, Mark Munoz, was getting married in Rochester.
0:27:00 Ed was in the wedding party. A week before he told Bob Aitken he’d need to leave Friday at noon for the
0:27:07 rehearsal dinner. Sure, no problem, Bob said. But Dick Stack heard about it and found Ed in the store. And here is how
0:27:09 Ed remembers this conversation.
0:27:12 You’re not going to that wedding. The store is open, so you’re working.
0:27:15 It’s Munchie’s wedding. He’s my best friend. I’m in the wedding.
0:27:22 I don’t give a shit. You’re working. End of conversation. I’m going. If you go, don’t come back on
0:27:28 Tuesday. Ed caved. He called Munchie to say that he couldn’t make it. At 23 years old, standing in the
0:27:33 store, instead of at his best friend’s wedding, Ed realized he couldn’t work for his father indefinitely.
0:27:40 They were heading for a reckoning. Sometimes the cost of keeping peace is losing yourself.
0:27:46 Ed kept the job, but lost something bigger. That moment crystallized everything wrong with how Dick ran the
0:27:51 business. Meanwhile, Ed was discovering something about himself that would matter more than any
0:27:56 business strategy. His father had made him work the store since he was 13, but never taught him
0:28:02 the actual business. Dick kept all the real knowledge, the buying, the vendor relationships,
0:28:08 the planning locked in his own head. So when Ed walked into the Holiday Inn to meet salesman Paul
0:28:13 Grossman, he didn’t know the first thing about placing an order. Paul had all these jackets laid out
0:28:18 on the beds and racks, and Ed started pointing at everything he liked, ordering the same quantities
0:28:24 in every color, every style. He was like a kid who’d never been to a candy store and suddenly got the
0:28:29 keys. Paul watched this for a while and then looked over his glasses. Son, you don’t have enough money to
0:28:35 buy all the stuff you’re trying to buy. Let me help you. Most 23-year-olds would have faked it, but Ed
0:28:40 didn’t. His inexperience was so transparent that Paul couldn’t help but teach him. They spent hours going
0:28:45 through the basics, how to read a market, how to plan inventory, how to balance desire with reality.
0:28:52 The same thing kept happening. Mike Rich from Woolridge would quote $40 for closeouts, and Ed would
0:28:57 counter with $15. And Mike would usually say yes, not because he had to, but because he wanted to help
0:29:03 this kid succeed. Why? Because Ed Stack didn’t pretend to know everything. He didn’t throw his weight
0:29:09 around as the boss’s son. He treated vendors with respect, remembered their names, asked about their
0:29:14 families. When he didn’t know something, he just admitted it and said so. When someone helped him,
0:29:20 he remembered and thanked them. Dick Stack had built trust with vendors over a decade, but Ed built
0:29:26 something different. He built a faction. People didn’t just trust Dick’s sporting goods. They wanted it
0:29:32 to win. For three years, Ed had been calling Puma and Adidas, begging them to let Dick’s carry their
0:29:38 shoes. These were the brands that every kid wanted. Hell, Ed had one of them when he was a kid, but his
0:29:44 father wouldn’t stalk them. Now that Ed could make decisions, he was desperate to get them. The answer,
0:29:49 though, was always no. In their eyes, Dick’s was some outdoor store, hunting and fishing, not a place for
0:29:55 cool sneakers or cool kids. Ed would call between trade shows and leave messages. And when they did
0:30:01 call back, which was rare, the answer never changed. It was always no. So Ed did what Dick’s had always
0:30:09 done. He gave an unknown guy a chance. Nike was a nobody in 1978. Bob Aiken had bought some basketball
0:30:15 shoes from them while Ed was in college, but that was about it. And now Ed added running shoes. They flew
0:30:23 off the shelves. By 1980, Nike had captured half the US athletic footwear market and Dick’s rode the wave
0:30:29 with them. And that’s when Puma finally called back and said, yes, we’ll sell to you. Ed immediately
0:30:35 called Adidas, just wanted you to know Puma’s going to sell to us. Really? Yeah. Ed had Puma’s business
0:30:40 card ready to prove it. There was a pause. Well, if they sell to you, we’ll sell to you. Finally, three years
0:30:47 of rejection. And now both brands wanted in. But when the Adidas rep came to take their first order,
0:30:52 he had conditions. What do you want for Adidas apparel? He asked. Oh, we’re not really interested
0:30:57 in apparel, Ed said. Just the shoes. The rep started packing up his samples. If you’re not buying apparel,
0:31:03 we’re not giving you shoes. Ed was furious. Three years of begging. And now this guy was making demands,
0:31:09 but he had no choice. Okay, we’ll buy some apparel. After the rep left, Ed turned to Jay. Someday,
0:31:14 those guys are going to be begging to us to buy from them. But here’s where the story gets really
0:31:21 interesting. The Adidas apparel that Ed didn’t want, it exploded out of the store. Running was
0:31:27 becoming a national obsession in the late 70s. And runners didn’t just need shoes. They needed
0:31:34 shoes and shorts and skirts and socks and everything. And the margins on sportswear were incredible.
0:31:39 Dicks made more profit on running of it than on an expensive hunting gear or jacket.
0:31:46 That arrogant Adidas rep had accidentally shown Ed the future of Dicks sporting goods. Sometimes the
0:31:51 best thing that can happen is not getting what you want. Dicks succeeded and rode a 40-year wave
0:31:57 with Nike because Puma and Adidas wouldn’t give them a chance. They discovered apparel because Adidas
0:32:02 forced it on them. The rejections and the demands that felt like insults at the time were actually
0:32:07 gifts. Years later, Adidas would indeed come begging. But by then, Dick’s was huge.
0:32:12 Dick’s stack spent most of the year in Florida recovering, but he still managed to lose his
0:32:20 mind over the phone about every change Ed made. First, it was the apparel. What the hell is clothing
0:32:27 doing in my store? Ed let the numbers do the talking. The apparel Dick didn’t want was generating the profits
0:32:33 he did one. Dick grumbled, but couldn’t argue with math. Then Ed revolutionized their advertising.
0:32:40 For decades, Dick had run black and white ads in the sports section. Same spot, same format since the 1950s.
0:32:47 Ed noticed other retailers using tabloid inserts, 8 to 12 pages, full color, impossible to miss.
