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First Person: Bill Malone

Park City’s point man for the 2002 Olympics reflects on preparations for, life during, and lessons from the Games

There’s not much Bill Malone doesn’t know about the day to day challenges of putting on the world’s biggest event, the Olympics, in a small resort town.

He was the executive director of the Park City, Utah, City Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau leading up to and during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Today Malone is the manager of the Chamber of Commerce and Resort Associations in Park City and the job takes him all over the world as he shares the lessons his town learned in hosting the Games.

Malone recently visited Whistler to chat with businesses as the town gets ready to host the Games in 2010.

Pique Newsmagazine’s Clare Ogilvie sat down with him during his visit to ask what businesses should be focusing on two years prior to the Olympics and what advice he has for Whistler.

Pique: Whistler is just a couple of years out from hosting the Games. What should businesses and the resort be focusing on now?

Malone: The real key for now is making those plans about what are you, the business, going to do. I’m sure there have been corporate sponsors coming to town looking for places to rent already. But what if you are a kitchen gadget store? Are you going to do business or are you going to close up and rent it out to, say, Monster.com or something else? At this point in time on the Games schedule you need to be making those decisions.

In our case there were those who made adjustments in business to cater more to the Olympic crowd. We sort of go through this every year for the Sundance Film Festival, so it is not that unusual for companies to close up for 10 days of the festival and rent their space out to Entertainment Tonight or something.

Our businesses looked at the Olympics like the festival and some businesses said, “the Olympic groups are not my customer. They are not the core of who buys my art, or my bikes,” so they closed up and maybe rented out their space.

We saw ski shops that closed up for the Games and then we also saw ski shops that partnered with their supplier to become the hospitality host for Rossignol or Salomon.

Pique: There are concerns that business will be down significantly in the Olympic year thanks to the myths that always seem to surround the event about price gouging, construction woes, and lack of access to skiing. Should the resort be looking at combating those myths now?

Malone: We really started looking at that about a year out from the Games.

We worked hard at driving those myths out, you know construction, price gouging, all of the myths that are associated with the Games, and trying to drive as many customers as possible in that Olympic year.

We had a pretty good Christmas before the Games. But the January before the Games you could shoot a cannon on the mountain and not hit anyone. It was so sad.

But then we had all this pent-up demand after the Games, like in March.

We didn’t do as well on the destination side in March but the regional business side was strong. I think there were so many people who gave up skiing for so long to work on the Games or volunteer that they were just chomping at the bit to get out and ski.

We estimated that we could be down 25 per cent in skier days in the Olympic year and we ended up down 9 per cent. It was like having a bad weather year, so we were pretty pleased with that.

We managed that through a combination of both marketing and public relations. And we communicated to past customers to say, “you can ski in the Olympic year. We have got deals for you. We have a great price deal. You can ski on the runs you will see Olympic competitors on.”

And we told them about the free bus system that was running as we tried to dispel that myth of high prices in an Olympic year and disruption in terms of construction going on.

I think there are opportunities to work on in terms of selling that year and it is a challenge.

To me our goal was how far were we going to be down. We knew we were going to be down. History showed us whether it was Lillehammer (1994) or Nagano (1998) or wherever, we knew the season was going to be down. It was more about how much and how could we develop plans to mitigate it.

Also in that time leading up to the Games, we used the torch relay as something to launch off of and market it and we worked with sponsors of the torch relay with offers like, win a trip to Park City, which would just keep our name out front. We told people the excitement was building but you could still go on a ski vacation.”

Pique; Were you pleased with being down 9 per cent?

Malone: We were actually. You have to keep in mind too that in five months before the Games we experienced 9/11, so we weren’t sure what was going to happen. There were a couple of days after 9/11 that we weren’t sure we were going to do the Games. We got past that, then everything was about security.

Pique: How was security managed and how did that affect businesses?

Malone: Security really didn’t affect business because so much of it we didn’t know anything about. After the Games though you really see the remnants. There were cameras that were placed on top of buildings. No one knew who they belonged to. They were just left there. We had Blackhawk helicopters that would fly over all the time. But from a security standpoint we felt that it went very well because it wasn’t that overt automatic weapon-on-the-chest type of thing. It was very low key. We always joked that if you were walking down Mainstreet and there was someone on your right and someone on your left one of them was affiliated with police of some kind, you just didn’t know which one.

