Editor’s note: This story was originally published by The Denver Post on March 20, 2005. It has been re-posted in conjunction with a new report about Telluride Ski & Golf owner Chuck Horning.
TELLURIDE — With the tips of his skis casting a shadow on the town below, Chuck Horning shoves off onto The Plunge, a famously steep bump field atop the 33-year-old ski area he bought more than a year ago.
Soon he’s on his belly. Then his back. He slams into several moguls before scraping to a stop, laughing hard.
“You know, I’ve learned more in my life through my mistakes,” Horning says. “And let me tell you, there is nothing I’ve ever done that is more interesting or more frustrating than this.”
More than a year into his tenure as owner of the Telluride Ski & Golf Co., the Southern California commercial real estate mogul admits he has been learning on the job. He’s neck-deep in a maturing industry in which independent operators battle deep-pocketed corporations for a dwindling number of skiers.
“Everything that could be wrong with this business, except for the location, is wrong with this business,” he says. “So why not step up to the challenge? How many chances do you get in life for this kind of challenge?”
Record snow year
Horning’s on-the-job training as owner and operator hasn’t been entirely smooth. He fired the chief executive just 10 months after hiring him, and five other top-tier execs have left the company under his ownership. But a record snow year and skier visits that are running 10 percent ahead of last year have blurred many blunders.
Unlike other resort operators who thump their chests and crow about the strategic planning that fills their ski lodges and chairlifts, Horning is the first to admit that he knows little about skiing.
“The credit for our success this year goes to the weather,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s because of what we’ve done. I am an ant on a log, floating down a creek and thinking I’m driving.”
But maybe, Horning says, a fresh perspective in an aging business could remedy a lot of the resort industry’s ailments. At least that’s what he was thinking when he spent $21 million for the resort company and another $23 million for several parcels of Mountain Village real estate – including an 18-hole golf course – in late 2003 as part of a joint venture he created with former owner and Sony scion Hideo “Joe” Morita.
“It’s a different perspective. We need that here,” says John Knowles, Telluride’s mountain manager, who has worked under four owners.
After all, George Gillett had no resort experience when he acquired Vail, and he became one of the most successful resort operators in the history of the business. The well-liked Gillett is credited with elevating Vail to world-class status during his ownership.
“I don’t think there is a formula for success in this business,” says Ford Frick, a ski-industry analyst with BBC Research & Consulting in Denver. “Certainly, there are many businesses that could be invigorated with a new set of eyes that can maybe see new ideas.”
Does it take a village?
Horning grew up in Southern California, the son of a doctor. His father helped him develop a chain of nursing homes that he eventually sold before moving into commercial real estate. His Newport Beach-based company, Newport Federal Financial, owns several office parks, and, just six months before buying Telluride Ski & Golf, Horning and his son Chad paid $37.5 million for a 270,000-square-foot office park in Newport Beach.
That kind of success will be difficult to replicate in the resort business. Skier visits declined during the 1990s as the baby boomers who built the modern ski industry in the 1970s moved away from the sport. Industry giants like Intrawest and Vail Resorts now thrive by marketing themselves to aging visitors more interested in owning a family gathering place than spending eight hours a day on the slopes.
That’s a game Telluride Ski & Golf can’t really play. The company owns some real estate, but not enough to anchor the kind of village Intrawest is building at Copper Mountain and Winter Park.
Telski, as the company is known locally, owns no lodges. It has no plans to develop a village and has no condos, single-family homes or lots for sale. It culls all its revenue from lift-ticket sales, summertime golf fees, ski lessons and on-mountain dining. It is what the resort industry used to be: an uphill transportation company focused on keeping people happy and on the mountain.
Although big money could be made by selling the company’s limited land as slopeside homesites, Horning says the property would best serve the resort as a hotel. Only 479 hotel rooms exist in Mountain Village, the tony slopeside enclave above funky Telluride.
Yet Telski hosted 368,000 visitors last season, making it the ninth-busiest ski area in Colorado. Horning says his mountain can handle another 200,000 to 300,000, and he wants to lure them by building another 1,000 hotel rooms.
This month, he joined local developer John Horn in a plan to build two hotels in Mountain Village. Their proposal, submitted to local planners, calls for a new road from the village core to the hotel sites.
Firings and promotions
Horning came to his newest career almost by accident. With six Northern California ranches, he was shopping for an Aspen investment home in late 2003 when his Realtor mentioned that Joe Morita was trying to sell the ski area.
Horning remembers saying, “So what?” Then he visited Telluride and fell in love with a lifestyle and community unlike anything he has known in Southern California. Within a few months, he owned the resort.
Horning tapped Ray Jacobi in April to run the ski area and gave him absolute authority. With almost three decades in the hospitality business, most recently as the chief operating officer for Dallas-based Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, Jacobi was eminently qualified.
But when Horning visited last Christmas, he was not pleased. The chili served in mountain eateries was lousy, he said, and guest services weren’t adequate. He fired Jacobi in early February.
