So now we come to the educational part of our season. It's clinic time! We have clinics that we put on for ski clubs and our customers. We have clinics put on by Manufacturers reps for our staff. We also have in-house training for the staff. For a few weeks a year I spend a lot of time as a teacher as well as a student.
Last week we did a boot clinic for a club called SnowPals (WWW.snowpals.org) as well as customers that signed up. We took the first twenty people that registered and did a free basic stance and alignment evaluation. While this was going on in the boot area, I did a clinic on boots. Boot design, liners, insoles, fitting, boot fitters tools, and boot modifications were covered in some detail. This is one of the presentations that I have done many times and really feel comfortable doing. I think that everyone got some good info out of the event and a number of people found out ways to improve their skiing with boot modifications. The next morning we had a number of attendees come in to get their suggested work taken care of, so it seemed that at least some of them were paying attention and that the information was useful.
This week we have two club events that are part social, part clinic, and part retail (at least I hope that there is some good retail action involved!). We have a SnowPals social mixer combined with a ski technology clinic. The next night we will host the UC Berkeley Ski and Snowboard Club sale event. Also fit into this weeks agenda are two clinics put on for us by our vendors. The sales reps know us well and typically do a different presentation that is more technical and in-depth than the ones they do at other stores. I always look forward to them.
Our Elan/Dalbello rep is Will Lachenauer. Will is very interested in why the factories choose to do what they do. Will said his talk will be about boot design from the manufacturers point of view. How they decide on hinge placement for cuffs, different plastics used, and that sort of thing. Then Dan Dixson who is our Head rep will come in and do a few hours. I don't know what Dan will cover but he always does an excellent clinic as well.
An exciting aspect of this years first clinics is that we will have some new staff members at the clinics for their first days working at the shop. They will be sort of thrown right into the fire, and I think they will really enjoy it! We needed to add some staff to the store for this season and so for the first time I ran an ad on Craigslist.org. The response was overwhelming! Probably 50 responses the first day! Over a hundred in total! I suppose it is a sign of the times and I shouldn't have been surprised but I was. Some of the candidates were simply looking for any work they could find. Many of them were skiers and appeared to be good candidates. I came up with about 35 resumes that would be worth interviewing. That's about ten times as many as I usually seem to have had in years past when I needed to hire. I picked the top twelve and spent three days doing the interviews. Frankly, I think that any of them would have been acceptable. The ones chosen will be fantastic if I am not mistaken. New blood is always fun. We miss the employees that move on, but they typically stay in touch and the CalSkiCo family just grows that much bigger! A woman named Sara that worked for me the very first year randomly saw the ad and dropped me a line just to say hi. I hadn't heard from Sara in over a year and it was good to do so.
So Boreal is open and sales are taking off suddenly. We have new employees. Clinic season is in full swing. Wow. Slow and easy to really hectic all of the sudden. I will try to take a few days the week of the 19th off if I can. After that I think we will be expanding our hours, finishing up our clinics and...SKIING!
Here we go! It's off to the races one more time. Educated, with new blood, and ready for action!
