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The difficulties facing those who enter mountain resort life are well documented: long hours (and, ironically, little ski/board time), high cost of living, high expectations, as well as stress and isolation—all of which can lead to high employee turnover and mental health issues. 

But Arizona Snowbowl—spurred on by growth at parent company Mountain Capital Partners (MCP)—may just have developed the magic elixir for employee happiness, fulfillment, and success. 

A closer look finds a resort that walks the walk when it comes to company values, from being “family first” to empowering young workers to embrace more challenging and advanced roles. 

Why focus on company culture? First, says Snowbowl general manager Rob Linde, there’s the pragmatic. “We are in what I would call acquisition mode,” he says of MCP as a whole. “In order to run well, we need good people.”

But there’s a deeper reason, Linde says, and it’s one he embraced at Snowbowl even before MCP came into the picture. “You can cite all the business reasons you want, but to run a good company, you need a good work environment. It’s a matter of creating an environment people thrive in,” he says. “Sounds simple, but I can tell you it’s not easy to do.”

“You have to live by what you are creating,” he says. “I live by it every day—it’s kind of who I am.”

A Clear Culture

Shortly before Snowbowl became part of the group, MCP had developed what it calls  “culture statements.” Those statements are anchored on three main values: freedom, happiness, and purpose. 

It had always been the company’s intent to let each resort adopt those values as the resort saw fit for its unique location and culture. Linde, wanting to embrace the new ownership and ensure the Snowbowl team kept thriving, set up a plan to personalize those statements. 

Three managers—who represented the thoughts and needs of the entire team—workshopped the statements and tweaked them to “make them our own,” says Linde. That helped gain buy in. “Rather than top down and forced, it is something we all came to together.”

Snowbowl focuses on five principles: “family matters;” “serve, help others;” “climb your mountain;” “be there for your team;” and “winning is fun.” Those apply to employees and the ski and ride community at large. 

Freedom. So, “freedom” for the employee is translated into “climb your mountain,” or a culture where you should strive for growth and can create your own destiny, be it a want to transfer to another resort or a desire to learn how to work in a totally new department. 

Freedom also, Linde says, means being secure in putting your own family first, i.e., “family matters.”

“For our employees, saying ‘work isn’t everything’ and ‘your family is important’ really resonates,” Linde says. Staff can take parental leave and time off for special family events, and there’s no lying about why one needs a day off—even in busy times—Linde says, adding that management encourages employees’ away messages to read “off for family time,” because “that matters,” he says. 

Happiness. “Family matters” also means creating a family dynamic for the entire employee pool, something that supports employee happiness. “A lot of our employees are young and away from home for the first time,” says Linde. “We try to create the family environment; one in which they look to one another as ‘Snowbowl family.’” This means staff dinners and special employee events, and encouraging folks to look out for one another (an extension of that “be there for your team” value). 

The resort’s employee newsletter also speaks to this goal. Sent by the resort’s People Team biweekly in winter and monthly in the summer, the employee newsletter celebrates wins (like a busy weekend last season when everyone had to step up; even Linde was working in the rental shop), shares special events, provides reminders of employees’ benefits, and offers employee recognition. 

Purpose is promoted through service, to the guests as well as to one another. Service means empowering employees to help guests have their best experience—even if it costs the resort money. 

Like the time a family arrived at the hill ill-prepared for a day on the slopes. Guest services team member Jessie Perry noticed the struggling group on the hill, and while it is Snowbowl’s policy to refund guests who are unhappy or unprepared (no matter the refund cost), Perry saw an opportunity to have a greater impact and offered the group a complimentary private family lesson to help them get more comfortable. “The father said to me after, ‘Oh my gosh, you just absolutely saved our trip,’” she recalls. 

“The option to fix someone’s day or give them an extra piece of happiness—it was intoxicating to me,” says Perry, who started as a guest service representative at the resort as a college student and quickly found her passion in the industry. 

Arizona Snowbowl customized Mountain Capital Partners’ culture statements to create its own. 

Attracting And Keeping Talent

Part of the goal of the operating culture is to stabilize staffing levels while also giving employees the freedom to learn, advance, and even sometimes move on.

When hiring, Snowbowl looks for people who will embrace the resort’s belief system. “If someone comes in for an interview and has a huge ego? They’re not going to fit, and we can tell that fast,” Linde says. 

That philosophy extends into the resort’s talent development strategy. What they look for in high-potential employees, Linde explains, are the soft skills: the ability to learn, to support the culture, and to be open to challenges and even failures. “We can teach the hard skills (as in technical),” he says. “But the right attitude? That comes from them.”

When Snowbowl spots a worker with potential—or when one asks to learn more or something new—management is proactive in helping that employee find opportunities to grow. “A lot of our success has been with cross-pollination and promotion,” says Linde.

