The Ivory Tower

Yet another gorgeous fall day at the Lincoln Peak base area of Sugarbush

When I arrived at university as a Freshman all those years ago, I took the advice of a close friend of my father’s and signed up to take Economics 101 with a member of the faculty that had been his own professor thirty years prior. Yes, that meant that this professor had been there a long time and was perhaps lacking some modernity in his approach, but I was grateful for the suggestion and the course got me hooked. Four years later, I received my Bachelor’s degree in Economics. The professor (who shall remain nameless) definitely took an ivory tower approach to the teaching of Economics – the course was very heavy on theory, light on ‘modeling’, and totally devoid of finance. The Economics Department, as he took great pains to tell us, was the first organized department at this old, originally Episcopalian, traditionally liberal arts college, so the faculty knew it as the “Mother Discipline”. By mid-semester, one of my classmates asked the Prof why all of the other Econ 101 sections were spending so much time doing hard math, financial modeling and practical, real-world stuff while we were using out-of-print texts and working so hard on theory. Prof’s response, matching his demeanor, lockjaw, appearance and general world view, word for word, was “Here in the Mother Discipline, we hope that when you graduate from Trinity College, someone else will be doing that work for you.” All of us in the class had the same response – ‘I’m with that guy!’ Needless to say, it was a fanciful attitude as antiquated as believing that World War I was won on the playing fields of Eton, but it did inspire us to reach higher. Needless to say, that was a looooooong time ago, and at the time I didn’t exactly have my sights set on a career in the ski industry.

Fast forward to 2012, and I’m busy getting the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School ready for another winter here in Warren, Vermont in my first year as the Director. Virtually all snow sports schools go through the same process, and the nature of our business means that they definitely don’t fit neatly into any conventional business model we would have learned in Prof’s class. When the snow melts in Spring and the lifts stop turning, we lay everyone off only to rehire them in October. At Sugarbush, we have about 300 instructors, a bunch of supervisors, and several sales staff that report to me – all must do their intake paperwork before we can put them to work, and we need to process all of it and input them all in our HR, sales and scheduling systems. We accomplished the majority of this over the last two weeks, with me mostly watching and listening to my more experienced staff. And there’s more: ski and snowboard teaching requires a lot of knowledge, skill and training to do well, but with an amount of attrition typical in the industry this means that in the fall we hire a number of first-time instructors that we have to teach the ins and outs of what we do, introduce them to our systems, ethos, facilities, policies and programs, and then make sure we equip them to succeed as instructors. Yikes. And then we need to conduct on-snow training for all of the instructors to get them back into the groove, to enhance their abilities to teach, and to make sure our end-product is at the level of quality that we demand for our guests. This business model definitely was not covered in the pages of my dog-eared, well-worn, and long-out-of-print economics text books. Getting all of this done, keeping the staff focused on the big picture of why we’re here, keeping our passion for skiing and riding front and center, and getting ready to provide an exceptional guest experience for all ages and abilities of skiers and snowboarders so that we open in a month with all pistons firing, will be deserving of some satisfaction. Keep it up every day for a six month season outside in all kinds of weather on the slopes of a big, steep and gnarly mountain, and we’ll have accomplished a great deal. And that’s all simply the baseline expectation of our business. Don’t mistake my tone for concern or a lack of confidence – I have a terrific staff, some very capable supervisors, a kick-butt business manager and it’ll all happen in good time and in good form for our season to begin. If we do it well, we'll all get to enjoy skiing and riding a ton and will get tremendous satisfaction from making it happen for our guests.

The first time I went to New Zealand for the Southern Winter, planning what to bring and how to pack required some guess-work and a lot of reliance on what other people had told me. After six seasons down there, that guess-work is gone along with my anxiety about it, and I can pack for the summer with ease, not breaking a sweat as I account for all of the possibilities that affect what I need, what I’ll want to have with me, and what room there will be for things that make my time away more comfortable. My pre-season work-load at Sugarbush is somewhat similar, and my expectation is that in the years to come it’ll be far easier to keep all of the details in perspective so that I can stay in my more comfortable big picture view without worrying about dropping any balls.

As has always been the case with pre-season planning in all of the roles I’ve played in skiing, I am looking forward to the day when I get down to the business of the day-to-day operation of a ski and snowboard school. With a little help from Mother Nature, that day will be one month from now and when we open I may just have to make a bunch of turns for myself just to put all of it in perspective. I’ll be packed and ready, so to speak. In the interim, I’ll do my best to stay out of the ivory tower, to stay abreast of the details, and not to take for granted the people who will have done so much of the work for me.