Building Deeper Relationships with the Natural World: Interview with Dave Allee, the founder of Almond Surfboards, Windward-Westward, and Ranger Bison
This week’s interview is with Dave Allee, the founder of Almond Surfboards, Windward-Westward, and Ranger Bison. Dave became an entrepreneur in 2008 when he started Almond as a 22 year old recent college graduate. He’d spent his college years learning everything he could about making surfboards and thinking about the way his classes could apply to the theoretical surf brand he kept dreaming about. At the time, he thought he’d try it out for a year and then have to get another job. 17 years later, he’s still at it with highlights including the creation of the R Series surfboard line and a collaboration with Porsche.
The thing about Dave is that he is not just the surf guy. He has an insatiable curiosity for the natural world, which has led to a passion for regenerative agriculture and bringing people together for richer conversations around the table. Those passions have since taken the form of Windward-Westward, a club that hosts wild fish and game dinners, and Ranger Bison, a bison jerky brand. As Dave told me, he’s learned to embrace the editing and refining process that comes with being an entrepreneur who has diverse interests and a commitment to not missing out on family time.
Over the course of a wide-ranging conversation, we spoke about:
Why he decided to make a go of starting Almond as a recent college grad
What’s kept him going mentally through the ups and downs of running a business
How he’s learned to manage overwhelm by continually identifying where he adds value
Why he takes a step back and spends three months every summer in Idaho
The importance of chasing curiosity in areas outside of surfing
How marriage and parenthood has changed his perspective on entrepreneurship
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
How would you describe your occupation?
My name is Dave Allee, and I own a surfboard business called Almond Surfboards. I feel like that paints a very incomplete picture because surfing is only one of the things that I am currently gripped by. I don't have a good way of explaining it at a cocktail party. When you start telling people that you do custom surfboards and bison jerky, they tend to get very confused. I’m working on a way to encapsulate the various expressions into something that's a little more cohesive. My best attempt at doing that has been in the realm of deeper relationships with the natural world and richer conversations around the table.
You made your first surfboard in college; a process which I read took a year! When you graduated in 2008 into an incredibly tough job market, you decided to give yourself a year to make a go of starting Almond. Can you talk more about what helped you make that decision? Even in a tough job market, I can imagine there were still so many moments where it would have been tempting or felt easier to go do something else.
During the time I was studying business at Chapman, I was running everything I was learning through the filter of my hypothetical surf brand. In doing that, it became clear to me that there was a glaring void in the marketplace. I remember thinking, “I can't believe no one's doing it this way yet.” I was excited about creating a space where people could step in and get a full five senses experience, and I wanted it to be a vehicle for us to be able to produce the kinds of products I wanted to make. It was honestly as simple as that at the time. When you're 22-23 years old, you're kind of like, “What else am I going to do? The bar I have to clear every month to survive is essentially 0.” I expected to do it for a year and then have to go get a real job.
I listened to an interview you did with the “Be More Like You” podcast where you talked about the first two years of running the business. You said, “I needed to be poor and broke in the beginning. There were days where if I didn’t sell a board, I wouldn’t be able to fill up my gas tank.” What kept you going mentally through those first few years?
I think it was stubbornness. Selling a board that day and having 50 bucks to fill up the gas tank were pretty low stakes. As I got deeper into the business and the company grew, the stakes got a lot bigger. My appetite for risk at this current stage of life is much different now than it was back then. I’m married, have two kids, and a mortgage. My payroll is way bigger than I could have fathomed at that time.
I really do think it's stubbornness. There have been a lot of hard seasons we've encountered that were way harder than not selling a board in the beginning. There’s a level of determination that you don’t know you have until you have to call upon it and reinvent the thing. I would say that's probably been one of the most interesting challenges of the past 9 years or so. It’s all one big board game. Once you think you’ve solved one thing, the board game starts moving again. We've had to reinvent at a pretty regular clip for the last 9 years. There’s never been a moment where we could say, “Oh, we can chill now.” The game is always changing, the rules are changing, technology is changing, the market is changing. I think about the early days, and it all seemed so much simpler then. Even though we have 16 years of operating experience, it feels a lot more chaotic now.
Have you noticed that your mindset about that uncertainty has changed over time?
I would love to say that I’m steady as an arrow and never get tossed around, but that’s not true. The scoreboard of your daily sales resets to 0 every night at midnight, and every day you have to wake up and figure out how you’re going to pull a rabbit out of a hat that day. There’s the long term strategic work and thinking, and then there's figuring out what you need to do day to day, which can definitely be a mental and emotional rollercoaster.
I listened to an interview where you mentioned that you felt like you lost control of the business as Almond got bigger. What helps you feel like you’re in the driver’s seat versus being overwhelmed by the business?
Some of that is as simple as perception. It’s easy to think, “Oh, this thing has gotten so big. There are all these people who have certain expectations of how things are supposed to work.” When those things change, like an employee leaving or a change of strategic partners, you start to realize, “Maybe I was putting too much expectation on everything.” I think the interview you’re talking about is referencing a big change we went through from 2012-2014. We'd gotten really deep into apparel. Surfboards had almost become a side piece to this surf apparel brand that we were becoming. I realized that I hated how much waste there was at every step of the process. I hated having to redesign the line every year. I didn't like going to those trade shows. Conventional wisdom in the industry says that you don't make your money in your hard goods. You make your money in soft goods. Regardless of the conventional wisdom, I had that kind of entrepreneurial defiance to want to figure out how to do things a different way. I stopped doing the apparel stuff and shifted the focus to developing what would eventually become our R series line of surfboards. It took 3 years of development from July of 2015 to May of 2018. It was about taking where I felt we added the most value and duplicating it in a format that was more repeatable and able to be offered at a more accessible price point.
Tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but it sounds like the overwhelm was significantly lessened when you were honest about what you actually liked doing and what you thought made sense for your unique business.
Absolutely. I feel like knowing or identifying where you add the most value as a brand is what it comes back to.
On the “Surf Splendor” podcast you talked about reaching a point of burnout when you were about 10 years into running Almond. You stepped away and took three months off in Idaho with your family. What signals led you to the point of realizing that you needed a break and what impact did you see from taking that time away?
I now do three months in Idaho every summer. It really forces me to release control. It’s a pressure release that allows me to come up for air. When I'm here at the shop, I’m going from a zoom call to being locked in working on our 2025 Porsche collaboration to making mood boards and line plans. It’s go go go. In order to be a functioning human, I need those three months. I still check-in and go into a co-working space for a few hours a day while I’m there, but it’s been important for me to know that this place can work without me. It forces a level of problem solving when I'm not immediately available to the rest of the team and allows me to just be me, instead of being a reactionary entrepreneurial monster who is constantly responding to external inputs.
Letting go of control is way easier said than done. What helped you loosen your grip on control?
You take a lot of abuse over the years of running a business. It definitely humbles you once you’ve lived through many cycles of ups and downs. You realize that plates are gonna hit the floor. Sometimes we clean up the pieces. Other people need to have breathing room to be able to rise up and take ownership over their areas. Griffin, our shaper, and I always joke that surfboards are just floaty ocean toys. At the end of the day, we make glorified toys, and I try to keep that perspective. I think my team was very confused the first time that I went to Idaho, but they did a great job and certain things even went better without me there.
You’ve made a point to pursue other businesses and interests with Windward Westward and your bison jerky brand, Ranger Bison. What led you to seek out other projects?
Insatiable curiosity for more topics than just surfing. I spent a year building my first board. I was just devouring everything I could about surfing when I was in my early twenties. I still don't know everything there is to know about surfing and surfboards, but I kind of know everything that I care to know about surfing and surfboards at this point. There's not a lot of meat left on that bone for me. There are still opportunities I see to serve our customers in different ways. We're gonna completely overhaul our R series this year to be lighter, faster, and stronger, add some colors, and do a bit of a rebrand. There’s more I want to do, but there’s not much more I care to know about surfboard design theory.
Hunting, wild food, and open fire cooking are infinitely more interesting to me. I’m super curious about regenerative agriculture. Windward Westward started as an excuse to bring people together at dinners. I started getting into hunting and was talking to other friends who were into things like spear fishing, duck hunting, and fly fishing. It was an excuse to have everyone crack into their freezer, pull something out, and then come together and share it. I love the ethos behind that - working hard to procure something and coming together to share it. That’s just not a theme that I see playing out in a lot of arenas in our modern life.
Ranger Bison came about because of my interest in hunting and cooking with primal cuts of meat. The bison jerky thing came out of talking with a bison rancher that I know in Montana. He basically said, “When you harvest an animal, there are the prime cuts that consumers and restaurants want like ribeye, but there's the whole rest of the animal that is harder to sell. The ground meat is the lowest return on investment.” A real need of his was to balance out the imbalance of demand. That struck me as an interesting problem. I realized that you can make jerky from ground meat and that jerky is a shelf stable way to make use of the rest of the animal.
Why has it been important for you to nurture these other areas?
I've joked for years that my life would be so much simpler, and I probably would have made more money if I just loved working at my surf shop everyday. But I don’t want to just be the surf guy. Yes, I built a brand around surfing, but surfing was more of a vehicle for all these other things I was curious about and the type of community I wanted to create. I didn’t want to only build my life around surfing. It's just too small of a cup, and there's not enough to hold my attention.
It's like you need these other sandboxes to keep the curiosity firing, and you learn things from one arena that lend themselves to the others. It's not a tremendous discipline in terms of focus, but it does keep me excited.
You’ve now been running Almond for ~17 years, during which time you went from being an early twenties recent college grad to now being married and having two kids. How has getting older and experiencing life changes like marriage and parenthood changed how you approach entrepreneurship (if at all)?
I definitely have more defined limitations on what I’m willing to miss. I wake up at 5 so that I can work out and either read, write, or get a jump on my day before my kids wake up at 7. I make breakfast for my family every day. I’m talking about making pancakes and bacon midweek. I take my daughter to school and resume work at 9 after I drop her off. I work hard throughout the day and try to pack in a lot of stuff, but then at 4:00pm I want to go home and play with my kids. I’m cooked by the time my kids go to sleep at 7 or 8:00. I've got nothing left and can't even hold a conversation with my wife.
I’ve had to learn to be more strategic with my priorities and know that stuff's gonna take longer. In the old days, I’d have an idea at 8:00am, enact it by 10:00am, and stay up as late as I needed to. Now it’s a more measured pace so that I can be the dad I want to be and spend time with my kids.
Has anything surprised you about learning to work in a different way at this stage in your life?
It sounds like I have it all together. I definitely don't. I'm still figuring it out on a day to day basis. There's days when I feel like I've got it, and there's days when I wonder how much more coffee I need to drink. I honestly value that 5:00am time slot so much. If I don't get that early morning time slot in because I drank too much wine the night before or wanted to sleep in, I’m grumpy the next day. The work day is already reactionary enough so starting off the day in a reactionary mindset is just horrible for me.
Many people I interview for the No Directions blog have created lives that are uniquely theirs in terms of how they live, work, and build their lives. What does the life that is uniquely yours look like today?
The next year is really going to be about refining the focus. Like I said earlier, it’s about finding the places where I create the most value and prioritizing them. What am I willing to say no to in order to do the most important work? That’s a constant editing process, especially for an entrepreneur with too many interests and family time I’m not willing to miss out on.