The thing to us that was the biggest change was going into the venues and the (searching) and emptying backpacks and so on. It was pretty far out in ’02 and it is pretty common today.

Pique: What were your biggest concerns as you headed into the countdown to the Games?

Malone: We were concerned about our image, and we were concerned about the myths around hosting the Olympics.

One of the ways we combated concerns about our image was to set up a media centre that we developed in town and that ended up being a huge success. We ended up working with Letterman there and it really set the tone early on.

You have to keep in mind that so many of the people who are coming to the Games are sitting at home in say Chicago and watching this on television for the first week. So that positive image helped us a lot.

We also worked a lot on the business preparations side. About 16 months out we started regular monthly meetings for the business community, each one on a different topic, like transportation, parking, pin trading, arts and culture celebrations.

One of the things that we always kept in every one of those programs was an athlete element to remind people that this wasn’t just all about the economics, it was about the Games.

Pique: What did Park City do to cope with worker shortages and keeping staff through the Games?

Malone: We have an extreme labour shortage and affordable housing shortage, the same as here.

One of the key ingredients that I heard about in terms of employers trying to develop plans to keep staff were the kind of programs that gave bonuses to employees who stayed until the end of the Games. That’s because one of the things that happen is that you have these guys role into town from big corporations like NBC and Coca Cola and they pay wages that might surpass by a lot what someone is making at a hotel, so it is hard to hold onto employees in the face of that.

We had to work hard at doing this. I don’t think there is any magic thing, it is that individual employer-employee relationship that pulls that together.

Pique: How do you attract the workers in the years leading up to the Games since you don’t want everyone just arriving in the months before the event?

Malone: I think there are people who look and say, “I want to be working in Whistler when the Olympics occur. I want to experience that in my life.”

I think those people are not waiting until September 2009 to do that, they are thinking about it now, so you need to reach out to them.

Labour is such a problem and in our case it is getting bigger all the time. It was a challenge in ’02 and it is even more of a challenge today. There are no magic solutions.

Pique: What kinds of businesses decided to close up shop in ’02?

Malone: There were different types of businesses that closed up for the Games. They didn’t run out they just said to themselves, “I’m not going to sell insurance during the Games. I am going to volunteer and I will be there to get my emergency phone calls on Thursdays.”

It is the same thing with realtors. In our case the real estate community was experiencing a real downturn prior to the Games. People didn’t know if the pricing was smart or dumb. You really don’t know until after the Games whether it was a great buy or a dumb buy. Many people shied away in terms of vacation real estate so a lot of our realtors were very involved in the Games in terms of training to become officials with the organizing committee and volunteering in other capacities.

Pique: How did workers and guests get around with all the traffic restrictions?

Malone: Those types of strategies have to be left until about six months out. Things like parking permits and how many people would get access and what time of day would they get access. Deliveries for large restaurants had to be coordinated so that there were deliveries after midnight and before 6 a.m.

In our three venues we had Utah Olympic Park, Deer Valley and Park City. The organizing committee organized it so that there were only two venues working at a time, but it meant that… it had to happen before that event was open on that day or after it was over.

The lodging community also communicated to guests and employees to let them know when it was going to be difficult to get to the hotel or condo and they would offer alternate times to get there.

So it is very important to have good communication amongst the lodging sector and the guests.

On the part of employees, we had park and ride outside of town so you would go and park at the park and ride and there was always five buses in a line to take you into town. They took you to a central transfer station and you would get the bus to wherever you want. The buses ran for 22 hours a day.

Pique: What were the greatest transportation challenges?

Malone: The area we had the biggest challenge in terms of parking was the time period between when the parking lots began to be gobbled up by venues, satellite trucks, and all of the staging, and the time when the real bus system for the Olympics kicked in. So there was this period of time, about four weeks leading up to the Games, where the excitement is building as you see the venues completed but you are losing your parking. The joke in town was that the season pass for skiing was nothing; it was the parking place that was of real value. You had to get creative in terms of saying where I am going to park and catch the bus to get in.