0:32:54 So Ed built one of these inserts. He drew stick figures wearing clothes, primitive sketches of products,
0:32:58 handed these scrawls to the newspaper, and they turned them into a professional eight-page color
0:33:06 insert. Business exploded, but so did costs. Annual advertising jumped from $40,000 to $100,000.
0:33:11 His father got on the phone. What the hell are you doing? Dick screamed from Florida when he saw the
0:33:18 expenses. Bill Humsman, the accountant, stepped in. Dick, look at the sales. Sales jumped from $2.7 million
0:33:23 to $3.1 million. Profits had doubled. They spent a lot of money, the accountant said,
0:33:28 but they made a lot more. The kid is on to something. The proof came from their competitors.
0:33:32 Jerry Harper, their Nike rep, walked into Dick’s biggest rival and asked how back to school was
0:33:39 going. It’d be a lot better, the kid said, if we weren’t getting Dick to death. At 26, Ed was running
0:33:44 the business, but Dick still owned it. And he still called from Florida to complain about nearly
0:33:50 everything. Nothing Ed did was ever right. Even though Dick couldn’t argue with the results,
0:33:56 he was content with two stores. Where else but America, he loved saying, can a dumb kid who got
0:34:02 out of high school by the skin of his teeth make it like this? In his mind, he’d made it. And he wasn’t
0:34:08 wrong. He’d lost everything at Hillcrest in the 50s and rebuilt from nothing, creating a profitable
0:34:14 business. So why risk it all again? But Ed saw Herman’s expanding from New Jersey and Modell’s growing
0:34:20 and new chains forming. The comfortable two-store operation was already dead. It just didn’t know it
0:34:27 yet. The lesson here is about different definitions of success. Dick Stack thought success meant not
0:34:33 failing again. And Ed thought success meant growing before someone else grew past you. One was playing not
0:34:40 to lose. The other was playing to win. And in retail, playing not to lose is just losing slowly. Ed wasn’t
0:34:46 satisfied with the two stores. He was paranoid. And his paranoia was justified. He’d watch Walmart destroy
0:34:52 local department stores. Home Depot was steamrolling hardware stores. Sporting goods would be next.
0:34:58 Ed wanted to expand to Cortland, 40 miles up Interstate 81. It was the perfect size, perfect location,
0:35:04 perfect market. For months, he had argued with his father about it. But Dick wouldn’t budge. Hillcrest
0:35:10 still haunted him. Finally, Dick exploded mid-argument. If you think you’re such a goddamn smart son of a
0:35:16 bitch, go down to the bank and get your own line of credit and buy me out. So Ed did exactly that. He
0:35:21 went to First City National Bank in Binghamton, showed them the numbers, and walked out with a verbal
0:35:27 commitment for a credit line. The bank was ready to back him. We’re good to go, Ed told his father a few
0:35:32 days later. What do you mean, we’re ready to go? When Ed explained what he’d done, Dick turned
0:35:39 indignant. This is my business, and it’s going to stay my business. Dick hadn’t expected his bluff to
0:35:44 be called. He wasn’t ready to let go. So Ed was still trapped, loving the business he once hated, but
0:35:50 unable to grow it. Watching the retail landscape change while forced to stand still. The stalemate
0:35:56 might have continued forever, but Ed had an unexpected ally, Uncle Joe. Dick’s brother and accountant
0:36:00 started whispering in his ear about succession planning. Dick was 55, had been running the
0:36:07 business for 36 years, and his health wasn’t improving. Maybe it was time. The negotiations
0:36:13 were classic Dick stack. He’d sell the business to his five kids for $1.25 million, but on his terms.
0:36:20 They’d pay him over 20 years at 12% interest, and couldn’t pay it off early, even if they wanted to.
0:36:25 He’d keep the buildings and lease them back at above market rates for 25 years.
0:36:31 The kids couldn’t break those leases without his permission. Dick would have income for life and
0:36:36 stay connected with the business from Florida. But Uncle Joe insisted on one crucial detail.
0:36:42 Someone had to be in charge. Larry Shore, the young lawyer structuring the deal, suggested a
0:36:48 two-class stock arrangement. Ed would get 51% of the voting shares. Ed would have control. His
0:36:56 siblings would get equal equity stakes, but not have control over operations. In the summer of 1984,
0:37:02 the same summer that Ed would go on to marry the love of his life, Denise, he took control of Dick’s
0:37:08 sporting goods. He was 29 years old. Dick finally stepped back, and Ed could finally move forward.
0:37:13 The first thing Ed did was move operations out of the cramped quarters behind Court Street.
0:37:20 They rented a distribution center 10 minutes away. It was 20,000 square feet of warehouse and offices.
0:37:27 Dick Stack saw this from the sidelines and lost his mind. A retailer should be in the store. Everything
0:37:32 happens in the store. How the hell can you know what’s going on sitting on your ass at a desk?
0:37:39 Ed knew the chains were coming. Herman’s, Modell’s, Sports Authority, they weren’t being run by guys
0:37:44 standing behind cash registers. They had systems. They had infrastructure. They had strategic planning.
0:37:51 Dick’s needed the same to survive. Still, his father had a point. You couldn’t really run retail
0:37:57 remotely. So Ed spent time at Court Street regularly, walking the floor, talking to customers. The
0:38:02 difference was that Ed saw both needs. His father thought you had to choose. Ed knew you
0:38:08 needed both. Time in the store to stay connected, and time away to plan the future. One was tactics,
0:38:13 the other was strategy. Without both, Dick’s would die. Ed did something else really smart. He
0:38:19 assembled a board of advisors. They met quarterly and saved Ed from himself often. They were generous
0:38:24 with their time, but brutal with their opinions. And of course, Ed always knew that his father’s advice
0:38:31 would be, don’t do it. In 1986, Tim Myers and Ed drove to Syracuse on a Sunday, scouting locations for
0:38:37 their first store outside Binghampton. Syracuse was three times the size, with a major university,
0:38:44 plenty of hunters, and fishermen. It was perfect Dick’s territory. They met Mary Claire Cod, a real
0:38:49 estate broker who showed them property near a shopping town mall. They looked at it, liked the location,
0:38:54 and before they really thought it through, they signed the papers. Driving home, Tim looked over at Ed.
0:39:01 Did we just buy a piece of land? I think we did. What are we going to do with it? I don’t really know.
0:39:07 By the time they got home, they were in full panic. They just committed to buying land with no plan, no
0:39:12 budget, no idea if they should buy or lease. They called the real estate agent that night and backed out.
