CEO runs finance during rapid expansion

Ten years ago, Portland Gear was an apparel maker focused on celebrating the Pacific Northwest city. Now after two years of explosive growth, founder Marcus Harvey, who is CEO and runs finance, said he hopes 2026 revenue hits “mid-eight figures” with its new product offerings: travel bags.

Harvey is confident in the nearly 50-person company’s ability to reach its revenue goals, he said, because of the close attention he gives to balancing inventory and sales and having enough working capital.

Hearvey recently explained to CFO Brew how he decided to shift the business to bags, why he’s starting to think hiring a CFO may be a good idea, and how he’s juggled the dual role for over a decade.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did Portland Gear make the choice to go all-in on bags?

We were just really methodical about inventory management, just-in-time inventory, and trying not to sell out. But inventory and projections are 100% guaranteed to be wrong; you can never get projections right, so you just do your best with as much data [as you have to] get as close to it as possible.

It was a lot of checking what works, what’s selling, how much inventory we have, lead times…lead times are four to six months, so making sure we’re getting that into account for the reorders, stocking up, and planning growth. But you also can’t plan growth, so it’s always been, “As long as the bags are profitable and the ad spend is profitable, how big can we be?”

What was it like to grow that much in a short period of time, not only as the CEO but CFO, too?

It’s constant check-ins. I spend a lot of time finding financing options, so a lot of time going through bank loans and alternate loans, things that when a business is normalized are much easier to get, but when you’re growing at rapid rates, it’s much harder to do.

I spent a lot of time shopping our business to banks, national and regional, to increase lines of credit. Access to working capital was the biggest thing last year to maintain that growth. And I still own 100% of the business, so [focusing on] not selling it, not diluting it, not raising capital by selling equity, but trying to raise capital by raising debt.

I have a finance team, controller, and people who do the books and the high-level stuff, but when it comes to planning and things, that’s still me. And I’ve been in the finances every day since I started this thing 11 years ago, so I intimately know where every dollar is at any time. I think that’s really imperative, and not even just in a high-growth company…I still see almost every transaction because I think if I take my eye off that stuff, that’s where things can slip.

Are you considering hiring a CFO in the next few years?

I think that’s an inevitable thing for us. We’re probably getting to that scale where it will be needed, and the complexity of our finances are more complex and need more of a tenured manager and steward of them. So yeah, I’d say definitely in the next couple years we’re bringing on, I don’t know if it’s a full CFO level to start. I don’t know if it’s a C-suite, but it’s definitely a VP of finance or a head of finance for sure.