Success Story

Back to index»

About the company
The online retailer of outdoor gear, founded in 1996 by two entrepreneurial hopefuls, brings together a community of backcounty skiing experts and the best backcountry gear available on the Internet. Backcountry.com reached profitability within its first year of business and continues to sustain 80 percent annual growth. The company’s mantra remains the same today as the year it was founded, “We use the gear we sell.”

What was changing?
According to Charla Brown, Human Resources Director at Backcountry.com, a typical year for the online retailer looks something like this: starting January with just over a hundred employees and ending in December with nearly three times that number, finding ways to manage seasonal and full-time staffing needs — including long hours and mandatory overtime — to meet customer demands year-long, steady growth in sales and product orders, and relocating an entire warehouse to remedy the company’s need for more space.

“For the employees at Backcounty.com, so many changes resulted in a lot of unknowns,” Charla said. How would the company’s rapid growth affect different positions and departments? Was the small company growing too fast to sustain its initial customer base? And for some, an underlying fear and resistance to change resulted in understandable growing pains. She continued, “There were times when we were growing like mad and I didn’t know if we’d survive! We had a lot of performance expectations and it seemed like we were asking the impossible by expecting people to keep up.”

What did they do?
Who Moved My Cheese? Training was used to help people gain change skills and as a way to create awareness about individual reactions to change. “A tendency when you’re down in the trenches,” Charla explained, “is to only see your corner of the company. You may not know how what you’re doing affects the bigger picture, or why things have to change.”

By involving diverse groups of people throughout the company in multiple sessions, participants had a chance to “see the big picture and how they fit into it.” Employees benefitted from open cross-departmental sharing, and at one point the Director of Operations even stepped in to facilitate, making the training immediately relevant to employees’ day-to-day work. Charla continued, “Everyone suddenly realized how what we were doing really could make a difference in our daily work. People started viewing the change skills as a way to take matters into their own hands and finding ways to apply the principles for results.”

What results have they seen?
Founder Jim Holland stated, “We don’t take our growth and our situation for granted… [we] recognize that we must always be evolving. The only constant is change.”

Charla concluded, “One of the biggest impacts of the training is the way we’ve learned to ‘look up’ and survey the landscape once in awhile. Like the skill of Anticipating Change, we have to pay attention to what’s happening outside our own corner of the world. We look at what other people bring to the table. We’ve formed better relationships and are a culture more receptive to change. We have the skills to be great at what we do.”

With warmer weather coming, Backcountry.com is gearing up for another busy season and the frantic hiring process associated with it. Charla is preparing for the second round of Who Moved My Cheese? Training — she’ll spend her summer months helping new employees gain four powerful change skills they can use to see the “bigger picture.”

“Like the skill of Anticipating Change, we have to pay attention to what’s happening outside our own corner of the world.”