0:39:19 She was very generous. She said, no problem, I understand. Weeks later, they were back properly prepared
0:39:24 this time, or at least so they thought. This time, they leased space in a strip center. They spent
0:39:30 months creating detailed plans. Departments like boutiques, displays that would stop shoppers in
0:39:35 their track, a layout that would pull people through every section. They handed the plans to the developer
0:39:41 and waited. Then came the education. The contractor called them over to show them the progress.
0:39:48 So Ed and Tim walked into four walls and a roof. Well, when do you start the interior? Ed asked.
0:39:53 What interior? We’re building you a vanilla box. You’re supposed to build us a store.
0:39:58 They hadn’t ordered fixtures. There was no shelving. There was no lights. There was nothing.
0:40:04 They were supposed to open in six weeks. The contractor luckily saved them. He agreed to do the
0:40:10 interior work for extra money and definitely gouged them a bit, but he finished on time and the store was
0:40:16 beautiful. The Syracuse opening was a revelation. They moved Binghampton people up to run it,
0:40:21 including Ed’s sister, Nancy. Hundreds lined up for jobs. Their advertising started weeks early with
0:40:29 just a teaser. The biggest sporting event in Syracuse starts on August 3rd. Opening day, the crowds
0:40:36 overwhelmed them. Nike reps who’d seen everything were shocked. Nancy had to take bags of cash to her
0:40:44 apartment because the registers couldn’t hold it all. The store did $8.3 million in its first year.
0:40:51 With one opening, they doubled the size of the company. A year later, Gary Stefanano from Nike toured the
0:40:56 store with Dick. Dick, you must be so proud of these kids. They’ve done such a great job. Now, before I tell
0:41:02 you what Dick would say, can you guess? Dick nodded. Of course, the store looks great. They’re doing a great
0:41:08 job, but these kids did 25% more business than they thought they would. So you know what? They’re not
0:41:15 really quite as smart as they think they are. Think about that for a second. His son just doubled the size
0:41:20 of the family business with one store, proved all Dick’s fears wrong, and the best he can manage was
0:41:26 pointing out that they underestimated their success. But here’s what Dick didn’t understand. Not being as
0:41:33 smart as you think you are is how you learn. Ed and Tim made every mistake possible in Syracuse.
0:41:38 They bought land they didn’t need. They didn’t know what a vanilla box was. Nearly opened with empty walls.
0:41:44 And because of all those mistakes, they learned more about opening stores than any NBA program could teach
0:41:49 them. The real lesson from Syracuse isn’t about real estate or construction contracts, is that sometimes
0:41:56 your ignorance is a great asset. If Ed had known everything that could go wrong, he might never have
0:42:02 tried to expand. Next, they opened a second store in Syracuse, 12 miles north. Ed expected to match the
0:42:09 first year’s sales. It should be about $8.3 million. But the new store only did $7 million, and the first
0:42:16 store’s sales dropped to $8 million. Combined, they’d grown a lot, but it’s not what they projected. Ed learned an
0:42:22 expensive word, cannibalization. When you have one store in a city, customers drive from everywhere to
0:42:27 reach it. But when you add a second store, you split that customer base. One plus one doesn’t equal two.
0:42:34 In this case, it equals about 1.75. Still, both stores were wildly profitable, so they pushed forward.
0:42:41 Rochester next, then Buffalo. Each store bigger than the last. Each one a revelation to customers who’d never
0:42:47 seen anything like Dick’s Sporting Goods. In Buffalo, Ed overheard a kid, who was maybe nine years old at the
0:42:55 time, standing wide-eyed before a wall displaying 30 feet of baseball gloves. Mom, he gasped. I’ve waited
0:43:03 for a store like this my whole life. He wasn’t the only one. The Buffalo store did $12 million in its
0:43:09 first year. But growth brought new problems. Bigger stores meant more employees, which meant higher
0:43:14 turnover. And thieves got creative. They weren’t just stealing clothes anymore. They’d bring razors,
0:43:20 cut the heads off graphite golf clubs, pocket them, get them reshafted elsewhere, and sell them on the
0:43:26 black market. Ed called his best friend from college, Bill Colombo, who was then on the fast track at JCPenney.
0:43:33 He convinced him to leave to join Dick’s. In 18 months, Bill cut theft in half. By 1990, Dick’s had
0:43:39 seven stores when Herman’s World of Sporting Goods finally arrived in Binghamton. Herman’s was the apex
0:43:46 predator of East Coast Sporting Goods. They’d been in the business since 1916. They had way more stores,
0:43:52 and they were crazy aggressive in expanding from their New Jersey base. Ed was smart. He studied their
0:43:59 patterns and discovered they had a weakness. They ran predictable sales inserts every Sunday. So Dick’s ran
0:44:05 their inserts on Wednesdays, which gave them 24 hours to read Herman’s Sunday ads for the following
0:44:11 week and adjust their prices to beat them. Week after week, Dick’s undercut Herman’s prices before
0:44:16 Herman’s even knew they were in a fight. After Thanksgiving one night with a bit too much to drink,
0:44:22 Tim Myers called the Herman’s store, pretending to be Bob Corliss, Herman’s CEO, asking how the holiday
0:44:27 business had been. The manager, thinking he was talking to the CEO of his company, was pretty candid about
0:44:32 what was working and what wasn’t. Then Tim got a little carried away and said, your store’s a mess.
0:44:38 I’ll be there tomorrow morning at 9 30. It better look different. That night, Ed drove past Herman’s.
0:44:43 Every light was on. The parking lot was full. Employees working through the night to fix problems that
0:44:51 didn’t exist. Ed felt terrible about it after. It was underhanded and unnecessary and not the way he
0:44:56 wanted to do business. They were young and stupid, letting competition turn into something ugly.
0:45:03 But it also showed another side, which was how seriously they took the threat. Herman’s wasn’t just
0:45:09 competition. They were an existential danger. This chain could crush dicks without thinking twice.
0:45:15 Ed knew they had to fight with everything they had. Though he’d learned that night, there were lines he
0:45:21 shouldn’t cross. The real lesson here isn’t about competitive tactics. It’s about fear and survival.
0:45:26 When you’re seven stores facing a hundred store chain, you feel like David loading a slingshot.
0:45:31 Sometimes that fear makes you fight smart, like using Wednesday ads to beat Sunday prices.
