American Dream Achieved
IBA, as a fifty-one-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
The Story of Greg & Paula Shaw of 2nd Ascent
By Nesha Ruther
Greg Shaw has always had a passion for the great outdoors. From a young age he loved hiking, camping, and particularly rock climbing, and took any opportunity to spend time in nature. “When I was around 20 years old, I started climbing and backpacking, and really dove into the whole mountaineering thing,” he recounts. It only made sense then, that he would pursue a career related to the outdoors. “Because I was buying lots of new gear, I was spending a lot of time at REI, getting catalogs from every mail-order climbing company, and really scouring them.”
He began working in retail as a young adult, selling fishing and hunting gear, before moving to Seattle. “I moved into the Fremont neighborhood,” Greg says. “There was a small shop that sold a total hodgepodge of used products, from board games to basketballs to backpacks. I became friends with a guy who worked there, and he told me after a few months that he was looking to purchase the business from the guy who started it. He and I bought it together and became partners.”
The business was called Second Bounce, but when Greg became an owner January 1, 1996, he immediately took out all products that didn’t have to do with the outdoors. “I got rid of all the bouncing items,” he says with a laugh. “Anything that did not pertain to backpacking, camping, and climbing.” With the removal of all the bouncing objects, the store needed a new name that better reflected its products. Greg liked the previous title’s emphasis on secondhand goods and decided on the name Second Ascent.
Within a few years they had expanded from the original 1,500 square foot store into a neighboring space that was 2,500 square feet. Greg also bought out his partner, who wanted to move to North Carolina to pursue his dreams of becoming a bluegrass musician. Seeking some additional support in running the business, Greg brought on his wife Paula, who began working full-time. “She had been in the outdoor industry as well, working for a small manufacturer in Fremont called SunDog that made backpacks, climbing accessories, and camera bags,” Greg says. “Paula and I ran the store in Fremont until 2000 and then we moved to a much bigger space—like 5,000 square feet—in Ballard for the remainder of our tenure.”
Greg and Paula first met at a chain sporting goods store they both worked at, where she was his boss. She stayed on at the company while he took over Second Bounce, before she began working with THAW (REI’s private label manufacturing plant) and eventually, SunDog. They both shared a love of nature, although Paula preferred hiking, backpacking, and backcountry skiing to Greg’s favored rock climbing.
Having a shared passion with different special interests applied to Greg and Paula’s work life as well as their hobbies. “When she transitioned into working with me in the shop, she took over all the bookkeeping and accounting, which I was grossly in need of, while I bought product and worked in the store.” Greg says.
As the business grew, they took on a larger quantity of both secondhand and new items. “We started buying lots of samples from salesmen in the outdoor industry. Every season they have to buy their own samples of the products they’re selling to show retailers, all the new collections and new styles,” Greg says. “And that’s how we started developing relationships with manufacturers and started selling new, current products.”
Still, it remained important to Greg that Second Ascent always stocked secondhand products. “We had a mix of roughly 25-30% used products as well. And people could trade their used stuff in, or we would buy it outright,” Greg says. “That was what really differentiated us from REI or other outdoor specialty stores in town that were just full-price retail.” In addition to backpacking and camping gear, Second Ascent sold new and used bikes, and employed full-time mechanics, as well as gear for backcountry and Nordic skiing.
The option to trade-in or buy discounted products meant a lot not only to Greg and Paula, but to the community they served. While the great outdoors belong to everyone, the gear needed to enjoy it safely and successfully can often be prohibitively expensive. “We felt it was key to have an off-price mix in the store and give people the ability to trade things up. If you had an old Gore-Tex jacket and wanted to buy a new Arc’teryx jacket for $500, you could bring in that old jacket and offset the cost, making the purchase more doable.”
This was also helpful for novice outdoorsmen who were not yet sure of what gear was the best fit for them. “We also got a lot of people who were dabbling and weren’t sure if they were going to get into rock climbing or mountaineering. Or some people would come literally just to climb Mount Rainier and then never use the gear again, so they could get mountaineering boots and other gear, and then sell it back to us. That was a big part of the assortment that we wanted to maintain.”
