Recently, Rick Kohr, CEO of Evergreen Advisors and Mike Gill, Chairman met with Kevin Plank, Founder and CEO of Under Armour. They covered a wide range of topics from leadership, a 1,000 hits, innovation, to what Kevin looks for in people that join the Under Armour team.
Frustrated by the “soaking wet” T-shirts he wore under his University of Maryland football uniform, the special teams captain created a fabric that wicked away sweat while providing muscle support. Sixteen years later and over $1 billion in revenues, Kevin has built one of the most recognizable brands in America.
What follows is an excerpt of the conversation that Mike, Rick, and Kevin had at Tark’s in Greenspring Station.
{Mike Gill} Some people talk about vision and some people talk about growth. You have said that you don’t think people talk enough about growth. Can you make a couple of comments in that regard?
{Kevin Plank} I am a huge believer that every business we get into has to make money and every business needs to go beyond just a vision. They have to have a practicality of how are we going to make the rubber hit the road and create the returns because: A) we are not that big and B) anyone these days can go out of business as fast as the world moves today. I have a great saying from a guy who told me one time: It’s ok to take one dollar to make ten, but it’s not ok to take ten dollars to make one. Therefore, I live by that rule at Under Armour and frankly, personally too. It is one of my investment philosophies.
{Mike Gill} So if anyone brings you a business plan, it had better show you real clearly how and when you are going to make money?
{Kevin Plank} Timing is a very important thing and being able to hit the market at the right time is almost as important as having the right team and especially the right product.
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{Mike Gill} I heard this years ago: Excellence is not doing one thing 1000 percent better; it’s doing 1000 things one percent better. I have heard you say, “I like the idea of 1,000 hits every day”, and I would love nothing more than see us get one hit, another hit, another hit, and instead of living by the three run homers, I would be happy if we could just get a lot of hits.
{Kevin Plank} Well I say progress over perfection. Anyone who has ever built, made, or created a product hated the first version they put out there. More than likely, they went to market with it anyway. Any product that we put on the market has a feature or benefit better than what’s currently offered out there in the marketplace. That gives us a lot of latitude from the first t-shirt that I made from Under Armour, and now we are close to our 50th iteration of that shirt.
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{Rick Kohr} And how long has that been Kevin?
{Kevin Plank} 16 years. So, the idea that I tell our guys is that you have to publish and like our innovation team – I like to call them our commercialization team because what I want Under Armour to become is the center or energy of every great idea in the world.
I want people to think they can be an Entrepreneur, can bring this to market myself, and can bring this idea to someone else. I want them to bring those ideas to Under Armour. Then we need to be humble enough and open enough to be able to recognize that that is a pretty good idea and think about what if we put that into our production system, our manufacturing system, our supply chain, our distribution system, our platform which is our brand. Therefore, whenever young startups come to me, the best advice I ever give them would be to say “I have a company I want to start.” And one of the questions I ask is “Are you willing to compromise?” And I don’t mean that from accepting or taking less, be it from the way you view it financially or from other angles, I mean are you willing to make the hard decision to move point to point to point to point. Because a lot of times in business I bet there are more great ideas that are currently sitting in an attic or a basement somewhere where someone is going, it is just not right and all of a sudden time passes you and opportunity misses you and someone else comes out with something similar and you miss the boat completely.
You know the first year we made shoes, you know we weren’t as good as what we could have been , but 8 years later as we sit here today, had we not been bold enough to take that first step then we would never be where we are today. Now we are positioned to be the foremost footwear company in the world based on where we are positioned today.
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{Mike Gill} Since you started Under Armour, if I could give you one mulligan, what would you use if for?
{Kevin Plank} I probably would have taken more time before we launched our women’s products. We ended up burning close to 2 million dollars worth of product because it wasn’t right. You know that is the kind of thing that hurts, but we realized that some of the best decisions we made were the ones we haven’t screwed up.
When we launched athletic shoes, we ran a 60-second Super Bowl commercial called “The future is ours”, and we told people we were going to make training shoes. We surprised people by airing a Super Bowl commercial at the end of January when the shoes were not going on sale until the beginning of June. So it was like four or five months of not selling product on time and we showed a hundred million people a commercial that was relevant to about 10 to 15 million of them.