Local recruitment. Many resort employees come from the nearby Northern Arizona University, where, Linde says, the resort looks for interest and passion over hard skills. The university presents a unique opportunity to capture young people who may not have thought of a career in the ski industry.

“We can get them to come work part time while in college and then say, ‘hey, why not come work in the ski industry?” says Linde. 

He uses himself as an example of what is possible: “I can stand up in front of them as a 65-year-old and say, ‘your parents may say you cannot be a ski bum, or you need a real job, but look at me: this is my career.’”

Meet The Results

Perry is just one employee who has found growth and purpose at Snowbowl. She took a part-time job at the resort in 2019, while still a college student, and fell in love immediately, she says. “Getting out and playing on the snow with a bunch of like-minded people and in a place where management really cares about that? Yeah, I was hooked.”

She started in guest services (“I’ve always loved customer interaction,”) and showed her value right away. Soon, despite her youth, she was asked to interview for the guest services supervisor job. 

“I was nervous. It’s a big department,” she says. “But my direct report (her boss, in Snowbowl parlance) said ‘even if you don’t feel ready, we believe in you. Even if you’re scared, we want to give you this opportunity, the chance to fail, learn, and grow. This is how you’ll find your path.’ And so, I said yes.”

Moving out to move up. A month later, she heard about MCP’s Willamette Pass Resort needing help. “I have family in Oregon, and I’ve always dreamt of living there—at least for a period of time. So, I put my hand up to go,” she says.

She headed to Oregon for the 2023-24 season. The job had no set role; Perry filled in where needed. “There I was, 22 years old and I’d never left Arizona, and I’m going to help run a resort in Oregon. Incredible. I learned so much. I failed so much. The growth was incredible.”

At the end of the season, Perry rejoined the team at Snowbowl in a new role as ticket and revenue manager, having gained new experience, skills, confidence, and a fuller embrace of the company values. 

“It was actually a hard sell to get me to put family first,” Perry says. But the time in Oregon blending work with family time “made it happen,” she says. “I’m better rounded now.”

Crosspollination And Promotion

Josh Heydorn is another case study in human form. He chose Northern Arizona University 20 years ago to be near the mountains. As a pre-med major, he landed a part-time job in the Snowbowl ski school—and that wound up being the end of his medical-field goals.

“I enjoyed sharing my passion for snowboarding,” he remembers of those early ski school days. Still, he says, he “never thought this would be long-term.” And then one day, after seeing snowcats heading off to do their work, a spark was lit. “I’d never seen one close up,” he says. He decided he’d like to get into one. 

Snowbowl being what it is, Heydorn voiced his wish and was transitioned to the grooming team, where he learned the hard skills (since he already had the soft). “I sort of forgot my college career and got into this life.”

For the next 10 years, he learned and progressed on the operations side, becoming terrain park manager and getting a chance to lead multiple capital projects. 

Failing forward. What was interesting about his upward move, he says, was the fact that he was untrained in terrain park management and that Snowbowl encouraged him not to be conservative but to “fail forward.” “There can be so much pressure in terrain park operations,” he says. “But I felt safe (in my job) as they say, ‘failing fast and failing forward.’” 

As his family life shifted—Heydorn married two years ago, and the couple just had their first child—Heydorn realized that working nights in a snowcat was no longer sustainable. “I was looking to get out of nights, and I saw a risk management position opening.”

With his embrace of Snowbowl’s culture, history of learning from scratch, and desire to put family first, he got the job. Not that transitioning to the new role was easy.

“I thought I had an idea of what risk is all about; everything we do in terrain parks is about mitigating risk,” he says. “It may have given me context, but I had nowhere near the depth I needed.”

But, he says, “Our culture has enabled me to discover things in myself and rise to where I never thought I could. Here, you can take comfort in knowing you are surrounded by a team that backs you up and boosts you.

“Those aren’t my colleagues out there; they’re my family. I love them. It ties back to service and purpose. The more I help people, the better off I become.”

Family matters. As the birth of his first child drew near, Heydorn was also able to have a frank discussion about that time without worry of being judged. “I told Rob: Full disclosure—my wife expects me to take time off to help (when the baby is born). I was really nervous about it,” he recalls, fearing older ideas about paternity leave as a bad career move. “Rob was just like ‘of course! Take as much time as you need!’ It was so genuine; he really meant it.” 

Heydorn took five weeks. The support he received, he says, is evidence of the strength of Snowbowl’s values. “That’s when you know the culture they’ve created really is family first.” 

What’s more, the resort’s culture statements, says Heydorn, “gives a purpose to what we do. It’s not just about making money; it’s about making connections and bringing people into the joy of this world. That’s what keeps me in this.”

An ongoing process. The work of adopting MCP’s ethos continues, at Snowbowl and across the group’s other resorts. Linde believes it’s working.

“We aren’t just placing words on a wall,” he says. “We are living them. And that’s good for all.”