In addition to discounted items, they sold closeout items as well. Closeouts refer to products that, due to updates and trends in style or color, would no longer be made by the manufacturer going into the next season. “The manufacturers would close out these items by selling the existing product at a discount,” Greg says. Closeouts were excellent opportunities for buyers, because the gear was completely unused, but they could buy it at a discounted price because the color or style had been discontinued.
In addition to closeout items, Second Ascent bought demo products that they sold in store. “Sales reps would have big demo fleets that they would take to rock climbing gyms. A couple times a year, we would get a few hundred pairs of demo shoes from different rock shoe manufacturers that had been used very lightly and could be sold at like 40 or 50% off,” Greg explains. We also bought demo skis from sales reps at these big events where they would demo next year’s skis. The reps would buy those skis from the manufacturer, and then we would buy them from the reps and sell them in stores. So basically, you could buy next season’s skis at half-off. those were always a big draw for people.”
As Second Ascent grew, they found opportunities to collaborate with their counterparts in other cities. “As we grew more competitive, we partnered with some guys in Portland that had a big retail store called Next Adventure that had a similar format, and Recreation Outlet out of Salt Lake City. We would combine our buying power and go to trade shows, where we could buy large chunks of product as big as some of the larger closeout manufacturers like Sierra Trading Post,” Greg explains.
Second Ascent had the privilege of being located in one of the nation’s hubs for outdoor activities and Greg made sure that both locals and tourists alike knew where to go for all their gear. “We advertised with a combination of print media and radio,” he says. “There’s a local station, KEXP, that’s pretty big. It had originally been the University of Washington’s school radio and then became a not-for-profit. They broadcasted out of New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. We would buy a lot of their ad space on the radio because it really spoke to our consumer base.”
Another way Second Ascent built up their customer base was by making the store an active part of the outdoor community. Greg and Paula understood that their clientele wanted more than a place to shop, but an institution with valuable expertise they could trust, who shared their passions and could connect them with likeminded individuals. “Because we’re in a hub for a lot of climbers, we would get people who had just come back from expeditions and let them do presentations and slideshows in the store,” Greg says. “We were also heavily involved with instructional clubs like Everett Mountaineers, Seattle Mountaineers, The Washington Alpine Club, and Boeing’s mountaineering group. We had gear nights where we would open the store at night specifically for those clubs to outfit themselves. They would bring their members into the store, and they could find a used ice axe, boots, a backpack, or whatever they needed.”
Another organization Second Ascent collaborated with was Mountain Madness, a Seattle-based mountaineering and trekking company that specializes in mountain adventure travel. Mountain Madness would host 25-30 trips a year, many of which would begin at Second Ascent. “They would start their trips in our store,” Greg says. “Their clients would come in at like 7 am and do a gear check. So, if someone had come in from out of state and thought they had the boots they needed, but turns out they weren’t right, or they didn’t have the crampons that fit their boots, they would do a last-minute check in our space, and they could make sure they had everything they needed.”
Second Ascent’s commitment to community building was aided by the fact that right next to the store was a music venue, Tractor Tavern, where they occasionally hosted events. “Every year we would partner with Teton Gravity Research, and they would release a big ski film that we helped sponsor,” Greg says.
In addition to print media, radio, and community outreach, Second Ascent also maintained a small but significant online presence. “At our peak we maybe got 10% of our revenue online, but we did always have an e-commerce platform,” Greg explains. “We sold really special items on Amazon or e-bay.”
As for Greg and Paula themselves, the flexibility of entrepreneurship allowed them to be able to spend time actually doing their hobbies as well as selling gear. “Her and I had done a big trip where we backpacked in the Swiss Alps and I’ve climbed pretty much all the volcanoes in the Northwest. Paula was a big cyclist and a triathlete, so she went from doing sprint triathlons to Olympic-size triathlons to Half Ironmans,” he says proudly.
When they had children, Greg and Paula bought a house in the mountain town of Leavenworth in Eastern Washington, where they could all go as a family when they needed to relax and get away. “It was right at the foot of this icicle canyon, so the kids spent a lot of time hiking, biking, Nordic skiing, all of that,” Greg says.