We have hit all kinds of bumps and learned lessons along the road from just missing timing. We get a little ahead of ourselves and all of a sudden you think you are bigger than your britches and then you get humbled – you realize you are not and that you are only pretty good. You want to accentuate the positive and you want to bring out those things and do things the right way and in time those things take care of themselves. I think that we as a company have really found a good way to hopefully demonstrate that. Innovation is the key that drives everything we do. In addition, I think that where we will win is where we continue to lead from an innovation standpoint. That is something we are very proud of.
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{Mike Gill} If you could insert a chip into your employees coming through the door at Under Armour that gives them what you believe it takes to be successful in the Under Armour world, what would be the characteristic in that chip?
{Kevin Plank} I think that the least and the most probably undervalued characteristic in the world is leadership. I will take leadership in a heartbeat and leadership starts with having a point of view. Throw in all of the given information, you want character, you want honor, you want decency, you want good strong people, you want trust, but I want people who have a point of view. Not people who are just sitting around waiting to hear what someone else says, waiting to see what direction it is going, waiting which way the mob sort of votes, or to define if I am going to be on the left side of the fence or the right side of the fence.
People turn to brands because they want that point of view and they want that leadership. And so I hire people and give them new challenges or opportunities in our business because I think that they are leaders, I think they have a point of view, I think they know what they want, and I think that they are hard workers. If I am our competitors, when I think of Under Armour I would be worried.
I will throw in another characteristic and that would be intellectual curiosity. Anybody in senior management in our company better be intellectually curious. If I got on an airplane from Baltimore to Los Angeles and the guy next to me was a plumber, then by the end of the flight, I would know every darn thing there is to know about plumbing, steam fitting, learning it inside and out – just because I want to know. I want to know the stuff I don’t know. That’s the same way we approach it at Under Armour. Our job is to make all athletes better and that is what our mission statement says. When you look at guys getting cold and we think “what is something that can keep their hands warm” or “what’s a tactic that can make their gloves react when it gets wet to make them stickier.” Or “how do I genuinely solve that problem?” That is one of the, if not the most important characteristic, at a leadership level. I hope that it proceeds throughout the company. Good leaders drive the answers to the question.
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{Mike Gill} Kevin, people ask you what it is like to be a public company. Will you comment?
{Kevin Plank} Being public is not a bad thing. At the end of the day we want a good clean company, we have nothing to hide. Everything is out there. The fact that being public means four times a year we tell the world here is how we are doing, and here is what our business looks like. We are fortunate enough to have growth because if we did not have growth, I would not recommend having a public company. It makes everything else a lot easier.
There are some things that I find to be a little extraordinary from an accounting side and other places, but for the most part, I have really enjoyed being public.
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{Rick Kohr} Tell me a little bit about your attitude and approach to life.
{Kevin Plank} You can do whatever you want. Just get your mind right and you can do a lot of things in life. I am lucky enough that I put myself in a position that I can do a lot of different things. I have to ask that question more than anything. I tell everyone that I have a five-year cycle that I sign up for and every year I renew it. If I ever get to the point where I am not renewing it, then I will let you know. If five years turns to four and if that is the case then I need to start setting up, who is my president, where’s our CEO, and how do we think through the succession. I make the proactive decision that I am doing what I want to do in life and I think that everything I have done has trained me to be pretty good. For a long time I was the youngest guy in the room ( I still am one of the younger guys in the room) but you know I feel like I am hitting my stride and I think we are pretty well positioned to do something great.
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{Mike Gill} Give me one or two folks, leaders that you admire, whether living, dead, or just somebody that somewhere has influenced you. Someone that gets you fired up when you are around them, living or dead or anywhere in between. Are there one or two folks out there?
{Kevin Plank} George Bodenheimer (President, ESPN / ABC Sports) who I was with today. He is just a great man.
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{Mike Gill} Will you mention just a few things about him?
{Kevin Plank} George is just a quiet leader; he doesn’t have to jump on a soapbox in order to rally his troops. People see him lead from within. George is a guy that has come up the ranks -started in the mailroom and he has earned the respect of everybody in there. For example, today we were walking around the building and we walked by Colin Coward, who is one of the radio hosts. Colin says, “Let me tell you why I came to work for George Bodenheimer. It’s because when I first came here, I met with George and he walked me down to the cafeteria and he knew everyone’s name. Then we walked over to the checkout counter, not only did he know her name and said it is good to see you, he asked about his kids, he knew the kids’ names, and asked how they were doing.” It’s that kind of behavior that says I want to work for somebody like that. Personally, I would love to create that type of leadership inside Under Armour.
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