The industry-wide campaign to retain new skiers and riders could well focus attention on an often-neglected aspect of serving these customers: rental gear maintenance. That would please Ron Siekmann, a 20-year veteran who has served as rental and risk manager at resorts in New York and New England. Ron thoroughly believes in the current rhetoric linking quality of service to industry growth. “Good management understands the need to provide a good product,” Siekmann says.
“Customers at an area have every reason to expect a certain standard of care, from lifts, food service, trail grooming or rental equipment,” he says. “Making sure that you are providing the best rental product is just another aspect of good customer service.
“If you aren’t maintaining your rental inventory properly—and that includes tuning and waxing skis and boards—you aren’t providing first-time or learning guests with the best possible experience. That can mean lost business for the shop and the sport.”
Siekmann takes skier and rider care seriously. He has served on the New Hampshire Safety Board and the ASTM shop practices committee on snow skiing, and received the National Ski Area’s Association’s (NSAA) Award of Excellence for developing a reckless-skier education program.
He’s also a believer in hands-on training, both in his own shop and at the annual Ski and Snowboard Workshops each fall. “No matter how many years you’ve been at it,” he says, “doing it once, by the numbers, at the beginning of the season really helps. Learning by doing in a structured environment is the best way to train or retrain your staff or just refresh your own skills.”
After the workshop, it’s time to head to the shop. The pre-season inspection should cover everything the rental technician has no time to check during a typical rental transaction. It verifies everything that the tech assumes when the equipment is dispatched—that a 3 on the release indicator scale means the same thing as the 3 on the wall chart, or that a boot with a sole length code of 22 will work properly with a binding which has been adjusted to fit a 22. “It’s all just industrial strength common sense,” says Siekmann.
Inform your rental staff that their goal is to find problems. “It’s much better to find the problem in your pre-season inspection than to discover it for the first time during a post-accident inspection,” he says. If you go through your entire inventory and you don’t find a single broken part to replace, or a single binding that fails inspection, then you probably haven’t been looking carefully enough for these problems.
While every manufacturer’s rental maintenance manual is consistent with ASTM standards, there are minor differences in procedures between brands. This can be confusing for the shop with more than one brand of binding. Sometimes, the difference is critical to the product’s design, but often it is not.
The way to resolve the differences is to write your own maintenance procedures, Siekmann says. “Write your procedures in a way that removes any ambiguity created by the tech manuals, and if necessary, fax or e-mail the company for tech support,” he says.
In the long run, not only does well-tuned equipment make learning easier, properly maintained gear can keep rental guests safer. Siekmann’s diligence has paid off for his customers. The rates for on-slope injuries at Ron’s facilities are consistently a third or less of the industry average.
“I don’t care what kind of business you are in, to excel you have to provide the best product possible,” he says. “The image of skiers in casts is just bad for the sport. From a risk management perspective, fewer injuries mean fewer claims. And that’s good for the area’s overall bottom line, not just the rental shop’s.”
Tips for Pre-season Maintenance
1. Hire rental staff by September. Try to hire the following season’s rental manager no later than May—even if he’ll be away for much of the summer—to give him time to plan off-season maintenance. A good shop manager will also want a say in the budget.
2. The last day of one season is the first day of next season’s maintenance.
- Put a coat of wax on the ski edges.
- Relax the bindings’ springs.
- Don’t store gear in piles, since this can cause warpage over time.
- Place a thermometer in the storage area and check the “max” temperature routinely. If it gets too hot for too long, bindings could lose grease, and some plastics may warp or age prematurely.
3. Take a random sample of your equipment (30 pairs is sufficient unless you have more than one brand) as early in the offseason as possible, perform all maintenance and inspections, and determine:
- What percentage of your equipment will have to be replaced.
- The types and frequency of repairs you’ll do in the rest of your inventory.
- The time, tools and materials required to perform those repairs.
- The time, tools and materials required to complete normal maintenance.
4. Set up an assembly-line process.
- Minimize movement of inventory. Every unnecessary step will be repeated hundreds or thousands of times. Bring the workstation to the inventory.
- Determine in advance how many parallel paths you will need to keep everyone working efficiently.
- Organize your teams so that the techs and equipment runners can, at routine intervals, switch jobs to avoid boredom.
5. Whatever you learn in steps 1 to 4, write it into your maintenance procedures to build on your experience for next year.
—CM