When it came to running a business and raising children—while no parent/entrepreneur will ever say that it’s easy—Greg and Paula did it as they did everything, as a team. “What was great was that the store was not even two miles from our house, and the kids’ school was super close. We had enough flexibility in our schedule that I could take them to school and pick them up lots of days.”
While Greg and Paula were always a team, they each had their specific roles. Part of the success of their partnership was their ability to thrive in their areas of expertise and trust the other to excel in theirs. “It helped having defined roles in everything we did. [Paula] was always good at keeping things separate. Both of us couldn’t get too deep into the weeds of where things were at financially, so she would plug the numbers in and treat it like it was any other business,” Greg says. “She wouldn’t get too attached, wouldn’t take on all the emotional stress because if we both carried it, it would be too much.”
While Greg was the heart and passion of the company, it took Paula’s logical, highly objective point of view to keep them on track. “She would temper my ebb and flow seasonally. It would always be hard coming into winter because that was a big time of year for us and if it was slow, that would be extremely stressful. Or as we’d come out of winter there was always a transitional period between spring and when it really picked up in summer, which would again, make me swing emotionally,” Greg says candidly. “Paula was a rock when it came to stability and balance, and in many ways, she offset whatever angst or ups and downs I was experiencing.”
“It was really key for me to have that counterpoint,” Greg says. “Especially when we talk about moving or getting a bigger space, Paula was the sounding board and the system of checks and balances to see if it was doable, and when it was, she helped encourage and facilitate all of that.”
Greg attributes the success of their business and family to Paula’s ability to balance the two and keep the emotional responses of each separate. “She could make that separation of being able to go from work to home and kids to a degree that I wasn’t always able to,” he says.
Still, even the most organized of people have to make sacrifices when running and business and raising a family. Because weekends were often the busiest times for the store “we had to sacrifice different weekends trying to balance between the store, with the kids’ activities of soccer and basketball or ski days. It was always a compromise.”
It was the compromising throughout the year that made the house in Leavenworth a necessity, and spending time together around the holidays nonnegotiable. “We would take off a chunk of time after Christmas and New Years to spend locked down together in Leavenworth,” Greg recalls fondly. “It was full of skiing, playing in the snow, and hanging out family style. We were fully off-the-grid in the sense that there was no TV, so we were isolated, but together.”
One thing that allowed for Greg and Paula to take time off and trust that the business was still running smoothly was the fact that they had a cohort of long-tenured employees. “Our guy who managed the store for us, his name is Chad, had been with us for 13 years. When we went away, he would stay at the house and take care of our dog, Rudy, and bring him into the store—which was where he spent most days—so Rudy didn’t have disruption in his daily life. We had a dozen guys who had been at the store for ten years or more,” Greg says.
This was a huge point of pride for Greg and Paula, and indicative of their goal to not only build a business but foster a community. “For retail, I felt really proud that we had the ability to retain guys for so long,” Greg says. “It was a really great thing that I felt we cultivated, we had very deep, meaningful relationships with all our long-term staff.”
Greg attributes much of the success of those relationships to Paula, who became a de-facto counselor and mentor to many of their employees. “She took on a lot of roles for some of those guys and had a great connection with them because she did all the scheduling. She would get updates on the way their lives changed whenever they asked for time off and acted as a kind of counselor for them,” he says.
“From early on we paid well above the minimum wage, since we knew we got value out of keeping guys for longer and getting them to feel invested in the business. From 1997 onward, we really only had full-time employees and had insurance for every employee that worked there. It was important to us that as long as they wanted to stay, we could compensate them so that they could continue to live in the city,” Greg adds.
Greg and Paula also understood that they attracted a staff that loved adventure and activity, and they allowed them to take time off to pursue the same hobbies that they sold gear for. “They had a significant degree of time off,” Greg says. “Many would take off large chunks of time to go climbing in Yosemite or Europe. They were also happy to work on weekends if it meant getting time off midweek, which was always good for our family as well.”
