Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Andy Wirth, co founder and CEO
Speaker 1: of Peak Skis Andy, how do you know Body Miller
Speaker 1: your partner, Bob.
Speaker 2: Great to be here and really an honor to be
Speaker 2: on your show, and also total dig on your Joe
Speaker 2: Walsh riff that brings us into the show. One of
Speaker 2: the great songs of all time.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, most people don't recognize it. That's Meadows,
Speaker 1: the first song on the second side of the Smoker
Speaker 1: you drink the player that you get. How do you
Speaker 1: know that?
Speaker 2: I am a music fan. I played guitar. He used
Speaker 2: to play a little bit better than I do nowadays
Speaker 2: because of this lile accident ten years ago. But I
Speaker 2: have loved and appreciated anybody who can play guitar well,
Speaker 2: regardless of genre. And I first cut my teeth on
Speaker 2: Joe Walsh Gosh, I know, early eighties, late eighties, seventies,
Speaker 2: something like that, and just love that album. And Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountain Way a different album though.
Speaker 1: Right, well that's the opening track on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then Mountain Meadow excuse me, love that I like. Also,
Speaker 2: how on your show you took out the oh really
Speaker 2: and yeah at the.
Speaker 1: Beginning of the song me you really know it? That's
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 2: Oh no. I listened to that tune probably about fifteen times,
Speaker 2: and then I've also played it on guitar a tenth
Speaker 2: as good as Joe Walsh about three hundred times. So yeah,
Speaker 2: great tune, cool cool selection. What's your story on it?
Speaker 2: What is the deal?
Speaker 1: I mean there's I mean, I'm a big Joe Walsh fan.
Speaker 1: Joe said I could use it, but I knew the track.
Speaker 1: But his final albums ABC Dunhill Deal. He put out
Speaker 1: a live album which was actually a TV show. And
Speaker 1: I was driving from Salt Lake back to Connecticut and
Speaker 1: I played the six cassettes that I bought. I never
Speaker 1: bought cassettes, but I didn't have a tape player. That
Speaker 1: was one of them, and I think of They'll passed,
Speaker 1: which used to be difficult but now since has been
Speaker 1: for many years. Four lane but at the top it's
Speaker 1: like a meadow and I remember playing that right in
Speaker 1: that area. But you have a relationship with Eddie Vedder.
Speaker 1: How do you know Eddie Vedder?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know, I'm well, but I've been a
Speaker 2: fan of Pearl Jam going back to along with about
Speaker 2: ten billion other people early nineties, with everything that they
Speaker 2: put out starting in ninety two ninety three. And like
Speaker 2: I said, love all kind of music. I probably go
Speaker 2: deepest on country, country, Western, both types of music. But
Speaker 2: at the same time was always into Zeppelin, Aerosmith and
Speaker 2: the great guitar players Joe Walsh and the like you
Speaker 2: name it, but then got into Pearl Jam. And what's
Speaker 2: interesting is I had a bad skydamming accident about ten
Speaker 2: years ago. In fact, coming up on the ten year
Speaker 2: anniversary of that accident, which I want I call my
Speaker 2: live day. When we talked about that week, certainly can
Speaker 2: but one of his tunes that I really accidentally came into,
Speaker 2: accidentally stumbled into, came to me at a very critical
Speaker 2: moment what I was bleeding out and dying, and I
Speaker 2: eventually died, but they brought me back and which worked
Speaker 2: out well. It was a good day. But one of
Speaker 2: his tunes called just Breathe was halfway through the closing
Speaker 2: credits of a movie about a very good friend of
Speaker 2: mine who's a good, great horseman. His name is Buck
Speaker 2: Branneman out of Sheridan, Wyoming. He had worked with Nicholas
Speaker 2: Sparks on the movie the book A Horse Whisper with
Speaker 2: Redford on the movie Horse Whisper. But he had been
Speaker 2: doing a whole bunch of horse work for years and years,
Speaker 2: and they made this indie film about him, One Sun Dance,
Speaker 2: and I'm watching it for the first time and halfway
Speaker 2: through the ending of the closing credits, just brief comes
Speaker 2: on and it just doesn't make any sense. I mean,
Speaker 2: you got to keep in mind that when I introduced
Speaker 2: Buck in Steamwa Springs, Colorado, where I used to live,
Speaker 2: to Tanny Tucker, I mean, that was the deal. I
Speaker 2: mean he thought tannyse the sun rose and said on
Speaker 2: Tanny Tucker, and he probably right. It probably still does.
Speaker 2: But in this case caught me off guard because what
Speaker 2: is a Pearl Jam song doing at the end of
Speaker 2: a movie about Buck? Brannman curious called him found out
Speaker 2: four months later. And I had known this song. This
Speaker 2: song came to me at a very critical crucial time.
Speaker 1: Right before you get there.
Speaker 2: How did it end up in the movie. It had
Speaker 2: to do with his upbringing and his life. And I
Speaker 2: highly recommend watching this movie. Whether or not you're into
Speaker 2: horses kind of doesn't matter. And he had a really
Speaker 2: really rough upbringing in a town called Ennis, Montana, which
Speaker 2: I happened to live nowadays, about fifteen twenty minutes away
Speaker 2: from Ennis, and he just got the crap beat out
Speaker 2: of him by his dad. It was bullshit. Angers me
Speaker 2: to think about it as part of him navigating that
Speaker 2: and a's who he is today because of that. He
Speaker 2: mentioned that song just fit, It just worked, and the
Speaker 2: song had meeting and more so that's how it kind
Speaker 2: of related to his It was a tip of the hat,
Speaker 2: regardless of the music type, tip of the hat to
Speaker 2: what that song speaks to. Okay, so let's go back
Speaker 2: ten years ago. You're skydiving. How much experience had you
Speaker 2: had skydiving? A fair amount. I've got what's called AFF
Speaker 2: Accelerated free Fall Certification.
Speaker 1: What is that.
Speaker 2: It's a licensed certification to jump. It's like get in
Speaker 2: your driver's license. And I never sought to wanted to
Speaker 2: jump in a tandem. So I ended up getting AFF
Speaker 2: this certification, and it ended up jumping a bunch with
Speaker 2: friends that you might might know of or no from
Speaker 2: Squaw Valley, JT. Holmes and Timmy Dutton, the late Great
Speaker 2: Timmy Dutton, and a few others. Charles Bryan RedBull air
Speaker 2: Force guy, and I had to. I had to. I
Speaker 2: got to jump with them quite a bit, actually, Paris,
Speaker 2: Lodi Davis, all over California anytime could find an airplane
Speaker 2: with the door love jump out of it. So got
Speaker 2: into that in a substantial way and had a fair
Speaker 2: amount of experience. The thing is jumping with these guys.
Speaker 2: I had the opportunity. Most of them had jumps well
Speaker 2: over ten or fifteen thousand. Most of them actually jump
Speaker 2: for a living. Most of the guys that I would
Speaker 2: jump with with whom I would jump excuse me, would
Speaker 2: would actually be in films. You know. JT worked with
Speaker 2: on Transformers three. I mean, these are very high level folks.
Speaker 2: So I was kind of the rookie tagging along. But
Speaker 2: because of that I got a fair amount of experience
Speaker 2: quickly and had the opportunity to jump with some outstanding people.
Speaker 1: Okay, so tell us about this day ten years ago.
Speaker 2: So, by the way, I love it. Have you ever
Speaker 2: done it?
Speaker 1: I never have.
Speaker 2: By that look, it doesn't look like it's on your well.
Speaker 1: You know, I like being in control. It's like when
Speaker 1: someone said, you know, I remember when someone said, let's
Speaker 1: go to mammoth for the day, and there's this airplane
Speaker 1: these people have with a parachute whatever. But he was
Speaker 1: an instrument rated and I said, no, it's like if
Speaker 1: I'm going to commercial jet, I'm not worried, or if
Speaker 1: you're flying net jet or something like that. So there's
Speaker 1: certain Let's put it this way, if I die on
Speaker 1: the hill, if I run into a tree or god knowed,
Speaker 1: or an avalanche whatever inbounds, that's okay with me. But
Speaker 1: there's certain things I don't want to take a risk doing.
Speaker 1: Begging the question, other than skydiving, are you a limit
Speaker 1: tester in other areas? Oh.
Speaker 2: I quote my good friend JT, who he's been on
Speaker 2: sixty Minutes twice, I think, both times with Anderson Cooper
Speaker 2: AC and he was asked a questions similarly by Anderson Cooper.
Speaker 2: Are you an adrenaline junkie? Maybe a different maybe second
Speaker 2: cousin to your question, right, but pretty close, And he
Speaker 2: said no, I'm an adrenaline aficionado. So I don't know
Speaker 2: if I could say testing limits. I've not had a
Speaker 2: life full of compliance. But at the same time, I
Speaker 2: don't necessarily volunto. But I just say that maybe I'm
Speaker 2: not too sure I think about it like that, but
Speaker 2: I totally well have you have you bungee jumped? Oh?
Speaker 2: Heck yeah?
Speaker 1: What other extreme things have you done?
Speaker 2: Well? I don't know. Uh, gosh, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know how to define that other than I don't
Speaker 2: see it think them as extreme. They're just things. I
Speaker 2: fought wildland fires on a shot crew when I was young,
Speaker 2: pagd for college. Maybe maybe that's scene by extreme, is
Speaker 2: extreme by others, but for me, it was a great
Speaker 2: way to make a living running a chainsaw on on
Speaker 2: big fires out of southern New Mexico and northern New
Speaker 2: Mexico and Arizona. Oh, I've done quite a bit of uh.
Speaker 2: I was backcountry ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park, did
Speaker 2: quite a bit of hig angle rescue that was more
Speaker 2: industrial climbing because it was rescue than anything else. But
Speaker 2: I think some might see Hiengel rescue as being a
Speaker 2: little bit extreme. I don't know, but I thought it
Speaker 2: was great.
Speaker 1: Before you get there, you had this near death experience
Speaker 1: ten years ago. Prior to that, had you had any
Speaker 1: experiences were you were on the line.
Speaker 2: No, And by the way, I have to say, I
Speaker 2: found out a year later. It wasn't near death. I
Speaker 2: was dead. I was dead for six minutes. That's why
Speaker 2: it was a good day, right, Because my arm got
Speaker 2: torn off. They put it back on. I was dead
Speaker 2: in the helicopter and they brought me back to life.
Speaker 2: So in all, October thirteenth was a great day.
Speaker 1: Okay, a little bit slower. You jump out of the
Speaker 1: plane and where are you? What happened?
Speaker 2: Sure? And by the way, you just got to answer
Speaker 2: one of your five questions there, and that was I
Speaker 2: love freefall. When there would jump at fourteen thousand feet AGL,
Speaker 2: which is an acronym for above ground level, and you
Speaker 2: typically we'll come back to that pull at four thousand AGL.
Speaker 2: In between fourteen and four thousand feet is ten thousand
Speaker 2: feet of free falling. And it's just one of the
Speaker 2: most pure, condemned joyful things I've ever done in my
Speaker 2: entire life. It doesn't take a particular a great deal
Speaker 2: of skill or athleticism even but it is fucking fun, man.
Speaker 2: It is so exhilarating, thrilling joy. From the first time
Speaker 2: I jumped in Paris, California, getting aff I just couldn't
Speaker 2: stop smiling. So I just love it. Absolutely love that.
Speaker 2: And I don't know if that's testing limits or adrenaline whatever,
Speaker 2: it just all they can do is tell you I
Speaker 2: love it. But so it was down there, JT and
Speaker 2: I and other friends would go down and jump down
Speaker 2: a load. I quite a bit. We lived in Trucky.
Speaker 2: I was CEO at squad Ally and Alpine Meadows for
Speaker 2: a little bit. Got hooked into JT. Great guy, great
Speaker 2: dear friend of mine and the late great Timmy Dutton
Speaker 2: who died tragically a year later in an air to
Speaker 2: air accident skydiving the same location. Still breaks my heart
Speaker 2: to think about Timmy because he's remarkable kid, remarkable young
Speaker 2: man with an incredible story. He's overcome more than most
Speaker 2: people have U and he had. He was just the
Speaker 2: best ever. Talked all show long about Timmy Dutton. But
Speaker 2: so Timmy, JT and I are jumping. Oh, actually it
Speaker 2: wasn't this weekend we were jumping with were jumping with
Speaker 2: some other friends. We had gone down to Davis to jump,
Speaker 2: but the winds were blusteries, so we got blown out there.
Speaker 2: They weren't flying that day on that Saturday, so we
Speaker 2: drove to Lodi, which is not too far from Davis,
Speaker 2: I guess and load Ie is kind of considered. With
Speaker 2: a smile on my face, I'd say it's a little
Speaker 2: bit of the truck stop of drop zones. They kind
Speaker 2: of are flying and jumping all the time and it's
Speaker 2: a good place, but it's, you know, just there and
Speaker 2: it works, and we ended up getting in a load.
Speaker 2: So what happened is we ended up in classic three
Speaker 2: or four cloaked things in sequence took place because we
Speaker 2: have a fair amount of experience jumping. We jumped out
Speaker 2: of the plane light the last group jumping Number two's
Speaker 2: pilot flew a slightly bad jump line number three. Importantly,
Speaker 2: the winds changed fold about one hundred and twenty degrees
Speaker 2: from the time we took off to the time we
Speaker 2: got to fourteen thousand feet AGL and the green light
Speaker 2: came on to jump. And then the last thing is
Speaker 2: because JT and Timmy and I had jumped quite a
Speaker 2: bit and those guys base jump, we tend to pull low,
Speaker 2: so instead of pulling at four thousand feet AGL, which
Speaker 2: gives you a fair amount of time to remedy problems
Speaker 2: like a bad wing, a bad canopy or something like that,
Speaker 2: or spiral kick out of twisted lines. You have time
Speaker 2: to remedy. But we're pretty competent, and there's that whole
Speaker 2: confidence competent breakover curve. And I violated that curb right there,
Speaker 2: pulled low on a day I shouldn't have it. Turns out,
Speaker 2: the entire plane it was a d day landing. Everybody
Speaker 2: was scattered. But by the time I pulled it was
Speaker 2: that twelve hundred feet AGL, pretty close to the ground
Speaker 2: under canopy, and I didn't Nobody realized that the wines
Speaker 2: had folded at that point, including me. That's why I
Speaker 2: was a DDA landing. Everybody went everywhere. So got my
Speaker 2: canopy up, got a good wing, I'm gonna looking. I'm going, oh,
Speaker 2: I have a headwind right now, and I should have
Speaker 2: a tailwind. And when you don't have propulsion like in airplanes,
Speaker 2: this matters. And so you take off from and you
Speaker 2: seek to land on the drop zone. Now I'm aiming
Speaker 2: at the drop zone under canopy at say a thousand
Speaker 2: feet AGL, and your cent rates pretty decent. And I
Speaker 2: have a set of power lines in front of me,
Speaker 2: in front of me and to the right, and a
Speaker 2: couple of buildings, and I remember thinking I think this
Speaker 2: is a crack up that it's you know, skydiving Onlike skiing,
Speaker 2: for instance, there's not much of a gradient of injuries right.
Speaker 2: In other words, skiing you can hurt yourself a little
Speaker 2: bit or a lot. In skydiving, it's pretty binary. There's
Speaker 2: not much to it, right. All I could think about
Speaker 2: was the headline kind of the skydiver tried to make
Speaker 2: it underneath the power lines, right, end up like one
Speaker 2: of those bugs on a bug zapper. Okay, that one
Speaker 2: through my mind was nope. So I look down to
Speaker 2: my left and now I'm about eight hundred Things move
Speaker 2: pretty quickly in this moment. Ended up hook turning, So
Speaker 2: flying my canopy, pull hard left and hook turned into
Speaker 2: what turned out to be a vineyard. And if you
Speaker 2: didn't know what in vineyards, they have these very high
Speaker 2: tensile strong wires hold up the vines. And I'm lining
Speaker 2: up this landing. I'm pretty decent under canopy and land
Speaker 2: and blinding it up. Still a bit of a blustery day,
Speaker 2: but I'm like, okay, pull this off. Nothing panicky in
Speaker 2: my mind at this point. But right as I'm flaring,
Speaker 2: which is you've flown enough to know when you land
Speaker 2: an airplane, to see the pilots put down the flaps.
Speaker 2: So when you flare a canopy, it's the same effective
Speaker 2: things as a plane pulling the flaps down. Right, basically
Speaker 2: bring yourself to a clothes of land on your feet. Well,
Speaker 2: right as I'm flaring this, I remember catching out of
Speaker 2: the front left's risers on my canopy. My parachute pushed
Speaker 2: about foot to the right, and I'm landing in between
Speaker 2: these rows of vines and by god, if that little
Speaker 2: foot it feels like foot. Maybe it was more pushed
Speaker 2: me enough right right at the right time where one
Speaker 2: of those high tension wires caught my arm pulled it
Speaker 2: off and uh and uh at the at the elbow
Speaker 2: and uh yeah, that's that's okay. Just dont cover that, okay.
Speaker 2: Was it completely detached. It was detached at the elbow,
Speaker 2: and there was this thin strip of tissue turns out
Speaker 2: very valuable thin strip of tissue that was there. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I know, my my forearm and right hand were kind
Speaker 2: of on the ground ground. I was kneeling because the
Speaker 2: shrouds of my canopy were held up behind me on
Speaker 2: the vines. And uh yeah, so yeah, I was detached
Speaker 2: minus a shred of tissue. And I have to mention
Speaker 2: this because I again I think it's I look back
Speaker 2: with it worked out really well that day, it worked
Speaker 2: out great, and but I reached down. I'll talk about
Speaker 2: all that I did. I've done a bunch of work
Speaker 2: in trauma, right, I've been around trauma. And there's a
Speaker 2: question you asked me about eight minutes ago that I
Speaker 2: not answered. But I have never had anything like this
Speaker 2: happened to me. But I treated a whole lot of
Speaker 2: people in bad places and trauma, climbing accidents, car accidents,
Speaker 2: you name it. I've done a whole bunch of stuff
Speaker 2: in trauma. I've been in the blood. I have a
Speaker 2: stick if you will, and so, but never in this
Speaker 2: case with myself, if I had something like this, so,
Speaker 2: I hadn't clicked into that gear yet. But I reached
Speaker 2: down right when it happened, I looked down. And do
Speaker 2: you ever see that Money Python movie, Monty Python in
Speaker 2: the Holy Grail? Of course, remember when the night cuts
Speaker 2: off his arm as a blood spurt OUTA that was me.
Speaker 2: It was spurting out, man, it was it was going
Speaker 2: after it. And I hope that it doesn't gross out
Speaker 2: some of your listeners.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe it is audio. You got to put the
Speaker 1: metal images.
Speaker 2: So so, first thing I did was reach down and
Speaker 2: grab my right forearm with my left hand and tried
Speaker 2: to reattach it. Tried to put it back, tried to
Speaker 2: put it back into the elbow socket, and that didn't work.
Speaker 2: It didn't work, it didn't stay. I was bummed about that.
Speaker 2: But then then the next you know, eight ten minutes
Speaker 2: were interesting, to say the least.
Speaker 1: Okay, Unfortunately, I've been injured a number of times. Usually
Speaker 1: whatever the science is, you don't feel the pain for
Speaker 1: a while. When did you ultimately feel the pain? If ever?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to hear more about your injuries. I'm
Speaker 2: sorry for that. Hopefully you had somebody good on you.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, well listen, I'm here now, but keep going.
Speaker 2: Good, good guy?
Speaker 1: How long until you uh so?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It was, You're right, And I couldn't say that
Speaker 2: I felt pain, but I know maybe a few I
Speaker 2: would say moments, and I lose track of time because
Speaker 2: I've been tracking it. I felt some pain because when
Speaker 2: you have that kind of I had a stub, basically
Speaker 2: a humorous bone sticking out and bleeding out pretty well
Speaker 2: and I'll go back and provide you some other interesting
Speaker 2: stories about ed vettersong just Breathe that came in my
Speaker 2: background experience and more. It is quite critical how these things,
Speaker 2: in a crazy way converged into one moment my mind.
Speaker 2: But I did feel pain when I took my fist
Speaker 2: because I couldn't make a tourniquet. I just had a
Speaker 2: great tourniquet on my left hand, an altimeter had a
Speaker 2: Velkoz trap, but I couldn't get it off to put
Speaker 2: it back on the stub. So, as most anybody who's listening,
Speaker 2: as any trauma experiencers with you have that kind of bleeding,
Speaker 2: there's two things, tournique or direct pressure. In this case,
Speaker 2: I took my fist and put it underneath my stub
Speaker 2: and slowed down the bleeding. That was painful, I have
Speaker 2: to say. In the past, I've said that that was
Speaker 2: a fair amount of discomfort, but I think it'd be
Speaker 2: fair to call it pain. At that point, I felt
Speaker 2: the pain.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're in this situation, you're aware enough to
Speaker 1: try to stanch the bleeding. What's going through your mind?
Speaker 1: How does the just Weaze song come along? And how
Speaker 1: long till somebody gets to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So after I tried to put my arm back
Speaker 2: in and it didn't work, I was able to do
Speaker 2: I was now kind of in my EMT AMT mode
Speaker 2: and did an assessment of quick assessment of situation. The
Speaker 2: first thing to think about is mechanisms. Was there anything
Speaker 2: else wrong with my body? No neck head, anything like that.
Speaker 2: No good. So then what's glaringly obvious is that I'm bleeding.
Speaker 2: And now I do some quick calculations more in my
Speaker 2: clinical or trauma mode of how fast I'll bleed out
Speaker 2: with that, Now there are arteries that we can sever
Speaker 2: that will bleed out a lot faster. This one's pretty
Speaker 2: in the top five, right, the one that runs down
Speaker 2: your arm.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: Particularly because I had a slightly accelerated heart rate at
Speaker 2: this point, so leaning out and I remember thinking, I
Speaker 2: think it might have about eight minutes, And that was
Speaker 2: before I staunched the blood. Maybe eight minutes the blood
Speaker 2: flow coming out and was able to to slow that down.