0:45:35 And sometimes it makes you do things you’ll regret, like the prank phone call.
0:45:40 Ed never pulled a stunt like that again, but he never stopped taking competition seriously either.
0:45:46 Because in retail, the day you stop fearing your competition is the day competition stops fearing
0:45:53 you. By 1991, Ed had billed dicks to 12 stores using Sam Walton’s playbook. Grow quietly in
0:45:59 concentric circles. Stay under the radar. Stick to cold weather hunting markets, always on major highways.
0:46:04 Places that are big enough to support a store and too small to attract the bigger chains.
0:46:09 The strategy was working. Every store was profitable. They understood their customers because
0:46:15 they were their customers. But Ed’s siblings wanted out. They saw friends cashing out for
0:46:20 millions and saw Herman’s with hundreds of stores and sports authority expanding everywhere.
0:46:25 So when the phone rang, Michael Barrick from Bessemer Venture from Partners was on the other end of the
0:46:30 line. We can help you become a national player. We’ve done this before. Ed thought about his father,
0:46:36 content with two stores. His siblings wanted their payday. Let’s talk, Ed said.
0:46:45 $6 million hit Dick’s bank account in 1991. It came from venture capitalists who’d built Office Depot and
0:46:51 PetSmart, who’d funded Staples, who knew how to turn small regional players into national powerhouses.
0:46:56 Ed Stack had spent months negotiating with Michael Barrick from Bessemer Partners,
0:47:02 Jerry Gallinger from Oak Investment Partners, and Denis Defory, the French genius who’d founded Carrefour.
0:47:08 These weren’t just investors. They were kingmakers. Ed kept control of the board with five seats to
0:47:15 there too. But $6 million doesn’t come free. It comes with high expectations. You need to establish
0:47:20 beachheads, they told him. Get into markets before your competitors do. Figure out the details later.
0:47:27 Dick Stack would have hated this. He’d lost his second store in 1956 by expanding too fast and spent 40
0:47:32 years terrified of growth. But sometimes you have to take risks to build something great. The money
0:47:38 transformed Dick’s overnight. They went from opening three stores a year to opening 20. But too much
0:47:46 growth too quickly creates a lot of problems. In 1994, they tried hiring a top tier CFO. The candidate
0:47:51 loved Dick’s and they loved him. They brought him and his wife and his daughter to Binghamton for dinner.
0:47:57 Everything seemed perfect, but then the family went shopping for a house. That afternoon,
0:48:02 the candidate called Ed. “My wife said if I wanted the job, I can move here. But she and my daughter
0:48:08 won’t be coming.” Dick’s had to leave in order to attract top talent. They looked at Boston, but the real
0:48:15 estate prices were astronomical. Hereford had perfect housing, but no affordable office space. Philadelphia
0:48:21 was briefly considered until the evening news declared it the murder capital of America. Pittsburgh,
0:48:26 on the other hand, had everything they needed: central location, great airport, and reasonable costs.
0:48:32 The day they left Binghamton, Ed’s six-year-old son Brian sat in the back of the minivan. “I just
0:48:39 want to look at our house for as long as I can as we drive away.” Ed almost turned around, but they went.
0:48:45 Before the move, Jerry Gallinger came to see their new prototype store. The sign blazed 10 feet tall,
0:48:51 Dick’s Sporting Goods. “Do you ever think about changing the name?” Ed knew what he meant, but he
0:48:56 wanted him to spell it out. “My assistant asked me about it. My wife, too. I don’t understand. We’re
0:49:03 a sporting goods retailer.” Jerry squirmed, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Maybe Dick’s just
0:49:10 isn’t the best name. You know, like Guy’s Anatomy?” Ed turned indignant. “That’s what my grandmother named my
0:49:15 father. The name stays.” And this subject never came up again. But it showed that the new investors
0:49:21 were more hands-on than you’d expected. In Pittsburgh, they’d opened three stores simultaneously,
0:49:28 each one 50,000 square feet. The city went wild for them. And success has a way of making bold people
0:49:35 bolder, so they kept pushing harder. By 1995, they had 22 stores, and then 40. They were opening stores
0:49:41 at breakneck speed, convinced they had the Midas touch. You know what happens when you convince yourself you
0:49:46 have the Midas touch. The new stores were enormous, 60,000 square feet. But more than that, they were full of
0:49:53 fancy floors that nobody noticed, and expensive fixtures that didn’t drive sales. They opened in
0:50:00 markets that they didn’t understand, like Cincinnati, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Three stores per city,
0:50:05 all at once, that had worked in Pittsburgh. They didn’t know local fishing seasons, or hunting culture,
0:50:11 or what people actually wanted. And their inventory system, which had been built for two stores,
0:50:18 was cracking under 40. Pallets stacked on pallets in the warehouse. Stores had too much of what wouldn’t
0:50:26 sell and not enough of what would sell. They had to mark everything down. Margins crashed. In 1996,
0:50:34 Mike Hines told Ed they’d be out of money next month. They owed $13 million they didn’t have. The banks
0:50:38 wouldn’t restructure the debt, and the venture capitalists wouldn’t put in more money until the
0:50:44 banks restructured. It was a classic catch-22. We should file chapter 11, someone suggested at a
0:50:51 meeting. Ed felt physically ill. His father had refused bankruptcy when their second store failed,
0:50:57 selling everything he owned to pay his creditors. Ed wouldn’t use bankruptcy to escape debts he’d created.
0:51:03 That’s not an option, he’d said. Someone mentioned GE Capital. And at the time,
0:51:07 they had a reputation for brutal terms and restrictive covenants. Basically,
0:51:13 one step above Tony Soprano. But they would do something the banks wouldn’t do. They would take
0:51:18 risks the banks wouldn’t touch. The night before the meeting, Ed stood at his hotel mirror, giving himself
0:51:23 a little bit of a pep talk. Get your shit together, stack. Walk in there and talk like you don’t care
0:51:29 whether they give you the loan or not. The conference room he walked into wasn’t exactly what you’d expect.
0:51:34 There were suits firing questions like prosecutors. How can you run a business without a computerized
0:51:39 replenishment system? Why did you increase the store size to 60,000 square feet?
0:51:44 After a while, Ed took a different tactic. He interrupted them and said, guys,
0:51:49 let me tell you something. We made a series of mistakes. And these are the mistakes we made.