Pique: How was shopping and daily life for people?

Malone: It was just fine. The key was that you just had to know when to go. You are not going to go to the grocery store across the street from the Olympic park at load-in time. But you could go when the event was going on as long as you were done before the load out happened, before the 8,000 cars were leaving.

Maybe you would go to the grocery store after work at night and then there was no problem.

There were some shops that did a lot in terms of prior to the Games, telling people it was a good time to stock up on goods. In our family we just crammed the refrigerator full of food, as much as we could fit in there, and said everyone just go at it.

You could always find the people who left town during the Games and they look down and shuffle their feet when you talk about the Games. You would ask, “Where were you at Games time?” and they say, “Boca Raton.”

“What did you do?” I would ask, and they say, “We watched the Games on TV.”

Everyone is going to talk about this for the rest of your lives.

Pique: How did your volunteer program come together?

Malone: In our case there were volunteers with the organizing committee in a variety of capacities. But because our Games had some significant budget problems leading up to them visitor services was not a part of the organizing committee’s responsibility. So we as venue communities got together and created an organization called Visitor Information Services and we became licensed by the Games to use the logo.

We had corporate Olympic sponsors. So each town that was a venue community created their own visitor information services plan. In our case, we had seven different satellite visitor information centres and they were basically tents. But the staff did everything from helping if you got your keys locked in your car to telling guests what time the entertainment started or where the restrooms were and so on.

We had someone from the organizing committee who actually sat in on all this planning so they knew what we were doing and approving or not approving it. Visa was the biggest sponsor and they sponsored the uniforms and so on.

We produced all the literature as well and we had training sessions as well. But what was neat about it was that we designed it in a fashion so that it wasn’t a 17-day commitment. It was as little as four or five days. So you could become a part of the Games and go through three training sessions and you didn’t have to give up your whole life to do it. And you got your uniform and you got to be part of the Games as well.

Many of the volunteers were realtors, county commissioners and lots of the people who were in the types of occupations that were not really busy during the Games.

Pique: What was the relationship between small businesses and the organizing committee?

Malone: The Organizing Committee is not unapproachable if you have an idea. In our case there were people in the community who could steer you as to making an appointment. There were people in the organizing committee whose responsibility was procurement of services and they weren’t going to bring in a florist from California to hand flowers out. They want someone local.

We became a facilitator in terms of these kinds of ideas. We would say, “hey, that is a great idea, let me get a hold of somebody in the organizing committee,” and we would act that way.

At our monthly breakfasts that we held there were always people from the organizing committee and so there was opportunity to go up to that person afterwards and explain the idea.

It is no good sitting there and saying, “Oh, no one is going to call me.” It is just like any business operation, you had to go out and sell the concept.

A real void on our part was that one of the big sponsors at the Olympics was Bank of America and we didn’t have a Bank of America in Utah, they are not chartered to do business, so there was no relationship in play like you have here with the RBC… You go to the RBC and they are trying to facilitate the business and how you capitalize on the Games, but for us there was nothing. I am very impressed with what you have here.

Pique: Any last words of wisdom?

Malone: “The one thing I always try to remind people of is to take the time to enjoy the Games. The day after it is over, it is over. In the case of our office we were pretty morose.

Schedule some time to go out and go to events. You are going to be busy but you still want to taste and feel it, and so do your employees. In our case we made sure that everyone of our employees had two tickets to an event so they didn’t have to go through life and say I worked my tail off during the Games and I didn’t see anything. We made sure everyone had two tickets.

The one big thing I look back on for us is a lack of legacy — and it seems like you are doing a much better job on this that we did.

I think in our case so many people were so focused on getting back to normal quickly that we missed opportunities to capitalize on them.

We had people who came to visit us in May and June say, “Well, it doesn’t even look like you hosted the Olympics. Where were the Olympics?”

The banners were gone, the stadiums were all temporary, so then we were scrambling to say, “how can we capture some of the Olympic magic and how can we keep Olympic structures?”

And there are businesses which say, “I wish I had taken more photographs of what my business looked like during the Games to put on the wall.”



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