Wayne Metcalf’s career as a Canadian military pilot may be behind him, but he’s still making flight plans.

Nowadays, though, Metcalf’s flight plan is purely entrepreneurial.

The youthful Calgary businessman recently became a key player in Calgary’s retail market, becoming Canada’s first franchisee for The Athlete’s Foot Group, an athletic footwear chain of 700 stores worldwide, based in Atlanta, Ga.

Metcalf’s ambitious plan calls for five Calgary stores, with the first due to launch in mid-April in the indoor mall area of Brentwood Village Shopping Centre.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
Wayne Metcalf is lacing up for the run of a lifetime – taking on archrival Forzani Group in the athletic footwear industry. The Calgary entrepreneur is the first Canadian franchisee for the Athlete’s Foot Group.

And the dynamic 38-year-old real estate and retail investor isn’t about to stop there. In this flight plan, the sky’s the limit.

1. How do you reflect on your nine-year career as a military pilot?

“It was my boyhood dream to be a pilot. It was interesting, because I was able to travel a lot and get exposure to that industry. While I was a pilot, I became more and more interested in business. Initially, the plan was to do the time in the military and then become a pilot with an airline.”

2. Was life as a military pilot everything you thought it would be?

“No. To be honest, I found the takeoff and landing phases to be very interesting. But I didn’t like the long-haul stuff over water. Often, I’ve likened it to sitting in a chair and staring at a white wall for eight hours. I just could not visualize doing that for the rest of my life. It wasn’t for me. The lifestyle wasn’t viable to my wife and me.”

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
Wayne Metcalf, with wife Dina looking on, believes his new Athlete’s Foot franchise store can run down the competition.

3. What did you learn in the military that you’ve been able to channel into your career in the retail and real estate business?

“I learned a sense of discipline. A lot of the military experience was flying at odd hours of the night. It was extremely draining. When you’d go away on exercises or missions, you worked an 18-hour day and every day you’d get up at a different time, roughly six hours out of sync. You’d do that for two or three weeks. Nothing I’ve done in my business career ever since has compared to that in terms of difficulty.”

4. So was it a smooth transition to business?

“My wife and I have done well in business. Frankly, I’ve made more money than I ever did in the military and without risking my life. My wife and I have had different investments in retail and real estate. I’m energized by having control of a given project in a way that I’m certainly not energized when I’m taking a paycheque from somebody else.”

5. What sparked your interest in being a franchise owner with The Athlete’s Foot Group?

“I met up with the people from The Athlete’s Foot Group at a trade show in Calgary some two and a half years ago and, after ongoing dialogue, this fall they finally cleared the legal hurdles to operate in Canada and specifically Alberta. While I was involved in other businesses, I was always looking for something I could replicate into a larger chain. To make significant money in retail, in my experience, it has to be something you are able to replicate into a chain and leverage across a larger territory rather than just one location.”

6. What specifically appealed to you about The Athlete’s Foot?

“It’s the right price point, meaning that the average transaction is in the $50 to $150 range. You can go significantly lower than that, say in a business such as a coffee shop where it’s a $2 to $3 transaction and it becomes very labour intensive and very intensive in terms of accounting, bookkeeping and extended hours. It’s very hard to control an 18-hour business and replicate that into a chain. I’m not going to say it can’t be done, but it’s more difficult. We looked at dozens and dozens of other franchise opportunities.”

7. Why shoes?

“It’s not a dot-com or something trendy. Running shoes or athletic shoes are here to stay. Every consumer out there has them – in their house and in their closet. So you’re focusing on a very wide segment of the population that uses your product. I thought it would be much easier to get into a business that focused on a wide appeal to the consumer rather than a narrow appeal that might dry up the next day or the next year, such as a dot-com business. Although it’s a very mature business, it’s also a very large one in which it’s easier to get a toe-hold.”

8. What’s the key to gaining market share from competitors such as the Forzani Group of stores, that have a strong toe-hold in Calgary?

“It was very important for us to be aligned with a major player in whatever industry we picked, because otherwise your odds of success would be very low. It would be very difficult statistically to go from a complete startup from nothing and build it into a large brand. With this company, we’re tapping into a company with critical mass. And we only need about 15 to 20 transactions a day at these price points and margin to make a reasonable living at it.”

9. Where do you hope to gain an edge over your competitors?

“One of our big advantages will be the FitPrint System (a patented foot-pressure device that measures pressure points in feet and provides detailed information on foot characteristics and proper fit). As a consumer, if I walk into a store and see a $70 running shoe, a $100 running shoe and a $180 running shoe, personally, I would consider parting with that $180 if someone was able to explain to me what value there was. In many of the stores and the competition out there today, they’re unable to give that focused, personalized service. So it’s not readily apparent to you what value there is in a higher-priced item. But you have an advantage when you specialize, and having store staff that know the product line and the athletic footwear business much better than your competition. To be better, you must be distinct in some form or fashion or nobody will notice you in the marketplace. The FitPrint helps you do that. Nobody else has anything like it.”

10. What’s the most important thing you have to do in operating your business to be successful?

“We are placing a premium on our service and our ability to fit the consumer with shoes that fit them properly and fit their needs properly, as opposed to a self-serve concept where you pile the shoes on the floor and let them sort through it.”