Another perk of the job was that their staff could get great deals on gear. “They were all gear junkies too,” Greg says fondly. “They would pay whatever we paid for an item, rather than it being marked up to in-store pricing.” Getting high-quality gear for such a good price was so desirable, that multiple staff members would often want the same items, and Greg would have to remind them that they had to let it sit out on the floor for at least a week before they could claim it as their own. “If there was anything that was contentious with the employees, it would be multiple people vying for the same piece of used gear that would come in,” he laughs.
Ultimately though, the atmosphere and culture at Second Ascent was the product of a group of people all passionate about the same things. When you can trust that your staff genuinely care about the job and the community they are a part of, you can allow them a degree of freedom many in retail never get to experience. “We tended to get people that were pretty self-motivated,” Greg says. “I never had to do a lot of micromanaging. I gave them a lot of freedom in their day, and they got to do what they loved, which was talk gear with the customer.”
As their staff grew, Greg and Paula’s responsibilities shifted. “I was doing a lot of the sourcing and bigger negotiations on closeout buys and samples, but we also brought on buyers for footwear, climbing, backpacking, and camping, so my role was giving them budgets, overseeing their assortments, reviewing seasonal orders and then managing a lot of the private label products that we started to develop,” he says.
A few times a year, Greg would go to trade shows where he and his buyers would make substantial purchases for the business. “There were two Outdoor Retailer shows a year, one in the winter and one in the summer, so ahead of that I would come up with budgets for everyone and oversee the buyers,” he says.
Even with big buying opportunities, Greg was a pretty relaxed boss. “They had a decent amount of autonomy. It was really giving them an open-to-buy and seeing how they managed that and the logic they were putting into the orders they were making.”
When he wasn’t supervising the buyers, Greg still made it a priority to be in the store five days a week. “That was important to me because it was such a community-based thing. It meant a lot for people to see me in the store and for me to get to interact with long-time customers.” On top of having long-tenured employees, Greg and Paula had devoted customers who came to Second Ascent every time they had to stock up for their next adventure. “We would see the same customers time after time, we knew people by name, and we even got to see kids that started getting stuff in the store when they were 12, 13 years old come back as adults and still be really dedicated to it,” Greg says.
In 2014, after nearly 20 years of running the business, Greg began feeling the burnout that any entrepreneur has surely, at some point, experienced. “I’d started in retail at 18 and had the shop from the time I was 23,” he says. “And it’s not that I thought retail would get easier, but it seemed like every year it was getting a little more challenging to do the same level of volume without having a big online presence, and I also wanted to see if I could do something outside of retail.”
Another indicator to Greg that it was perhaps time to move on was that many of their long-held, beloved employees had begun to leave. “I did have an exodus of guys who finally left over the last few years,” he says. “Chad, our main guy, moved to Bend, Oregon, another went to Sun Valley, Idaho, a couple of other guys became sales reps. They all started to depart, and I didn’t feel I had the energy to take a whole new crop of guys and get them to that same level of trust.”
While Greg was ready to move onto his next adventure, Paula had not yet reached that point. “It was probably as a big a point of contention as any in our relationship because [the store] was so much a part of our identity and social network,” he says. “Paula understood that I was bearing a different weight than she was in terms of the stresses I carried, but she certainly loved all aspects of the business in terms of the community, the employees, the social elements, and just being immersed in that outdoor community.”
Ultimately, however, Paula supported Greg’s desire to move on, and Greg began looking for brokers who could facilitate the sale of the business. “There are several other business brokers in the area, but honestly, there is not even a close second to what Gregory Kovsky has at IBA,” Greg says. “The team of folks there are spectacular, and Gregory’s been in the game so long, he’s been through so many transactions, he has a real depth of knowledge.”
Under Gregory and IBA’s supervision, Second Ascent sold seamlessly in 2014. “Gregory outlined to us how he thought it would go, and it went down exactly how he forecasted. The buyers were so well vetted by the time we came to the table to talk. Every facet of the transaction was smooth. I can’t say enough good things about how the sale went and working with Gregory in particular.”
After selling Second Ascent, Greg tried his hand in the cannabis industry from 2015-2021. “It was probably even more unsatisfying to Paula that I said I needed a break from [Second Ascent] because of how consuming it was, and then I jumped into something that was even more consuming because it was so wild west, and there was so much regulatory oversight,” he laughs.