0:51:54 He told them what happened, then moved on to why it happened. That he thought establishing beach
0:52:00 hedge in new markets was important, but they’d moved into too many too quickly. And this is what
0:52:06 we’re going to do so that it never happens again, Ed said. Our venture group will put in additional
0:52:11 equity into the business. We’ll be disciplined on expenses and growth. We won’t allow our growth rate
0:52:16 to outstrip our capital. All told, the interrogation, the meeting lasted for about 90 minutes.
0:52:22 And in the back of this room sat a man who hadn’t spoken once. He had a dark suit. He was about 40,
0:52:29 watching everything like a hawk. The meeting ended with no promises made. But as he was gathering up
0:52:34 his papers, the quiet observer went over, sat down and said, “Tell me the three things I need to do so
0:52:40 that we can agent this loan.” There were only two. Ed told them how much money they needed and when they
0:52:46 needed it by. The man quietly studied Ed for 10 seconds, his head cocked to the side saying nothing.
0:52:52 His eyes weren’t adversarial. He seemed to be seeking understanding, not delivering a challenge.
0:52:58 This was a gut instinct call and this silent appraisal was his due diligence. Finally,
0:53:05 he smiled. We can do that. He shook Ed’s hand and left. To this day, Ed doesn’t know who he was. Walking out,
0:53:11 Mike asked what just happened. I think we just saved the company. There’s a lesson here. If you’re in a
0:53:16 big meeting and there’s a person sitting off in a corner, not saying anything, that’s probably the
0:53:22 person you have to convince. They’re the decision maker. GE Capital gave them $140 million, but it
0:53:27 came with a really short leash. They couldn’t buy inventory with permission or open stores without
0:53:34 approval. Every penny was tracked. Every metric monitored. Ed would say later, “We peered into the
0:53:39 halls of hell and we were never going back. Funny thing, GE Capital turned out to be a wonderful partner.
0:53:44 If we had an issue or wanted to do something different, they wanted to know about it and to
0:53:49 understand our thinking. But I don’t recall a single instance when we were mulling some important
0:53:55 action and they said no. Their covenants proved far less onerous than they’d seem. In fact, they were
0:54:01 easy to hit. They put those in place to keep us from getting ourselves into trouble. And once our new
0:54:05 systems were installed and we were back on solid footing with our inventory under control and our
0:54:12 margin rates back to normal, the covenants were performance bars that we cleared easily. All told, fixing all that was
0:54:18 broken took a little more than a year. By early 1997, we were a far healthier company than we’d
0:54:22 been before the scare. Hitting the pause button in our growth enabled us to take a more thoughtful
0:54:28 approach to further expansion. And with our new systems, we had an almost microscopic view of Dick’s
0:54:34 operation and a far better sense of what we were doing and why.” But this near-death experience taught Ed
0:54:41 an important lesson about debt. Listen to his words here because they contain a profound amount of wisdom.
0:54:47 You never get over a close call like the one we experienced in the mid-1990s. I will never again
0:54:53 be comfortable relying on someone else’s capital. I will always be a little paranoid and insist that we
0:54:58 finance all we do from our own earnings. It seems to me that’s the only way to control your own destiny.
0:55:05 The banks can’t take away your business if you don’t owe them any money. So we carry no long-term debt.
0:55:11 Self-reliance requires discipline, but we’ve managed it. I think that’s one reason we’ve survived when so
0:55:16 many other retailers have run into trouble, especially our direct competitors in sporting goods.
0:55:22 Many have carried a heavy debt load pushed on them by their private equity owners, firms that use these
0:55:27 stores and that debt to pay themselves. When you’re leveraged up like that and have significant interest
0:55:34 payments to make, you’re not as nimble when things get turbulent. Wall Street gets on my back sometimes
0:55:39 saying we don’t have an optimal balance sheet, which is its way of saying we have too much cash
0:55:44 and don’t have what the street considers the proper amount of debt. Let them say what they will:
0:55:50 our balance sheet is optimal for us. Wow. There’s so much wisdom in that.
0:55:56 Warren Buffett later encapsulates the exact same idea by saying we never want to count on the kindness of
0:56:02 strangers in order to meet tomorrow’s obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a
0:56:09 night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits. I think that’s a profound lesson. But the near-death
0:56:14 experience changed the dynamic with the venture capital partners too. The VCs had invested for
0:56:21 quick growth not to watch Ed slowly rebuild. Jerry Gallagher and Mike Barrick started pushing for changes:
0:56:27 focus on footwear, go all in on e-commerce, stop opening stores and become an internet company.
0:56:33 Michael, Ed told him repeatedly, we’re not going to do that. The VCs pulled out their spreadsheets. They
0:56:41 wanted Ed to focus on the fast sellers, but Ed knew that that would destroy dicks. They needed all categories
0:56:47 for credibility and authenticity with the actual customers. That kid in Buffalo who said he waited his
0:56:55 whole life for 30 feet of baseball gloves. He was one customer among tens of thousands, each seeking
0:57:01 something specific. To win, dicks had to be good at every sport. And Ed was eventually proven right. Within
0:57:09 years, the specialty stores the VCs cited as the future had all cratered. The lesson here cuts deep. Sometimes the
0:57:15 most profitable decision on a spreadsheet is the worst decision for a business. Jeff Bezos has this quote
0:57:21 that I think about often. When the data and the anecdote differ, the anecdote is often right. You’re
0:57:28 measuring the wrong thing. It’s not that the data is wrong. The VCs saw the numbers, Ed saw the customers, and
0:57:35 in retail customers always win. The venture capitalists though, they were drunk on this internet fever. Remember what the
0:57:43 the late 90s were like? It was 1999 and E-Toys.com had just gone public at $20 a share. By day’s end, it was trading at
0:57:51 $67. The company had never made a profit, but it was suddenly worth more than Toys R Us. Michael Barrick and Steve Lebeau
0:57:58 caught the fever hard. They wanted dicks to stop opening stores, pivot entirely to the web. Ed thought they were insane.
0:58:03 Home computers were still slow and clunky. Most households weren’t even connected to the internet
0:58:10 at the time. But the VCs wouldn’t listen. They forced dicks to create dsports.com and poured $20
0:58:17 million into it. The name itself was a problem. Dicks.com was obviously taken by a gay pornography site.
