Day 17 of 30

Part of the deal this year was this…in order to close biz you had to add value to the ad deal. The easiest way for us to do that (an millions of other media outlets) are contests. Thats right, your basic “caller # 7″ promos you’ve heard on the radio. The “enter to win” sweepstakes you see on TV. But for us, its more like “make a bad ass video and maybe win something.” Or “take semi-nude photos of yourself and maybe be exploited further.” I love this time of year, but it is busy. Right now I am working on a social media promo where your best “white lie” you’ve ever used to go skiing just may win you a trip to Copper. Then we have the Lange Girl promo – where girls enter themselves into the contest to become the next lang girl…which means you become the poster girl. Then we have promos to win boots, gloves, trips to the dew tour, trips to the x-games and even a contest where we will send pro skiers to hit your backyard jib set up. Jesus, what have we gotten ourselves into? Heaven and hell?

Day 16 of 30

Magazine is on deadline, so shit is hitting the fan. Sorry about the profanity in this blog, seems I’ve been dropping the s-bomb a little too often. One advertiser’s ad looked horrible, so now its a last minute scramble to figure out what the problem is. Most of the time its a rookie designer who told his buddy that he could design a sweet ad for his company for 1/4 the price. This is what you get….something that looks good on your computer but horrible in the magazine. This is all motivation to keep the “agency arm” concept of our company moving. We do know what we are doing…at least the majority of the time.

Day 15 of 30

I always fall for this when traveling for work. You see that 6:30 AM flight on Monday morning that will get you into the office by 10AM. So you book it, then you realize the night before that you are waking up at 4AM to catch that flight. So you don’t sleep well because you are afraid that you’re gonna sleep through your alarm, because who wakes up that early? I haven’t done that shit since I was a snow reporter at Sierra-at-Tahoe.

So made it into the office by 10, and didn’t leave until 6PM. If I don’t come down with the swine flu or something after this little stunt I will be surprised. Here’s to foolish optimism and sunrises.

Day 14 of 30

Brought Taryn along to check out the show, meet everyone and get some deep dish pizza down the street from the hall. So we took the L together, hit up Dunkin Donuts and enjoyed the show. It was the first time that a lot of the people I work with had the chance to meet my wife. This was probably more fun for my coworkers than Taryn, but thankfully our very own Digi Dave was on the mic doing what he does. That being calling the play by play in the rail jam while walking the very fine line of “edgy” and “offensive.” Entertaining to say the least. The rail jam kids killed it again, and the crowd had a good time. We really are the life of the show.

Later that night we went out for a last night in Chicago, and ended up at PJ Clarkes. Great spot, classic down to the white shirts/black ties. I don’t know where this giant glass came from, but the bartender hooked it up.

Day 13 of 30

Today was a great day in Chicago. Woke up to a massage (dont ever do this hungover BTW), took the L to the show and grabbed a little Dunkin Donuts. Kicked some ass at the show (as always) then went out to Bucktown to catch up with some great friends. My little woman and I took a cab to the meeting spot (pizza place called Piece) and ordered up the garliciest pizza ever made. We partied it up a bit and left the restaurant to head back to our friends place to have a nightcap before calling it a go. We had some leftover pizza, and my friend decided to offer it to some hippie-beggar-kids on the corner. One of them had a sketch book, so my buddy told him “I’ll give you this pizza if you give me a drawing, but I get to pick”, and surprisingly the hippie-beggar-kid said OK. So there were were flipping through this kids sketch book and this is what we picked. I may keep this for a while.

Day 12 of 30

So part of working in the ski industry is making lifelong friends. Afterall, the people you work with share your passion, and isn’t that the best base for friendship? So a good friend and former collegue is now doing some marketing consulting based out of Chicago. Since I am here on biz I made sure to get a hold of him. And as it worked out, he’s consulting a hotel property in downtown Chicago, and asked me if I would be interested in doing a little experience audit at the hotel for him. We called this “product testing” when we worked at a ski resort together, which was code for going skiing and getting paid for it. I of course took him up on the offer, not too sure what I was getting myself into. But he’s a great friend, so I assumed it would be cool. And my wife is coming along on this trip, so it would be nice for her to be in a downtown location so she could adventure out and do some Ferris Bueller shit.