11. What’s your view of the Calgary athletic footwear market?

“In this venture, your best focus is on dealing with a population that is relatively athletic. Secondly, although it’s mostly a mature market in Canada, a lot of those rules change when you come to Alberta because of the rapidly growing population. Even in an industry that is relatively mature and stable, if you have an influx of five per cent of your population every year, in general that means even mature businesses are growing. Here, you have an ongoing influx of newcomers into this province that help sustain growth.”

12. How will your prices compare with that of the Forzani Group stores?

“In general, our prices will be comparable. It’s my understanding that the thrust of the Forzani Group is in their Sport-Chek and Sport Mart brands and that they’re tending to get out of the Forzani-brand stores to focus on the bigger-box format. So, to a certain extent, I would suspect that there’s an area of the market opening up there. Furthermore, in my analysis, and the analysis of the people at The Athlete’s Foot, the market (for athletic footwear) is significantly less competitive than the market in the States.”

13. What kind of people will you hire for your store?

“In my experience as a store manager, attitude is always the most important factor. I’d like someone who presents themselves well and converses well with the public. You can’t teach those items.”

“Even if you could teach that, it would take an extraordinary amount of energy. First and foremost, if they can’t come in for an interview and converse with you in a sociable manner, it’s pointless going any further. You need good verbal skills and good social skills in a retail job.”

14. What’s your goal with The Athlete’s Foot stores?

“As a near-term goal, I’ve made a commitment for five stores in Calgary, and that’s a three- to five-year plan. So I want to ensure I open those five stores and that they’re all successful. Longer term, I think the Alberta market can handle more than five stores. As a 10-year plan, I’d like to expand to about the 10-store range. Beyond that, I do have other business interests that I’ll be involved in.”

15. What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned in business?

“If you’re not on top of things, they can get out of control at an astounding rate. If somebody is not there motivated to look after all the details, it’s remarkable how fast things can fall apart in front of your eyes. Perhaps, 30 years ago, you could have gotten away with being an absentee owner by injecting some money and paying somebody to take care of it, but in a modern, more competitive economy, that tends not to be a recipe for success.”

16. Who’s the entrepreneur you most admire?

“Frank Stronach, the founder of Magna Inter-national. He’s a self-made Canadian billionaire, of which there are very few.

He came from Austria. He could hardly speak any English. He was virtually penniless, and as I understand it, got a job in a machine shop. Several years later, he scraped together enough money to buy the shop. Rather than pay money for rent, he slept on a cot next to the lathe. That kind of focus and discipline is extraordinarily rare. Of all the tens of thousands of people that graduated from the best universities of this country with the best pedigrees, with the best families and with the most money, how many of them accomplished even a small percentage of what that individual accomplished in his life?”

17. What motivates you in business?

“I like the challenge. It invigorates me and gives me life. A challenge and a goal make everything in life meaningful. I admire individuals who start from humble origins and succeed against large odds. Those individuals inspire me. That’s the kind of background I came from. As a kid, my first job was as a newspaper carrier. My second job was lifting hay bales, working out in the hay fields of Ontario and lifting bales in the sweltering heat and breathing the dust. Eventually, I moved on to work jobs that were higher paying and less onerous.”

18. Does being an entrepreneur feel like a job to you?

“No. It’s invigorating to be your own boss. Most of the time it doesn’t feel like work at all. It’s just part of living and enjoying what you do. The hours are almost irrelevant.”

19. What are your favourite pastimes?

“I’ve always been interested in fitness and working out. I’ll go out and run for a mile or a mile-and-a-half, but not farther than that. I was built as a quarterhorse, not a thoroughbred.”

20. What do you hope to be doing when you’re 50?

“I’ll still be working and looking at opportunities. By the time I’m 50, I would hope to have a range of business interests on a much larger scale than they are now and still be actively pursuing new challenges and goals. I don’t plan to retire. That’s not part of what interests me or motivates me. I like to relax from time to time, but to just retire and sit on a veranda somewhere when I’m 50 or 55 has no appeal to me.”

IN PROFILE: Wayne Metcalfe
* Born/raised/age: Ottawa, 38.
* Occupation: Entrepreneur/franchise owner.
* Career: Metcalf recently became the first franchise owner for The Athlete’s Foot Group with a deal to open five stores in Calgary. After a nine-year career in the Canadian military as a pilot, Metcalf launched his business career five years ago, focusing on retail and real estate investments.
* Role model: Canadian entrepreneur Frank Stronach.
* Pastime: Fitness.

THE COMPANY: The Athlete's Foot Group
* Profile: The Athlete’s Foot, based in Atlanta, Ga., is the world’s largest franchisor of athletic footwear, with more than 750 stores worldwide, and is currently focused on expansion into Canada, starting in Calgary. It is a privately owned subsidiary of Groupe Rallye, a French conglomerate.
* Claim to fame: The Athlete’s Foot stores feature the FitPrint System, a computer system that measures
pressure points in the feet to provide details regarding foot characteristics and proper fit.
* Franchise requirements: The company focuses on five-store agreements and generally requires a $35,000 U.S. franchise fee for a first-store agreement. The fee is then discounted to motivate growth. Candidates for franchises generally have a net worth of more than $400,000 U.S. with at least $100,000 U.S. in liquid assets.
* Calgary franchise: The first of five Calgary stores is slated to open in mid-April in the Brentwood Village Shopping Centre in the northwest.
* Website: www.theathletesfoot.com