Is a Snowsports School a Profit Center or a Recruiting Center?
By Rick Kahl

There’s a constant tension in snowsports school between management, which aims to earn as much as possible from this “profit center,” and the aims of the Growth Model, which is to introduce and retain as many newcomers as possible. And this tension was on display at the NSAA convention in San Francisco, if you knew where to look.

Two workshops illustrated the conflict perfectly. The first was “The Business of Snowsports Schools: Getting More Out of Your Operation.” The second was ”Model for Growth Update: Tough Questions, Hard Answers, and Lots of Work Ahead.” The point to the first was “how to squeeze every last dollar from snowsports school.” The point to the second was “we have to recruit and retain more customers.” Those two goals are being pursued in isolation, and they are cancelling one another out.

The Kottke study helped prove the point. Lessons overall increased a tiny two percent, despite a much larger nine percent increase in resort visits. Beginner lessons actually declined.

The shrinkage in beginner lessons was predictable. School directors and managers agreed that schools are operating at capacity—certainly, that’s true of beginner classes, they said. We can’t handle any more.

“Fewer and fewer people are willing to make the sacrifices in pay and prestige that instructing demands of them.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Partly, it’s because foreign instructors dropped out of the instructor pool, thanks to H2B restrictions. But reliance on H2Bs is a symptom of a different issue, which is the lack of teachers, period. Fact is, it’s not so much fun to be an instructor anymore. There was a time, some of you may recall, when instructors were viewed as gods and sex symbols. They helped give skiing its cachet. They could earn a decent living.

That idea seems so quaint, it’s almost enough to make you chuckle. Fewer and fewer people are willing to make the sacrifices in pay and prestige that instructing demands of them.

“The business of snowsports school” didn’t offer them much hope. It spent a fair amount of time worrying about labor costs for instructors. Anyone surprised that tamping down pay rates limits the number of instructors available? Yes, schools are anxious to hire more instructors, but that requires more reward than resorts have been offering ($8 an hour, skiing privileges, lockers in the base lodge).

Now stop me if I’m wrong here, but it would seem that if beginner lessons are essential for the health of our business, hiring and keeping enough instructors to handle the crowds we want to attract should be a priority for every school, and resorts should be implementing strategies to expand the number of these jobs.

Everyone talks about how important the instructors’ role is in the trial-and-conversion process, but nobody’s doing enough about it. Most instructors, who live to give their students a breakthrough experience and help them become better riders and skiers, are would-be agents of the Growth Model. They want to be facilitators of improvement and willingly serve as goodwill ambassadors of the resort. But they need a little more help and encouragement. If the snowsports school profit margin has to drop a few points so that the resort can hire and retain enough instructors to gain more lifetime customers, that would seem like a smart investment. In fact, everyone would win.


Remembering Darcy Brown
By Ann Rowan

Darcy Brown, the man who created Aspen, was the second president of the National Ski Areas Association by design. The first, David Judson, operator of a small eastern ski area, got the ball rolling, and Darcy agreed to take over next and put the prestige of a big Rocky Mountain resort behind the fledgling NSAA. I was the first paid executive director and NSAA was off and running.

The first order of business was to establish a national insurance program because smaller areas got pushed around by their underwriters. The big resorts had no problems getting insurance, but Darcy promptly signed Aspen up for NSAA’s insurance, anyway. On the other side, big resorts had their troubles with the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Darcy went to Washington, D.C., representing large and small.

We traveled everywhere in his single-engine Cessna, taking off and landing with grim determination between huge passenger jets in New York and Washington. Then we took off in the little plane for meetings in the Midwest and West selling NSAA projects.

He was an early riser and liked to get down to business in the NSAA office as early as possible—particularly hard when NSAA, short of money, set up its offices in my apartment. So, we met at the Yale Club where he stayed in New York, usually at 7 a.m.

Once Darcy told David Rowan that he would like to have a business on the model of Ski Area Management—a small, independent, high-quality experience. In fact, he always said he wanted to operate a small, privately-owned, metropolitan ski area near Denver the next time around.

As an operator of one of the largest resorts in the country, Darcy always cared about this industry, no matter the vertical.