Speaker 2: I said, okay, maybe I bought myself another couple three.
Speaker 2: But point being in that first component, that first element
Speaker 2: of the situation, I was in that full trauma mode,
Speaker 2: and that was kind of the first component, it was okay,
Speaker 2: interesting to say the least, there was a little bit
Speaker 2: more to it. That's probably a good way to tie
Speaker 2: off on that. What's then interesting is I flashed back
Speaker 2: to all of my experience both Heinengel Rescue Rocky mountin
Speaker 2: National Park and a volunteer fire and ambulance crew in
Speaker 2: Northwest Colorado. Everything gunshot wounds too, meaning from hunting and
Speaker 2: you name it. And almost every paramedic, every EMT has
Speaker 2: their stick and they come up on you and you
Speaker 2: probably if you've had this. Hey, Bob, my name is Andy,
Speaker 2: I'm medically trained. I'm here to help you. I want
Speaker 2: you to write and exactly.
Speaker 1: They're very calm, very direct.
Speaker 2: And usually that's to gain information quickly, including meds and
Speaker 2: all that stuff. If you're AO time, alert, awake and oriented,
Speaker 2: and in this case you issue somethings like Bob, I
Speaker 2: wants you to just pay attention to me. All I
Speaker 2: want you to do is breathe. Just breathe, man, that's
Speaker 2: all you're going to do. Two reasons for that. Number One,
Speaker 2: it gives in this case a person in a bad
Speaker 2: place something to think about, which is good regardless of
Speaker 2: where they are in terms of enjoying or enduring pain.
Speaker 2: But number two, critically, the goal there is to keep
Speaker 2: shock away because shock in and of itself is a
Speaker 2: psycho psycho, somatic, psycho, what's the word I'm looking for.
Speaker 2: It's a bodily reaction that is both mental, emotional as
Speaker 2: well as physical to protect the body. And shock will
Speaker 2: kill you. Shock kills so many times because it does
Speaker 2: things to your heart rate, your blood and more. So
Speaker 2: I went into this motive I have to keep shock away,
Speaker 2: and that was part of the tail end of the
Speaker 2: clinical side. And my whole thing is it's not uncommon.
Speaker 2: It's probably seven out of ten empts and parameds have
Speaker 2: just breathed. Bob, I just want you to breathe, and
Speaker 2: just breathe came into my brain. I'm not kidney, but
Speaker 2: I was like a meteor out of the heavens into
Speaker 2: my brain. The tune came into my head that I
Speaker 2: just was learning on the guitar a few months ago.
Speaker 2: I was not aware of it till the Buck Brandaman
Speaker 2: song or movie my good friend Buck, and it really
Speaker 2: helped me a ton, because at that point there was
Speaker 2: not much more I could do. I had stuffed my
Speaker 2: fist underneath the humorous slowed down the bleeding as much
Speaker 2: as I could, and then I was in waiting game
Speaker 2: because I couldn't do anything else because my trouds were
Speaker 2: caught up in the vines behind me and Marma's four.
Speaker 2: I was sitting there and that song came to me.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting is I was applying to myself these
Speaker 2: words that I applied to one hundred and fifty other
Speaker 2: people in rough spots, really tough spots, some of them.
Speaker 2: I'll finish off on that tale with the helicopter. Make
Speaker 2: it to the helicopter is a really important element. But
Speaker 2: that tune came to me and which I can tell
Speaker 2: you it's to me. It's remarkable and fascinating. I've never
Speaker 2: had anything like this ever happened to me my entire life.
Speaker 2: It was this convergence, the bland in my mind and
Speaker 2: the first if you know the song, yes, I understand
Speaker 2: every life must end, maybe not exactly, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of mister Rogers, Disney Sesame Street happy words when you're
Speaker 2: sitting there dying, And at this point, I think I'm think,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure I had like a couple three minutes left,
Speaker 2: but the words gave me something to think about, or
Speaker 2: the words myself. But then the lyrics gave me something
Speaker 2: to consider as I sit alone, I know someday we
Speaker 2: must go and incredibly powerful stuff. Bob Man, I gotta
Speaker 2: tell you I had never considered. I always knew about
Speaker 2: the risk of Scott having done stuff, but never been
Speaker 2: in this place. And I guess the punchline. The whole
Speaker 2: thing is, I was certain I was going to die
Speaker 2: of that. It was a clinical thing. It wasn't any
Speaker 2: kind of It was just a clinical, straight up deal.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to make it. There's nobody owhere near
Speaker 2: because it's a d Day landing. Everybody scattered and nobody
Speaker 2: knows I'm here in this vineyard. And those lyrics came
Speaker 2: to me and Bob, they helped me come to peace
Speaker 2: with something I had never even considered, and that was dying.
Speaker 2: It helped me come to peace with death, and that
Speaker 2: made everything perfect. And I was at peace in those
Speaker 2: three four moments, three or four minutes, five minutes, and
Speaker 2: that meant everything. Which I slowed down my breathing, deep breathing,
Speaker 2: and I kept cycling through those lyrics, and I don't
Speaker 2: I've listened to a couple of your podcasts, and I
Speaker 2: tried to think most folks try to be polite and
Speaker 2: try not to cuss a lot. But fucking amazing what
Speaker 2: that song did that afternoon, because the song kept me alive,
Speaker 2: and it did zeroed out in my mind because it
Speaker 2: played a role on the psychology of trauma, psycho all
Speaker 2: the psychological aspects of trauma, what it can do to people.
Speaker 2: And it just stemmed from me saying just breathe because
Speaker 2: that was my stick for being amt and didn't know
Speaker 2: the song until the Buck movie, and gosh, I don't
Speaker 2: twelve fifteen minutes later, a gaal named Amanda came to
Speaker 2: me and she had not had any experience with trauma,
Speaker 2: so I felt badly because she hadn't had any experience
Speaker 2: with trauma, but I had asked her to kind of
Speaker 2: coach her through for forming a tourniquet out of my
Speaker 2: altimeter and that really helped a lot, because then I
Speaker 2: was able to move my left fist out of my
Speaker 2: armpit and then I don't know however, many minutes later,
Speaker 2: ambulance came up. They somebody had already dispatched to Flight
Speaker 2: for Life out of UC Davis and so I'll just
Speaker 2: complete the story and you can unpack it as you
Speaker 2: see fit manif shapes. This creates this tournique end up
Speaker 2: getting backboarded. I also think it was a little bit
Speaker 2: interesting because it was a volunteer crew from Lodike, California.
Speaker 2: He was working on me, and I was somewhat coaching
Speaker 2: them through this, which was kind of freaking some of
Speaker 2: those guys out because they went to put oxygen on
Speaker 2: me because I said, guys, I need some MO two
Speaker 2: and they put a nasel caniola on me, and I said, guys,
Speaker 2: I think I'm down quite a few quarts. Do you
Speaker 2: think you could put a mask on me and crank
Speaker 2: it to seven? And I remember the guy looking at
Speaker 2: me like the hell, what the hell? And they went
Speaker 2: to the sea collar on me. I said, look, there's
Speaker 2: no mechanism on the neck, but it's cool put a
Speaker 2: sea collar. And put a sea collar on me. I said, no, dude,
Speaker 2: you're putting a size two on me. I'm not twelve.
Speaker 2: And so I'm coaching the through again. I thought it
Speaker 2: was funny, but maybe in retrospect itness. Then I hear
Speaker 2: the turbines of the helicopter backboard me. Get me set
Speaker 2: and it turns out they had to a rubber tire
Speaker 2: vehicle in the ambulance to the landing zone for the helicopter.
Speaker 2: And flash back to my days in Rock Ammant National Park.
Speaker 2: There's lots of times we put people on overnight rescues
Speaker 2: on Long Peak, Long's Peak and other climbs that honestly,
Speaker 2: we would stabilize them, transport them, get them to a
Speaker 2: good spot, and then package them up, get them on
Speaker 2: the helicopter and then fly them down to Denver. And
Speaker 2: there was three out of five times there are people
Speaker 2: that there's like, no way they're going to make it.
Speaker 2: I'm not kidding you, no way that tragically, that guy's
Speaker 2: a goner. Too much trauma, blood loss, name it internal injuries.
Speaker 2: And it's just amazing, amazing high five and the tip
Speaker 2: of the hat. Any pyramids that are flying, the flight
Speaker 2: nurses that are in these helicopters do amazing things. And
Speaker 2: those three at all, those folks, most of them that
Speaker 2: I know about, they live because of the flight nurses.
Speaker 2: And so that came to me as things were. They
Speaker 2: got the right sea color on me, got some O
Speaker 2: two and I'm making my way and I kept singing
Speaker 2: the tune. By this point, JT was on me and
Speaker 2: he was giving me encouragement and he said, you kept
Speaker 2: singing the song. We couldn't quite make it out to me.
Speaker 2: I was singing it out loud. It was at vetter
Speaker 2: song just breathe the entire thing, and couldn't meant so
Speaker 2: much to me. At that point I realized how the
Speaker 2: value of that song. But inside I was thinking about it.
Speaker 2: If I can make it to the helicopter, I have
Speaker 2: a shot, because I had done that so many times
Speaker 2: with others. I might have a shot. Because at that
Speaker 2: point I was starting to get the shroud, you know whatever.
Speaker 2: The I was starting to go. I was starting to
Speaker 2: go leave for good, one way trip. I'm bind strassa.
Speaker 2: But I figured if I could make it to the helicopter,
Speaker 2: there's a shot. And fucking amen made it to the helicopter.
Speaker 2: They slammed the doors. I'll never forget my friend, and
Speaker 2: asking the flight nurse who had his advisor down, I
Speaker 2: think he'll make it, and the guy goes like this,
Speaker 2: he shook his head no, and I looked up and
Speaker 2: I said, I'm right here. I'm sitting right here, and
Speaker 2: they slammed the door. They crank up the turbines, blinding
Speaker 2: lights from the sun, and I was like, I looked
Speaker 2: up to the guy and I said, I put fucking
Speaker 2: everything I could into getting here, and it's all on
Speaker 2: you now. I got nothing left to give on this fight.
Speaker 2: It was a fifteen to twenty minute fight to get
Speaker 2: to that moment. Apparently I died about a minute and
Speaker 2: something later, and this guy brought me back. Amazing, freaking amazing.
Speaker 2: I just love it. So October thirteenth this year and
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks, I'll be going out to Paris,
Speaker 2: California and jumping to celebrate my ten year anniversary with
Speaker 2: a couple of dear friends, including JT. Holmes. Another good
Speaker 2: friend who's a Navy seal who stepped off about two
Speaker 2: years ago, Zach Armstrong. And We're going to go celebrate
Speaker 2: my a love day because I was dead and I'm
Speaker 2: not and I'm alive and I have an arm.
Speaker 1: Okay, a couple of things. Have you been jumping in
Speaker 1: between this time? I haven't today. How good is your arm?
Speaker 2: It's exceptional because it's there. Took thirty two surgeries to reattach,
Speaker 2: it rebuilt it. I left my bicep out there, I
Speaker 2: don't have a bicep, my triceps got trashed. My hand
Speaker 2: kind of Works's back to that little strip that was
Speaker 2: still there. How good is it? I don't know how
Speaker 2: to say other than it's there and it functions plenty,
Speaker 2: good enough for me to do most everything.
Speaker 1: Can you type yes?
Speaker 2: And I know this is a podcast, but yeah, by
Speaker 2: the full motion here?
Speaker 1: Okay, It's like a doctor will say, most injuries are
Speaker 1: caused by over use and a lot of bad situations
Speaker 1: a result of bad judgment. Oh yeah, are you playing
Speaker 1: this story? Was bad judgment involved?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? And the follow up question is how right I
Speaker 2: mentioned earlier about confidence and competence, And when the condence
Speaker 2: competence curve is largely in line right with any activity,
Speaker 2: including jumping, you tend to be in a decent spot
Speaker 2: because your confidence comes from training, experience, your confidence comes
Speaker 2: from execution. Without going too much deeper into that, but
Speaker 2: in this case, my confidence was probably outstripping and then
Speaker 2: creating a deficit of judgment, and probably the major deficit
Speaker 2: in judgment there. The problem was thinking I was too
Speaker 2: cool for school and pulling love. Had I pulled it
Speaker 2: four thousand, three thousand instead of one thousand because I
Speaker 2: was jumping with all these other guys, probably would have
Speaker 2: been able to rectify and remedy the situation in a
Speaker 2: different situation. In other words, if I had been instead
Speaker 2: of one thousand feet with a tailwind, I might have
Speaker 2: been at four thousand feet with a tailwind or thirty
Speaker 2: five hundred feet with a tailwind and been able to
Speaker 2: make it over the power lines and not be a headline,
Speaker 2: or choose some other landing area other than vineyards. But
Speaker 2: I was presented with what I was presented with, and
Speaker 2: in that case, it was not good judgment on my part.
Speaker 1: Okay, Usually when something this traumatic happens, you get cancer,
Speaker 1: you have a near death experience for a period of time,
Speaker 1: you're so thrilled to be alive that it changes your perspective.
Speaker 1: But that tends to wear off. So it's ten years
Speaker 1: later and you have the anniversary. But how long did
Speaker 1: this affect your outlook? Into what degree does it affect
Speaker 1: your outlook today?
Speaker 2: Not surprisingly a very informed question. Spent it, Oh gosh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, five months in the hospital something like that,
Speaker 2: in and out of I CUS and whole bunch of
Speaker 2: surgeries ended up having to replicate the first round of
Speaker 2: surgeries that I had because they didn't take they took
Speaker 2: veins out of my legs, inverted them, became my humorous
Speaker 2: skin for my legs. My laps are taken out, rebuilt
Speaker 2: the arm, all that kinds of stuff. And in that case,
Speaker 2: it was just about trying to I mean, hell, I
Speaker 2: don't know make it through that. So phase one was
Speaker 2: glad to be here. What's going on now? And what's
Speaker 2: the next surgery? What are we trying to get done
Speaker 2: going I became quite good at surgery, as I have
Speaker 2: a pretty good stick when it comes to the antiseesiologist.
Speaker 2: Here's what to do, here's a size tube to intubate me.
Speaker 2: Surgeries longer in eight hours, put goop in my eyes.
Speaker 2: Because anyway, made it through that. Then getting out was
Speaker 2: the next six months after hospital was in all kinds
Speaker 2: of petea and my arm was still the size of
Speaker 2: a rugby ball because swelling. I still had ongoing surgeries
Speaker 2: went on for a little while, but it'd be fair
Speaker 2: to say that I was pretty heavily medicated. Bob and
Speaker 2: the meds were a mets on board with oxycotton oxy
Speaker 2: coot on GABA penton, which is a nerve med, and
Speaker 2: in that time frame, it was still about cool that
Speaker 2: I'm here, great that I'm here, encouragement from friends, everybody,
Speaker 2: from Jeremy Jones, J T. Holmes, famous people and not
Speaker 2: famous people. I didn't care. I was encouraged, glad. But
Speaker 2: then the darkness, you know, Tolkien fan, the darkness of
Speaker 2: Mortar set in. And I don't know if it's probably
Speaker 2: a combination of things, but the reality is I started
Speaker 2: getting pretty down, pretty f and depressed. I came into
Speaker 2: the Jump pretty fit. I was working out, running, traveling,
Speaker 2: all kinds of stuff. But now is me. I was
Speaker 2: one hundred and forty five pounds. I was weak, I
Speaker 2: had no muscle, and I was working with one pt
Speaker 2: guy who's outstanding. You said, Andy, I can see you're bummed,
Speaker 2: But you know, there's a million things you can still do.
Speaker 2: There's about seven things you used to do you can
Speaker 2: no longer do. What are you going to focus on?
Speaker 2: And that helped pick me up. But the long tail
Speaker 2: be truthful is that for the next year to two years,
Speaker 2: I had a pretty damned good excuse to ask for
Speaker 2: some help with pain. And I had doctors that were excellent,
Speaker 2: doctors who were prescribing me opiates to help with that pain,
Speaker 2: and it'd be fair to say that I was. I
Speaker 2: had a very difficult time stepping off of the opiate.
Speaker 1: So so how did you do it?
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, how did I do it? First was I
Speaker 2: was at a meeting in Jackson, Hawayoming and I saw
Speaker 2: this TV show And I didn't know this Bob. I
Speaker 2: kind of lived in a bit of a cave in
Speaker 2: some ways. I watched this network show, a news deal
Speaker 2: on how if some of the heroin addicts, let's face it,
Speaker 2: in the rural West, there's challenges everywhere, right, and that
Speaker 2: includes this is kind of pre fentanyl, I guess in
Speaker 2: some ways. But they talked about heroin addicts will get
Speaker 2: oxyconton oxy cota and if they can't get heroin, and
Speaker 2: to scare the shit out of me, I'm not done
Speaker 2: drugs my entire life. I'm that guy. I wear wranglers,
Speaker 2: I work with horses, all that kind of stuff. Copenhagen Tequila.
Speaker 2: Never had any need to do drugs, never did In
Speaker 2: this case, I was scared shitless and I stopped for
Speaker 2: a bit, but then ended up a couple months later
Speaker 2: a couple of bounds with pain, get back in them,
Speaker 2: and basically was to help support the words of JT. JT.
Speaker 2: Holmes and other folks around me to get off it.
Speaker 2: And then there's all there two guys, they didn't know it.
Speaker 2: Two guys at the time were with Navy Seal Team
Speaker 2: four Troop two that remained very dear friends of mine
Speaker 2: to this day, Commander Ryan Hall and Zach Armstrong, who's
Speaker 2: stepped off, and they caught win through an interesting intersection
Speaker 2: with those guys of what my circumstance was, and they basically,
Speaker 2: without necessarily saying it, knowing it, they challenged me to
Speaker 2: get off my ass and stop being a pussy and
Speaker 2: stop being a victim, and get my shit together and
Speaker 2: get fit again. And I couldn't use the word inspired,
Speaker 2: but it was driven by those guys to get better,
Speaker 2: and part of that was physically get physically fit again
Speaker 2: and get off that off those meds. Different times here
Speaker 2: and there, I found I realized that those things are
Speaker 2: freaking powerful. And also was in that camp of it's
Speaker 2: a lame version of the John Wayne thing. Why take
Speaker 2: some oxy cato oxycodone without some Jack Daniels, right, So
Speaker 2: Jack and O and so it was a bad deal truthfully.
Speaker 2: So it was a couple three years in there where
Speaker 2: I was in black bad spot, but I pulled out
Speaker 2: the friend JT and others, and also pulled out with
Speaker 2: the friends Commander Ryan Hall and Zach Armstrong got back
Speaker 2: into riding my bike. First time I got on a bike.
Speaker 2: I'd ridden bikes, race bikes for parts of my life.
Speaker 2: I rode for two miles and was exhausted. It was
Speaker 2: so like crap. You got to be kidney, but then
Speaker 2: stuck with it because these guys got my shit together,
Speaker 2: got off. Those had a couple more bouts, but I've
Speaker 2: been able to step off without going to any other
Speaker 2: clinics or anything like that. So that's how.
Speaker 1: So as we sit here right now, are you in pain? No?
Speaker 2: I can find it if you want me to, pretty easily,
Speaker 2: but no. Okay, So where are you from? Originally I
Speaker 2: am a product of the US Air Force. My dad
Speaker 2: was a fighter pilot. I was born in West Germany,
Speaker 2: back when there was a West and an East Germany, right,
Speaker 2: you and I know this now there are folks under
Speaker 2: the you know, reminding them, Hey, there used to be
Speaker 2: a West. I'm not talking Western Germany. So West Germany
Speaker 2: and then lived in Scotland. When my dad would go
Speaker 2: over seas to fight in the war fly he flew's
Speaker 2: flu F four phantoms. In fact, i'm burying him later
Speaker 2: this week up in Montana. Your father just died, died
Speaker 2: about a year and a half ago, and I have
Speaker 2: his remains. His wishes were free for me as a
Speaker 2: young new pilot to fly his ashes over the Grand
Speaker 2: Titan National Park. So I'm doing that on Thursday afternoon,
Speaker 2: and so yeah, I'm excited to do that and get
Speaker 2: that to honor his wishes. But so son of fighter
Speaker 2: pilot Scotland, Germany, Germany, Scotland. And then I think it
Speaker 2: was about ten or so, moved to southern New Mexico.
Speaker 2: Lived in southern New Mexico for a while Holloman Air
Speaker 2: Force Base, and then we moved to Virginia Langley Air
Speaker 2: Force Bace. And then my dad retired and we ended
Speaker 2: up moving around. But I've been it was in Colorado
Speaker 2: since seventy nine. Moved to Colorado, missourim.
Speaker 1: What year were you born? Sixty three? Okay, So typical
Speaker 1: Air Force brats can get along with anybody because they've
Speaker 1: been moving so much in the relatively self reliant. Would
Speaker 1: that describe you?
Speaker 2: Yeah? The only thing is I resist the ever rebut
Speaker 2: was the word to reject? The word brat? I was
Speaker 2: a prideful son of a fighter pilot. He wasn't much
Speaker 2: of a dad, but he was a kick ass air
Speaker 2: combat warrior and I respect him greatly for that, and
Speaker 2: I don't think he would have ever called me a brat.
Speaker 1: Well that's what I say. Sorry for the judgment. Come on,
Speaker 1: that's a you know, a term.
Speaker 2: Totally kidding you, totally no, no problem, okay, But so
Speaker 2: so the point being is I call it chameleon when
Speaker 2: you're when you grew up in that environment, different cultures,
Speaker 2: you learn how chameleon into different places in the answers, Yes,
Speaker 2: I feel like I can fit in almost anywhere I can.
Speaker 2: I may not look like I'm from there, but I
Speaker 2: can usually figure it out. And I was spent a
Speaker 2: year and a half in Saudi Arabia, Northwest Saudi Arabia
Speaker 2: about two years ago and was great there. Comfortable there,
Speaker 2: It was a little bit warm, but yeah, good to go. Okay, siblings,
Speaker 2: I have an older sister. This is a big thing
Speaker 2: for you, isn't it the family thing?
