Brian Smith

I was lying on my back on the floor and the show finished.

I clicked the TV off and I rolled over on my stomach.

And got up on my hands and knees and I started crawling towards the bedroom, you know.

And Laura, who is a really quiet person, she just looked at me and said, you get up now and walk to bed like a man.

And she sort of shocked me.

And as I stood up, I just, I was like coming out of a fog.

It was like, oh my God, there's so much more to life than this crappy little sheepskin company.

And that night I started, you know, how...

How can I get out of this?

You know, I literally wanted to just get out.

Yeah.

Laura was working for an architect and she was paying the bills at the time.

Yeah.

His business was Yamaha Motorcycles, and he was a distributor for them.

But he was also an opportunist, and if he saw good deals in the marketplace, especially in the ski industry, he would buy a whole bunch of closeouts and figure out a way to make money out of it.

So that was who Paul Bussman introduced me to.

And Neil came down and looked at our operation and said, you know, I could do this.

But, you know, then we had to sit down and try and figure out how we were going to do it.

OK.

I had a warehouse girl and someone that came in part time did accounting.