Brent Whittington of Arkansas moved his family to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, last month so he could be more hands-on with Moots, a near-40-year-old bicycle company.
Whittington bought the company after taking a public tour of the factory, and later cold-calling the then owner. His route to owning a small company was unusual because his background is running much bigger ones.
“I was in a very, very different world,” he told me last week from the bicycle-specific Impact Media Summit in Ketchum, Idaho.
Whittington is a former executive officer for Windstream Holdings, Inc, a Fortune 500 telecommunications company. He served as the firm’s chief operating officer from 2009 to 2014, having been executive vice president and CFO for the four years prior to 2009. Previously, he served as senior vice president of operations for Windstream’s predecessor company Alltel Corp. In 2008, he reportedly earned $2 million a year, putting him in Fortune’s then “highest paid under 40” list.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock accountancy grad started at Arthur Andersen, joining Alltel in 2002.
(On February 25, 2019, Windstream filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after being hit with a $310 million judgment in a lost legal fight with a bondholder.)
“[At Windstream] I had a team working for me in the thousands and then to jump from that to an entrepreneurial role in a very small company was quite a change,” Whittington says, but emphasising that it has been the “most rewarding [time] in my entire life–I’ve never done anything I’m happier or more proud about.”
Made in the USA
While most bicycle brands import finished bikes from Asia, Moots hand builds all of its frames, welding titanium tubes into lust-worthy $8,000 mountain-, road- and gravel-bikes sold all over the world. (Gravel bikes are fat-tire, drop-handlebar race bikes for riding long distances on dirt roads–after electric bikes, the gravel bike category is currently the hottest in an otherwise deflated sector.)
He doesn’t miss the cut-and-thrust of the Fortune 500 world.
“There’s no question I took a fundamentally different path. The natural route for me would have been to pursue a CEO job of a public company, something with more pay. But it wasn’t what I was seeking.
“You reach a point where, what are you working for? I’ve been around people who have tonnes of money, but they’re not happy. When I am on a bike, I still get chill bombs. I found myself wanting to do that, more than I wanted to pursue the dollar.”
When he left Windstream in 2014 he embarked on a year-long sabbatical and felt no twinges about giving up a well-compensated corporate career.
“I took my kids out of school, traveled the world, spent time with my family. I did not have [any] desire to go back to [the corporate] world. I don’t [want to be] always chasing the [dollar]. My quest is to feel satisfied.
“My passion for riding has never been greater. And I chalk a lot of that up to my team here at Moots. I thought I was into cycling before–and I was–but these guys are at another level.”
The fit and toned 48-year-old says he now gets emails from happy customers, not something he experienced when he was in charge of a telco.
“There’s a passion behind what [Moots] makes. In telecoms, you struggle to provide respectable service. I mean, who loves their telecom provider? I [used to have to deal] with all kinds of painful customer-service issues. Today, we’re delivering products that bring joy into our customer’s lives.”
His cold-call to buy a bicycle company wasn’t left-field.
“I’ve been a lifelong fan of cycling,” he explains.
“I love to ride. The chance to do something personally and professionally [with bikes] was such a sweet spot for me–it’s still pretty special.”
Company man
His firm’s latest model is the Routt YBB gravel bike with 1990s-style elastomer rear suspension and an on-trend 3D-printed titanium rear dropout. (The bike is named for the fire roads coursing through the nearby Routt National Forest.)
Whittington is intimately familiar with this and his company’s other wares–his “What I’m Riding” email sign-off lists five Moots bikes he’s currently got on long-term test. And he rides them plenty, including in early June taking part in this year’s Dirty Kanza, the “World’s Premier Gravel Grinder,” an annual 200-mile one-day race up and down the Flint Hills of Kansas.
“I have found myself doing events I would have never considered before,” enthuses Whittington. “Even as just a cycling fan, I would have never signed up to [such] a crazy event [as Dirty Kanza]. My team talked me into it–it keeps me young.”
Moots was founded in 1981 by cycle tourer Kent Eriksen, who sold the company some years before Whittington’s involvement. (Eriksen is still in Steamboat and still makes bikes.) The brand was a winter downtime project of Eriksen’s Sore Saddle Cyclery, a bike shop based out of a 30-foot-tall, cone-shaped sawdust incinerator sourced from a local lumber mill meshed with a repurposed ski lift tower. (The space is still a bike shop, and, yes, it stocks Moots.)
Famous in the bike industry for sticking with titanium when other performance brands switched from aluminum to carbon composites, the firm is also noted for its bicycle-riding alligator logo, Mr. Moots, based on Eriksen’s school-years pencil-top eraser.
Subsequent owners of Moots have retained these and other quirks, and what Whittington brings to the table, he says, is a customer-eye view:
I was that customer, buying an expensive bike every single year, and the minute I bought one I was thinking about my next one. I helped push the team to think like our customers. The team [use] our bikes as tools–they have access to these amazing bikes; they don’t worry if they get muddy or scratched. Our customers don’t think like that.”
After Whittington bought the company he ramped up the brand’s aesthetics, improving frame finishes, and adding eye-candy graphics.
“I geek out on making my bike look awesome, and our customers do that as well.”
His geekery hits the right note with a receptive audience of employees–most of whom are fellow cycle nuts–but Whittington hasn’t found that a smaller staff is any easier to handle than a corporate-sized one.
“[At the telco] I used to have 11,000 people report to me. How hard could it be to communicate to 23 people? Well, it’s just as hard as with 11,000. The challenges with a small company [are surprisingly similar to the challenges of running a] large company: it’s about making sure we’re all aligned around the same strategic objectives.”
Some of the world’s best bike shops stock Moots, including a select few in Europe. About 1,200 high-end bike frames are made each year in Steamboat Springs, a third of them for export. Whittington isn’t running a vanity business–Moots has to make money.
“[Moots] was profitable before I bought the business, and it’s profitable now,” he stresses, acknowledging that the return on investment in the bike industry is low.
The company has an annual turnover of about $5-million.
“If I’m growing the company 2 to 3% a year, I’m happy. I’ve seen enough [bike] brands who have screwed up, who have gone through bankruptcy, because they didn’t have the focus on the business, they didn’t keep their eye on the ball. I own 100% of this business–it would hurt if it crapped out.”
Whittington is pleased with the way things are working out in Colorado: “I’m not writing checks every year to keep this thing going. We have to deliver the results that yield the cash to continue being the best.
“We build a bike and it rolls out with the Moots name on it. And because of our limited number [of bikes built per year], we price them accordingly to pay for our wages and our team. We don’t discount. All of the bikes are hand built in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and we don’t want to lose that. From a growth perspective, we’re not trying to blow the doors off–I’m happy with slow and steady.”