Speaker 1: Well, you want to know where someone comes from. We
Speaker 1: got a lot of territory to cover up. I won't
Speaker 1: exactly go into why I ask all those questions, but
Speaker 1: you know, in birth order those things really matter. So
Speaker 1: when was the first time you skied?
Speaker 2: When I was in we were in southern New Mexico
Speaker 2: and there was a little scaria near due east of Almagordo.
Speaker 2: At that time, it was called Sierra Blanca and it
Speaker 2: was owned by the Muscalleo Apache Indian tribe. And learned
Speaker 2: how to ski there as part of a you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, somebody grabbed me, I think id of
Speaker 2: You know, no dads are on the air Force base.
Speaker 2: It's all a tactical air command base, all the squadrons overseas,
Speaker 2: and so I have no idea it took me, but
Speaker 2: went skiing up near Ridoso in southern New Mexico for
Speaker 2: a time as skid was air, but then really got
Speaker 2: into it in college for Collins.
Speaker 1: When you get to college, was this the type of
Speaker 1: thing you did once and the Heaven's opened, this is
Speaker 1: my thing? Or did it take a while to be
Speaker 1: that invested.
Speaker 2: Somewhere in between? I couldn't say there was an epiphany
Speaker 2: or a light bulb or heavens open, the clouds parting.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, I was like, this is great.
Speaker 2: Also keep in mind, although the desert is certainly fun
Speaker 2: for a kid when you're ten chasing lizards and stuff,
Speaker 2: you get up to this environment near upt mountains and
Speaker 2: loved that. Right, spend some time in the mountains in
Speaker 2: Scotland and Germany. But I did love it. I loved
Speaker 2: being in that environment and I loved trying something new,
Speaker 2: and so yeah, I did enjoy it, Okay, So tell
Speaker 2: me about getting back into it seriously in college Colorado
Speaker 2: State University, Go Rams was there, and it's just what
Speaker 2: we did Port Collins, Colorado. If you know Colorado, which
Speaker 2: I think you do, we would scheme winter Park Mary
Speaker 2: Jane for the day, but then we would go to
Speaker 2: Steamboat for the weekends because you kick a northerly route
Speaker 2: through the Kashlipooter River down into Walden and a crossing
Speaker 2: the steamboat. So I just totally dug on it, just
Speaker 2: got way into it, and freshman year on just going
Speaker 2: up with friends winter Park Marriage Jane for the day
Speaker 2: and Steamboat for the weekend. Loved it, Okay. So you
Speaker 2: ultimately work at Steamboat. You graduate from college, what are
Speaker 2: your first jobs and how do you end up at Steamboat? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Completely by accident. I was formative elements to answer that
Speaker 2: question of critical I was a back country ranger in
Speaker 2: Recommanded National Park. My grandfather ran in the National Park
Speaker 2: Service for three presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. And I
Speaker 2: grew up in a family where he was the patriarch
Speaker 2: or the family. Conrad Worth, you know, respected, sorry, respected, veered,
Speaker 2: remarkable man did incredible things post World War Two for
Speaker 2: our national parks. And I grew up in that environment.
Speaker 2: In fact, was reading the works of Eldo Leopold Santa
Speaker 2: Sound County Almanac, and you know, certainly John Muir. I
Speaker 2: mean I grew up in Some folks grew up in
Speaker 2: households with football teams, religions. Mine was conservation preservation and
Speaker 2: the works of John Muir and Elder Leopold and these
Speaker 2: great people who established this culture and thinking of care
Speaker 2: for the lands. Preservation conservation mean different things. But I
Speaker 2: was aiming that direction. And UH couldn't quite pay for college,
Speaker 2: uh doing the rock the ranger thing, So they shifted
Speaker 2: gears to fighting wildland fire. On an initial attack Crew
Speaker 2: Type one crew in New Mexico, and UH loved that.
Speaker 2: I was a sawyer on a shock crew and made
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of money doing that. I loved debt
Speaker 2: work too. Love debt work, still miss it and the
Speaker 2: crew that we was with, but couldn't see a career
Speaker 2: developing out of either of those deals. But I certainly
Speaker 2: loved the mountains. Was headed to grad school. Was actually
Speaker 2: accepted to a really nice UH university up in northern
Speaker 2: California to study what I was going to get my MBA. Yep,
Speaker 2: I had shifted and took a whole bunch of business classes.
Speaker 2: Took the LSATZ, figured I was I know you were
Speaker 2: an attorney. I thought about becoming an attorney, went nah,
Speaker 2: ended up getting my I was headed to get my
Speaker 2: MBA applied to him. Was shocked to get accepted to
Speaker 2: a very high end program. I freaking hate name dropping,
Speaker 2: so I'm not going to say it, but it was
Speaker 2: a really nice school in northern California. But then all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, somebody told me I needed to my
Speaker 2: counselor said, hey, by the way, you need to do
Speaker 2: an internship to complete your undergraduate degree. And they're going
Speaker 2: to need. You're going to have to have that be
Speaker 2: where you start school at getting your MBA. It's like,
Speaker 2: oh crap. At that time, I was on the crew
Speaker 2: team rowing for this school. I had gone over to
Speaker 2: Europe into a year in Scotland University of Edinburgh study
Speaker 2: history and economics. There, worked for my uncle on weekends
Speaker 2: up in the Highlands. Came back was now extended a
Speaker 2: little bit because some of the credits and transfer. Long
Speaker 2: story short is was head of that direction.
Speaker 1: Crap.
Speaker 2: I got to do this internship. What the hell? And
Speaker 2: just aircraft carriers slammed into an internship at Steamboat Ski
Speaker 2: Area June two of nineteen eighty six. I started, and
Speaker 2: I was quite by accident. It was completely velcrode and
Speaker 2: duct taped together, and it was just to punch a
Speaker 2: you know, to check off a box. And it turns
Speaker 2: out dumb luck. A lot of my it's been good fortune,
Speaker 2: dumb luck. But I can work pretty hard. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, I'm never the smartest person in the room.
Speaker 2: In this case, I was the only person in this
Speaker 2: entire company at Steamboat who knew how to run these
Speaker 2: new things called spreadsheets. It was lotus one point one
Speaker 2: two X and I became as an intern because I
Speaker 2: was there willing to do anything. It was an unpaid internship,
Speaker 2: so I worked internship from eight thirty am to five.
Speaker 2: I was racing road bikes two so I'd train and
Speaker 2: then try and sleep for a few hours, and then
Speaker 2: I'd work at midnight as a night time monitor at
Speaker 2: a hotel in Steamboat to try and make some money
Speaker 2: because internship didn't pay. But it was like hell bent
Speaker 2: to get it done. A couple months and so go in.
Speaker 2: But in that period of time was able to become welcomed,
Speaker 2: I guess you could say by the CFO, the VP
Speaker 2: of marketing, the president of the company, and through that
Speaker 2: work with Excel, I ended up by the end of
Speaker 2: the internship they said, hey, why don't you stay here
Speaker 2: and work force for a couple of years, then go
Speaker 2: get your MBA, into which case I'll never forget, thinking, well,
Speaker 2: this is cool, I get to go right now at
Speaker 2: least combine my love of living in the mountains, skiing,
Speaker 2: and some kind of viable work in making money doing
Speaker 2: something other than hengel rescue or fighting wild land fire.
Speaker 2: And it was completely by accident, Bob, that I ended
Speaker 2: up in the ski business. And that's how.
Speaker 1: Okay, needles say you never left for MBA school, That's right.
Speaker 1: If you work in the ski business frequently, you don't
Speaker 1: ski that much. So you're working at Steamboat. How many
Speaker 1: years were you at Steamboat?
Speaker 2: Twenty just under twenty years?
Speaker 1: How much did you actually ski? If you're there for
Speaker 1: twenty years, you were moved up the corporate ladder.
Speaker 2: It points extremely well made. And the answer is always
Speaker 2: never as much as you want, and never as much
Speaker 2: as people think. To your point, and gosh, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I loved it. I loved Steamboat. I love champagne powder snow,
Speaker 2: really light dry snow that falls very uniquely in a
Speaker 2: few places. You were a little cottonwood guy at some point, right,
Speaker 2: and there's very police places on the planet where snow
Speaker 2: falls with that level that moisture content. Right, and go
Speaker 2: techy on you if you want there. But loved it.
Speaker 2: And I don't know, I'm probably skied twenty five thirty
Speaker 2: five times a year, but I was definitely working hard.
Speaker 2: And so I quickly ended up with a family and
Speaker 2: a couple of step kids, and ended up with a
Speaker 2: place north of Steamboat, a little horse ranch north of
Speaker 2: steamboat about eighteen miles. So I ended up working two
Speaker 2: sometimes three jobs just to pull things together. So I
Speaker 2: didn't ski much because of that.
Speaker 1: Oh well, if you're working for the corporation, what are
Speaker 1: the other jobs you're doing.
Speaker 2: I was pretty handy with a chainsaw, so on weekends
Speaker 2: i'd go help a fella who had a business where
Speaker 2: he was clearing brush and clearing out places for people.
Speaker 2: And I was kind of a hard worker and could
Speaker 2: work a saw pretty well, so I did that. I
Speaker 2: also would pick up pick up different kind of miniature,
Speaker 2: many consulting jobs with folks using my spreadsheet skills and
Speaker 2: some modeling quantitative analytics, and those weren't particularly taxing, but
Speaker 2: they took a lot of time.
Speaker 1: Okay, who owned steamboat when you started?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Great, great guy by the name Martin Hart in
Speaker 2: a consortium of other owners, and that was in eighty six.
Speaker 2: He ended up selling it in eighty nine to a
Speaker 2: Japanese group called Kamori Kanko. And because of my spreadsheet
Speaker 2: skills and the quantitative quant I was a bit of
Speaker 2: a quant. I got pulled pretty quickly into the transaction
Speaker 2: and running the analysis, sorry, running analysis in the like
Speaker 2: to help facilitate that transaction. So yeah, it was Martin Hart.
Speaker 2: Wonderful gentleman, great guy, deep roots in the Steamboat community.
Speaker 2: He was on the board at Pepsi for instance, PepsiCo
Speaker 2: and others. Just brilliant guy of a lot of roots
Speaker 2: in Steamboat. And then Kamara Japanese group out of support
Speaker 2: about it, and I'll stop there. I think I've answered
Speaker 2: your question.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you left. Who owned it.
Speaker 2: When I left? Yeah, oh that was okay, Now fastward,
Speaker 2: So it's Kimora Kanko and then we bought Heavenly and
Speaker 2: now I have to recreate this in my mind. And
Speaker 2: then there's American Skiing Company less Hoten the Canyons, and
Speaker 2: I had some responsibility for a bunch of resorts on that.
Speaker 2: In that case you're from New England. Absolutely, So I
Speaker 2: ended up pretty close to moving to Bethel, Maine to
Speaker 2: work with American Ski Company. It was like, man, this
Speaker 2: is pretty cool town nothing in my life had I
Speaker 2: seen like it was like a TV movie set, like
Speaker 2: town Square. And all ended up not going there but
Speaker 2: American Skiing Company and we ended up, long story short,
Speaker 2: ended up selling it to a group called Fortress Investment Group,
Speaker 2: large pe firm they might have nowadays probably two three
Speaker 2: hundred million billion under management. In that case, guy named
Speaker 2: Wes Edens was one of the four founders of Fortress.
Speaker 2: He was a skier. He went to Montana State undergraduate
Speaker 2: ski racer, then he went to Harvard, got his MBA,
Speaker 2: then off to the races. But he was held bent
Speaker 2: for owning Steamboat. He also contemporaneously was working on a
Speaker 2: transaction with Buying Interest, which was a Canadian owned company
Speaker 2: sold on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the TSX. So he
Speaker 2: bought Fortress, bought Interest the same rough time bought Steamboat.
Speaker 2: I was a big part of that transaction and was
Speaker 2: there for a little bit, and then it got pulled
Speaker 2: up to Vancouver to work with the parent up there,
Speaker 2: the parent company up in Vancouver, Canada. And had a
Speaker 2: just great time up there because its forty eight or
Speaker 2: an hour forty eight minutes away from Whistler. Skied got
Speaker 2: up there as much as I possibly could, and went
Speaker 2: back and forth between Steamboat and Vancouver, and I stepped
Speaker 2: off Steamboat. Stepped out of Steamboat in twenty ten as
Speaker 2: part of an eu nique circumstance with Squaw Valley to
Speaker 2: acquire Squad Valley.
Speaker 1: Okay, you worked at Squaw Valley for how many years total?
Speaker 2: Shoot? Seven I think?
Speaker 1: And when was the last year you were there?
Speaker 2: I believe it was twenty seventeen, but I reserved the
Speaker 2: right to be wrong.
Speaker 1: Okay. So there's been an incredible modernization in Olympic Valley.
Speaker 1: There's been the gondola between Alpine and Squaw. H How
Speaker 1: much of that was in place in terms of plans
Speaker 1: before you got there?
Speaker 2: None?
Speaker 1: So that is something. Let's just talk about the link
Speaker 1: between Alpine and Squad That has been something that's bandied
Speaker 1: about for decades. How did you finally make that happen?
Speaker 2: I'll give you as brief an answer as I can.
Speaker 2: So I took the role running as CEO of Squad Valley.
Speaker 2: Prior to that, a year prior, I'd gone down to
Speaker 2: Squad Valley with an asset manager from Fortress to buy it.
Speaker 2: Got to know the asset. If you will allow me
Speaker 2: to talk, not like a skier for a moment and
Speaker 2: more like a pe guy for a moment. I have
Speaker 2: as much passion for mountains as skiing as anybody, But
Speaker 2: at the same time I had a role and got
Speaker 2: to know the business pretty well at that time, the
Speaker 2: widow of Alex Cushing kind of the kind of the founder.
Speaker 2: One could argue that Polsons founded it. I think they'd
Speaker 2: be right in that assertion, but Nancy Cushing was only
Speaker 2: willing to sell that time forty two percent of the company,
Speaker 2: which was a no go. But in the meantime I
Speaker 2: learned a lot about it and it was WHOA, this
Speaker 2: is a incredible mountain. Incredible mountain. A year later got
Speaker 2: a call out of a clear blue sky from a
Speaker 2: CEO that I knew from American Skiing Company. Instreingly enough,
Speaker 2: and some family litigation had been settled and Nancy Kushing
Speaker 2: no longer had controlling interest of the company. Part of
Speaker 2: the settlement was that she was now a minority shareholder
Speaker 2: and I was asked to come out and be CEO
Speaker 2: of Squad Valley at that time, and this is not
Speaker 2: necessarily a scoop, but first time really discussed this publicly.
Speaker 2: Some of the family members had us, what's it take
Speaker 2: to get you here? And I said, really, this is
Speaker 2: a place where careers go to die. And I love
Speaker 2: the mountain and I love the area. Such incredible mountain,
Speaker 2: but from a career perspective. I'm on a pretty good track.
Speaker 2: I know the asset really well. I know what could
Speaker 2: happen here. Boy, I am going to do this, And
Speaker 2: they said, what's it taken said, well, honestly, this place
Speaker 2: needs new ownership more than anything else. And they said,
Speaker 2: can you help us with that? I said, yeah, past
Speaker 2: ten years, I've been working in the strategic side of things,
Speaker 2: or George Bush would say the strategicy side of things.
Speaker 2: So in this case, I said, yeah, if you guys
Speaker 2: want me to line up a transaction with this place,
Speaker 2: I guarantee you I can line it up. So before
Speaker 2: taking the role and just on a handshake, I lined
Speaker 2: up transaction A perspective buyer turns out was a group
Speaker 2: called the KSL Capital Partners based out of Cherry Creek, Colorado.
Speaker 2: They were number two behind Fortress and acquiring Steamboat, so
Speaker 2: I knew them pretty well. A couple former Veil guys
Speaker 2: were running the show. Three Veil guys were Veiled associates
Speaker 2: guys running the show down there, and knew them pretty well.
Speaker 2: And I started August two, and I think it was
Speaker 2: by September tenth, I had an exclusive letter of intent
Speaker 2: in hand from KSL interested in acquiring Squad Valley. Ended
Speaker 2: up a very sophisticated financial a group on one side
Speaker 2: and something not that on the other side. With Squad Valley.
Speaker 2: I was brand new. I didn't know much frankly, but
Speaker 2: was able to push that transaction through where we closed
Speaker 2: on the transaction I think October fifteenth, October twentieth, so
Speaker 2: in about thirty forty five days, closed on the transaction,
Speaker 2: which is lightning speed in almost any case, and the
Speaker 2: one hundred and seventy three million bucks on that transaction,
Speaker 2: and celebrated for about fifteen minutes, went for a few turns,
Speaker 2: then immediately turned my attention to Alpine Meadows. Turned on
Speaker 2: my heels, started reaching out to the PE Group small
Speaker 2: PE group out of California called JMA JMA based out
Speaker 2: of San Francisco to inquire about buying Alpine Meadows, and
Speaker 2: so was able to line up a transaction to acquire
Speaker 2: Alpine Meadows about a year and changed later November fifteenth
Speaker 2: see eleven. Yeah, twenty eleven, arranged that transaction for that transaction,
Speaker 2: I think we closed on December two, and now we
Speaker 2: have Squad Valley Alpine Meadows, and in that meantime, in
Speaker 2: the meantime, part of the investment thesis and the analytics
Speaker 2: and the transaction is to the why included. Yeah, connecting
Speaker 2: these two mountains is something that would be desirable. We
Speaker 2: were definitely not and yours truly was definitely not the
Speaker 2: first person to consider that. Right, There'd been lots and
Speaker 2: lots and lots of stuff that had happened prior a
Speaker 2: lot because mister Cushing and some of the ire he
Speaker 2: had raised with folks have pretty substantial hold sway in
Speaker 2: northern California, including Hewlett's anyway, So yeah, that's uh, there's
Speaker 2: a little bit more to it, but that's the most
Speaker 2: the samets, right.
Speaker 1: Okay, for years, you have this guy who owns a
Speaker 1: piece of land white Wolf, bought a lift, the towers
Speaker 1: are installed. I've been hearing about it for years. That
Speaker 1: is in the area between Alpine and Squaw. Why was
Speaker 1: that not rolled into the expansion connection?
Speaker 2: Troy Caldwell, this guy's name is good pal, good friend,
Speaker 2: and before I closed on, before I closed on buying
Speaker 2: Alpine Meadows, had quite a few meetings with him and
Speaker 2: said Troy just literally over his place with Troy and
Speaker 2: Suzy makes ZUZI makes great bunt cake by the way,
Speaker 2: and we're going to complete this transaction, it's really unlikely
Speaker 2: it doesn't go through. Without going into too much detail,
Speaker 2: and the next conversation is a real serious conversation about
Speaker 2: what's it take to work with you on some means
Speaker 2: by which can connect the two resorts. It turns out
Speaker 2: that how Troy ended up getting the land is a
Speaker 2: fascinating story associated with the I can't remember the name
Speaker 2: of the railway companies used to own most of the
Speaker 2: land in the West, particularly this area. He ended up
Speaker 2: buying it from the CEO of this railway train company.
Speaker 2: I can't remember how much he paid for it, but
Speaker 2: it was a below market deal and it was a
Speaker 2: pretty key piece of land. But he was clearly, and
Speaker 2: I say this very respectfully, not interested in selling. Wasn't
Speaker 2: interested in being part of the transaction. Like he said,
Speaker 2: He'd put up on his own accord a couple of
Speaker 2: lift towers and had intent to make a go of
Speaker 2: it himself. And how could you not freaking respect that
Speaker 2: guys got some key land that he has, he acquired,
Speaker 2: he put his heart and soul into it. He became
Speaker 2: a good friend and so we But we had also initiated, well,
Speaker 2: there's not going to be a transaction here for us
Speaker 2: to acquire this land, which it looked like for us
Speaker 2: to establish long term lease. And we started on that
Speaker 2: in earnest summer of eleven I think was our fall
Speaker 2: of eleven, and it took a little while to design it,
Speaker 2: but it came to pass. I guess December this last winter, right, yeah, December,
Speaker 2: this last winter. I go into that in great detail,
Speaker 2: more detail if you'd like.
Speaker 1: Well, I just don't know. The guy's not going to
Speaker 1: live forever, and now people can't ski on it. I mean,
Speaker 1: isn't it inevitable that it becomes part of Alpine's bois
Speaker 1: now called Palisads.
Speaker 2: You know what's interesting is, you know I left before
Speaker 2: I had negotiated over many years and executed a great
Speaker 2: many contracts, but many of those were probably modified or
Speaker 2: new agreements, and I don't have visibility into those, but
Speaker 2: I can tell you the conversations that Troy and I
Speaker 2: had were respectful. They weren't any kind of we want
Speaker 2: to acquire you and all that kind of stuff. It's
Speaker 2: sent how I roll, who I am. It's not how
Speaker 2: we would do it. It was clearly not how anything
Speaker 2: good was going to happen anyway, So useful on forefronts
Speaker 2: in this case, by those conversations where Troy, you know,
Speaker 2: we're not going to be around forever. We all die,
Speaker 2: taxes and death right, and what do you want to
Speaker 2: have happened to that through this land, like we're just
Speaker 2: you know, you want to put in a foundation trust.
Speaker 2: I'm here to help you, right, And you got to
Speaker 2: keep in mind that my background and my upbringing now
Speaker 2: is playing a role. And I there was turns out
Speaker 2: there was an original essays in Danger Species ACTIUDY that
Speaker 2: indicated that there was a potential impact of soon to
Speaker 2: be listed frog and the habitat was a part of
Speaker 2: this land, and I'd say, well, we're going to design
Speaker 2: around it. My grandfather would reach out of the grave
Speaker 2: and strangle me like a horror movie if I did
Speaker 2: anything to impact any endangered species listed or not. And
Speaker 2: we did that, and that was the tone and nature
Speaker 2: of those conversations. And with Troy and him, you know,
Speaker 2: the answer question is, I don't know. I don't think so.
