It Only Looks Easy

He's the cool boss, the take-a-year-off-to-snowboard guy, the company owner who leads by doing only what he loves. But he's also an intense and talented businessman-which is the real story of why Jake Burton of Burton Snowboards utterly dominates a $400 million industry.

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I had been told not to worry, that I'd know him when I saw him, that even in a thick coat, ski cap, and goggles he just sort of looks like you think he would, whatever that means. Jake Burton, the public relations person for Burton Snowboards had told me, "just has an aura." The weird thing is, it was him who spotted me. I was wandering around the lodge, looking for a dude with a halo, or perhaps backlit with the golden glow of a permanent sunset, when a guy with shaggy hair and thick black eyebrows waved at me from the food line. "You must be Josh," he said, appearing a bit less kempt than I had imagined a person with an aura would be. "How did you know that?" I answered. "You looked like you were looking for somebody," he said. "And I kind of know everybody else."

This was the lodge of the Stowe Mountain Resort, a northern Vermont ski mountain (owned by the AIG insurance company, oddly enough) that is Jake's home hill, one that he can see if he cranes his neck from the porch of his house in the woods. I apologized for my timing, for taking him away from what snowboarders call a powder day. So far, six inches had fallen. Eight more were expected. "No worries," he said. "We had a great morning." Burton, it turns out, had been out since the lifts were first cranked up at 8 a.m., cutting up the virgin snow with the oldest of his three sons, George, who for some reason was not in school, perhaps because it was a powder day.

"You're gonna love it out there," he said to me, giving my shoulder a smack. "Great day to learn."

A little backstory: When I first broached the idea of getting to know Jake Burton, someone (perhaps me) mentioned that it would make sense to meet up on the mountain, to see the man who fathered a sport in the very environment in which it was born. "Do you need to borrow a snowboard?" the Burton rep had asked me. "No, no," I told her. "I ski." She laughed. "Not with Jake you don't." Which meant that, apparently, I would be taking up snowboarding.

"I have my own method of teaching," Jake said, back at the lodge, as he filled a Styrofoam cup half full of coffee and then topped if off with hot chocolate. He said that by the time we were finished he'd have me "linking turns" and then he started my snowboarding lesson smack in the middle of the cafeteria, amid the moms reading romance novels and a chattering mass of British students who were almost all wearing some form of Burton clothing.

"I was teaching Katie Couric at the Olympics, on TV," Burton said as he adjusted my posture into the correct one--knees slightly bent over an imaginary board, torso forward, weight on my front foot. "That's pressure. I only had 45 minutes. If I'd had another hour I'd have had her ripping."

A trio of doughy English lads loitered on our periphery and then approached, sheepishly, each one brandishing a copy of Burton Snowboards' thick catalog. It was an odd scene: Teenagers--from a country with little snow and no ski resorts--borrowing a pen to get an autograph from a fiftysomething businessman, but such is the cult status of Jake Burton, a man who didn't invent snowboarding but very much popularized it.

"You guys boarding?" Jake asked, as he scrawled a signature across the glossy front of each kid's catalog. They nodded. "Good."

Outside, there was a quick lesson on fastening bindings and propelling oneself on flat ground, and then we were off to the lift, where even in cap and goggles Jake was greeted by kids and adults, lift operators and ski instructors. I was asked multiple times if I knew how lucky I was to be getting this lesson--once by a ski school teacher who added that Jake is the "Howard Stern of snowboarding." To this day, I'm not sure what he meant.

My ensemble, though, spoke clearly. My board, boots, and bindings were Burton. My helmet was R.E.D., a division of Burton. My goggles were by Anon, also a division of Burton. My pants: Burton. Only my jacket belied the trend. It was Special Blend, owned by Four Star Distribution. Come to think of it, Burton bought Special Blend in 2004. Though the hardware was provided by Burton, the soft goods were mine. I had, without realizing it, purchased three items from three brands, all of them with Burton DNA.

At the top, we rehashed the basics and Jake plunged his board into the snow, the better to jog behind me as I attempted my first turn. Somehow, despite the nerves and blowing snow, I made it, repeating over and over in my head the lessons I'd learned while standing on a cafeteria tray. I made another turn, this one uglier but still successful. Gaining speed, I pointed down the hill and made another, then one more and then Jake was far enough behind me that he stopped giving chase. "I'll meet you at the lift!" he yelled, and then I promptly caught my front edge and nose-dived into the snow.

An uncomfortable solo lift ride later, I found him up top, leaning on his board, a huge grin on his face. "Six or seven turns on your first run," he said, slapping me an awkward, gloved high-five. "Am I a great teacher or what?"

It's a good time to be Jake Burton Carpenter. (Carpenter is his last name, also the last one anyone uses. He tends just to go by Jake.) He is 51 years old and the sole owner of a 550-employee company that by all estimates controls 40 to 50 percent of a $400 million market that is still young. He lives five minutes from a resort, rides more than 100 days a year, and is wealthy by any definition of the word. He is having the time of his life. In late 2004, Burton handed off most operational responsibilities to the company president, 38-year-old Frenchman Laurent Potdevin. Shortly thereafter, Jake and his wife, Donna, pulled their boys out of school, hired some tutors, and took the whole bunch on a round-the-world tour during which they surfed and snowboarded on five continents over 10 months. When they got back, Burton made Potdevin CEO, holding on to the titles owner and chairman.

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