0:58:27 Ed tried buying it repeatedly without success. Dsports.com launched on Super Bowl Sunday 1999 with 34,000
0:58:34 items for sale. They advertised on ESPN and Fox Sports, burning through cash. Ed’s goal wasn’t
0:58:39 to make money. It was to limit how much they lost. During one meeting, Henry Nacella, the former
0:58:45 stables president, helping run their internet venture, told Ed, “You clearly don’t want to win in this
0:58:52 business because you’re not willing to lose more money.” And Ed thought, “You’re right.” Exactly. E-Toys had already
0:58:59 collapsed from $68 to $0.09. Dozens of dot-coms were crashing. Why should dicks join them? The tension
0:59:05 exploded when Ed took his first vacation in years to Cabo. His assistant called, “There might be a coup
0:59:12 underway.” So Ed flew back immediately. “You shouldn’t be the CEO,” Barrett told them when they met.
0:59:18 Barrett compared their disagreement to Truman firing MacArthur and tried to rally the board to remove Ed,
0:59:23 But the other directors wouldn’t go along. The VCs wanted out. They’d been trying to cash out for
0:59:28 years. At a board meeting, Gallagher sneered across the table, “I think you’re not going public because
0:59:33 you don’t want to go public.” Then Gallagher played dirty. He invoked a mandatory redemption provision,
0:59:39 demanding dicks buy back his shares immediately. He knew they didn’t have the money, so he offered a
0:59:44 deal. “Extend the deadline by two years, but give the VCs a bigger piece of the company.” Ed looked
0:59:51 across the table and thought, “It’s time for you to go.” The solution was audacious. Ed went back to GE
0:59:57 capital and borrowed $60 million to buy out 60% of the venture capital stakes. The VCs were so
1:00:03 desperate for their money, they agreed immediately. But then disaster nearly struck. A fax arrived from
1:00:09 Leonard Green and Partners offering to buy all the VC shares at a higher price. Someone had clearly
1:00:14 leaked the deals. Dicks was in play now for a hostile takeover. Ed had one hope, Dennis DeFore,
1:00:19 who’d invested years earlier. Dennis called from Paris with this simple question, “Ed, do you want
1:00:24 to sell your company? I don’t want to sell it for this price. I don’t want to sell it for twice this
1:00:31 price.” Neither do I. The takeover was blocked. Ed had control again. While Ed was fighting for control,
1:00:37 a former Maryland football player named Kevin Plank was building something revolutionary in his
1:00:44 grandmother’s basement. A moisture-wicking shirt that kept athletes dry. He called his company Under Armour.
1:00:49 Ed first saw Under Armour at a trade show. They had a tiny booth in a company no one had ever heard
1:00:56 of. But Ed saw what others missed. This wasn’t just another shirt, it was a completely new category.
1:01:01 This wasn’t the first time he’d bet on an unknown company. Remember Nike? Dicks became one of Under
1:01:07 Armour’s first major retail partners. When other stores wouldn’t give the unknown brand any shelf space,
1:01:13 Ed gave them prominent placement. The partnership exploded. Under Armour grew from nothing to a
1:01:18 multi-billion dollar company, and Dicks rode the wave with them the whole time. By 2002, though,
1:01:24 the world had changed. September 11th had shocked the economy. Ed employed thousands of people,
1:01:29 and if another crisis hit while Dicks was private, those families would suffer. They scheduled the IPO
1:01:36 filing for July 17th, 2002. Dick Stacks’ birthday. “Call me superstitious,” Ed said, but I thought he might be
1:01:42 able to help. The roadshow was brutal. Three weeks of dawn to midnight meetings. Their investment banger had
1:01:50 promised $18 to $20 per share, but as they toured, the price kept dropping. Then Ed did something unheard
1:01:57 of. Instead of cashing out like most executives, Ed bought in. He purchased 80,000 additional shares in the
1:02:02 IPO with his own money. The night before going public, the bankers pushed to lower the price
1:02:09 even more to $12, saying that there was no demand. But then something odd happened. Ed’s phone rang. A
1:02:16 woman from Merrill Lynch, not knowing she was talking to the Dick CEO, told him that his order for his shares
1:02:24 had been cut because the IPO was so oversubscribed. Ed turned to the Merrill Lynch banker beside him. “You
1:02:30 said we couldn’t do a deal at $13, and now you’re cutting me back because it’s oversubscribed?” On October
1:02:36 15, 2002, Ed Stack rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The company his father started
1:02:45 with $300 from a cookie jar was now public. The stock opened at $12.25 a share and closed the day at $13.15.
1:02:52 Within a month, it was trading above $20. Without getting into the banking aspect of this or how
1:02:57 they tried to take advantage of him or the VC’s behavior, the lesson here is about believing your
1:03:02 own story when nobody else does. The bankers didn’t believe. The market didn’t believe. But Ed believed
1:03:08 enough to buy his own stock because he knew what Dick’s could become and what it was worth. Sometimes
1:03:13 the best investment you can make is betting on yourself when everyone else is betting against you. The other
1:03:18 lesson is you have to be really selective and careful about who you let on your board and
1:03:24 who you bring in as your partners. While everybody looks good on day one, it doesn’t always look good
1:03:31 There’s a moment that captures everything Dick’s Sporting Goods was meant to be. Ed Stack was working
1:03:37 the sales floor when it happened. A kid, maybe nine, tried to steal a baseball glove. An employee caught
1:03:41 him in the parking lot and dragged him back inside, yelling at the thief. Dick Stack walked over and
1:03:46 looked at the boys’ worn clothes. “Why’d you steal the glove?” The kid looked up, tears streaming
1:03:51 down his eyes. “I just want to play baseball.” “You can’t steal,” Dick said, “no matter how bad you
1:03:56 want something.” “Promise me you won’t do this again.” “Yes, sir.” But then Dick walked the boy
1:04:01 back to the baseball section and had him pick out a ball and a bat to go with the glove. “You go play
1:04:08 baseball. Stay out of trouble.” Ed never forgot that moment. His father understood something fundamental.
1:04:13 When parents buy their kids a baseball glove, they’re not buying equipment. They’re buying a dream.