In his cannabis business, Greg partnered with a father on his daughter’s soccer team and ultimately bought him out of the business. Like with Second Ascent, Paula came on to help manage the financials, but selling a federally illegal drug was far more complicated than selling outdoor gear. “Even just finding somebody who would lease a space to a business that was doing something federally illegal was challenging. If you had a FDIC-insured loan or anything like that, you were out of compliance. And the buffer zones around schools and daycares made finding a space brutal. Getting a bank account was brutal. There are only two banks in the state of Washington that allow banking for federally illegal businesses. The oversight and the reporting that was necessary to run the business was a lot,” Greg explains.
From there, Greg started a company called Pearl Extracts that sold cannabis extracts to edible makers, as well as an ancillary company called Veo that sold THC cartridges. “One of the issues there was that the hardware you put the cartridges in was really crappy. The batteries weren’t always married with the voltage and the resistance of the coil, so I started going to China after a few years to source our own hardware,” Greg explains.
Greg accumulated enough hardware where he began selling batteries to retailers and cartridges to other manufacturers. “It was kind of like how during the gold rush, you got a better margin on picks and shovels,” he laughs. Greg ran Veo for a few more years until his earlier partner decided to re-enter the business and bought Greg out.
After that, he returned to Second Ascent, now called Ascent Outdoors. The initial buyer of the store had gone bankrupt, but it was bought out of bankruptcy by another entrepreneur who grew the business. “I spent the last couple of years working for him because he expanded and bought several other retailers in Oregon,” Greg explains. “I was spending a few days a week in Oregon running three large brick-and-mortar stores that had 160 employees.”
Unfortunately, it was around this time that Paula passed away. “It was about a year-and-a-half ago,” Greg says. “She and I had been together for over 30 years and married for almost 28. We’d been together since I was 21, so it’s definitely been impactful and hard, certainly for both of our kids since they were extremely close to their mother.”
Paula’s death also impacted the community she and Greg had dedicated their lives and careers towards. “She had such an amazing community of folks between what she did recreationally, her social involvement, her volunteer work, everything. We had lived in Ballard for 25 years, so she had a really special place in the community. It’s hard to describe the loss for both us and the community of people around us,” Greg says.
“She was so much of the motivation for everything I’ve done,” he says. “When I started [Second Ascent], a lot of what helped me make that initial step was the amount of faith and confidence she had in me. And of course, when she became a part of the store, the infrastructure she provided allowed us to grow because it was not a strength of mine. We had a really good partnership where we both excelled, and even working together day-in and day-out for 20 years was a great thing.”
Grief has the ability to put everything in perspective. After Paula’s death, Greg left Ascent Outdoors to spend more time with his children. “[The owner] wanted me in Portland more, and after Paula passed, I still had my son Ewan at home, so I hung it up. I just said, ‘I can’t give you any more, I can’t spend more time there.’ I really wanted to be back home.”
Greg Shaw has always been one to take the road less travelled. He decided as a young man that he didn’t want to finish college. As a young adult he climbed mountains and scaled cliffs. As an entrepreneur, he built his career around the community and activities he loved. For him, the latter is the embodiment of the American Dream. “Being able to engage in something day-to-day that I had a true passion for made it that much easier,” he says. “It wasn’t like selling widgets or things I had no affinity for. I was able to find my path in something I loved.”
Being able to build a successful career in something you love is no small feat, and something many go without. “I grew up in a house where my dad worked a job that paid him pretty well, but that he hated his whole life,” Greg reflects. “I was pretty determined not to follow that path. Even if it meant I wasn’t going to find financial riches, I really wanted to do something I had a passion for, and I achieved that. I couldn’t feel more fortunate that I was able to carve a path in something I am so deeply connected to.”
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She recently completed a tenure as the Lead Writer at Bond & Grace, and a co-host for the podcast Lit Talk (https://www.bondandgrace.com/the-lit-talk-podcast). Currently, Ms. Ruther is teaching classes and working on her Master’s Degree at the University of Kentucky.