As you know we operate a seasonal business. And having worked for many years in an international corporate environment for companies with a strong long-term culture, the challenges of a seasonal business keep fascinating me, which is why this subject comes up on a regular basis.
As a guest ranch we even enjoy a longer season than most other guest ranches. Partly because of location, and partly because I don’t know how one can operate a successful business being open only 3 months a year. We find it already a challenge to do this operating 7 months a year. Still, it remains a seasonal business which is an interesting and challenging kind of venture to operate.
Every year we must look for, and hire, new people, and most of these employees have a seasonal mindset, not a long term one like we have. As every business owner can tell you, since Covid this has become much more time-consuming and difficult. The new staff needs to be trained and become operational in a very short term. New wranglers need to learn the way we operate, our processes and in Spring to early Summer learn all the trails in the valley. After that all the trails in the mountains. Learn to drive trucks and trailers, the names of all the horses, etc. And living and working together in a small place and little town is like working below deck on cruise ship. With that comes that many seasonal employees often have never been away from home for such a long time.
The biggest challenge is to create a common culture and have everybody buy in, support and fit into this culture of horses surrounded by hospitality, care, professionalism to create a great experience for our guests.
Sourdough, Baking Bread and Culture – The Keepers of the Culture.
Of course we employ around 10 people, including ourselves year around. We call this group “The Keepers of The Culture”, they help train and support new staff. As I enjoy baking bread, I compare this group with the sourdough to bake the bread. Every season we bake a new bread, mixing our sourdough with all other seasonal ingredients to bake a new seasonal break. Your experience at The Hideout. We have had seasonal members of our crew coming back each season for over 20 years. And some years we have more first and second year seasonal staff that want to come back than other years. Mostly that is because they feel The Hideout is the right fit for them. The culture and work environment they are looking for. Much like we are looking for the right fit, our culture needs to be the right fit for them also. Jim Collins in Good to Great talks about finding the right people for the bus, and finding the right place on the bus. Some people like our bus. Some don’t. It took a while to understand what kind of individuals were looking for our kind of bus.
This year we have been lucky.
This year was one of those seasons that belongs with the Top 3 in our history in terms of having a super crew on board that is entirely aligned with our Culture of 3 C’s. And many would like to hire on again next year. We are lucky! We tell them often we appreciate them and are happy they are on board. And what is fun, is that they say the same. Cultural Fit.
Many say luck has nothing to do with it. It is about management, leadership, how you operate things, vision, experience and more. There is some truth in that, but after operating The Guest Ranch for almost 20 years, visiting on a regular basis with other guest ranch owners, and operators of seasonal businesses, visiting with my aunt and David who started this guest ranch, I conclude there is a lot of luck involved.
And most of these old timers say the same. We usually follow the same hiring process, training process, interview process, but some years it just works out better than other years. And even the best sourdough cannot make up for lesser ingredients. Sometimes the sourdough fails also. Including ourselves. We learned that during Covid. Some years you just have that little more energy in you. That little extra to deal with challenges. Some years we were a little sloppy to feed the sourdough also, including ourselves.
Back in the time when I was a young buck myself, I thought it was all because of the way I did things. The more this buck gets older, the more he realizes there is a lot of luck involved. Victor, one of our sons came on board last year, and he is interested in taking over and continue The Hideout. An interesting journey, onboarding the next generation and young buck. I am trying to share a lot of things I learned with him. Especially mistakes we made and what we learned. More about that in my next blog post. And I will write about Shelve Life!
In the meantime, I wish you a lot of Luck in whatever you are doing, and if you read this blog post to the end, I feel fortunate and lucky. Simplicity comes after a lot of Complexity!
I wish you well and go do good things,
Peter