1:04:19 Dick Stack died in March of 1998, dementia having stolen almost everything from him. The funeral
1:04:26 procession made a slow loop past the store at 345 Court Street. At his death, Dick’s had 51 stores in
1:04:32 six states. What happened next would have been unimaginable to the man who started with $300 from
1:04:40 a cookie jar. By 2012, Dick’s had 518 stores, approaching $6 billion in sales. It has taken 53 years to reach their
1:04:47 first billion. They hit $2 billion just three years later. And today, they have over 850 stores and over
1:04:53 $16 billion in sales. But the transformation wasn’t just about size. When Ed learned that one in five
1:04:59 American high schools were no longer offered sports due to budget cuts, Dick’s launched the Sports Matter
1:05:07 initiative, committing over $100 million to save youth sports programs. Then came the guns. After Sandy
1:05:13 Hook in 2012, Dick’s pulled assault-style rifles. After Parkland in 2018, where the shooter had bought a
1:05:21 shotgun at Dick’s, Ed made a decision that would cost at least $250 million annually. No more assault rifles.
1:05:28 No firearms to anyone under 21. They destroyed $5 million in existing inventory rather than return it.
1:05:36 The backlash was vicious. Death threats: 65 employees quit immediately. But Walmart followed suit, and so did
1:05:42 Kroger. When asked if Dick’s would ever reverse the decision, Ed’s answer was one word: never. Today,
1:05:48 Dick’s operates more than 800 stores and employs 55,000 people. At headquarters, the original cookie jar
1:05:54 sits in a place of honor. Every employee who reaches 25 years receives one just like it, with $300 tucked
1:06:00 inside. The real legacy isn’t the stores or the money, it’s the millions of kids who got their chance
1:06:06 to play. You go play baseball and stay out of trouble. Eight words that built an empire, not because they were
1:06:13 a business strategy, but because they were human. Okay, let’s get into some of the reflections from this episode.
1:06:20 This whole freaking story is insane. From that list that Dick Stack gives the guy, his boss who wants to
1:06:25 go into fishing, asks him to do it, and then he tears up the list. He starts crossing things out, and then
1:06:32 Dick grabs it, and then goes to his grandmother, and his grandmother gives him $300, which is her life
1:06:39 savings on her unproven grandson. And then the father-son dynamic between Ed and Dick and the tension and the
1:06:45 stress, and to VCs, and to all the lessons that they learned, and how important it is to
1:06:53 have the right partners and never ever be dependent on the kindness of strangers, to finding his confidence
1:07:01 to ban guns in the sporting goods store. This is such an insane story. And one of the things that came to
1:07:07 mind when I was reading this cookie jar part of the story is that, oh, people say, no, nobody starts a
1:07:12 business like that today. That doesn’t happen. Well, least you think that doesn’t happen, I point you to
1:07:20 Shopify, which Toby Luque’s father-in-law mortgaged his house so that Shopify in the early days could make
1:07:28 payroll. Every business that you see that exists is somebody’s irrational dedication, and it’s also
1:07:34 somebody else believed in them at a moment when nobody was believing in them. One thing that was
1:07:39 interesting about Dick was when he expanded to two stores and then he had to pull back, you know, a move that
1:07:45 scarred him for life. He never declared bankruptcy and paid off all his creditors. That was the exact same
1:07:51 thing that Jimmy Pattison’s father had happened to him, too. He took him a lot longer to pay off all of his creditors,
1:07:58 but he made a point of doing it. And in both cases, that reputation for what you do in this time of fire and how you
1:08:03 treat people and paying back the people that you owe money to ended up benefiting them later
1:08:09 in life. Not only did it benefit Jimmy and, you know, the son and Ed, who was the son, but it benefited
1:08:14 the company. I mean, the only reason that Dick was able to start again was because he had paid back
1:08:20 those people. The problem there is that he over learned this expansion lesson. He should have taken
1:08:25 away the mistakes that he made and not made them. He picked a development in the wrong location with an
1:08:30 inexperienced developer with bad tenants in the building. He was north of the city, if I remember
1:08:35 correctly, instead of east or west, where the traffic patterns were moving as people exploded into the
1:08:42 suburbs. Another thing that I found really fascinating was Ed’s work ethic is intense. It often involves
1:08:48 long hours, a lack of work-life balance, and a preference for being deeply involved in all aspects of his
1:08:53 company. He’s not running his company out of a spreadsheet. He’s running it from the territory. A lot of people
1:08:59 think that you can run things from the 30,000-foot level, and I don’t think that’s true. When we study
1:09:05 outliers, they know all the details. Sure, they might operate at the 30,000-foot level often, but they can go
1:09:11 down to the one-centimeter level, and that’s one of the things that differentiates them. But to do that,
1:09:16 you have to be obsessive about details. You have to be in the weeds. You have to know the business cold.
1:09:22 You can’t just get the gist of things. You have to play with the data. You have to be in the mess. You have to
1:09:29 talk to the customers. Everybody wants to skip that part today. There’s a part in the book that never made the podcast
1:09:35 episode where Ed talks about what he learned playing sports, and I want to read it to you.
1:09:40 What I learned on the field is part of a team transcended athletics. How to work hard for
1:09:45 starters. You have to commit, to practice, to improving, to making an effort. There were always
1:09:51 people on our teams who were dodgers, who didn’t go all out in practice and didn’t give all they had in
1:09:57 games. As an adult, I’ve come to see that there are people like that in any organization. At the same time,
1:10:03 you learn that a team is only as strong as its component parts. And if one of those parts fails,
1:10:09 the whole team has a problem. If your left tackle lines up offside and gets called for it,
1:10:15 on the next play, the whole team lines up five yards back. Successful plays work the same way. They
1:10:21 inspire the whole team to reach further. I’ve seen that many times at dicks. You learn that the team is
1:10:27 more important than you are, that you’re part of a greater good. That can be humbling. It can mean taking
1:10:33 a demotion or an unwanted reassignment for the good of the group. That willingness to sacrifice is the
1:10:39 key to teamwork and to success in any collective effort. You learn how to win and you learn how to lose and
1:10:45 how to be a good sport. When you win, you don’t rub your opponent’s nose in it. Likewise, you don’t resent
1:10:51 it when he beats you. You take the lesson into whatever you do for the rest of your life. I’ve certainly
1:10:56 applied that in my career. We’ve had our share of losses along with wins. Individual sports are a
1:11:02 little different. Everything hangs on how you did and only you answer the call. In golf, wrestling,
1:11:07 skiing, and singles tennis, you’re on an island. I think that it takes a lot of guts to play those
1:11:13 solo sports, but they share one important lesson with team sports, which is that what you get out of
1:11:20 any endeavor is directly proportional to the effort you put into it. I love that last line. Whatever you get
1:11:25 out of any effort is directly proportional to the effort you put into it. There’s another really
1:11:30 subtle thing that happens that I think a lot of people don’t pick up on and I wish more people
1:11:35 would pay attention to. So the first time Ed goes to buy something for the store of the winter coats,
1:11:40 he goes into this hotel room at the Holiday Inn and he has no idea what he’s doing. And I think
1:11:45 this is a key moment. It has nothing to do with strategy. It’s something harder to teach.
