Trust Your Skis

As a skier I have found myself atop some formidable terrain – Rendezvous Bowl in Jackson Hole and the back country of Crested Butte, to name a couple – and those of you who ski understand the rush of fear and excitement that this vantage point brings. Negotiating a mountain is an athletic feat. You engage your body to carve through a series of turns and recoveries, and it is in these recoveries, when you spring up after one turn to prepare for the next, that you really test your mental strength (or is it mental insanity?). Your body instinctively wants to lean back and slow down when in reality you have to trust your skis and lean forward into the gathering speed. If you reach the bottom in one piece you do it all over again.

Quite the metaphor for life.

Business, like skiing, is replete with physical and mental obstacles. Every day we face new challenges and the only certainty is that nothing is certain. It’s in our ability to anticipate and engage risks, and to lean forward in our recoveries instead of sitting back on our heels, that we measure success. And just as inclement weather can turn powdery snow into mush, a workplace culture that does not nurture resourcefulness and creative thinking can be stifling to productivity and growth.

Professional mountains can be big or small, and in the early 1990s Delaware North faced a particularly imposing, but also exciting, challenge when we were awarded the contract to operate concessions, retail, hospitality, and recreation at Yosemite National Park. At that time the National Park Service decided that the contract with the prior concessioner – Curry Co. – must be re-bid upon and awarded to a concessioner that was willing to purchase Curry Co. and all of its assets and liabilities. As a family-owned and privately-held company Delaware North was able to take on these considerable environmental and safety risks and we were the only viable bidder to come forward. For a cost to our company of $115 million in today’s dollars and approximately $40 million in assumed liabilities we were in business in our nation’s most treasured national park. The fear and excitement were palpable, and it was time to trust our skis and lean forward.

For more than 20 years we operated in some particularly trying times – wildfires, historic floods, and rockslides, and the different kind of turbulence that came with multiple government shutdowns and the Great Recession. We made investments totaling more than $80 million into buildings and infrastructure throughout the park, and it’s my sincere hope that these efforts have strengthened the visitor experience at Yosemite for years to come. They certainly made us a smarter company. It was in Yosemite that we developed GreenPath, an environmental management system that guides Delaware North’s conservation and waste management practices at all of our locations today. It was also in Yosemite that we elevated our culinary capabilities. We launched our companywide Culinary & Hospitality Counsel, which is guided by our corporate chef who is one of only 70 prestigious certified master chefs in the country.

By leaning forward in our recoveries we strengthened our business practices and became more conscientious in our operations. We were successful, and I measure that success in the risks we were willing to take.

I’ll add what you may already know, that this past February we ended our operations at the park and are currently in a legal dispute with NPS over the terms of our 1993 contract. I won’t use this space to recap the full legal argument, which you can read about here https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/update-yosemite-park-trademark-dispute, but I will say that no one should underestimate how much our company loves Yosemite and its visitors and patrons. We treasured our time in the park.