Speaker 2: If Troy kept his same demeanor, he's established a trust
Speaker 2: or something for that land to advance through. But I
Speaker 2: don't know. Actually, as to this day, I can tell
Speaker 2: you in twenty seventeen, the answer would have been, no,
Speaker 2: it's not at all inevitable based on what Troy's disposition was.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how does it end with you at Palisades? Oh?
Speaker 2: You know, I was in a point where I had
Speaker 2: played a role in helping build Altair Mountain company. We
Speaker 2: now know it was a passholders called the Icon. We
Speaker 2: didn't call Altera at that time. Interestingly enough, that whole
Speaker 2: transaction started with West Edens. And I was on the
Speaker 2: board of USKI team, as was Air Resnik, who was
Speaker 2: the president of KSL Capital Partners. And we were at
Speaker 2: the New York City gala, a huge fundraiser for the
Speaker 2: USK team. And who's also involved this sk USK team
Speaker 2: as Wes Edens on the board of trustees. And he
Speaker 2: walks up to Eric and me and I know him
Speaker 2: quite well and Eric does him pretty well, and he says,
Speaker 2: I'm getting long in the tooth on interest. I think
Speaker 2: it might actually be putting putting a book out on
Speaker 2: that and selling it. Are you guys interested in it?
Speaker 2: To say it cut off, cut off offt guard would
Speaker 2: be an understatement. Hit pause six months earlier Mammoth Barry Sternlock,
Speaker 2: the guy had forty two percent of Mammoth and their
Speaker 2: other holdings, had put a book out on a book
Speaker 2: meaning a confidential information memorandum or kind of book out
Speaker 2: on Mammoth, but had wanted a really high multiple, very
Speaker 2: high number for that asset. Great Mountain, incredible Mountain, incredible holdings.
Speaker 2: What they built was incredible there, but just not worth that.
Speaker 2: So we passed. And then when west Edents walked away,
Speaker 2: Eric and I spent the next two hours talking about, okay, well,
Speaker 2: hold on interest in this current form. Was it no
Speaker 2: longer had Whistler's part of the asset base, but had
Speaker 2: a lot of great skirias And quickly went into the
Speaker 2: easy side of this critical word easy part of this,
Speaker 2: and that is, if you take all these great ski
Speaker 2: areas including Steamboat winter Park and others with interest, and
Speaker 2: do you have Mammoth and these other resorts, and do
Speaker 2: you have squad Valley as this point, squad Valley Ski
Speaker 2: Holdings the parent of squad Valley out by Meadows. Maybe
Speaker 2: there's a different perspective and now there's potentially a critical mass.
Speaker 2: If you can make this all makes sense enough, critical
Speaker 2: mass to actually be competitive with Vail Resorts, a very
Speaker 2: successful company based out of Broomfield, Colorado. And so that's
Speaker 2: I ended up playing a role in the role up strategy,
Speaker 2: pulling that together, some of the negotiations, some of the
Speaker 2: trips to all the assets, the presentations, the warming presentations
Speaker 2: that take place in that classic situation, and yes, skiing
Speaker 2: these mountains, which I had a great day at skiing everywhere,
Speaker 2: these places, including my hometown resort, Steamboat right which, by
Speaker 2: the way, ironically I was in Steamboat in the same
Speaker 2: very room that we had given so many management presentations
Speaker 2: to prospective owners, but now it was being presented Steamboat
Speaker 2: and all the other assets were being presented to me.
Speaker 2: I thought that was ironic. Ended up playing role and
Speaker 2: putting that together. And at that stage, Bob, I just
Speaker 2: was at a point in my career. You know a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff had gone on in Squad Valley, Alpine Meadows.
Speaker 2: I you know, by now had a few years under
Speaker 2: my belt with the ARM and I just had a
Speaker 2: different perspective on life and hit hit the punch out button,
Speaker 2: flew to ever and told those guys, said, hey, we
Speaker 2: want you to come run this company. We're building. I said,
Speaker 2: you know, I love I love these guys at KSL Capital.
Speaker 2: They're so good, they're so solid. But I'm just not
Speaker 2: it's not in the cards. It's not in the cards
Speaker 2: for me. I Yeah, So I punched out. And I
Speaker 2: also had recently been married to a wonderful lady who
Speaker 2: runs a company down here in southern part of Orange County.
Speaker 2: And I just I just had kind of worked hard,
Speaker 2: really hard like many people, like most people do, and
Speaker 2: it was time to find a different path. And so
Speaker 2: I punched out at that time.
Speaker 1: And when you punched out, as you put it, did
Speaker 1: you have enough money to get you to the end
Speaker 1: or did you?
Speaker 2: I did, Bob, And you know, I mean it seriously.
Speaker 2: You don't mean it cliche. I know how to work hard,
Speaker 2: and I think I might have learned that fighting fire.
Speaker 2: But I'm barely the smartest guy in the room, if ever.
Speaker 2: And so good fortune and hard work kind of got
Speaker 2: me to a place where, Yeah, things worked out pretty well.
Speaker 2: The transaction associated with the evaluation of squad Elly Ski
Speaker 2: Holdings and had three tranchas of equity, and things worked
Speaker 2: out pretty really well for me financially.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about the ski industry in general. So
Speaker 1: you know, skiing is a mature sport, and we've had consolidation,
Speaker 1: just like in the live music business and in the
Speaker 1: recorded music business. But in the sixties, that's when skiing
Speaker 1: originally blew up. Skiing was hip. Certainly wealthy people skied,
Speaker 1: but pretty much everybody skied. It was more of a
Speaker 1: blue collar thing. Ultimately, in the late eighties we had
Speaker 1: the transition to high speed lifts, which took really got
Speaker 1: traction in the nineties. Certainly by the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: those lists were so expensive that they raised tickets, and
Speaker 1: therefore conventional wisdom is that it out a lot of
Speaker 1: people who didn't want to spend that money. It was
Speaker 1: seen as more of the wealthy person's sport. Then, of course,
Speaker 1: Veil Associates is purchased by Apollo. Rob Katz comes in
Speaker 1: and runs it after he wants to leave New York
Speaker 1: City in two thousand and one and before the decade
Speaker 1: is out. He comes up with this concept of the
Speaker 1: epic pass. So instead of a season's pass at Veil
Speaker 1: Only or Veil and Beaver Creek costing between two and
Speaker 1: three thousand dollars for at the initial price in the
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, it was far under one thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: So there are a lot of things going on. The
Speaker 1: plan with American Ski Company with less odd and the
Speaker 1: plan with Interest was a real estate play, whereas Veil
Speaker 1: flipped the script. They said, no, we're going to make
Speaker 1: the money on the lift tickets, the ancillary, the skiing.
Speaker 1: What's on the hill? Of course, most people don't know.
Speaker 1: In most of the town's where Vail is, they own
Speaker 1: a lot of the branded shops see the Patagonia shops,
Speaker 1: see Solomon and they are evolved, involved a little in
Speaker 1: real estate. It's inevitable, but that is not their main focus.
Speaker 1: Now Epic comes along, cleans up and without going through
Speaker 1: the transition going to the ultimate point you make, we
Speaker 1: end up getting the Icon Pass, such as we have
Speaker 1: two major players. Icon Pass is a little bit more
Speaker 1: expensive than the Epic Pass, but not dramatically a couple
Speaker 1: hundred dollars. It's irrelevant if those are the skiers you're
Speaker 1: going to go to what do we know skier days
Speaker 1: And for those who don't know, that's when one person
Speaker 1: goes to a hill one day, that's a skier day.
Speaker 1: So if a person skis sixty days a year. It's
Speaker 1: sixty days. So we're not talking about the quantity of skiers,
Speaker 1: but the number of times people go on the hill.
Speaker 1: It's stable and went up, whereas before it had been
Speaker 1: you know, it had gone down, it matured, et cetera. However,
Speaker 1: there it's an interesting thing because there's backlash. You and
Speaker 1: me both know there's always backlash with any change. If
Speaker 1: you want to change we slow lift, fixed grip lift
Speaker 1: to a high speed lift in a bowl area, you
Speaker 1: always have the traditionally saying don't do that. They want
Speaker 1: to add a new lift in Jackson right now, same
Speaker 1: thing is happening. But the reason I mention all this
Speaker 1: to give a little bit of history. Take a snapshot
Speaker 1: of the industry. Now, okay, what is it mature? Can
Speaker 1: we have more excuse? I also wanted to talk one
Speaker 1: step further about the experience. Certainly on the Epic Pass,
Speaker 1: there are very few restrictions. There are a few more
Speaker 1: on the Icon Pass. This has resulted in a lot
Speaker 1: of publicity about crowding. A lot of it is not true.
Speaker 1: They'll show a picture a powdered day, people lining up
Speaker 1: where the lift opens. They'll show people when not that
Speaker 1: much of the ski area is open. It is nowhere
Speaker 1: near as crowded as the publicity, but this is seen
Speaker 1: as a factor. In addition, because of the law on
Speaker 1: the economics, you essentially can't build a new ski area.
Speaker 1: So what's gonna happen? Where are we and where we going?
Speaker 2: So you know, as an attorney, you just asked about
Speaker 2: a sixteenfold question, right, the sixteen elements here question me.
Speaker 2: I appreciate everything you just said. I'm serious, by the way,
Speaker 2: and I'll address every point that I possibly can. There's
Speaker 2: one key element you missed on the roll up on that,
Speaker 2: and that is the cheap pass. The buddy pass thing
Speaker 2: came about. I know for a fact because I was.
Speaker 1: There right in the front range of Colorado.
Speaker 2: It was Gary Defranz running when a park. He couldn't
Speaker 2: make payroll, and he came up with this idea to
Speaker 2: try and get cash in the door quick. And that
Speaker 2: was for every four people that I had passed, you
Speaker 2: get it for super cheap. And at that time it
Speaker 2: was Adam Aaron who came in from United Airlines, and
Speaker 2: Adam was running bail. Adam and I would contend, I
Speaker 2: know this to be true, would contend I would contend
Speaker 2: that his background of the United and the airline business
Speaker 2: was a little bit more commodity based pricing, where you
Speaker 2: lose share if you don't match on price. It is
Speaker 2: a simplistic way to put it, commodity being something that's
Speaker 2: only different siated by price. He ends up on Friday
Speaker 2: afternoon of Gary Defranz announcing this by Saturday afternoon during
Speaker 2: the Sneograb sale, which is a labor day sale in Denver, matching,
Speaker 2: and next thing, you know, the cheap passes born. I
Speaker 2: can't remember how many years later, maybe five, five, six,
Speaker 2: seven years later, after Adam Aaron leaves and shortly thereafter
Speaker 2: robcast leaves the board as a representative of the group
Speaker 2: you mentioned. I think they had large component of bail
Speaker 2: associations at that time. This is post bankruptcy Right Veils
Speaker 2: bankrupt in ninety two ninety three under Jillette because cross collateralization,
Speaker 2: all that jazz. But interestingly enough, the KSL guys picked
Speaker 2: it up, fixed it up, and took it public. But
Speaker 2: now it's Rob Cats coming in and he takes something
Speaker 2: that was the cheap pass. Thing happened completely by accident.
Speaker 2: It was a knee jerk like you read about. I'm
Speaker 2: not kidding you. It's kind of the I know this
Speaker 2: to be true because I was there so expand upon
Speaker 2: that time happens. Well, it was Garied French needed to
Speaker 2: make payroll for winter Park running. Oh you mean the original, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the original.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But then Rob Cats came along said there's something more here,
Speaker 2: and he took what was a complete aircraft carrier landing
Speaker 2: type knee jerk and made it into something a great
Speaker 2: deal more sophisticated, branded it called the Epic Pass, and
Speaker 2: here we are. Your point about business models is particularly relevant.
Speaker 2: I had my career responsibility for real estate, real estate development, brokerages,
Speaker 2: scary operations, you know, you name it. Pretty pretty understanding
Speaker 2: of that space. By the way, there's a pretty good
Speaker 2: analog with the music industry. In addition to these things
Speaker 2: that happened, there's also the maturation exactly just like in
Speaker 2: the music business, right when BGP gets acquired by I
Speaker 2: can't remember what group.
Speaker 1: And THENXX turns into absolutely and so there was that.
Speaker 2: There was also the maturation and the people running the businesses.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying for better or worse, it was just
Speaker 2: more mature, more people. You know, like mentioned in that email,
Speaker 2: Bill and Peter Barsodi, I learned from them from BGP.
Speaker 2: This is after Bill died concert with them, and I
Speaker 2: know the business a little bit. And you know, those
Speaker 2: guys were Gen one at BGP and the Gen two,
Speaker 2: three four, And I don't know the companies like you do.
Speaker 2: You worked for them, with them and helped lead them
Speaker 2: in this case, but you saw that first and in
Speaker 2: this case I saw firsthand the maturation of those working
Speaker 2: inside the key business. So it was a little bit
Speaker 2: more than you mentioned. But the point being is relative
Speaker 2: to real estate and what drives businesses, it's the going
Speaker 2: concerned principle they teach you in first year business school.
Speaker 2: Is really simple. You can't build the business on a
Speaker 2: long term basis just on real estate. It will fail
Speaker 2: because you're number one, run out of real estate. Number two.
Speaker 2: The evolution or the undulations associated with that. And there
Speaker 2: were those of us who is an old friend of mine,
Speaker 2: a boss of mine who went to Middlebury's also Christyman,
Speaker 2: said stick to our knitting. We're going to do this.
Speaker 2: We can do this other real estate element. But the
Speaker 2: real estate, for instance in Steamboat was meant to be
Speaker 2: was a means to an end and see what we
Speaker 2: had done tons of studies and research understand that we
Speaker 2: knew there's two three key factors to our success. Number
Speaker 2: one airline seats got to have these NonStop heats and
Speaker 2: from lax Smo, Dallas, Fort Worth all accounts of the
Speaker 2: other one is the proper running of the ski area,
Speaker 2: pricing the name. But the third one is available nightly
Speaker 2: rental pillows and we had a dearth of those. So
Speaker 2: we ended up getting into call it real estate only
Speaker 2: because it was a means to an end, not because
Speaker 2: it was a long term effort. There there were companies
Speaker 2: like Interest who were built largely upon that and they
Speaker 2: weren't successful in the long run. You mentioned another one
Speaker 2: American Skiing, a skiing company, they had their grand summit size.
Speaker 2: We ended up doing the steamboat. Grand was over hotel
Speaker 2: and conference center. Who doggie, you're stumbling back into some
Speaker 2: memories here, man, and you know your stuff. Not surprisingly,
Speaker 2: but there was a darkness and steamboat when less was there.
Speaker 2: There's bumper stickers and you name it.
Speaker 1: Just stop for one second. Yeah, how long are those
Speaker 1: grand some of hotels going to last? Depends on which
Speaker 1: one I've heard some of them are quite flimsy.
Speaker 2: It'd be fair to say that the ones and I
Speaker 2: get friends still running these resorts are going to fly
Speaker 2: out to Montana and beat me up or something that
Speaker 2: I don't know. The ones back east are pretty well veed,
Speaker 2: value engineered steamboat grant. We spent a lot of effort
Speaker 2: in securing viable, solid set up. Now, the design, physical
Speaker 2: plant design could have been better, but that one's solid.
Speaker 2: The canyons grand pretty darn good. So it depends on
Speaker 2: which one. It sounds to me like you've stayed in
Speaker 2: some of the ways.
Speaker 1: All I've read. I have some people that have ownership interests.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating thing. Just to stop an American skiing
Speaker 1: company less Odd has been trying to get back into
Speaker 1: the balsips for years now. Did it fail because of
Speaker 1: the macroeconomic situation in America or was it inherently flawed plan?
Speaker 1: Was it too much spending too soon? Was it to
Speaker 1: focus on real estate or all of that.
Speaker 2: It was even more simple than that, Bob. I can
Speaker 2: tell you from the inside out, straight up, straightforward. There's
Speaker 2: an experienced CFO who ended up cross collateralizing assets and
Speaker 2: put the company in a very very very difficult position
Speaker 2: when it came to structuring acquisition or securing companies ski
Speaker 2: areas and land with capital that was secured through cross
Speaker 2: collateralized loans, which can feel good for a couple three days,
Speaker 2: but as you know from your business experience, we'll catch
Speaker 2: up to your ass and those Our ass was caught
Speaker 2: up and it was covenants blown through and it was bad.
Speaker 2: It was really bad. So it was actually a number
Speaker 2: of factors. But I would I could make a very
Speaker 2: very strong salient. I sometimes I'm asked to speak, can
Speaker 2: do guest lecturing at business schools. It's really fun. I
Speaker 2: enjoy the heck out of that. But in this case,
Speaker 2: you can look at these three, four or five layers
Speaker 2: a little bit like my skyde accidents. Usually there's this
Speaker 2: one prevailing thing. In this case, one prevailing thing is
Speaker 2: I had an inexperienced CFO who and uh willingly or
Speaker 2: knowingly or unknowingly and unwillingly uh less signed off on this.
Speaker 2: But it was cross colateralized loans debt that brought that
Speaker 2: company to its heels, to its excuse me, Okay.
Speaker 1: So today, where is the industry that is their growth?
Speaker 1: Is there any consolidation I mean, yeah, give me your take.
Speaker 2: Sure. So inside looking out, I hear the phrase. I've
Speaker 2: heard the phrase during and after my career and the
Speaker 2: running ski resorts of consolidation, and honestly, it was there
Speaker 2: since eighty six and it's ebbed and flowed, and the
Speaker 2: trend towards consolidation. I'm like, well, which you know, this
Speaker 2: is about the sixth one I've seen. You can call
Speaker 2: it a trend. And truthfully, it's just like the music industry,
Speaker 2: right kind of. You can say the music industry just
Speaker 2: like you say the ski industry. But inside there, your
Speaker 2: view of this is very unique and informed. There's pockets
Speaker 2: of those who succeed and pockets of those who do
Speaker 2: okay and those who don't. And it has to do
Speaker 2: with their business acumen, their business model. They're thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: there's so many things to it. Ski industry is the
Speaker 2: same way highlight that they're those who have the shit
Speaker 2: together and those who don't, and those who rely on
Speaker 2: phrases like if you have snow it, you do well,
Speaker 2: if you don't, you don't. That's that's a false premise,
Speaker 2: entirely false premise. Or if we spend a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of money on share lips big metals. Spending money on
Speaker 2: big metals easy. The hard part is having it makes
Speaker 2: sense from a finite capital outlay perspective. My answer to
Speaker 2: your question is the industry has shed the intensity of
Speaker 2: focus on real estate being such a key part of
Speaker 2: seeing to the p and l their profitability. Thankfully, those
Speaker 2: who figured that out didn't take long. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of roadkill on that one in the past twenty years.
Speaker 2: And those who stuck to the netting, they are doing things,
Speaker 2: good things, whether they be Wachusetts Mountain, I think in Massachusetts, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: all the way up to the big guys. There's some
Speaker 2: smart people that still have passion for the sport that
Speaker 2: are good business people running these mountains.
Speaker 1: So well, let's just look at the two major players.
Speaker 1: There are some even Snowbrains. Today is listing the largest
Speaker 1: ski areas that are not aligned. You have White Water,
Speaker 1: you have a few in Canada, but most of these
Speaker 1: companies are aligned with one of the two major operations.
Speaker 1: So every year, at this time of year, Veil announces
Speaker 1: its capital projects. So at Veil Mountain, literally every lift
Speaker 1: is a high speed lift other than a couple of
Speaker 1: beginner lifts. Really the infrastructures improved this year at Steamboat
Speaker 1: mazing upgrades in infrastructure. So what we know is the
Speaker 1: business model is to get the capital in the spring,
Speaker 1: so you're not weather reliant. Okay. People want people to
Speaker 1: buy the pass, which breaks even usually between five and
Speaker 1: six visits. You have that money. Whether they go or not,
Speaker 1: you're at least set. So is that base of pass
Speaker 1: buyers And of course Epic two years ago actually lower
Speaker 1: the price, right, Okay?
Speaker 2: Is there a ceiling on that?
Speaker 1: You know, if you want to talk surfing, you got
Speaker 1: to be near waves, right, Okay, there's an inherently limited market.
Speaker 1: And in addition with surfing, there's in the water on
Speaker 1: the beach where's a lot of these skiaras you can
Speaker 1: actually entertain yourself if you never even go on the hill.
Speaker 1: And as a result of the high speed lifts, almost
Speaker 1: nobody skis from bell to bell every day few so
Speaker 1: you have these resort areas. What is the ceiling? Knowing
Speaker 1: that we I mean, it appears we can't build any
Speaker 1: more infrastructure in terms of new mountains, what's going to
Speaker 1: happen here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bob, I'm not trying to pivot or do the
Speaker 2: Sunday Morning, Meet the Press, politician pivot. I'm not I
Speaker 2: stepped off that business world, that world about five years ago.
Speaker 2: I don't have a good contemporary answer for you. But
Speaker 2: let me, just as President Obama said, I loved his interstitials,
Speaker 2: let me say this about that. In this case, I
Speaker 2: would say, I completely understand the center point of your
Speaker 2: question and all of the iterations. I get it. That
Speaker 2: could be said that that's one of the reasons I
Speaker 2: wanted to step off, and I'd be a hypocrite to
Speaker 2: not point out my contradiction there. The contradiction self evident.
Speaker 2: The very thing that I helped build is a very
Speaker 2: thing you're talking about, right, But at the same time
Speaker 2: I realized it wasn't. I had built a good career,
Speaker 2: I had done well. I was pleased and proud of
Speaker 2: some of the things I'd done look back and wish
Speaker 2: but this case, I was like, Okay, I'm not too
Speaker 2: sure I want to be a part of this particular
Speaker 2: circumstances going forward. And that was great. That was a
Speaker 2: personal But the answer question from a strategicy perspective, is
Speaker 2: the last time I use that reference. Is it the
Speaker 2: goal to set up a competitor for Vail we felt
Speaker 2: was a good one, and the onw O Resorts by
Speaker 2: Altara Mountain Company, and then there's the on O Resorts,
Speaker 2: and then there's affiliates, right, which are part of it.
Speaker 2: I think it's like forty eight or something now something
Speaker 2: like that. We built those with Mountain Collective Partners and more.