1:11:51 How do you become someone worth helping somebody that other people want to help somebody that other
1:11:56 people want to root for? So Ed in this moment could have let his ego destroy him. He could
1:12:01 have faked competence and made these catastrophic mistakes. Instead, his vulnerability becomes his
1:12:06 greatest asset. If you go into a deal looking at it as a partnership, Ed would say later, it almost
1:12:11 always works out. But to me, that’s kind of missing something because partnerships work when you’re the
1:12:17 kind of person other people’s want to partner with. When vendors, for instance, who could crush you
1:12:24 choose to lift you instead. When competitors respect you even while trying to beat you. When employees stay
1:12:29 loyal through the hard times because they believe in who you are, not just what you pay. There’s a world
1:12:35 of difference between people helping you and wanting you to win. Okay, I want to get into some of the
1:12:42 lessons I took away from this incredible story of Dick’s Sporting Goods. So the first is the gift of
1:12:47 belief. Dick Stack’s grandmother pulled $300 from her cookie jar after his boss crossed out his carefully
1:12:53 crafted list. She didn’t give him business or advice or connection. She gave him belief. Dick’s Sporting
1:12:58 Goods exists because someone believed in an 18 year old kid who barely graduated high school. Believing
1:13:04 in someone before they believe in themselves can change everything. Two, your name is your biggest
1:13:10 asset. When Dick’s second store failed in 1956, he could have declared bankruptcy like everyone expected.
1:13:15 Instead, he sold his house, his car, everything he owned to pay back his creditors in full. Six weeks
1:13:21 later, when he asked the same suppliers again for another chance, they remembered. Trust isn’t built in the
1:13:28 good times, it’s built in the hard times. Three, a taste for salt water. Ed despised working at his
1:13:34 father’s store every summer and weekend from age 13 to he was done college. While his friends played
1:13:40 baseball, he unloaded trucks and suffocating heat. However miserable those years were, he learned,
1:13:47 sometimes your worst experiences are your best education. Four, ignorance is a superpower. Ed and Tim
1:13:53 signed papers to buy land in Syracuse with no plan, no budget and no idea what a vanilla box was. They
1:13:59 nearly opened a store with empty walls. They made every possible mistake. But here’s the thing. If they’d
1:14:05 known everything that could go wrong, they might never have left Binghamton. That’s what kept his father
1:14:11 there. Those mistakes taught him more about expansion than any course could. Sometimes knowing too much can
1:14:18 kill action. Five, the quiet one decides. At the make or break GE Capital meeting, Suits grilled Ed for 90
1:14:24 minutes. But in the back sat a man who never spoke, just watched. After everyone left, he approached Ed,
1:14:29 tell me what you need. That was the decision maker. Every important meeting works this way. The loud ones
1:14:35 interrogate. The quiet ones decide. Find the person saying nothing. That’s who you need to convince.
1:14:42 Everything else is just noise. Six, and this is one of my favorite ones. When GE Capital asked about Dick’s near
1:14:49 bankruptcy, Ed didn’t deflect or minimize. He simply laid it all out. We made a series of mistakes. Here’s what they
1:14:55 were. Here’s why we made them. Here’s exactly how we’ll ensure they never happen again. That brutal honesty saved
1:15:04 the company. Most people explain away failure. The best dissect it like surgeons. The precision of your diagnosis proves the
1:15:11 the depth of your understanding. Seven, the kindness of strangers. After nearly losing everything in 1996,
1:15:17 Ed learned what Buffett already knew. Never count on the kindness of strangers to meet tomorrow’s
1:15:24 obligations. Dick’s has very little debt, despite Wall Street calling their balance sheets suboptimal. But Ed
1:15:31 doesn’t care. The banks can’t take away your business if you don’t owe them money. Never put yourself in a position
1:15:38 to need the kindness of strangers. Eight, bet on hunger. When Puma and Adidas wouldn’t return Ed’s calls, he gave
1:15:44 shelf space to a nobody called Nike. When established brands ignored them, he backed a football player making
1:15:51 shirts in his grandmother’s basement called Underoma. The rejection by established players forced Dick’s to bet
1:15:58 on hungry unknowns. Those partnerships made billions. Sometimes the best deals come from those desperate to prove
1:16:04 themselves, not those who’ve already made it. Number nine, follow the territory, not the map. The VCs pulled
1:16:10 out spreadsheets showing Ed what works on paper. But Ed remembered that kid in Buffalo who gasped at 30 feet
1:16:17 of baseball gloves. Sure, that wall didn’t turn inventory fast, but it got people in the store. The VCs were measuring the
1:16:23 wrong thing. When spreadsheets and stories disagree, the stories are often right. The data isn’t wrong. You’re
1:16:30 just measuring the wrong thing. Those specialty retailers run by spreadsheets, they’re all dead. Dick survived
1:16:37 because Ed understood something fundamental. The map is not the territory. The spreadsheet is not the store.
1:16:44 Number ten, high agency means no excuses. When Ed’s CFO said they’d be bankrupt next month,
1:16:50 someone suggested Chapter 11 and Ed felt physically sick. His father had sold out everything to avoid
1:16:56 bankruptcy in 1956. That’s not an option, he said. So he found another way. Even if it meant dealing with
1:17:03 GE Capital’s what he thought were brutal terms at the time. High agency people don’t accept the obvious
1:17:10 solution. They find the option that shouldn’t exist. While others explain why something can’t be done, they’re
1:17:16 already trying to do it. Number eleven, the real transaction. Dick’s Sporting Goods became an empire because
1:17:23 Dick and Ed Stack knew they weren’t just selling equipment. They were selling possibility. When you understand what
1:17:31 people really buy, you understand everything. Thank you for taking the time to listen and learn with us today. I hope you
1:17:35 loved this episode and learned as much from this story as I did. I’ll see you next time.
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