Rob Katz, 39, the new chief executive of Vail Resorts Inc., sat down with The Denver Post on Wednesday to discuss his strategy for the Avon-based company, which counts 14,000 employees during the peak winter season.
The conversation touched on the possibility of acquiring ski resorts owned by competitor Intrawest Corp., why he decided to relocate the company’s headquarters to metro Denver and how losing his job in 1990 was one of the best things that happened to him.
What he said:
“Certain Intrawest properties” are attractive to Vail Resorts, but not either of its two Colorado ski areas, due to antitrust concerns.
Vail owns four Colorado resorts – Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone.
“My assumption is that Copper and Winter Park – those would not be (Intrawest) properties that we would be interested in.”
Intrawest, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, announced last month it had hired investment bank Goldman Sachs to explore options that could include a sale, a merger or partnerships.
Intrawest owns 10 ski resorts in North America, including Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia and Stratton in Vermont.
The recent decision to move Vail Resorts’ headquarters to metro Denver had “zero” to do with the fact that Katz and his family live in Boulder, he said.
Combining the Avon corporate office with its RockResorts subsidiary – currently in Cherry Creek – will help the company centralize corporate staff, cut costs and make the publicly traded company more accessible, Katz said.
The company needs approximately 45,000 square feet of office space to house 175 employees, Katz said.
“The Route 36 corridor offers rents that are about 40 percent cheaper than Cherry Creek or where we are in Avon,” he said, adding that some of the properties they’re looking at have mountain views.
He was one of thousands laid off from Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., the firm led by junk-bond king Michael Milken, in 1990 when the company declared bankruptcy.
“I had concluded that was probably the end of my career,” said Katz, an analyst at the firm. “And it turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, because everybody that was at that company who might have had a good impression of me … went to all these other companies.
“At a very young age, I had relationships with people at a whole variety of places.”
Katz went on to become a senior partner at Apollo Management, the New York buyout firm that owned a controlling stake in Vail Resorts from 1992 to 2004. He has been on the Vail Resorts board since 1996.
Vail Resorts stock closed at $38.08 on Wednesday, up 63 cents, or 1.68 percent.
Staff writer Julie Dunn can be reached at 303-820-1592 or jdunn@denverpost.com.
