The best business advice I’ve ever gotten didn’t come from business school, a high-ranking executive or a wildly successful entrepreneur. No, it came from a guy who sells his handpicked produce for less than a quarter of market value, has never had an employee and has refused to ever borrow a dime to expand. “Keep your hands forward,” he told me- maybe a hundred times, maybe a thousand. “Keep your hands forward, your head and shoulders facing down the fall line, your shins pressed into the front of your boots, your hips above your knees and your ears above the snow.”
Let me be clear, he had no intention of teaching me about business. Nor did teenage me, sliding down the side of a mountain, have any idea that that’s what I was learning. In fact teenage me didn’t know a lot of anything about anything, except that I already knew everything about everything.
We weren’t privileged financially growing up, and skiing shouldn’t have been in our budget, but we were privileged with work ethic, and we all worked at the mountain. That afforded us the opportunity to grow up there skiing for free and making money while we did it. But with my father being who he is, it was never a gentle hobby, a casual pastime. We were at the mountain- a two hour drive from our house- every morning at opening, and skied until the last lift of every Saturday and Sunday, every school vacation, and the occasional Friday that a good dump of powder tipped the scales on the importance of a high school education. While our friends were going to Disney and Myrtle Beach with their families, we were pounding the slopes, being drilled endlessly on technique, making 200 turns a run down some of the best double blacks in the east until our legs and lungs burned. The running joke among our family was that we were constantly in training, but no one knew what we were training for, since none of us actually competed. Looking back, I know exactly what it was for- we were training for life.
The thing about skiing is, if we really thought about it no one would do it. From the perspective of our poor brains hell bent on survival, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the better your technique, the less sense it makes. Hurling our bodies down the side of a mountain is already questionable enough, and the steeper the hill, the more our natural instinct is to suck back away from the pull of gravity, to lean back, turn across the fall line and let ourselves succumb to the instincts of self preservation.
But oddly enough, that’s how we’re also most likely to fail. See when your body rocks back away from the hill and shifts your weight onto your tails, you have less control, and you’re in defense mode. When your hands aren’t reaching down the hill, they drop back and pull your shoulder back with them, twisting your body away from the fall line and causing you to slide.
Once you’re there, it’s just a matter of time before you’re either in a heap pulling the snow out of your ears and wondering if its worth the effort to collect your suddenly scattered gear, or at least pulled up on the side of the trail catching your breath, cursing yourself for making the turn onto this double black when your buddies all took off down the groomed cruiser and are probably at the bar right now without having broken a sweat.
But reaching out over the front of your skis, pressing your weight forward and into the mountain in front of you, into the danger, makes you proactive instead of reactive, and allows you to control the direction of the momentum you create.
The same concept applies to those of us dumb enough to ride horses. We all know the worst wrecks happen when we lose our nerve and apply the brakes. Galloping straight at a solid fence, coming into a barrel turn, or chasing a hard running cow, it’s easy to activate that little part of our brain that evolved to keep our species around to reproduce. Hold up, it says, we better bail on this one. It’s too fast, it’s too high, it’s too much. But at that point it’s also too late- and the minute we whoa, the wheels come off, and we’re lucky if being ejected is the worst of it. The even bigger crime is that we asked our horse to trust us, to come along on this bold move we committed to, and when we bail we let them down too. We break at minimum their trust and their confidence, if not their body.
Every time business gets scary, it’s easy to want to hit the brakes. The numbers get big, the demand from clients becomes overwhelming, the work seems insurmountable. Adding employees to meet the demand means adding more risk, and having to add more work to pay those employees and technology to manage them. Growth draws attention from competitors, and greater exposure to regulation. Any profits get sucked up by reinvestment in growth, and the growth means more clients with more demands. Your same friends that took off down the intermediate trail on the groomed corduroy to the bar while you leapt off the double black are spending their weekends relaxing, complaining about their boring jobs while they drink a hard seltzer and ask when you’re going to hang out.
I sit here at my desk on a Saturday, 37 weeks pregnant, with two new interns, an employee that started three weeks ago, a new one starting soon, and an outstanding offer to another. I have six prospective clients in the pipeline just this week, and an outstanding to do list four pages long for the existing ones. Over the last few months I’ve been inundated with well-intended advice from friends and family (and ill-intentioned advice from competition) about slowing down, not taking on so much right now, hitting the brakes a little bit for a while.
I hear it for the thousandth time- Keep your hands forward. Except the voice is different now- it's mine- and I remember to embrace the gravity, and dig into the momentum, into the danger.
Never had much fun on groomed cruisers anyway.