Speaker 2: Is extremely competitive and it's a competitive environment. And by
Speaker 2: the way, the research we did with McKenzie and others,
Speaker 2: we came out of the gates price higher than the
Speaker 2: Epic Pass very much on purpose, very much on purpose.
Speaker 2: And I'm thrilled to see the Foliot on purpose based
Speaker 2: on the numbers, based on the numbers, based on the views,
Speaker 2: and you know, the fundamental premises with Alterra and the
Speaker 2: icon it was, I would think it remains this is
Speaker 2: not a commodity product. We don't compete based on price.
Speaker 2: We compete based on price and many other things in
Speaker 2: some cases are precursors and other cases or epilogues to
Speaker 2: that whole discussion and the consumer's mind. And it's not complex,
Speaker 2: but it's nuanced. I could tell you this caliber since
Speaker 2: we're here in California. California is the battleground because you
Speaker 2: have in the market for the market high volume high
Speaker 2: visitation with Squad Valley, Alpine Meadows and Mammoth in the
Speaker 2: al Terra resorts. They also have vail resorts with north Star,
Speaker 2: Heavenly and the like. But California was it, and it's
Speaker 2: also a market that travels to Ski, to Utah, to Wyoming,
Speaker 2: to Montana, Colorado of course, so it is a big
Speaker 2: deal and it was the battleground as part of the
Speaker 2: roll ups. The initial quantitative analytics we did on this
Speaker 2: stand ups pointing is I don't know exactly where it goes.
Speaker 2: I do know this that scheme has become a little
Speaker 2: bit more affordable, and that's the good news. The other
Speaker 2: news is it's become more affordable and that's brought a
Speaker 2: lot more people to the sport and trying to find
Speaker 2: that equilibrium, that balance, I mean, it's it's with a
Speaker 2: great deal of pain and oh type kind of like
Speaker 2: geez seeing the lines on those high demand days. The
Speaker 2: compaction that we talk about, you know, to our lines
Speaker 2: at this resort and this resort, everybody gets them. And
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter how many gondolas high speed h you
Speaker 2: put out of a base. When you have twelve thousand
Speaker 2: people that want to go skiing in between nine am
Speaker 2: and nine thirty am. There's not a lift system on
Speaker 2: the planet that can move them out because squad we had,
Speaker 2: even with the base base which is at fourteen hundred hours,
Speaker 2: so twenty fourth there's I think out of base lift
Speaker 2: capacity might be six thousand something like that skiers per hour,
Speaker 2: and then you put nine thousand people that want to
Speaker 2: get up, mostly on KT understandably because fricking soul center
Speaker 2: of skiing universe right there, the incredible hill can't be done,
Speaker 2: so that compaction issue has been augmented by passes. I
Speaker 2: don't know where it goes from here. I don't have
Speaker 2: a crystal ball on that, but I do understand that
Speaker 2: I can say the obvious restate blinding clash the obvious
Speaker 2: it has become more affordable good news. The other news
Speaker 2: is it's become more affordable and it's invited more people
Speaker 2: to the sport. I'm not trying to avoid your question.
Speaker 1: No, no, I think you got it. But the reason
Speaker 1: we have to lay that groundwork is you are on
Speaker 1: the hard goods side of the equation now with peak skis,
Speaker 1: So what do we know about the hard goods. And
Speaker 1: according to your documentation, there's nine hundred thousand pairs of
Speaker 1: skis sold in a year worldwide. What do we know?
Speaker 1: The number has come down. So if we look historically,
Speaker 1: skis were not that well built. Skis are much better
Speaker 1: built than they used to. If you were a regular skier,
Speaker 1: you know you would be. We're best friends with the
Speaker 1: warranty department and I can talk from experience. Whereas the skis,
Speaker 1: the skis would just fall apart, never mind the residents,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Secondly, because of airline prices for baggage, there's
Speaker 1: a whole new paradigm which always existed. There was always
Speaker 1: a rental business. Then we went into the high end
Speaker 1: rental business and now there are plenty of people who
Speaker 1: travel without skis. There's a big issue of well, how
Speaker 1: many skis can be sold in the market, and we
Speaker 1: look at these individual companies. K two starts out as
Speaker 1: a private company in Vashon Island, Washington. The two Kirchen
Speaker 1: brothers owner for a long time. Then it goes to
Speaker 1: a couple of owners and nobody wanted it. Okay, it
Speaker 1: was successful. We have Rosignol sold to Quicksilver, a disaster
Speaker 1: repurchased by the original company. We have Solomon been through
Speaker 1: a few changes, goes to a mayor. We have a
Speaker 1: lot of companies that go out of business, Knisol, etc.
Speaker 1: On and on. Then we have the Nordica Group who
Speaker 1: builds a factory. Everyone says this is the stupidest thing
Speaker 1: of all time. And now Blizard is a dominant ski brand.
Speaker 1: Having said all of that, and you were talking about
Speaker 1: the value of Squad Valley, which is a large physical asset,
Speaker 1: there's not that many zeros. There's not that much money
Speaker 1: in the scheme. So if you go back decades, never
Speaker 1: mind opening your own ski area, you'd open your own
Speaker 1: drug store. That's all changed now. Okay. Even medical groups
Speaker 1: if you can find a doctor. Certainly in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: there are doctors, not parts of group. They don't take insurance.
Speaker 1: They might file. That's it. It's a very thin layer
Speaker 1: of the business. In addition, as I say, the skis
Speaker 1: last longer because of the quiver paradigm. Active skiers have
Speaker 1: more than one pair of skis. Yep, Okay, there may
Speaker 1: be a paer they don't use. We have the whole
Speaker 1: back entry thing. Terms of powder skis. If you have
Speaker 1: a pair ten years is good enough, even if the
Speaker 1: technology changes a little bit. So why go into the
Speaker 1: physical goods business?
Speaker 2: Now beyond a great question. But before I answer it,
Speaker 2: you went to Middlebury. Were you a ski racer or
Speaker 2: free I was.
Speaker 1: I was on a ski team once. Let's be clear,
Speaker 1: I was never of that caliber in terms of racer.
Speaker 1: I was on the team once I got hurt. Then
Speaker 1: after I went to Middlebury, I lived in Little Cottonwood
Speaker 1: Canyon and at the time, in the seventies, that was
Speaker 1: the epicenter of freestyle skiing. I did not know when
Speaker 1: I moved there, but it was I competed on the
Speaker 1: freestyle circuit. I wasn't a I mean I skied Scott
Speaker 1: Brooks Banks, all the guy skiving these people every day. Okay,
Speaker 1: but in terms of my results not good. And then
Speaker 1: you realize, okay, you know, people don't understand it any
Speaker 1: elite level of physical competition. It's sports. There are psychological
Speaker 1: elements in experium and this guy, Scott Brooks bake. I
Speaker 1: would ski with him every day. He would be just
Speaker 1: as good, if not better, in competition. The average person chokes,
Speaker 1: and an educated person would realize there's only a limited
Speaker 1: amount of money in this sport. Then a friend of ours,
Speaker 1: Dirk Douglas, got hurt on an inverted. They took the
Speaker 1: inverteds out of freestyle and it crashed the business. Now,
Speaker 1: ultimately Moguls were in the Olympics in renaissance. But that's
Speaker 1: a long answer to your brief question.
Speaker 2: Got it. But you know how to ski?
Speaker 1: Oh, believe me.
Speaker 2: I know how to ski, Gero Dow. Based on that,
Speaker 2: I go deep on the freestyle community. Not as a
Speaker 2: free see skier, but Park Smalley might have been.
Speaker 1: I used to skid. I ski with Park Smallly in
Speaker 1: Mammoth in nineteen seventy five. He came out and stayed
Speaker 1: with us long before he was a coach.
Speaker 2: He's a very very dear friend of mine from Steamboat College.
Speaker 2: Steamboat Yeah and yeah, we did a truckload of stuff.
Speaker 2: In fact, hosted a bunch of freestyle World Cups. One
Speaker 2: of them I named a whole freestyle complex after him,
Speaker 2: the Perks Freestyle Complex. I'm surprised him. It was really
Speaker 2: cool that night. But go deep in that space. In fact,
Speaker 2: very dear friend Johnny Moseley ninety eight Gold and Travis
Speaker 2: Mayor and other Steamboat kids mostly go deep in that space,
Speaker 2: but have a lot of respect. The other thing, by
Speaker 2: the way, terms of I don't know what your injuries were,
Speaker 2: but in the seventies and the early eighties, no, but
Speaker 2: you guys were doing some crazy stuff in the air
Speaker 2: and landing on hard pack. And now we put groups
Speaker 2: of choppers on the hill below the bumps, the airs
Speaker 2: on the bump courses, and certainly the aerials and stuff.
Speaker 2: You guys didn't have that, So I.
Speaker 1: Know, a vast improvement. I'm interrupting, but just to make
Speaker 1: this point in that that the ski business was driven
Speaker 1: by my air quotes racing skis for decades. Then you
Speaker 1: had K two that got out of the racing business,
Speaker 1: and certainly in America, racing skis don't mean that much. Ironically,
Speaker 1: skinny the skis still are sold in Europe much more
Speaker 1: than in the United States. However, we've gotten to a point,
Speaker 1: and this is just my own personal beef, that once
Speaker 1: you start making the moguls, it's become so profetd it's
Speaker 1: not the same way such that other than moguls, the
Speaker 1: best giers and you're working with buddy, the best skiers
Speaker 1: are the racers. Just to go one step further front
Speaker 1: of mine to instructor and Aspen, and there was a
Speaker 1: video of someone analyzing the technique of Marcel Herscher who
Speaker 1: was literally breaking every rule. Yeh okay, So there's different
Speaker 1: schools of thought. When I lived in Utah, the worst
Speaker 1: thing you could be, and you would laugh. You didn't
Speaker 1: want to be an instructor. We laughed at those people.
Speaker 1: By the same token, in most ski areas, the racers
Speaker 1: are off in their own hill, their own paradigm. No
Speaker 1: one even cares about those people. Then we had big
Speaker 1: mountain skiing. You know, we have the different album, but
Speaker 1: the average person is skiing in bounds, and an incredible
Speaker 1: percentage of people if it's a storm, won't even go
Speaker 1: out right.
Speaker 2: You know, you were in little Cottonwood. You were probably
Speaker 2: on two fours, two of sevens, two eleven's, probably raise skis,
Speaker 2: straight sticks, and you were hammering down on some of
Speaker 2: the bigger bumps. Totally pick up that scene. I would, well, we.
Speaker 1: Would laugh because people started to ski on one seventy
Speaker 1: zold and mark four that you're in seventy and the
Speaker 1: bombs come on.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, totally look down on him appropriately so so
Speaker 2: Mary Jane, it was the same way Colorado in the
Speaker 2: mid eighties. It was like, you know you do not.
Speaker 2: In fact, I think they had signs up there they
Speaker 2: said anything less than a two four, literally you can't
Speaker 2: ski here, right right? Get it? So that's really cool.
Speaker 2: You have that background, that heritage and park's great guy,
Speaker 2: great friend. The answer your question comes back to something
Speaker 2: I didn't answer. Your first question was how do I
Speaker 2: know body? But it relates to this. So when I
Speaker 2: retired body, and I let me answer straight up, it
Speaker 2: makes no sense to be in the hard good side
Speaker 2: of the business when I came back from a Middle
Speaker 2: East Well, let me back up step. So I think
Speaker 2: I purchased probably five hundred to million pairs of skis
Speaker 2: in my career for different ski areas, and knowing a
Speaker 2: fair amount about the business, models would probably consistently think
Speaker 2: to myself, why would you ever want to be in
Speaker 2: that business? Because all the things you mentioned about ski
Speaker 2: resorts and the hard good side of the ski skis
Speaker 2: is right. In fact, we looked at a book on
Speaker 2: K two Mark or Vocal gosh, the thing was sixteen
Speaker 2: or something like that, rubber Maid and can't remember the
Speaker 2: different groups, but it'd be fair to say that the
Speaker 2: ski resorts side of business, even if you have somewhat
Speaker 2: of a clue, you're you're okay. Regardless of the market
Speaker 2: dynamics we've talked about, you're okay. You're probably doing twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five percent EBITDA margin on bad years and thirty
Speaker 2: thirty five percent EBITDA margin on decent years. And there
Speaker 2: are those who exceed that on an ongoing basis, and
Speaker 2: that's ebitdah right net operating cash call. It's not exactly that.
Speaker 2: Bullet's call it that for the time being, hard you
Speaker 2: goes side of the business different tale out of any
Speaker 2: ten years of any ski company you mentioned, it's not
Speaker 2: even a capital intensive business either, but because of the
Speaker 2: retail distribution model and more, and it's largely driven by
Speaker 2: Europeans save K two and their intensity of focus on racing.
Speaker 2: Be fair to say that any ten year period, you
Speaker 2: can take a snapshot and say two of those years
Speaker 2: they might pull down five to seven percent margin three
Speaker 2: or four of those ten years on I'm talking trailing
Speaker 2: ten years. Of any ten years, they're barely breaking even
Speaker 2: in those other two to three years. Remnant on this
Speaker 2: math is they're getting crushed like a bug on a
Speaker 2: windshield and knowing that, why would you want to do that? Right,
Speaker 2: Passion drives a lot of people, and in some cases
Speaker 2: I compared to some of the great folks I knew
Speaker 2: that used to run airlines Delta Continental and like there's
Speaker 2: times where they would not be doing well.
Speaker 1: I find it, We're going to buy an airline stock
Speaker 1: you know the history of airlines.
Speaker 2: I did do that, and we could talk an awful
Speaker 2: lot about that. That's also how it cut my teeth
Speaker 2: in the business and SKI was through all the analytics
Speaker 2: around the air program.
Speaker 1: What people don't know is those are subsidized flights into
Speaker 1: ski areas, so you guarantee a certain amount to the
Speaker 1: airline and if you don't hit that, the ski area
Speaker 1: makes up the shortfall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right. Called minimum revenue guarantees, And right
Speaker 2: out of in my internship, I was running models on that,
Speaker 2: which made no sense because I had no freaking earthly
Speaker 2: clue what I was doing. But I learned a lot
Speaker 2: in that process on those revenue guarantees. So back to
Speaker 2: the point, it's it didn't make sense. But when after
Speaker 2: I had retired, I got to know body really well.
Speaker 2: At this time, I was on the USK team board
Speaker 2: of directors and we I was living with my wife
Speaker 2: in San Juan Capistrano, California, and he was just up
Speaker 2: the road in Coda Kotakuta, Coda Dekaza, Coda Dekaza, the
Speaker 2: neighborhood down there in Orne.
Speaker 1: I know it's down by ranchall Sam Bernardo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. Everything around here is a rancho
Speaker 2: or a. But we'd hang out, and at that time,
Speaker 2: most of it was, Hey, how do we fix the
Speaker 2: USK team. We're having some challenges again and again again.
Speaker 2: How do we stop this maddening cycle? Tragically in that
Speaker 2: we knew each other, we were friends. I pulled I'd
Speaker 2: been asked a long time ago, fourteen or thirteen to
Speaker 2: buy Governor Sandoval of Nevada and Governor Brown at the
Speaker 2: time of California to help bring the Olympics back to
Speaker 2: like Tahoe from nineteen sixty and I called him and
Speaker 2: pulled him into some of the initial discussions on that
Speaker 2: targeting twenty twenty two. So I knew him pretty well,
Speaker 2: and I knew him as a friend. And one of
Speaker 2: the other tales of Bodie this I think worth telling,
Speaker 2: is I was lining up to buy a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of skis for Squad Valley Alpai Metos, I know, like
Speaker 2: ten fifteen, twenty thousand pairs of skis, restock and head.
Speaker 2: He was on head at the time, but he was
Speaker 2: injured and he just basically didn't have a right foot
Speaker 2: that he could have put any pressure on. If you
Speaker 2: remember that injury, I think was thirteen something like that
Speaker 2: port right, and so Head to try and influence me, says, hey,
Speaker 2: we're going to bring Boddy Miller and hang out with him.
Speaker 2: They're like, okay, cool, And we ended up skiing for
Speaker 2: the day, just the two of us, him on one
Speaker 2: foot and me on both feet. I was able because
Speaker 2: of that to somewhat keep up with him, but we
Speaker 2: didn't talk about skis or skiing at all all day
Speaker 2: long because at that time he was going through a
Speaker 2: very public challenge with his daughter. And it was when,
Speaker 2: as you know, you have many very famous people on
Speaker 2: the show, with stuff like that happens, it ends up
Speaker 2: in freaking People magazine, and it's hard enough going through
Speaker 2: challenges with kids and a split family. Anyway, For those who.
Speaker 1: Don't know, he had a young daughter drown and a
Speaker 1: swimming pool well, just.
Speaker 2: About to get to that, and this case it's his
Speaker 2: older daughter. At that time, we all we did was
Speaker 2: talk about because I had three kids from a divorced family,
Speaker 2: and how to put yourself in your own interests behind
Speaker 2: those of the interests of your kid. All we talked
Speaker 2: about we skied and we were chair lifts, and that's
Speaker 2: all we talked about. We hardly and I was like,
Speaker 2: this guy's there's nothing like the persona many thought of,
Speaker 2: you know, showing up to start kits buel for the
Speaker 2: Hona khoum with a hangover, drunk or whatever. This solid
Speaker 2: guy inside I could see it. We ride chair lips
Speaker 2: with people. You get to get to see that if
Speaker 2: you know how to pay attention. I did. I was impressed,
Speaker 2: bookmark that. Then we were living near each other, were
Speaker 2: hanging out. We're the two guys that are retired, that
Speaker 2: have too much time on her hands, drifting a conversation
Speaker 2: at the coffee shop doing and then and then tragically
Speaker 2: his daughter Emmy died, And I do anything to undo that.
Speaker 2: I would take five rounds. I would do anything to
Speaker 2: undo the pain that that caused him and his wife, Morgan.
Speaker 2: It's just fucking heartbreaking, and I was amazed at how
Speaker 2: solid he was through that circumstance. I gave him a
Speaker 2: couple and gave him. I called him and said, I
Speaker 2: don't know, I don't have any words for you. I
Speaker 2: can't help you out. All I could do is be
Speaker 2: a wingman. And he called me too three days later
Speaker 2: and started off, did you know that drowning is the
Speaker 2: number one cause of infant death? Buddy had no idea.
Speaker 2: That's how he let off, Hey, Buddy, how you doing?
Speaker 2: Did you know that? And I was so from that
Speaker 2: point forward, I can't remember how to I don't even
Speaker 2: know how to describe that error. But became better friends,
Speaker 2: Like I said, do anything to freaking undo that shitty
Speaker 2: way to become better friends. But then we ended up
Speaker 2: drifting back into conversation about you a ski team, their
Speaker 2: business ventures and alike, and a lot of stuff in
Speaker 2: between there here and there. But then on an entirely
Speaker 2: different realm of work, line of work that I do,
Speaker 2: I was over the Middle East for about a year
Speaker 2: and change came back and I had by that time.
Speaker 1: We were up in Montana, this time out for one
Speaker 1: saying what were you doing in the Middle East?
Speaker 2: A couple of things. I was working for the Crown
Speaker 2: Prints of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Ben Solomon, and I don't
Speaker 2: have anything at all good to say about that person.
Speaker 2: He is everything you read about except worse. And so
Speaker 2: I was doing a couple of different things over there,
Speaker 2: and probably not something I talked about in great detail
Speaker 2: on air. But it was an entirely different sector in
Speaker 2: space I had to do with entirely nothing to do
Speaker 2: with skiing at all.
Speaker 1: What did it have to do with.
Speaker 2: A threat and risk assessment and mitigation and in some
Speaker 2: cases training with assets of our country that might be
Speaker 2: could be special way for operators working with their Ministry
Speaker 2: of Defense to help them improve their capabilities.
Speaker 1: How does one get that gig? It's a long story, Okay,
Speaker 1: then let's forget it. Yeah, comes from the Middle East.
Speaker 2: I come back from the Middle East and I have
Speaker 2: time on my hands. And at this point body says, hey,
Speaker 2: I want to help me out with this little project
Speaker 2: he's working on and it was with a hard goods company.
Speaker 2: It was a ski company, and he asked me to
Speaker 2: help do some work with this try and fix it up,
Speaker 2: remedy some of the challenges they were having. And at
Speaker 2: one point I said, body, I sure, I'll be doing
Speaker 2: anything for you, no problem at all. And it was
Speaker 2: fair to be fair to say that Warren Buffett couldn't
Speaker 2: fix this deal up. But in the meantime I had
Speaker 2: learned a lot. I learned a bit about manufacturing of skis,
Speaker 2: which I didn't know much, and I learned about some
Speaker 2: of the stuff that was in his mind mind that
Speaker 2: he never had a chance to put in place, because
Speaker 2: and that's actually part of the ethos of our company
Speaker 2: is this is what we've done, is take all the noise,
Speaker 2: all the egos, all the stuff, all the people in
Speaker 2: between his mind and the skis, and there's nothing in
Speaker 2: between the right what is in his mind is on
Speaker 2: the skis that you ski on hard stop. But in
Speaker 2: that process learned and then, oh gosh, I don't know,
Speaker 2: six months into it, said give me a second, and
Speaker 2: I crawled back into my rusty quantitative analytics mode cave
Speaker 2: and it ran a whole bunch of analysis, whole bunch
Speaker 2: of research, you know, kind of going back to my
Speaker 2: old days, and built some models and came out of
Speaker 2: that said here's the deal. Let's go do this. But
Speaker 2: we're going to have change the model because neither of
Speaker 2: us want to be in the hard goods business because
Speaker 2: of what we described earlier. What you described earlier to
Speaker 2: be true is true. But the only means by which
Speaker 2: to make this work is with these three, four or
Speaker 2: five tenants. And we're classic business planning stage stages of concept,
Speaker 2: proof of concept, developed business plan. We're in proof of concept,
Speaker 2: developing the business plan. And in this case we need
Speaker 2: to go direct consumer. Have e com only be our
Speaker 2: deal because the distribution system of ski shops and broker
Speaker 2: the broker groups, the buying groups were killing margin. And
Speaker 2: that's why you have that circumstance. Make a pair of
Speaker 2: skis for two hundred dollars a pair, right, sell them
Speaker 2: for eight hundred whatever the MSRP is or even the
Speaker 2: most available the most commonly available pricing. But then you're
Speaker 2: selling them to those resellers. It's not somewhat self evident.
