Ed Stack

Ed would say later, We'd peered into the halls of hell, and we were never going back.

Funny thing, GE Capital turned out to be a wonderful partner.

If we had an issue or wanted to do something different, they wanted to know about it and to understand our thinking.

But I don't recall a single instance when we were mulling some important action and they said no.

Their covenants proved far less onerous than they'd seem.

In fact, they were easy to hit.

they put those in place to keep us from getting ourselves into trouble and once our new systems were installed and we were back on solid footing with our inventory under control and our margin rates back to normal the covenants were performance bars that we cleared easily all told fixing all that was broken took a little more than a year

By early 1997, we were a far healthier company than we'd been before the scare.

Hitting the pause button in our growth enabled us to take a more thoughtful approach to further expansion.

And with our new systems, we had an almost microscopic view of Dick's operation and a far better sense of what we were doing and why.

You never get over a close call like the one we experienced in the mid-1990s.

I will never again be comfortable relying on someone else's capital.

I will always be a little paranoid and insist that we finance all we do from our own earnings.

It seems to me that's the only way to control your own destiny.

The banks can't take away your business if you don't owe them any money.

so we carry no long-term debt.

Self-reliance requires discipline, but we've managed it.

I think that's one reason we've survived when so many other retailers have run into trouble, especially our direct competitors in sporting goods.

Many have carried a heavy debt load, pushed on them by their private equity owners, firms that use these stores and that debt to pay themselves.

When you're leveraged up like that and have significant interest payments to make, you're not as nimble when things get turbulent.