The hotel is precariously situated on the 40th floor of the stock exchange building in Chicago. It only has 20 rooms at the most, along with an exclusive health club. While finding the place was a challenge, and the decor seems like stuff you’d find at your grandparents, it has the most unreal view ever. I’m talking billion dollar views. So I guess it’s more like your uber rich grandparents downtown Chicago apartment. So thanks B for the hook up. I gotta say again that I love the ski industry. I may not make the most money, but I sure don’t pay for much.

Day 11 of 30

It’s funny, I am writing about this day 3 days later because I’m traveling again and slammed with work. But that’s really what this is all about, the blog that is.

I am fortunate to live and work in the awesome town of Boulder. It’s awesome because it’s beautiful and everyone loves being outdoors. It’s a great place to base a ski magazine. I guess that’s why our main compeditors are based here too. I get to ride my classic schwin cruiser to work on a bike path that is totally separate from the road. It’s about 5 miles to work, pretty flat and usually takes me about 25 minutes. It’s an ideal way for me to get a little exercise and mentally prepare myself for the day. On this day, the weather was crisp and it just smelled like fall. I love that smell. So got to work and wrote some proposals, tried like hell to sell some more ads into our next issue and got myself ready for Chicago. All in all a pretty standard day at work…but I did get to enjoy this view on my ride.

Day 10 of 30

My 10th straight day of workin hard for a livin also happened to be my wife’s b-day. So thanks to the fact that I work for a small independent company, and that my boss rocks, I was able to stay home for the majority of the day and work from home. This meant that I could get some laundry done, clean up the house and spend some time setting up a very special birhday dinner for my wife. I did come into the office for a meeting with my boss where I learned that our magazine has officially passed our nearest compeditior in terms of newsstand sales and total distribution. This is big news. No longer can anyone call the pub a niche youth ski mag, now we are the 3rd biggest…behind the huge corporate old person ski mags that we really don’t consider to be our competition.

While working from home I was able to finally close a deal with a big ski company which has us producing a viral video series with a well known ski athlete. The videos are going to be hillarious…sort of a cheesy infomercial theme. Look forward to that. It also means that the big ski corp is OK working with us, despite the fact that we pissed them off pretty good over the past few weeks. Lesson learned, disaster avoided. At least for the time being.

So the special b-day dinner consisted to chateaubriand topped with a rosemary hollandaise, potatoes au-gratin, roasted golden beets, west coast oysters, an arugula salad with toasted almonds, bacon, blue cheese, Bosch pears and a pomegranite vinagrette. Servered with a rose champaigne to start and a bottle of Chateau St Jean Cinq Cepages with dinner. It was delicious, probably the best steak I’ve ever chef’d up.

Day 9 of 30

Back in the office again. The day starts off with a meeting at a major ski industry HQ which is none too thrilled with our company. This is the good and bad of social media. Anything I say online, or anyone at my company says online, is transparent. But that is also the beauty of web 2.0. So we continue to do what we do, which is stirring it up and eliciting reactions online. The better the job we do with stirring it up, the bigger the reaction. And the bigger the reaction the bigger the audience. And the bigger the audience the more people want a piece. That’s social irony. Is that a new term? The crazy thing is that we only speak our minds, just like anybody does on any given day. But with social media, our voices are amplified to those who care to listen. And as it turns out, lots of people care to hear what we say. So to that I say thank you world. Onto tomorrow.

Day 8 of 30

It used to be that I thought travel days were pretty much days off. But now with my iPhone, wifi and instant message, travel days are more work than office days. I did wake up in Redono Beach and I did have breakfast on a pier, but every other free moment was spent online getting shit done. But there is nothing like being busy to make the day fly by. So I am back in Colorado for the next 3 days, then back on the road. Sure was nice to spend a few days in sunny LA, but I didn’t mind coming home to snow on the ground. Good by Cali, see you in 10 days.