Well needless to say when I made this phone call yesterday I was not expecting the conversation to lean and end this way.

I called up a ski shop I had been working on building a good relationship with and they had asked me to call them back. That they had something I would be very interested in. When I placed the call I was pretty curious as to what this opportunity was going to be.

We started talking and finding out how each other were doing and then we got down to the main point of this conversation. I wanted to know what was such an awesome idea that it warranted a next day call. Needless to say, when I heard what the plan was, I was appalled. Here is how it lays out. They want to host a circuit next season, that’s cool with me and I support that, and they want to include my event!

Let me just break in here for a second before I finish the rest of this conversation. There is no chance that I will allow this event become a part of a series for two reasons. 1) Being the middle part of a series would take away from the scale of an event I want to produce or have produced, the largest part of any circuit or tour needs to be near the end. So why not be the last stop – enter my next reason. 2) To become the final stop of the event would require me to shift the date of my event which would change to many variables that I don’t have control over (weather, snow amounts) as well as moving the event directly into the trade show swing for the snow industries.

Back to the next section of the call:

After digressing and discussing college for a few minutes he came back and told me that if the event was ever to much of a burden that he would take it over for me.

To be honest I almost hung up on him at this point. Seems like a genuine enough gesture, offering to run the event in the future if I can’t. Wrong. This is the one aspect of my company that makes any money, it is the reason that midwestskier even gets looked at. It is the best event the Midwest has going for it because I work so hard for it (despite how much I down play it, about one thousand plus hours go into each event from myself). When I am done with the event there are two possibilities to what will happen with it. The first is that it just stops, the second is that I sell it off to some corporation to use as a marketing tool for their Midwest/Central region.

I know he is trying to do his best for what he sees to be the future of his shop, trying to find another way to bring in revenue because specialty shops are going under all over the place (though some do a very good job of hiding it).

Basically when I am done with MSO (in about three years if not sooner) I will either get what I want for it (which is basically back pay for the 8000+ hours I put in at that point in time) or will pull the plug completely and protect the namesake of Midwest Skier and the event from being copied.

Sorry for being so upset.

Take Care and God Bless,
~paul