Speaker 1: Right, they're selling them for like five hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but the manufacturing manufacturers are actually netting quite
Speaker 2: a bit less. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, what I'm trying to say is that coster two
Speaker 1: hundred wholesale is four to five hundred. The retailer may
Speaker 1: sell seven to eight So if they can sell them,
Speaker 1: they're making as much as the manufacturer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if it's four to five hundred on wholesale,
Speaker 2: that's a very good number. Suffice to say that we're
Speaker 2: not going to be able to do that. And now
Speaker 2: it's whatever it was twenty twenty one or twenty two.
Speaker 2: I would think so in that zone, and it might
Speaker 2: be the last industry to move into DTCEE con direct
Speaker 2: to consumer econ. Others sell skis smaller, great companies Jay
Speaker 2: Leventhal and they're great, and they've kind of had that model,
Speaker 2: but we're contemplating something a little bit bigger scale. And
Speaker 2: so that was our the business model, which sounds easier
Speaker 2: than it sounds easier to it's easy to say it
Speaker 2: out loud than it is to actually put it in place.
Speaker 2: But because you have a tradition, you have a history
Speaker 2: in ski business, and we respect that. There was more
Speaker 2: to it than that, but that was the key thing
Speaker 2: in terms of U saying we're going to do this,
Speaker 2: We're gonna have could go DTC com. I call the
Speaker 2: buddy of mine who ran Canyon Bikes, Great Bikes. He
Speaker 2: brought Canyon to the States in twenty sixteen and industry.
Speaker 2: That's a strong analog because bikes, bike shops and alike.
Speaker 2: But they had great success, and he was nice enought
Speaker 2: to open up his playbook and share with me. But
Speaker 2: it was basically three or four Harvard Business School case studies,
Speaker 2: full of notes, notepads, and adopted a lot of policies
Speaker 2: thinking approach the canyon. They fed straight into our business model.
Speaker 2: And when we announced Peak Ski Company April sixth, I
Speaker 2: think it was last year.
Speaker 1: So body Body retires and then of course he makes
Speaker 1: a deal with Bomber Skis, which ultimately became an elite ski.
Speaker 1: He leaves Bomber, but elite in terms of price, small
Speaker 1: market ski.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then he goes with a Pacific Northwest company Cross and
Speaker 1: he really says he's invested in that company. Then he
Speaker 1: leaves that to go to Peak. Now for the once again,
Speaker 1: every business is small at the top. However, skiing is
Speaker 1: a it is relatively small compared to software, cars, whatever.
Speaker 1: So within the business one can argue quite strongly based
Speaker 1: on conversation, that he hurt his image by jumping from
Speaker 1: company to company. Yeah, and therefore, to what degree is
Speaker 1: that a factor? It's almost like well now I'm starting over,
Speaker 1: but it's like the third time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, your point's really well made, particularly in the
Speaker 2: consumer market view of things. It's very well made, particularly
Speaker 2: those who are fishonados in the sport and follow and
Speaker 2: track that that's not many, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, your points well made. In
Speaker 2: this case, he was kind of indifferent to it. And frankly,
Speaker 2: I was two, and we had the benefit of being
Speaker 2: of being indifferent to that and saying okay, got it.
Speaker 2: But I knew on the inside. He knew on the
Speaker 2: inside what had and had not happened at all ski companies,
Speaker 2: including those two that you mentioned, and that was fundamentally
Speaker 2: his ability to take what is you have to understand.
Speaker 2: I know he's been on your show. I equated him
Speaker 2: because I grew up in the Air Force to the
Speaker 2: right stuff, General Chuck Yeager, you would go to the
Speaker 2: skunk works is when that was first developed, and hang
Speaker 2: out with the flight engineers all day long, months and months,
Speaker 2: and then you get a cup of coffee, jump in
Speaker 2: a flight suit and go fly the damn thing. Come
Speaker 2: back feed input to the engineers, saying it mock point nine.
Speaker 2: And I know this because he's a friend of my father's.
Speaker 2: He was an experimental pilot too at some point, and
Speaker 2: held General Dieger in great esteem. He was unlike anybody
Speaker 2: else because he could make how the X one happened.
Speaker 2: He didn't just fly the damn thing. He played a
Speaker 2: role in its development. I realized a bodie's like that.
Speaker 2: I also really realized that his mind is very different
Speaker 2: than many think. He's got a creativity. There's times I've
Speaker 2: been on hundreds of hours of calls with him, Bob,
Speaker 2: with engineers, some of the best engineers at Design Skis,
Speaker 2: and it's just times I'll hang up and go, when
Speaker 2: did you get your Masters in engineering from MIT? He's
Speaker 2: got this brilliant mind. What's that great movie with Robin
Speaker 2: Williams about the guy running calculus? He's a janitor. He's
Speaker 2: doing calculus on the chalkboard in between wiping floors. Oh God,
Speaker 2: was that movie. I can't remember the name of that
Speaker 2: one right now. It escapes me. But he's got this
Speaker 2: mental level brilliance, creative brilliance.
Speaker 1: Well, for those who follow, and as you say, it's
Speaker 1: a limited number. Body and Marcel Herscher were known as
Speaker 1: the most terms of tinkerers. Yep, Marcel Herscher was more
Speaker 1: focusing a lot of times. I'mlike, what was the ramp angle?
Speaker 1: And is the grinding of his boots? Not that body
Speaker 1: wasn't into that either, But just to stop with Marcel
Speaker 1: for a minute, Marcel has his own company, Van Deere.
Speaker 1: Red Bull is a heavy component of that. Van Deer
Speaker 1: is also in racing, which you know is a crazy thing,
Speaker 1: but you can't make any money. They are coming Garth
Speaker 1: Select will be stocking their skis at a very high
Speaker 1: race point two thousand. What do you think of that.
Speaker 2: Legendary skier body? And I to a lesser extent that
Speaker 2: to the extent of that matters have a great deal
Speaker 2: of respect for that gentleman and what they're taking on
Speaker 2: in red Bull Holy crap, I mean Red Bull Media
Speaker 2: house and what they do. They hunt butterflies with howitzers,
Speaker 2: not shotguns, and they're forced to be contented. We specifically
Speaker 2: are choosing, to your point, not to engage in the
Speaker 2: race community. To get deep into the World Cup level
Speaker 2: racing is a commitment that are that we chose to
Speaker 2: not take on as part of our business model. It
Speaker 2: is a very European centric approach and that's understandable, as
Speaker 2: you well know, alpine ski racing doesn't have nearly the
Speaker 2: traction in the US that it does in Europe. We're
Speaker 2: just I'm going over to sold in here in three weeks,
Speaker 2: we're going to the first World Cup race. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: we're going to launch Peak over the EU and as
Speaker 2: part of the lead up to that EU UK we
Speaker 2: call it and not we, but it's called And in
Speaker 2: this case everybody have interacted. Well, you guys know that
Speaker 2: Marcel is doing stuff right, yeah, and God bless them.
Speaker 2: This comes back to your point earlier. You mentioned that
Speaker 2: there's about nine hundred thousand, two million pairs of skis
Speaker 2: every year in the US. Sold in Europe, it's two
Speaker 2: point two millions total available market, total accessible market, and
Speaker 2: we're taking on very very small components of that. Thoughtfully,
Speaker 2: we think in terms of what we're trying to take on,
Speaker 2: where we're seeking to accomplish with our small but high
Speaker 2: impact company, we think, and in this case a lot
Speaker 2: of respect from oursel he's got great skis. The price point,
Speaker 2: the distribution system, the manner, you know, the simple aspect
Speaker 2: is what's going to be your price point? Establish it
Speaker 2: how's it going to appeal to what consumer? Price is
Speaker 2: as much part of brand as anything, both by pushing
Speaker 2: people away from your product, but also in some cases
Speaker 2: attracting them. Right, folks want to have the most expensive
Speaker 2: ski with gold leaf on the top sheet and all
Speaker 2: that stuff. That's not my deal, it's not bodies deal.
Speaker 2: It's not worry about. And so we have a different
Speaker 2: offering a different value and expressing the quality of the
Speaker 2: skis and skiing experience. So we have a lot of
Speaker 2: respect from ourselves what he's got going on for such family,
Speaker 2: great operation. We're direct to consumer eCOM and.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's go to the other side. The reason
Speaker 1: I bring Van Deere is it's the only small company
Speaker 1: that seems to be playing on a relatively realistic competing
Speaker 1: with the other brands. Because in addition to that, more
Speaker 1: than ever, they're these boutique companies. Yeah, the biggest, the
Speaker 1: one of the best reputation is Wagner out of tel
Speaker 1: your Ride Yep. The reason I mentioned Wagner is if
Speaker 1: you buy a pair of Wagner skis which are one
Speaker 1: hundred percent custom I mean gore such will sell you
Speaker 1: and off the rack Wagner etc. But generally speaking, you call,
Speaker 1: you talk to them. However, they ask you for your
Speaker 1: boots sole length, right, and they mount the binding. There's
Speaker 1: this point of friction. Okay, So you are selling a
Speaker 1: product that is direct to consumer, but inherently the person
Speaker 1: has to take it to retail to get the skis mounted.
Speaker 1: You sell bindings, whether they buy bindings there or whatever.
Speaker 1: When they get the ski, it is not sciable.
Speaker 2: Right, that is correct? Is there a question there? Yes,
Speaker 2: so I know your question, Bob, I'm.
Speaker 3: Sorry, okay, and also you know do you see yourself? Okay, Wagner,
Speaker 3: let me let me have okay, go, let me address
Speaker 3: your point. I didn't mean to be contankerous on that,
Speaker 3: but your forget the business model that I built did
Speaker 3: not contemplate. I spent thirty years, and I say this
Speaker 3: for effectfully everybody with a JD at some point in
Speaker 3: their academic career, working in a risk intense environment in
Speaker 3: different states, different countries, Colorado, Utah, California, British Columbia. And
Speaker 3: the amount of time, effort, money we put into defense
Speaker 3: against PI attorneys, they circle they have a role. I
Speaker 3: don't deny that. Also, in some cases it'd be.
Speaker 2: Long story but a fair amount of time, effort, money
Speaker 2: gone into that. I built this business model in a
Speaker 2: fashion that did not contemplate taking on that type of liability.
Speaker 2: And the only liability risk that is associated with our
Speaker 2: business in that case exists when we get into mounting bindings.
Speaker 2: And you know as well as I do anybody who's
Speaker 2: a listener rols releases of liability only goes so far.
Speaker 2: You can't disclaim gross negligence, and of course PI attorneys
Speaker 2: feed off of that, and so we've chosen to not
Speaker 2: engage in mounting.
Speaker 1: So quite consciously because of liability issues, you're not doing that,
Speaker 1: that is correct.
Speaker 2: We have built, just like Canyon did, many service oriented
Speaker 2: workarounds for the customer. We consult with people one on
Speaker 2: one if they have interest. You folks live in Chicago, Dallas,
Speaker 2: Fort Worth, they have ski shops and what's become more
Speaker 2: common even through backcountry dot Com, people buy skis without
Speaker 2: bindings and they take those skis down to their ski
Speaker 2: shop in Dallas and they pay the tech seventy five
Speaker 2: dollars to mount these TYROLA binding zone good to go.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we consciously choose this path for those reasons,
Speaker 2: and more so Bob, it's critical, and I can't tell
Speaker 2: you how sincere I am. You come up These phrases
Speaker 2: maybe seen as cliches. Most of the time, we co
Speaker 2: opt them. In this case, this is mine for my life,
Speaker 2: my career, my experiences. I've never met a horse, a mountain,
Speaker 2: a dog, or a pair of skis I don't like.
Speaker 2: And that's more than just respect. I'm not Body Miller,
Speaker 2: I'm not you. I know how to ski, and I
Speaker 2: can ski kind of almost anywhere. How well I do
Speaker 2: it is probably up for grabs. But I say that respectfully.
Speaker 2: I've been on the people that run these companies, the
Speaker 2: people that have built skis, love them all. They're my friends.
Speaker 2: Everything we're doing is respectful but taken in the past.
Speaker 2: But we have a different approach. We have a different
Speaker 2: take on things. The why Body and Andy came out
Speaker 2: of retirement to do this is really predicated upon this
Speaker 2: other statement as phrase of the least important thing about
Speaker 2: our company or the skis. But they're critical, a very
Speaker 2: purposeful my trying to channel Yogi Berra. The skis are
Speaker 2: quite good, quite prideful in what we've developed. The business
Speaker 2: around it is, as I've mentioned, includes taking the noise
Speaker 2: and the people and the pride and the egos out
Speaker 2: of in between Bodie's mind and the skis. But there's
Speaker 2: other things where we have going on with Peak Ski Company,
Speaker 2: including these strategic initiatives, technology integration. We announced Peak Locate.
Speaker 1: Okay, Wall, let's let's leave those. We'll come back to
Speaker 1: this second. But let's just talk about the ski.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So in a perfect world, Yeah, something like Wagner,
Speaker 1: that's boutique Jay Skis, the guy started line. He's got
Speaker 1: a certain market, but he's within his own niche. Sure,
Speaker 1: do you see Peak as a niche company or do
Speaker 1: you want to have enough traction to compete against the
Speaker 1: traditional majors.
Speaker 2: We know for a fact that we have enough traction
Speaker 2: to compete against the majors now at a much lower
Speaker 2: the volume. And I'll put in context. We'll make sell
Speaker 2: probably hundred pairs of skis this year. That's very small
Speaker 2: compared to Fisher, Solomon and the other big brands you've mentioned,
Speaker 2: And keep in mind, and we take on ten thousand
Speaker 2: pairs of skis. Say it was just the US. It's
Speaker 2: not exactly trying to take on the taxi industry like
Speaker 2: Uber did, Right, You know do quick math, and it's
Speaker 2: less than one percent of total available market, So one
Speaker 2: could say, wow, set in the bar pretty low, and
Speaker 2: that'd be a fair statement. So we know we can compete.
Speaker 2: How fast we grow is going to be a very thoughtful,
Speaker 2: conscious effort, guided by a whole bunch of research, response
Speaker 2: and response from the customer. But it's unlikely that with
Speaker 2: wild success that we grow that number beyond twenty thousand
Speaker 2: and three years. And that's because that's not our intent.
Speaker 2: Our intent really relates to the strategic initiatives. So we'll
Speaker 2: continue to develop and make very good skis, and we
Speaker 2: fold in some of the other elements of the strategic
Speaker 2: innovation that we're doing, including locating devices, including advanced materials
Speaker 2: development with Thermoplastics and alike with a group out of Idaho,
Speaker 2: and even the entirely re engineering the manufacturing pers some skis.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to pivot out of your question, but
Speaker 2: the reason why the intent Boddy and I came out
Speaker 2: of retirement take this on. We've had covered the directed
Speaker 2: consumer model, we've covered the margin, and we're not in
Speaker 2: where we're conscious, we're aware we're not Gordon Gecko. At
Speaker 2: the same time, We did not enter into this business
Speaker 2: with nonprofit in mind. We have we're profit oriented and
Speaker 2: we're doing well. With that said, the primary motivation is
Speaker 2: too is a means to an end to fund and
Speaker 2: get these strategic initiatives going, because that's where we get
Speaker 2: true motivation. That's where I passionalized. And the answer your
Speaker 2: question is again not trying to avoid it. But I
Speaker 2: guess we're a niche. I don't know. I don't want
Speaker 2: to try.
Speaker 1: You know, historically the business was based on hot skis.
Speaker 1: You know, whether it's the sixties the ros and all
Speaker 1: Strato and the DTA meet VR seventeen, whether in the
Speaker 1: nineties it was the Rosie for us, in the turn
Speaker 1: of the century it was Solomon Excreme. Now if you
Speaker 1: go on the hill today, unlike in the other days,
Speaker 1: you will never see one dominant brand, right Whereas it
Speaker 1: used to be a majority of people would have that
Speaker 1: particular thing. But since it is a word of mouth
Speaker 1: business and companies go hot and cold, if you got traction,
Speaker 1: one would think that you'd want to sell seventy thousand
Speaker 1: pairs of skis.
Speaker 2: Sure, and that may take place. I think it's unlikely
Speaker 2: for a bunch of different reasons, and it's hard to
Speaker 2: summarize them as simple to still down points. But that's
Speaker 2: not our goal. Maybe that takes place.
Speaker 1: I mean it is a skier, okay, there's a point
Speaker 1: of pride in the equipment, like in any equipment intensive business,
Speaker 1: auto racing, et cetera. And they are the people who
Speaker 1: buy the zy skis, by the four thousand dollars skis,
Speaker 1: and they want to be the one person on the
Speaker 1: hill who has them. But a lot of skiers at
Speaker 1: the elite level they want to be on what other
Speaker 1: people are on. Yeah, okay, so if they see one
Speaker 1: person out of ten being on peak skis, they say
Speaker 1: that's a boutique skis. Sure, Like in Colorado you'll see
Speaker 1: Wagner skis, which you know on a regular basis, so
Speaker 1: you know they're expensive. This is not a mainstream thing.
Speaker 1: Last year you saw peak skis were I skied not
Speaker 1: that many. But let me just shift gears here a
Speaker 1: little bit. Okay, I skied on one brand of skis
Speaker 1: for the better part of ten years. I got many
Speaker 1: peers of this brand. They used to as you know,
Speaker 1: the cycles used to be brief for every three years.
Speaker 1: The really change of skis. Other than the paint. Now
Speaker 1: some people are going to four years, etc. But the
Speaker 1: last two iterations have been somewhat less satisfying. So I
Speaker 1: decided to go to the shop, the elite shop, and say,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll ski everything you got, okay.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 1: I end up buying a brand that I hadn't brought
Speaker 1: for fifty years. Okay, because I bought the K twos.
Speaker 1: I haven't had a K two for fifty years.
Speaker 2: Sweet, Okay.
Speaker 1: Just to go very specifically, everybody's hot on the storm Writer.
Speaker 1: Storm Writer is the very smooth skies. But if you
Speaker 1: want to go in the bumps or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: it's relatively stiff. It's not that quick. The bona fide
Speaker 1: used to be a complete truck, a joke in my
Speaker 1: but it'll plow through anything that's got no life. They
Speaker 1: made vast improvements. You could own that ski. I would
Speaker 1: have a hard time rationalizing that ski. I'm a person.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: These characteristics have changed. But it used to be that
Speaker 1: the French ski was a very lively, fast turning ski,
Speaker 1: whereas the Austrian and German skis were the opposite. There's
Speaker 1: been a trend towards the Austrian and German skis. I
Speaker 1: am more of a friend ski person. I got a
Speaker 1: million pairs of Dina Stars, and I even skied the
Speaker 1: new Dina Stars before I bought them. They turn much
Speaker 1: better than the K twos. Okay, however, they do not
Speaker 1: hold on the herds no, right, you know? And you
Speaker 1: know why right, Well they made them for a year
Speaker 1: without metal, which was a joke. And now if they
Speaker 1: have the exact opposite of K two where the rocket frame,
Speaker 1: where they have less in the front. But I'm interested
Speaker 1: in your theory why they don't hold.
Speaker 2: Torsional rigidity in the waste. It's that simple. Most skis
Speaker 2: have the same trait or characteristic from tip to tail.
Speaker 2: And I got to know that there's in between thirteen
Speaker 2: and fifteen million skiers in the US, and none of
Speaker 2: them are the same, like any industry, like any product,
Speaker 2: and in this case, everybody has different expectations. You have
Speaker 2: a level of experience and knowledge that you can feel
Speaker 2: stuff in skis. Frankly, very few people can You can
Speaker 2: feel it and you can even articulate it, which is
Speaker 2: even fewer people. The Enforcer series great skis.
Speaker 1: Well, well wait, you know I'm on the opposite. That's
Speaker 1: that's a ski that I think people are buying on reputation,
Speaker 1: right if they ski it and they skied other things,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people on Enforcers would not
Speaker 1: buy that ski, and.
Speaker 2: I, you know, respect your view. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: things we buy, whether it be phones, glasses, you know,
Speaker 2: that are based on what others are saying. Of course,
Speaker 2: in this case, I've been on them, the Enforcer Unlimited.
Speaker 2: I love it. It's a nice lightweight ski that's kind
Speaker 2: of does backcountry pretty well and light light.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm talking about the traditional ninety four one hundred
Speaker 1: with two layers of metal zach et cetera.
Speaker 2: By the way, remind me to talk about Titanol, which
Speaker 2: I didn't learn about until a year and a half ago.
Speaker 2: It's a funny story on that. So all of your
Speaker 2: points were well made. Everybody has a different perspect actives
Speaker 2: on this and their viewpoints what they're looking to skip.
Speaker 2: But back to the point of the skis. The torsial
Speaker 2: legidity is something you can find and get quickly, so
Speaker 2: you'll hear, oh, they're really great skis. We got to
Speaker 2: really stand on them, right. You hear that constantly for
Speaker 2: the thirty years over thirty years or it's a really
Speaker 2: gumby soft powder ski, right, why and so get that
Speaker 2: on hard pack good luck, because it's a it's a
Speaker 2: noodle right torsally not very rigid. Everybody has different purposes.
Speaker 2: You're used to be an East Coast guy a long
Speaker 2: time ago, but now you're kind of Sierra's guy, right,
Speaker 2: so you're probably gonna wider underfoot ski.
Speaker 1: I got a lot of skis. I got my seventy
Speaker 1: two is my eighty six billion in the nineties, got
Speaker 1: my one aweight. It's got my one eighteens it. You've
Speaker 1: got to have the right tool for the right day.
