When I was living in Telluride, Colorado, I worked at a private residence club that provided hotel services. The parent company of this club had other private residence clubs like it at other resort localities and there were also country clubs, city clubs, and the like. Basically, these were places where rich people spent a great deal of money on memberships that created opportunities to spend more money. The private residence club in Telluride was the company's only location near a ski area.
This posed a bit of a problem. The local demographic near a ski area is very different from the local demographic at any other resort-like place where they golf or go to the beach. Near a ski area, you either have the super rich people who live in seasonal mansions who do not work while they're in town, or you have the people driving from a long way out to work every day in the ski town where the wages are generally higher than in the drab country towns in the lowlands where they're from, or you have people like me who were largely transient and worked just to support our skiing and riding lifestyle - we were ski bums. Although some ski bums stayed in the area for a long time even they were known to change jobs rather often. There is a very unique dynamic associated with a ski town and it affects how workplaces are most effectively run.
Well, the corporate office in Dallas tried to impose a corporate culture on the location in Telluride. That just was not going to work. The kind of issues an employer has to deal with in Telluride is vastly different from what one would deal with at a non-skiing resort or especially in a big city. Here's an example. In one year of working at this private residence club I became the 9th most senior employee in a workplace that had 50 employees and this kind of turnover rate is pretty normal for a ski town. In our particular workplace, the people who left during that year included the Front Desk Supervisor, Concierge, Reservations Manager, Maintenance Manager, Front Office Manager, Assistant General Manager, and even the General Manager.
The year before, I worked at a country club in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio with 30 dining room co-workers. When I visited them at the time that would have been my 2-year anniversary, I would have still been in the less senior half of that department. Management was changed only slightly at the mid-level and largely unchanged at the highest level. Bear in mind that country club dining room staffs typically turn over much faster than professional jobs geared toward university degree holders and yet this country club staff looked super stable compared to my decidedly less stressful workplace in Telluride. A ski town is just a very different place. People are more laid-back and casual and they just do not take life very seriously, especially not their professional lives, which really only exist to support their bohemian lifestyle anyway.
A few years later I found out that the building formerly occupied by the private residence club I worked at had since been occupied by another club not affiliated with the parent company I was working for. The parent company is still thriving but the Telluride location is no more. The failure of the club in Telluride may have been predictable given the signs that were evident even when I was there. Although a few people did see it coming, there were many who just did not recognize the signs.
John 8: 51-59
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