Horning now boasts about top-notch chili and fresher, tastier food at Telski restaurants. He has rewarded some longtime employees with management positions while ousting others, including Chris Ryman and Betsy Cole, the top executives for Avon-based Booth Creek Ski Holdings, who ran the ski area for Morita.
“I paid a lot of money to get rid of them. I told Joe I’d keep them, but then I found out how much I was paying them to treat this like a stepchild,” Horning says. “They are great, great people. They just have too many other things to worry about.”
Ryman and Cole say that Telluride almost runs itself, having been carefully groomed by previous owners.
Beverly Hills investor Joe Zoline opened the resort in 1972, betting that he could build a better, homier Aspen in the all-but-abandoned southwestern mining town of Telluride. He sold to local investors Ron Allred and Jim Wells in 1978. They developed the resort’s image as a luxurious enclave, and helped create Mountain Village and the $19 million gondola system that connects it with the mining town below.
Morita took Allred and Wells’ work a step further when he acquired the resort in 2001. He pumped a reported $30 million into Telluride Mountain and more than doubled its terrain.
Brash style worries some
Horning isn’t known for mincing words. His brash style has some townsfolk worried. He is often spotted late-night carousing through local bars, sometimes carrying a riding crop and chatting up local women. His late-night antics, which include licking the face of a female friend during a dinner with local officials, are uncommon for traditionally staid resort owners.
When Horning first arrived, a house he was in the process of buying from Morita burned to the ground. He now lives in a condo in Mountain Village and plans to rebuild on the site.
Then locals unearthed a dated website – www.christianparty.net – with his name on it, and the worrying began in earnest.
The site featured a “Father’s Manifesto” that lamented a bias against fathers in custody hearings. The site was linked to another site that held racist slurs. Horning’s name was listed as a supporter of the site and the manifesto.
Horning says he first heard about the site when he acquired Telluride. He has no affiliation with it, he says, and he has asked his lawyers to help him shut it down.
Although he has no connection with the group or the manifesto, however, Horning says he has struggled through “more than one” divorce where he fought for rights to visit his eight children.
He says he is very close with his children, he adds, but not so much with his exes.
Going for the green
While Horning may not know much about the ski industry, he says he knows how he wants his guests to be treated. It’s a service-oriented approach he learned while running several nursing homes in Southern California.
This season he says he is focused – almost to the level of obsession – on safety, a new marketing campaign, better food and a new environmental program.
After a 65-year-old woman was struck from behind, for example, Horning initiated a campaign that takes away skiing privileges for skiers and snowboarders who collide with anyone in front of them.
He also killed the resort’s 3-year-old marketing campaign shortly after he arrived. In it, animated storybook-like characters roasted visitors who wore designer outfits or talked on their cellphones. He replaced it with a new campaign that features quotes from actual visitors.
“The message there was wrong. It was a little snobbish,” says Ken Stone, a ski industry and marketing veteran who serves as a trusted advisor for Horning. “Our new plan goes to the people who are our raving fans. They are the ones who will do our advertising.”
Also on Horning’s to-do list is building up his resort’s environmental performance. Telski has not fared well in the last few Ski Area Citizen’s environmental scorecards, annual grassroots evaluations by environmentalists that rank resorts’ ecological sensitivity.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for the right leadership to take us to the next level, and we’ve got it now,” says Deanna Belch, the resort’s environmental programs manager. She plans to expand the resort’s recycling program, use recycled materials and ecologically sensitive construction, and educate visitors about the need for environmentally savvy living.
San Miguel County commissioner Art Goodtimes is among locals who applaud the effort.
“They seem pretty interested in working with the community and trying to develop more of an ecological niche for the ski area,” he says. “I think Telluride is well poised to occupy one of those green marketing niches. It could give us an advantage in the flat ski market.”
Like executives at the environmentally progressive Aspen Skiing Co., Goodtimes believes skiers will soon begin choosing resorts based on environmental policies. Other locals appreciate the fact that Horning is there, in Telluride, and has pockets that are deep enough to fix whatever breaks.
“Yes, there are people with various levels of unhappiness,” says Jerry Greene, whose 30-year-old Baked In Telluride shop is a local institution. “A lot of (the Hornings’) late-night exploits around here belong on the society page. I am pleased with what they’ve done so far. At least he’s here. We never, ever saw Morita.”
But some continue to fret. They are reluctant to share those worries, but while Horning focuses on improving the chili and eliminating accidents, they are concerned about who is watching the airline program that ferries needed overnight visitors into town and how the resort is courting large groups for summer business.
“The community is very, very concerned about the current leadership at the resort,” says Gregg Bagni, a marketing consultant who spent two years working with Ryman and Cole to create the animated marketing campaign.
“There is increasing fear and frustration in the community,” says one longtime local who asked not to be named.
“These guys don’t know enough to even know what to ask. Can Telluride wait while these guys finish their on-the-job training?”
