195: Marc Bale- Farbank, Built Around an Outdoor Passion for Fly Fishing
In this episode, Marc Bale and I talk about the fall IFTD Fly Fishing Show, his experience with Sage and now Farbank Enterprises and the great brands in their quiver, and Marc shares a bit about wine pairing at a sales meeting dinner.
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First Exposure to the Outdoors
I grew up in a small town in Northern Michigan, and I should probably point out for any Michiganders who might be listening, the lower peninsula and the upper peninsula, that's a big differentiation there. And I grew up in a little town called Big Rapids, not grand Rapids, just 50 miles North of Grand Rapids. And frankly, the outdoors was out the front door, out the back door, out the side windows of the house and everywhere. The Muskegon River flowed right through town. We lived about maybe three blocks from the Muskegon and as a kid, that was one of my great classrooms. In fact, I think about it often still today, at 68. I think about growing up there and I think about, what really truly a classroom, the Muskegon river was for me. I spent a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of time there doing various and sundry things.
So that was really my introduction to the outdoors.
Things we talked about
Bruce Kirschner
Don Green
K2 Ski Company
Travis Campbell
Advice
It was always easy to say be passionate about the sport or the industry or the outdoors. And I think that's still baseline. But I would also say that if that's all you are, your chances of getting very far in most organizations, unless they're really, really small, are not great with the amount of data that we have to process now. And essentially, I'm not telling everybody you need to go get an MBA by any means, but you'd better be pretty computer literate. You'd better be pretty good with Excel and Word. You'd better be pretty good with spreadsheets, you better be pretty good with pivot tables. You really better be able to look at data. That's somewhat of a cliche, but it might not be for people who are interested in getting in the outdoor world because you do need to have that sort of layer of skills that maybe my generation, 20, 30 years ago coming up didn't have to have.
Other Outdoor Activities
Growing Heirloom Tomatoes
Favorite Books/Podcasts
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Favorite Piece of Gear under $100
A pair of binoculars
Connect with Marc
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