For a modest-sized Midwestern ski area, Wisconsin’s Cascade Mountain has quietly been making bold moves for years.

In the 1980s, it debuted a run called the Mogul Monster, with bumps and jumps the size of small cars, a precursor to modern-day terrain parks. In 1997, it became one of the first Midwestern resorts to install a detachable chairlift. Then about six years ago, it was one of the first areas to convert its entire rental fleet to Head BYS skis.

Then, in the spring of 2011, owner Rob Walz made Cascade’s most daring move yet, investing in a Montana Challenger stonegrinding machine for his tech shop. The machine was delivered and installed in summer 2011. By mid-August 2011, months before snow started falling, Cascade’s five-man tech shop crew went through a two-day training session on state-of-the-sport ski tuning, and then set to the task of refinishing the resort’s 2,200 pairs of rental skis.

Why would a modest resort invest in a tuning machine that lists for $228,000? Perhaps because Walz is crazy like a fox.


A BETTER EXPERIENCE
Prior to 2011, the resort had been using a late-’90s belt grinder and sharpening edges by hand. The area also had a conventional hot waxer, the kind that left the backshop floors a slippery mess, and potentially dangerous.

“We were looking for a better tuning option because we had been tuning manually for years, doing a basic rental base grind once a year on most of our skis,” Walz says. “We thought we were doing pretty good, but we knew we needed to upgrade.”

Walz knew he probably wasn’t going to sell $40,000 worth of tunes during a winter, and no one at Montana led him to think otherwise. “The Montana guys said, at the very least, even if you don’t sell any individual tunes, you’ll want to be able to use this on your own equipment, and you’ll find putting exceptional product out on the hill is the right way to convert skiers,” Walz says. That’s pretty much what happened. So, after just a year with the new machine, he’s ecstatic about the purchase.

Like most Midwestern resorts, Cascade suffered from a lack of snow last winter—the area was down seven percent in skier visits—but still reported great results from the new stonegrinder.

The story of a small ski area buying a high-tech stonegrinding machine isn’t new; Nub’s Nob in Harbor Springs, Mich., bought a Wintersteiger stonegrinder a decade ago, despite maintaining a relatively small rental fleet. But it’s still a pretty uncommon purchase for cash-conscious resorts that don’t have any lodging revenue to boost their bottom line.

But the investment (between $140,000 for a base model stonegrinder, and $600,000 for the Cadillac version) can pay dividends quickly, says Wintersteiger sales manager Ryan Eittreim.

“First of all, you truly cannot tune a ski without a stonegrinder,” Eittreim says. “And the rental business has become such a heavy competition that you’ve got to make sure everyone is having a good experience. You’ve got to be able to keep your rental fleet looking and skiing brand new so you can have a hope of having the customer come back again. And that’s why all resorts, big and small, need to upkeep their rental equipment as much as possible.”

What type of stonegrinder to install—manual or automatic—depends on the number of consumer tunes a resort does in a season, along with how many units it has in its rental and demo fleets. Since only six percent of the skiers tune their skis on a regular basis, according to Eittreim, there is a lot of untapped business to be found in a resort’s regular customer base. Think season’s pass promotion.

“No matter what size the resort is, if they can have 20 percent less wear on a fleet of 500 skis, we think they can save $50,000 every six years. And if they can sell a few hundred or 1,000 tunes a year, that’s even better,” he adds. And selling hundreds of additional tunes is a distinct possibility.


CASCADE’S IMPLEMENTATION
In just its first winter, Cascade began to experience some of those benefits. First, in tuning its rental fleet, the staff found that most of the skis, which they thought had been tuned flat in the past, were in fact considerably less than true. Some of the rental skis needed 20 passes through the new machine—the Challenger is so precise it only removes a minute amount of material on each pass—in order to get a true flat base and a precise radial-tuned edge.

After giving the skis a new structure, the staff added a nice gliding finish via a new mess-free infrared waxer, a $6,000 investment Cascade made in summer 2011 in conjunction with the new stonegrinder. And just like that, the resort had one of the most exquisitely-prepped rental fleets in the country.

The result? Happy customers. Once the season started, the rental shop found it didn’t have ski school instructors coming back and changing equipment during their students’ lessons. The resort doesn’t have any hard data on the school impact, but Walz has plenty of reasons to think the tuning considerably improved the guests’ ski school experience.

“The product that went out on the hill was phenomenal,” says Cascade’s inside operations manager Dave Vonbehren, who oversees the rental operations. “We definitely felt the rental skis were better after they went through the tuner than when they were brand new.”

Cascade sold tunes to customers as well, offering a standard Montana tune for $60 and a Montana Race Tune for $80. The shop gave away a handful of free tunes to promote the service, and by midseason had created a buzz among season passholders and race coaches. In several instances, skiers who got a free tune came back later and paid for another. (Keep in mind that it was a low snow year, which meant skis were getting beat up more than they would during a big snow year.)

By season’s end, Cascade had sold 336 tunes and an additional 550 wax-only treatments. (A regular tune includes waxing.) The resort also sold 100 half-price tunes during a preseason sale in conjunction with online season’s pass sales. All that resulted in more than $30,000 in revenue for the repair shop.

While those numbers weren’t astronomical, the new equipment quickly built momentum during the first winter, and business is likely to grow stronger this coming season.

“We’d have people come in for new wax and say they didn’t really want a tune, and that’s when we’d ask them when they structured their skis, because the base really wasn’t going to hold the wax,” Walz says. “But we’d go ahead and give them new wax, only to have them come back later and say, ‘the wax is all gone.’ So we did a handful of tunes that way, and those same skiers would come back weeks later still very happy with their skis. Often they brought friends in to see us.”

Walz also found the resort was saving a lot of money in bulk wax, and that the shop floor was no longer so slick.

Walz can measure the financial return. “The interesting thing was that we skied seven percent fewer skiers, but my repair shop did $30,000 worth of business, which is up from $11,000 worth of repairs the year before when we had a pretty good season. With fewer skiers, I tripled the revenue of that shop.”

And that’s just for starters. Cascade has now begun to develop a reputation for top-quality ski tuning. (Walz believes that there is only one other machine like Cascade’s in the state, and that one is two hours away in Milwaukee.) And with the area’s relatively close proximity to large skiing populations in Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, the benefits are just starting to pay off.

Case in point: a race coach from Kenosha dropped off a couple of pairs of skis at Cascade for tunes, and returned a couple of days later while heading up north to another resort for a race.

“Then, when he was at the race and realized how good the tunes were, he called his wife and told her to bring eight more pairs of race skis to us so we could run them through the machine,” Walz says. “So one coach paid us $800 to do all of his kids’ skis over a weekend. Now that coach is sending business from Kenosha my way. That’s been an amazing effect.”

And that gave Walz another great idea. Why not offer Cascade’s tuning services to other races teams and resorts in Wisconsin? He started negotiating with a few local resorts to tune, wax and test bindings in their rental fleets.

And that business shows potential, too. “We actually have other resorts contacting us now,” Walz says. “All they have to do is drop off the skis and we’ll get them all done and ready to go for next season. As long as I can meet my costs, that’s something we’re open to doing.”

Why spend nearly $250,000 for a top-notch tuner? Because it’s just plain smart business.