The Company That Grew Too Fast

The thing about growth is that you have to finance it. And that, as Brian Le Gette learned the hard way with one-time Inc. 500 company 180s, can be tricky.

THERE was nothing on the door to suggest that anything special went on behind it. No name, no plaque. Just an anonymous white door. But when you got inside, the first thing you noticed was that all the windows were frosted over. No prying eyes allowed. This was the war room at 180s, the innovative Baltimore-based sports apparel company made famous by its patented ear warmers that wrap around the back of the head and fold up into tiny disks. But the goal of 180s had long been to get beyond a one-brand, seasonal product like ear warmers, and that's what the war gaming and the secrecy were all about.

The company's vice president for R&D, Nestor Benavides, stood next to a pair of marker boards. Resting on a table was a sample of a new prototype, fresh from a factory in China: the Quantum Vent running jacket. On each side of the jacket's front was a tab. Pull the tabs down and a vent opened, letting in air to cool the runner's back. Pull up tabs on the back of the jacket and the vent closed, holding in the warmth.

But the sizing still wasn't right, Benavides explained, and a deadline was looming. Fearful that it could lose its place in line at the factory in China, the company's managers, marketers, and designers all pondered last-minute changes to the jacket's design, all except the boss, co-founder and CEO Brian Le Gette, who toyed absent-mindedly with a cell phone. And then he excused himself abruptly: "Gotta go, folks. My day is just starting." His life, he added, had become "a seamless series of meetings."

One of those meetings, later in the day, was with a visiting reporter, who listened as Le Gette explained how stressful things had become at 180s despite years of spectacular growth. Actually, Le Gette said, things had gotten stressful because of that spectacular growth. Just the previous year, the company had placed No. 32 on the Inc. 500 list. In retrospect, Le Gette confessed, "I should have tapped the brakes sooner."

That conversation was in February. On April 4, a New York City-based private equity firm, Patriarch Partners, took control of the company. Three months later, on July 12, the new ownership installed its own CEO. In the end, it didn't matter that 180s was still churning out cool products like the ear warmers, the vented jacket, the Exhale glove -- featuring a patented system that allows the wearer to blow warm air into the glove via a tiny nozzle in the front -- and a new line of underwear for the Marines in Iraq (180s Battle Apparel) that Le Gette was vowing to turn into "the Hummer of T-shirts." It didn't matter that the company had moved into 48,000 square feet of sleek new office space on Baltimore's Inner Harbor. It didn't matter that everything about the young, athletic, fresh-faced people who filled the office's vast open areas, with even Le Gette's module marked only by the stuffed monkey that swung above it, suggested that this just might be the coolest small company in America.

"I still don't understand why this happened," says the company's longtime outside counsel. "They had such great numbers. They had phenomenal growth. It's incredible."

And it certainly didn't matter that no one had seen the takeover coming. In part, that was because it was almost impossible not to get caught up in Le Gette's enthusiasm. Everything always sounded so good. Even insiders thought the company was unstoppable. "I'm a Wharton School graduate, and I still don't get why this happened," says Curt Golkow, who provided outside legal counsel to 180s for seven years. "They had such great numbers. They had phenomenal growth. It's incredible." Well, maybe -- to insiders anyway, those for whom losing control of their baby is their worst nightmare. But to investment professionals, the people who finance growth companies, it's actually quite common. In fact, though entrepreneurs sometimes lose sight of this, it's really business as usual.

Originally known as Big Bang Products, the company started out as the brainchild of Le Gette and his partner Ron Wilson. Eventually, they would split, and their breakup would help propel the company into Patriarch's arms. But in the beginning they were a close-knit pair. With his short-cropped dark hair, stocky build, red cheeks, and husky voice, Wilson is Le Gette's physical and emotional opposite. "We're unalike in just about every way," says Wilson, and few who know them would disagree. Wilson was a country boy. He was a family man, too, while Le Gette was single. Not alone among their friends, Daphne Howard, a former QVC executive, has vivid memories of Le Gette driving flashy cars in the company of a series of very good-looking girlfriends. "Movie-star good-looking," says Curt Golkow.

For all their differences, Le Gette and Wilson both started out as engineers and both knew they wanted to be entrepreneurs. They met over a beer in the late summer of 1993 during their first week as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The two students, in their mid-20s at the time, discovered immediately that they had an interest in athletics -- and a passion for entrepreneurship. By the time they'd finished their beer that night, says Le Gette, "we were saying, 'Hey, we're going to start a business together!' Of course, we didn't know what it was."

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