Speaker 2: For many reasons. You're way more like I saw ed
Speaker 2: Vetter and this guy's over the weekend and I just
Speaker 2: saw a Guitarists used to be a little bit better
Speaker 2: than I am nowadays, but I guitar envy. I mean,
Speaker 2: I saw some Fender strap being played. I'm like, I
Speaker 2: want that guitar, that guitar, that guitar. I'm a less Paul.
Speaker 2: I'm a Gibson less Paul. Custom guy. Just loved this
Speaker 2: sound that came out of Dickey Betts. When I was young.
Speaker 2: It was like, I want that sound, that about a
Speaker 2: sixty three Fender basement amp to go with it. It's
Speaker 2: like three quarters or at least a quarter of the
Speaker 2: great songs have been written on the Fender nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: nine Gibson Less Paul custom plugged into a Fenders right
Speaker 2: basement amp. I want that sound right, Maybe you or
Speaker 2: like that. I want that out of performance of a
Speaker 2: ski and still plenty of room for people want to
Speaker 2: play strats or telecasters or less Paul's or you name it.
Speaker 2: It's the way I see it, and a bit of
Speaker 2: a reach on an analog, but I hope you appreciate
Speaker 2: the point of the effort there. Point being is back
Speaker 2: to the skis. It's not magic, but the key hole
Speaker 2: allows the best of both worlds. It's a little bit
Speaker 2: of a bipolar situation, and you'll appreciate this. It's obviously
Speaker 2: a podcast so Kim visually, but the front third of
Speaker 2: the ski, from the tip to the unlike other skis,
Speaker 2: they have the same trait orcharacteristic from tip to tail.
Speaker 2: It's soft and forgiving on the front third, and so
Speaker 2: turn initiation is shockingly there and easy. And I remember
Speaker 2: the first time being on the prototypes December two, two
Speaker 2: years ago and I noticed it. I'm not as good
Speaker 2: as ski as you were, body, but I can ski
Speaker 2: in a holy crap. I mean this the first time
Speaker 2: on these skis, the turn initiation, this case eighty eighths
Speaker 2: of the first boards out. I couldn't believe. It's like,
Speaker 2: this makes no sense, and I was waiting for it
Speaker 2: to be gumby once I loaded it up, got into
Speaker 2: a turn, but because soft on the front turn initiation.
Speaker 2: But then all of this is not by accident. This
Speaker 2: is stuff that does not happen by accident. Once you
Speaker 2: start loading up the ski, all of the weight pressure
Speaker 2: of the physics pull pull everything to the midwaist of
Speaker 2: the ski, and now it's torsionally rigid underfoot. And that's
Speaker 2: why you have this Unlike other ski designs, the turn
Speaker 2: initiations there, whether it be the eighty eighths or the
Speaker 2: one tens, but then it's Stiffen's up on her foot
Speaker 2: once you loaded up, and it's tortially rigid underfoot, and
Speaker 2: that's why it holds me.
Speaker 1: Let me more to than that, But let me just
Speaker 1: stop here on the point that I was making so
Speaker 1: in veil my friend at a pair of the peaks,
Speaker 1: he thought that the guy gave in to him was
Speaker 1: an investor lived in the let's that's irrelevant. Sure, but
Speaker 1: he said, okay, you know, go out on him. But
Speaker 1: I'm doing my own thing. And then he said, O,
Speaker 1: I passed them to somebody at Beaver Creek, so I
Speaker 1: didn't get on them. Let's be point blank sure, okay,
Speaker 1: bring it. In the ski industry, the people who were
Speaker 1: in the traditional retail business, they are down on peak
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons. Bodies jumping from company to company,
Speaker 1: and two they don't sell them and they want to
Speaker 1: do retail. Then there are some elite places they want
Speaker 1: to sell things that are not footballed. But let's not
Speaker 1: get into that, okay. So the reason I brought up
Speaker 1: the demo of the skis, I could have gotten anything
Speaker 1: at below wholesale, and I said, okay, I'm skiing so much,
Speaker 1: let me go demo and whatever. And I ended up
Speaker 1: buying what I never would have bought, Okay, which those
Speaker 1: K twos. I bought a couple of pairs, the ninety nine.
Speaker 1: The one aweight is an unbelievable ski that's better than
Speaker 1: the ninety nine. But whatever, My point being, this is
Speaker 1: a business of people who are buying traditional, top of
Speaker 1: the line skis. I'm not talking about custom skis. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about two thousand dollars skis. Skis at usually
Speaker 1: MSRPs like seven ninety nine. An incredible percentage of those
Speaker 1: people want to ski on that ski before they buy it,
Speaker 1: sure now more than ever. But I can't ski on
Speaker 1: the peak. So what do you have to say that
Speaker 1: as peak? I mean I basically have to blindly buy it.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm blindly and then if you don't like them
Speaker 2: after thirty days urn and no questions asked. Now here's
Speaker 2: the point points well made. The key is traditional in
Speaker 2: ski industry. We are not traditional, and we're really in
Speaker 2: the industry by default, but we just don't see it
Speaker 2: that way. In this case, Canyon bikes have the same exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know canyon bikes, but if I were to
Speaker 1: bike and bike, I don't know. When it comes to
Speaker 1: my door, does it have to be assembled?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And who assembles it.
Speaker 2: That you can if you don't know how to gear
Speaker 2: it and wrench it. You they have a company that
Speaker 2: comes helps you put it together. But it's pretty pretty good.
Speaker 2: But let me do let me just so I know,
Speaker 2: because I'm interested. So someone comes to your door like
Speaker 2: Wilson Speakers, and you pay them one hundred dollars and
Speaker 2: they you're not bringing it to a retail shop, right, Okay,
Speaker 2: that is correct, But the point being is go to
Speaker 2: a ski shop, go to a bike shop. That's the analog.
Speaker 2: What do people do at the bike shop. They get
Speaker 2: on that bike and they ride around the parking lot,
Speaker 2: turn it and say, oh, buy it or not. But
Speaker 2: up into that point, it's been shaped and formed by
Speaker 2: what the Tour de France guys are on, what everybody
Speaker 2: else is saying. They are local bike club guys, you
Speaker 2: name strap, all kinds of stuff. Much the same as
Speaker 2: if you were to demo a pair of peaks, you
Speaker 2: would trade your driver's license at at ten by ten
Speaker 2: ten and get ninety minutes on that ski. Now, a
Speaker 2: guy like you could probably probably have a good chance of,
Speaker 2: no matter what the conditions are in that ninety minutes,
Speaker 2: figure out that ski pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: I think one or two runs I found is usually enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to point out that you are atypical.
Speaker 2: Not to believe me.
Speaker 1: I know most people this has been a joke for
Speaker 1: sixty years. They paid them they love them. You're right,
Speaker 1: they all do you like those skis? You never get
Speaker 1: someone who says, hey, they're not that good.
Speaker 2: Exactly the ability to demo skis. We bludgeon that barrier
Speaker 2: by saying, no questions asked, thirty days, give us your money,
Speaker 2: send them back, no questions asked, We'll pay for the
Speaker 2: shipping back. All learned by from Canyon in this case scam.
Speaker 2: Thirty days. You can put sixteen different pair of bindings
Speaker 2: on them. You can skim every minute of every day
Speaker 2: for those thirty in all kinds of conditions. You choose
Speaker 2: where and how and when you ski those, send them
Speaker 2: back to us. Done deal.
Speaker 1: So what percentage of people send them back?
Speaker 2: Two point eight percent? Do you want to know? Why?
Speaker 1: Okay? Why?
Speaker 2: Mostly because they think they wanted a wider underfoot or
Speaker 2: narrower underfoot model. Very I think maybe a granted we're small, right,
Speaker 2: but maybe for thirty forty pair of skis came back
Speaker 2: because they just didn't like them. That's cool, and we
Speaker 2: learned from those folks.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's say I was one of those people.
Speaker 1: I returned the skis. Yeah, you're going to say, absolutely,
Speaker 1: give them the money back. But Why what am I
Speaker 1: going to find out? If I turn you? Am I
Speaker 1: going to get any reluctance? You're gonna give me credit
Speaker 1: on my credit card? Immediately?
Speaker 2: Yes, credit? The latter of this two a credit card credit.
Speaker 1: What did you learn from the people who didn't want
Speaker 1: them at all?
Speaker 2: They didn't like how they turn them. Many of them
Speaker 2: were very very high performance skiers, former ski racers. Many
Speaker 2: I couldn't tell you empirically, but the vast majority were
Speaker 2: high end skiers racers really wanting something more with a
Speaker 2: consistent trait of tip to tail. They wanted torsal rigidity
Speaker 2: all the way through or something else. But in some
Speaker 2: cases they weren't too sure how to articulate. Interestingly, I
Speaker 2: found that folks can know they like or don't like
Speaker 2: a ski, but it's also tough for them to articulate.
Speaker 2: Why so that bike shop thing? But right right right,
Speaker 2: going to a bike into store, what's the first thing
Speaker 2: that happens to go to a ski shop? Tac too?
Speaker 2: A guy, you have some perspective shaped by the outside
Speaker 2: magazine gear guy that just came out, and what do
Speaker 2: they do? They grab pair of skis and they bend them. Right,
Speaker 2: guy like you knows how what he's feeling. Guy like
Speaker 2: body knows. Of the fifteen million skiers in this country,
Speaker 2: about fourteen point nine million have no idea what they're
Speaker 2: feeling when they bend those skis.
Speaker 1: I would say, you're right, so.
Speaker 2: Respectfully, of all the great ski shops and ski technicians
Speaker 2: and the people that sell skis, how much value they
Speaker 2: add in that transaction is varying. In our case, we
Speaker 2: have a straight up direct line of communication with the
Speaker 2: customer prospects as well as customers. And you know, we
Speaker 2: contend that ride and bike around a parking lot like canyon,
Speaker 2: not doing it, getting on the skis for third days,
Speaker 2: bang them, test them, drive them, send them back to them.
Speaker 2: If you don't like us. It's that simple. It's a
Speaker 2: pretty It's kind of Nordstroms has that deal from back
Speaker 2: in the nineties. Remember when Nordstroms had that classic service
Speaker 2: story of guy comes back with four pairs of tire
Speaker 2: a four sets for tires and says, I want to
Speaker 2: return them. Nor from person said sure, Well, then the
Speaker 2: course the services story is that they don't sell tires.
Speaker 2: In this case, we're in that same mode because why
Speaker 2: because in this case it's a mitigan against the business
Speaker 2: planning process, going to call it B school type of
Speaker 2: course stuff. It's a mitigan against the resistance, the consumer resistance,
Speaker 2: because there's a history of people buying skis a certain
Speaker 2: way and doing them sort of including demo tents. The
Speaker 2: scariest say, we get that, we're we're acknowledging the past.
Speaker 2: At the same time, we have some mitigants to help
Speaker 2: people get to and through that. And thankfully that's going.
Speaker 2: It's going pretty well.
Speaker 1: Okay, if you go on your websites, you were selling
Speaker 1: one brand of binding. Look now the conventional price, you
Speaker 1: can get them from anywhere. Yeah, why Look, why sell
Speaker 1: bindings at all?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are agnostic to bindings people have. And maybe
Speaker 2: I'm applying bindings to religion. Maybe I shouldn't do that,
Speaker 2: But there are people that are tied to a certain
Speaker 2: style or type of binding, right, And there's the whole
Speaker 2: thing of Fundamentally, folks that are skiers see bindings as
Speaker 2: either retention devices or release devices. Right, a guy like you,
Speaker 2: maybe it's more retention.
Speaker 1: Oh, believe me, I've only been hurt with the bindings
Speaker 1: of released exactly.
Speaker 2: And I learned that when I was skiing over in
Speaker 2: Japan with a guy who's really good skier, and he
Speaker 2: used to take those old Look bindings and take the
Speaker 2: coil out, take a section of ski pole and put
Speaker 2: it in there, and says, I just want the ski
Speaker 2: to stay on my feet. Right, Not that many people
Speaker 2: think that way. Right Back to bindings in this case,
Speaker 2: in the absence of a preference, we sell Look. Well,
Speaker 2: we'll also be selling ATK bindings here shortly and other bindings.
Speaker 2: So first year out of the gates, yeah, we Look
Speaker 2: in the absence of a you know.
Speaker 1: I'm a Look guy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, so I have to ask why Look.
Speaker 2: Simply put, how they're made. They're very durable. Number two,
Speaker 2: the Look pivot binding in particular has a small bass
Speaker 2: plate on the toe, small bass plate on the heel
Speaker 2: on a relative basis, and because of that it doesn't
Speaker 2: impinge the flex of the ski as much. Is are
Speaker 2: two basic answers. It just depends on what folks like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I buy all those things. I'm a
Speaker 1: little guy, and a funny thing. Just to go back,
Speaker 1: I had a switch from Look in the seventies because
Speaker 1: they didn't have shock absorption forward and backward, which of
Speaker 1: course they have now Now it's the freestyle of dining.
Speaker 1: Your true used to be the Solomon. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: get into the skis. You sell an eighty eight, sell
Speaker 1: a ninety eight, sell a one o four, you sell
Speaker 1: a one ten. Yep, someone comes in also, although you
Speaker 1: saw a one seventy eight, you have to solo one
Speaker 1: sixty eight instead of a one to seventy, and you
Speaker 1: go up to one ninety, which a lot of people don't.
Speaker 1: Can someone call and say, hey, give me advice which
Speaker 1: one to buy?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: And what are you going to say relative to those skis?
Speaker 2: First thing we do is go through the good old
Speaker 2: questions of where do you ski? What are the primary conditions?
Speaker 2: Give us a mountain, where do you like to ski
Speaker 2: most of the time? What are the conditions you abhor
Speaker 2: and avoid? What are the conditions you thrive in, What
Speaker 2: are the conditions you find yourself in between, background, history, frequency,
Speaker 2: all those kind of things, and what are the skis
Speaker 2: you're on? First thing, I do this all the time.
Speaker 2: We're a small company with twenty one people up there
Speaker 2: in Bozeman, Montana, where we're headquartered, and I end up
Speaker 2: on conversations all the time, which I love our perspective
Speaker 2: customers and a lot of business. What are you skiing
Speaker 2: on right now? What ski do you dig on? What
Speaker 2: are the skis do you not like? And that by
Speaker 2: the time we get through those questions in conversation, it's
Speaker 2: not like we're telephone what it call them TSRs from
Speaker 2: the nineties. You know, we're after the scripted kind of
Speaker 2: flow chart of stuff. It's more just conversation with the
Speaker 2: folks and we can help figure out pretty quickly what
Speaker 2: they're looking for in terms of with underfoot and then length.
Speaker 2: One thing about the peak skis is they tend to
Speaker 2: It's not just the keyhole, but because the other elements
Speaker 2: of the geometry absence relative apps and subsidecut comparatively for
Speaker 2: the kind of turns you can pull off in these
Speaker 2: deals on these skis, but also the rise on the front.
Speaker 2: It's not a full rocker, but it's a rise. They
Speaker 2: tend to ski about four to five centimeters shorter the
Speaker 2: most conventional skis. I think it's fair to say these
Speaker 2: are not conventional skis because the key hole and more
Speaker 2: so we take that into account. But we will get
Speaker 2: a conversation with folks because we know our skis and
Speaker 2: we'd like to know more about what they're looking for,
Speaker 2: and then we match them and we do it with
Speaker 2: human beings, not with AI, not with bots.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go to the strategic initiatives. One is the
Speaker 1: UH homing device, the location device. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2: So we had gosh when I got back it before
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabia, I think it was I was training for
Speaker 2: Denali and I had gotten up. This is back when
Speaker 2: I was talking to Bodie doing a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: different stuff, and I had this has shocked some of
Speaker 2: my good friends from the business and you maybe I'd
Speaker 2: skied fifty sixty days but had not ridden a chairlift
Speaker 2: once because I was training for Denali. A pack on
Speaker 2: my back, slide on my back, and it's a lot
Speaker 2: of boun country work. Loved it. I had a wild
Speaker 2: here one day and Strap literally duct taped some Apple
Speaker 2: layer tags onto my skis. I just want to see
Speaker 2: what would happen. Quickly found out the dark sides, the
Speaker 2: blind spots of the Apple air tag, form factor, limitations,
Speaker 2: battery life and all that kind of stuff. But then
Speaker 2: bookmarked that and said, still there's something here right in
Speaker 2: terms of being able to find your skis come fast forward.
Speaker 2: So one of the three strategic initiatives prior to our
Speaker 2: announcement of Peak Locate was technology integration. We think there's
Speaker 2: a better way to integrate technology in a real way,
Speaker 2: not just in a whiz bang zippity due to a
Speaker 2: led light crap way right, true innovation that does stuff.
Speaker 2: We found a development partner called Pebbleby and they have
Speaker 2: a unique position in that they have a locating tracking
Speaker 2: capability that worked with both Apple iOS as well as
Speaker 2: Android platform Google Android platforms. Unique nobody else can do that.
Speaker 2: It's also a device that's externally rechargeable. With it in
Speaker 2: the Apple world is the Apple mag Say technology. It's
Speaker 2: called technically a g charger and the battery life is
Speaker 2: three months right out of gates. There's more to it,
Speaker 2: but then we were able to work with us and
Speaker 2: customize in the form factor, make it very small, very thin.
Speaker 2: It's roughly gosh. I think it's a neighborhood of eight
Speaker 2: millimeters by eleven millimeters and about the thickness of a
Speaker 2: credit card. And last three months worked with both platforms
Speaker 2: and so in externally rechargeable. So we announced this in
Speaker 2: March of this last year this year, excuse me. And
Speaker 2: we're working on integrating against all of our skis for
Speaker 2: twenty four to twenty five. And it's basically a tracking
Speaker 2: locating device and Simplicity does simple stuff really well. And
Speaker 2: I would argue the following I learned from the ski
Speaker 2: resort side of things. The spectrum of people that are
Speaker 2: skiers in the US A good pick on the US
Speaker 2: you have and Epic is a good example. Epic Mix.
Speaker 2: Remember when Bail came out with Epic Mix. A lot
Speaker 2: of folks still use that, but there's initial adopters that
Speaker 2: were kind of very technically tech oriented. They have used it,
Speaker 2: continue to use it right out of the well. Those
Speaker 2: people don't know these track your vertical, your runs, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Very technology tech oriented to say the least. And then
Speaker 2: the other end of spectrum is leave my ski experience alone.
Speaker 2: I don't want any technology. I just want to freaking
Speaker 2: ski right. And then the vast majority of American skiers
Speaker 2: are in between. And I equate it to four wheel drive.
Speaker 2: I live in the mountains, and I use my four
Speaker 2: wheel drive on when I have to, maybe fifteen to
Speaker 2: twenty percent of every day every year. But when I
Speaker 2: need it. I really need it, right. This device is
Speaker 2: really simple, it's elegant. If you're you don't want technology
Speaker 2: invading your ski experience, great, don't use it if you
Speaker 2: If you're a techie guy, you want to know it here.
Speaker 2: You can light it up all day long, but it
Speaker 2: goes as a device that goes underneath the top sheet,
Speaker 2: so you can't see it. And for the vast majority
Speaker 2: of people that want to locate their skis in deep snow,
Speaker 2: they are at fail and there's three thousand pairs of
Speaker 2: skis outside the lodge and they can't remember where they
Speaker 2: put them. It is a device that is a theft
Speaker 2: deterrent right because hard to defeed it without ruining the ski.
Speaker 2: It's also tracking locating device from traveling. So it's a simple,
Speaker 2: straightforward ability, a deal that works with Apple find My
Speaker 2: as well as androids.
Speaker 1: Okay, just a little bit slower.
Speaker 2: Sorry.
Speaker 1: Find My works on Wi Fi and then every other
Speaker 1: phone in the area. Yeah, it doesn't work with Wi Fi.
Speaker 1: But yeah, okay, if I'm in deep powder and I
Speaker 1: lose my ski, there might not be any other phones there.
Speaker 1: How's it going to find my ski with?
Speaker 2: We have combination Bluetooth and NFC nearfield.
Speaker 1: And what's the range of that.
Speaker 2: We've tested it at forty meters we put a ski
Speaker 2: forty meters. Yeah, we put a ski in January forty
Speaker 2: meters away and one meter deep snow, so called three
Speaker 2: feet deep in snow forty meters away, a little bit
Speaker 2: you know, call it, you know, forty yards away one
Speaker 2: hundred twenty feet. Found the ski within about thirty eight seconds.
Speaker 1: Okay. Two questions. One, Hey, the tracking device is not
Speaker 1: in this year's skis correct? Is this a business? Is
Speaker 1: this something you're going to license to other companies?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: What are the barriers to entry for competitors?
Speaker 2: On the pure technology side, competitors of a very very
Speaker 2: difficult time finding somebody who can develop this technology that
Speaker 2: works with both Apple and Android. The relevance of that
Speaker 2: is the US, sixty four percent of Americans use Apple
Speaker 2: iOS largely, the balance use Google Android. Those metrics almost
Speaker 2: perfectly invert for Europe, where Google androids the dominant platform.
Speaker 2: I think it's at sixty two percent last year, and
Speaker 2: the balance are Apple iOS. They'll a very difficult time
Speaker 2: finding somebody can make this kind of technology work with
Speaker 2: both platforms and have a device that is externally rechargeable.
Speaker 2: So those are the primary technology barriers to entry, and
Speaker 2: that's we have some exceptional IP attorneys. One guy, our
Speaker 2: primary IP attorney, worked with a little technology company in
Speaker 2: Coup Patino called Apple for sixteen years. He knows stuff,
Speaker 2: and so we have a exclusivity in this sector globally
Speaker 2: for this device that does all everything I just mentioned.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's switch to materials. Yeah, I've lived long enough
Speaker 1: to go. When they took the metal out of the skis,
Speaker 1: then they went to foam cores, then they put the
Speaker 1: metal back in. Dina Stars now putting a foam stringer
Speaker 1: for in their skis. Yeah, and you talk about something
Speaker 1: that's a new material. You were talking about titanyl earlier.
Speaker 1: Tell me about this new material.
Speaker 2: Sure, titanol. I made reference to it twice so far.
Speaker 2: But Tino I had personally and ski resorts bought skis
Speaker 2: since nineteen ninety two that had the name of the
Speaker 2: ski in ti or titanium. And I didn't find out
Speaker 2: until about two years ago that titinol is less than
Speaker 2: one point two percent titanium in it, right, I think
Speaker 2: that's I think that's deceptive.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's I already deceptive.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, uh so, hey, look we're guys carbon
Speaker 2: fiber and titanium and must be good. Right, that's bullshit.
Speaker 2: I mean, let's just call it like it is. That's bullshit.
Speaker 1: Mean college, especially now that Apple is selling a phone
Speaker 1: with titanium exterior. It it implies that these skis have titanium,
Speaker 1: which they don't.
Speaker 2: They don't. It's an elementum alloy made by a group
Speaker 2: in Austria. MG walcked it down ninety two, and since
Speaker 2: ninety two we've been seeing that, right right. I didn't
Speaker 2: know that until a year and a half could fell.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna say it was a sucker, but I was like,
Speaker 2: I kind of believed it. When I saw TI and titanium.
Speaker 2: I was like, that's not true. That's really not true.
Speaker 2: And so relative of the materials switching gears, I also
Speaker 2: came to find out and understand that carbon fiber has
Speaker 2: been to use in many skis and is a less
Speaker 2: than desirable material. Now I did know that, but I
Speaker 2: didn't know the way I do by way of body.
Speaker 2: And that is because fundamentally, without getting too deep into
Speaker 2: my modern level of engineering and physics understanding, is how
Speaker 2: it receives energy and returns energy is very spiky. So
Speaker 2: you've been on skis that have a substantial amount of
Speaker 2: carbon fibers. Somehow in this construction they receive energy and
Speaker 2: returns energy in a way that for a skier like
Speaker 2: you would be probably not very desirable. Chattery. You can
Speaker 2: got lots of different descriptions, but it doesn't work well,
Speaker 2: but it achieves the outcome desired the people making the
Speaker 2: ski light and stiff, but doesn't theoretically.
Speaker 1: They charge more for a carbon fiber ski. Is carbon
Speaker 1: more expensive?
Speaker 2: No, it depends on the braiding, It depends on all
Speaker 2: kinds of stuff. But I'm not saying it's bad because
Speaker 2: in some skis you're getting what you want, which is light, stiff,
Speaker 2: and you're not necessarily looking for performance on a turn right,
Speaker 2: backcountry touring, all kinds of side country stuff. You want
Speaker 2: skis that are primarily lightweight, right and stiff ish. But
Speaker 2: this trait and characteristic carbon fiber and how it sieves
Speaker 2: turns energy is a absolute core part in the pun
Speaker 2: of what we're talking about. So in describing this to
Speaker 2: this group we're working within. Their clients include the Department
Speaker 2: of Defense, NASA, Boeing. They're working with Amazon on the
Speaker 2: Blue Origin space shuttle. The we're small ski industry is
Speaker 2: really small compared to what they're taking on, but we've
Speaker 2: been able to work our way in and we're working
Speaker 2: with this group at the molecular level to develop. As
Speaker 2: the mag group did in Austria developed Titanle, we're working
Speaker 2: at the molecular molecular level developing our own thermoplastic that
Speaker 2: has a tracing characteristics that we desire, which is to
Speaker 2: receive and return energy in a fashion more similar to
Speaker 2: what we know to be wood rite, a more smooth
Speaker 2: distribution curve of energy return, but we still want to
Speaker 2: get the lightness and stiffness out of the material. So
Speaker 2: we're at the early stages, incipient stages of that work
Speaker 2: and very encouraging what we're doing right now. But I
Speaker 2: emphasize we're not looking at a different type of braiding
Speaker 2: of carbon fiber. We're literally starting at the molecular level
Speaker 2: of developing our own thermopas.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is also something that you as you
Speaker 1: reference Titanel on the group overseas, that you would like
Speaker 1: to see this as a standard throughout the industry, and
Speaker 1: therefore it's profit potential.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so much the same. You asked the question straight
Speaker 2: up with peak Locate. We're going to We've already we're
Speaker 2: already waist deep in discussion of use of licensing Peak
Speaker 2: Locate to other manufacturers, many of whom you've already mentioned
Speaker 2: on your show or on this podcast with we're not
Speaker 2: nearly as far down the path with the materials we're
Speaker 2: developing the thermoplastics, but be fair to say that we
Speaker 2: anticipate developing this material and being in probably a similar
Speaker 2: situation as MG has been to Titanol, and licensing it
Speaker 2: to other manufacturers.
Speaker 1: Okay, the third component of your strategic indition is the
Speaker 1: actual manufacturing process. Presently, skis are pressed. If anyone has
Speaker 1: seen the video, and it's funny because they have how
Speaker 1: you make this video. These are essentially made by end
Speaker 1: to this day, and it's the aquatic of drills light
Speaker 1: years better than it used to be. But anybody who's
Speaker 1: really into knows that every pair of ski is going
Speaker 1: to ski a little bit differently. So tell us about
Speaker 1: your manufacturing.
Speaker 2: Initiative again, stuff I didn't know until two years ago.
Speaker 2: Ska presses are basically a Panini maker, right, you have
Speaker 2: a form, you have a mold, layers that have been
Speaker 2: specified designed, all that kind of stuff go into this
Speaker 2: large machine. We have one of them in Montana laying
Speaker 2: zwn skip Press, the best one on the planet and
Speaker 2: basically a bit of pressure or a bit of heat,
Speaker 2: not a ton of pressure in a very specifically oriented way.
Speaker 2: Takes a sandwich construction which involves a pockey's glues, resins,
Speaker 2: some heat and this impresses it pull them out your
Speaker 2: points well made. Every pair of skis is handmade. They
Speaker 2: just are made too through them.
Speaker 1: I mean literally they personally got they lay the fiberglass.
Speaker 2: Yes, incredible, it's it's actually the equivalent if you know
Speaker 2: what a mimeograph machine is. But it would be as
Speaker 2: if the laser printer had yet to be made and
Speaker 2: we were still using mimiograph machines. That is what a
Speaker 2: ski press is.
Speaker 1: Verse.
Speaker 2: But if you attach a computer the mimeograph machine, it's
Speaker 2: still a mimeograph machine. Right. Get a point. So body
Speaker 2: has some contacts in public Germany group called Beeler BI
Speaker 2: H l E R. And they have nothing to do
Speaker 2: with ski business and their clients include Mercedes, benz Bosch
Speaker 2: and others. They are exceptionally good at fully automated, high precision,
Speaker 2: multi material elements coming into a machinery process. To automate
Speaker 2: skis in manufacturing, basically take us out of the mimiograph
Speaker 2: era and do what maybe the Healtt Packard group did
Speaker 2: developed laser printer. We're well down the path on that
Speaker 2: working with this group, and be fair to we call
Speaker 2: it Project Treadstone because it's I thought that was kind
Speaker 2: of a funny reference. Obviously, with the absence of your smiling,
Speaker 2: it wasn't funny enough. Maybe you can help me owe
Speaker 2: a new name. But we're getting pretty far down the
Speaker 2: path to basically re engineer the entire process by which
Speaker 2: skis are made, and it has to do with materials
Speaker 2: coming in, the components, how they come together and come out.
Speaker 2: The other elements are probably not It's not going to
Speaker 2: look much in a year to maybe nine months to
Speaker 2: twelve months from now. We'll help a prototype over in
Speaker 2: Germany and be fair to say that it won't look
Speaker 2: anything like how skis are made today.
Speaker 1: And that would also theoretically be a business. You would
Speaker 1: sell that to other manufacturers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we would, We would see ourselves.
Speaker 1: Okay, now, these three strategic initiatives. Were they there at
Speaker 1: the advent where you started to make skis and you
Speaker 1: came up with this other stuff?
Speaker 2: They were, But today we have a much clearer line
Speaker 2: of sight than we did a year and a half
Speaker 2: ago on all three of them, because we've advanced. On
Speaker 2: the same time, we were standing up the business in
Speaker 2: a very fast moving basis, launching it going meaning peak
Speaker 2: skis and getting in the marketplace. But then we really
Speaker 2: started going pedal down on these with this great team member.
Speaker 2: We have a guy named Darren Hougan who's our chief
Speaker 2: product officer in engineer, brilliant guy. We're boeing for a
Speaker 2: little bit. Master's and engineering work with K two for
Speaker 2: quite a while. You knows skiing. He's a passionate skier,
Speaker 2: mountain guy, used to be a ski patroller for a
Speaker 2: big sky. He gets it and putting body together with Darren,
Speaker 2: it's great, it's fantastic. I'll drop something on here in
Speaker 2: a second new ski. It'll be a scoop if you will.
Speaker 2: We're probably gonna launch in late October seventy eight Underfoot
Speaker 2: for the European market and also the US skier primarily
Speaker 2: East Coastkier that wants narrow underfoot ski. But Darren's been
Speaker 2: really critical on advancing these initials, including the work with
Speaker 2: Bealer and this engineering process. I have to make mention
Speaker 2: that the reliance on glues, residents and epoxyes on this
Speaker 2: current process skis when they get retired, where do they go? Right?
Speaker 2: And not as bad as lithium ion batteries, But if
Speaker 2: they don't become atirontic chairs or fences around some people's backyards,
Speaker 2: they end up in a dump and those gluz residents
Speaker 2: and epoxyas are not good for the environment. In our case.
Speaker 2: One of the five primary development criteria include the same
Speaker 2: process by which we make the skis, the same materials
Speaker 2: of processes by we're able to deconstruct those exact skis
Speaker 2: after they're retired and retask those materials.
Speaker 1: What do you think of the rosi recyclable ski?
Speaker 2: Good stuff? More the better? Okay, great, great stuff, a
Speaker 2: brilliant minds good stuff. This is different.
Speaker 1: Who actually makes peak skis.
Speaker 2: Right now? It's a lawn outside of Bluebliana and Slovenia.
Speaker 2: We might be diversifying our manufacturing sources going.
Speaker 1: Forward, diversifying meaning multiple manufacturers.
Speaker 2: Yes, what would be The reason to do that d
Speaker 2: risk any business when you have a single source supplier
Speaker 2: or a single point of failure. You know, Fisher had
Speaker 2: a factory burned down was about two and a half
Speaker 2: three years ago. We don't have a single point of
Speaker 2: failure if for some reason something were to happen in Liviana.
Speaker 2: Elon we have a single point of existence right now
Speaker 2: until we get Treadstone built. I don't want to come
Speaker 2: back to treadchtone in a second, but yeah, right now,
Speaker 2: it's guys in Slovenia.
Speaker 1: Okay, they're making the skis, but they're also in the
Speaker 1: business themselves. Yeah, what is their incentives to do as
Speaker 1: well for you? And you actually have someone on site
Speaker 1: when the skis are made.
Speaker 2: So they have these huge factories. Their incentive is basically
Speaker 2: they have production capability. I can't speak on their behalf,
Speaker 2: but if I'm the CEO of Elon and other companies
Speaker 2: that do this, including Fisher and Kessley and others, many
Speaker 2: do it, oem white label, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 2: They have capacity and their production facilities and they feasibly
Speaker 2: or theoretically hit their head on the ceiling of demand
Speaker 2: for their brand and their products. So they use capacity
Speaker 2: and we buy skis from them. Very common Black Crows
Speaker 2: make their skis at Elan. There's fact to do these
Speaker 2: factory tours with all the manufacturers. I'm just amazed how
Speaker 2: many skis. I thought, Wow, I never even thought about
Speaker 2: who makes their skis, But they're made here. So it's
Speaker 2: the vast majority of skis that you know of are
Speaker 2: made by these big factories.
Speaker 1: Okay, so last year in the middle of the season,
Speaker 1: there were incentives early, like you buy the skis, you
Speaker 1: get a pair of binding something like that. But you
Speaker 1: got to the point where you got two pairs of
Speaker 1: skis for price of one.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: However, one words that it appears to be a sale,
Speaker 1: and it makes many people might say, well, why should
Speaker 1: I pay full price now, because I'll wait for them
Speaker 1: to go on discount.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: There are certainly companies rolex at a lot of if
Speaker 1: they have excess inventory, they bring it back, they destroy
Speaker 1: it because they don't want to lower the value. What
Speaker 1: was the thinking and why should I trust the price
Speaker 1: going forward?
Speaker 2: Straight up? Or finished with the consumer view of get
Speaker 2: that at times ten the simple nature of things. We
Speaker 2: launched company in April. First batch of skis come in
Speaker 2: and they come in in different Transas throughout the fall,
Speaker 2: and some of those transfers, some batches of skis were
Speaker 2: pretty late, so we were not We weren't fully i
Speaker 2: would say inventoried until mid to late November early December.
Speaker 2: Number one. Number two, we're brand new and as much
Speaker 2: credibility and impact as body Miller's name has. It's a
Speaker 2: brand new ski and a market full of traditionalists skeptics,
Speaker 2: understandably skeptics, and so yeah, we did not have as
Speaker 2: much pickup and traction and demand as we thought we
Speaker 2: would in the September through November December timeframe. We turned
Speaker 2: the corner on New Year's and so set that aside.
Speaker 2: We're also a direct to consumer eCOM company. We have
Speaker 2: some excellent strategists and tech. I have this Chief Marketing
Speaker 2: Officer or I caller, our digital marketing assassin. So we
Speaker 2: do a lot of testing. And our industry is small enough.
Speaker 2: It's not like anhyder or cold companies or beer companies
Speaker 2: have big enough market to go test demand at price
Speaker 2: points and those kinds of things. We don't have that luxury.
Speaker 2: So in this case we're doing recon as much as
Speaker 2: anything to see what bundles, what offers move right. We've
Speaker 2: done a lot of that, binding ski bundles, multiple bundles,
Speaker 2: a lot of it's testing, and yeah, a lot of
Speaker 2: it's to sell. This case, the two for one we
Speaker 2: ran for ten days. I think it was in January,
Speaker 2: and unlikely we will go back to that, but we
Speaker 2: learned a lot through that process. Well to learn Number one,
Speaker 2: I was called by a couple of friends saying, whoa
Speaker 2: you guys desperate in a tough spot?
Speaker 1: Is it?
Speaker 2: No, we're testing and we're moving out product. It's year
Speaker 2: one doing okay.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: By the way, our retention on revenue per ski is
Speaker 2: still higher than yours. Think about that, we're selling skis
Speaker 2: at eight ninety. Cut that in half. That's our take
Speaker 2: per ski. On a two for one, we're still retaining
Speaker 2: more revenue per ski. It was off model, off our
Speaker 2: pro form and modeling, but at the same time it
Speaker 2: was in and out and not a consistent and it
Speaker 2: achieved a great deal success and movement inventory. But more importantly,
Speaker 2: we had to get our skis under people's feet on
Speaker 2: the mountain and we wanted to do that quickly. We
Speaker 2: know the demand curve in the traditional sense of hard
Speaker 2: goods and ski business labor day through mid January. But
Speaker 2: running key resorts, I know that the forty two percent
Speaker 2: of most revenue is made in between presidents in late March.
Speaker 2: There's a lot more demand out there just the traditional
Speaker 2: distribution system, and the ski business doesn't know how to
Speaker 2: deal with that because they've already pushed all their product
Speaker 2: through the retailers and they're barely able to know who's
Speaker 2: buying what let alone. I mean that from a consumer perspective,
Speaker 2: not volume, but there's a lot not known. In our case,
Speaker 2: we learned a truckload through that sale and other bundles
Speaker 2: and other packages we put out there, and yeah, it
Speaker 2: went well.
Speaker 1: Okay. Many ski manufacturers don't change the construction but paint
Speaker 1: the job every year and the skis are discounted at
Speaker 1: some point during the season. Also, there are model cycles.
Speaker 1: Will you follow the same situation where you will change
Speaker 1: the paint shob discount? And when will we see other
Speaker 1: than the tracking device? When will we see updates in
Speaker 1: these models?
Speaker 2: Three questions? No, no, no, and twenty four twenty five?
Speaker 1: Okay, twenty four to twenty five? What is going to
Speaker 1: be different about the skis other than the track.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, don't need to be too truncated there
Speaker 2: on the answers. We don't just change the paint job.
Speaker 2: We're extremely porthright, very very honest, glaringly honest with what
Speaker 2: has and hasn't changed. For twenty three twenty four, we
Speaker 2: have increased number of lengths and models. The skis are
Speaker 2: largely unchanged in some ways, a couple of refinements here
Speaker 2: and there. Most folks who are not at all categorizes overhauls.
Speaker 2: But we nor have we represented to anybody that we've
Speaker 2: overhauled the skis or it's a whole new model. Twenty
Speaker 2: four to twenty five there will be a host of
Speaker 2: changes for the design of the skis, some of them substantial,
Speaker 2: some of them not. One of them will be the
Speaker 2: high likelihood of integration of peak located into every pair
Speaker 2: of skis.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think we've covered. Is there anything you need
Speaker 1: to say about this that we haven't spoken about out?
Speaker 2: Holy crap? No, I mean, geez, line of questions. Man,
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm in a deposition.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, as I said, great, believe me, I
Speaker 1: have more, but I won't ask them because as you
Speaker 1: get in I mean, listen, they're so you know, some
Speaker 1: of this shit is marketing. Give you look at Blizard
Speaker 1: and I'm not a fan of their skis. First they
Speaker 1: talked about flip core, then they change their core again
Speaker 1: in terms of now they're talking about and they're not
Speaker 1: the only company. Well, everybody else just makes the same
Speaker 1: ski in different lengths. We make it just for these lengths,
Speaker 1: and then other people there are certain skis identical, but
Speaker 1: everyone knows no, you've got to buy it in this length,
Speaker 1: not that length. So there's a lot of variables. And
Speaker 1: as you say, uh, okay, Amazon, I'm a big Amazon fan.
Speaker 1: Customer service is amazing as long as you don't abuse it.
Speaker 1: If you send back four fifty five inch TVs, they
Speaker 1: will say we're not going to sell anything anywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hey wait a minute, right.
Speaker 1: Right, but shy of that, they'll work with you. You
Speaker 1: never get whereas I've had, So you buy something on
Speaker 1: eBay because it's unavailable, it's out of production. A lot
Speaker 1: of those people they don't want to take well you're sure,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah. So you know, I think
Speaker 1: just getting peopled over the hurdle knowing that hey, you'll
Speaker 1: take them back is important.
Speaker 2: In two seconds without any questions. They think. There's a
Speaker 2: couple of things I'd thrown that you hit on in
Speaker 2: those comments, and that is number one. We have this
Speaker 2: internal deal. We're not here to do what's been done before.
Speaker 2: And that's not disrespectful of the past. It is, in
Speaker 2: fact respectful of the past. There's just not much about
Speaker 2: our company team what we do that has any trait
Speaker 2: or characteristic that has a tracer bull of going back
Speaker 2: to the traditional ski industry in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 2: And it's just not necessarily anything other than our chosen path.
Speaker 2: That said, we have this patentable, patentable cut out that
Speaker 2: we call the Keel. I was dragged kicking and screaming
Speaker 2: into naming it. I didn't want to, and the main
Speaker 2: reason being upon Titanol and other things. The industry has
Speaker 2: been void of real true hardcore innovation. It's been a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of really nifty, tricky names flipping this and that,
Speaker 2: core this, you know, Titanum, all that stuff, And I
Speaker 2: wouldn't say it feel like a sucker, but we came
Speaker 2: into this bob as contrarian's skeptics. That has fed our
Speaker 2: development of our business model that includes I don't want
Speaker 2: to name it because it sounded like yet another iteration
Speaker 2: of nifty sizzly crap that doesn't necessarily but we had
Speaker 2: to name it, so like, okay, we'll call it keel
Speaker 2: because we have to. We have to name it something,
Speaker 2: and it makes a difference. And now we have a
Speaker 2: patent in place and we're in a good spot. But
Speaker 2: everything about our company is straight up. We don't speak
Speaker 2: in hipster's talk. In fact, inside our company there's a
Speaker 2: ten dollars fine anytime you use the words like disruptor
Speaker 2: or that kind of hipster talk, that these are words
Speaker 2: that used to mean something as a Middlebury graduate or
Speaker 2: I would be shocked if you don't have an appreciation
Speaker 2: for how the English language has been diluted in this case.
Speaker 2: These are words you used to mean something. Now they've
Speaker 2: been so abused by many in the industry, including advertising folks,
Speaker 2: that they don't have any value. In our case, we
Speaker 2: just say say things extremely straight up, fashion, blunt, force, trauma,
Speaker 2: like you said about ten minutes ago, point plank. Everything
Speaker 2: about our company is straight up. How we communicate the customers,
Speaker 2: the truth matters. We're not like, we're not going to
Speaker 2: be pulling out stuff that is sisily marketing bs and
Speaker 2: trying to convince people to buy our skis based on that.
Speaker 2: It's a different deal. We just hey, look man, Body
Speaker 2: and I are retired guys. We have a lot of
Speaker 2: time on our hands. We have some experience, and we
Speaker 2: think we can do this pretty well, including the strategic initiatives.
Speaker 2: But that's just a no bullshit coach to how we
Speaker 2: come into this world of making skis and selling skis.
Speaker 2: And good news is we've done well in some of
Speaker 2: the ski ratings and write ups and we're prideful in that.
Speaker 2: But there's we're just getting started. Body's got a notebook
Speaker 2: full of ideas and there's more to come on the
Speaker 2: skis themselves, as well as these other initiatives.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm kind of speechless because this is my passion.
Speaker 1: But in any of Andy, Andy, I want to thank
Speaker 1: you so much for taking the time to speak with
Speaker 1: me and my audience.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is great. I mean, I love the history.
Speaker 2: I got to say it. I'm intensely honored, particularly honored
Speaker 2: to be here because you have had books like Leiwikie
Speaker 2: Buying Rate, one of my guitar heroes, on the show
Speaker 2: and I'm just a I'm just a retired guy in
Speaker 2: Montana that rides horses a lot, and to be on
Speaker 2: the show and have questions, your passion is welcomed and
Speaker 2: I'll really appreciate the chance.
Speaker 1: Okay, till next time. This is Bob Left sets