Why Last Frontier Stays Independent
Mike Watling has watched the Canadian heliskiing industry change hands more than once. Acquisitions, partnerships shifting, family-run operations folding into larger groups. It’s a pattern he’s seen play out around him for the better part of thirty years, and lately it’s been picking up pace. Alterra Mountain Company’s acquisitions of CMH Heli-Skiing and Mike Wiegele Helicopter Skiing brought two of the sport’s most recognizable names under one corporate roof. Smaller operators have changed hands too, as the industry professionalizes and scales.
Watling, Managing Partner at Last Frontier Heliskiing, admits he doesn’t spend much time tracking any of it closely. “The honest answer is that I don’t really feel like I completely have my finger on the pulse with what everyone else is doing,” he says. “I’ve learned that it’s more beneficial for the business to focus on what we’re doing and keep a vague eye on what the others are doing, rather than stress too much about which direction this could be pulling us into.”
That doesn’t mean he’s dismissive of it, or of the businesses that go that route. “There are pros and cons to both,” he says. “I’ve been to some of the bigger operations, experienced their service firsthand. They do a very good job.” When a smaller operation gets absorbed into a larger one, he’s careful not to speculate about what changes internally. What he does hear comes secondhand, from guests who’ve skied at operations through a transition, or from guides and staff who’ve lived it. “You hear mixed reports,” he says. “I think it’s fair to say that the human being in most cases is resistant to change and doesn’t like it. So it’s also natural to hear the negative feedback, possibly more than the positive.”
What Watling is clear on is which model fits Last Frontier. Founding partners George Rosset, Franz Fux, Mike Watling and Geoff Straight started the company in 1996, chasing first descents through the Skeena Mountains. Nearly thirty years later, the number of partners at the table has changed twice, but it’s stayed close to four the whole way through. Every major decision, including the one about whether to sell, still gets made by that small group.
“The decision is in the hands of one, two or three people with our business,” Watling says. “It’s not in the hands of shareholders, a bigger number of shareholders. It’s four guys sitting around a table having a discussion.” Those conversations about a sale have come up before, he confirms. They just haven’t gone anywhere. Every year at their general meeting, the partners talk through where they want the business in three to five years. So far, the answer has kept landing in the same place.
“We’re all in agreement that, don’t mess with it if it’s working well,” he says. “And so far it’s working very well. We all enjoy what we do. We don’t necessarily have to be doing what we’re doing. So it’s a nice position to be in.”
Asked what independence actually buys the business day to day, Watling points to speed. “You can make decisions a little quicker. You don’t have the heavy structure that a larger business would have, some of the controls in place that you’d have in a big corporation.” He’s upfront about the tradeoff. A team of four partners doesn’t come with a legal department, an in-house accounting team, or specialists on staff the way a bigger corporate structure would. “We have to sort of navigate that on a different scale,” he says. “Maybe that makes us more nimble, I’m not sure, but it certainly feels like it.”
That same instinct for staying small shows up in how the operation actually runs. Small group heliskiing is the model here: four skiers per group, not the ten or eleven riders larger operators run in bigger aircraft. Watling is careful not to overstate the comparison, the lodges themselves aren’t a dramatically different scale from other operators’. It’s what happens underneath those numbers that he thinks matters. “I have no idea how the bigger companies do as good a job as they do being as large as they are, because we’re not necessarily the smallest,” he says. “I see the challenges of having 120 staff. At least I can, as the managing partner, have a reasonably good crack at knowing everybody’s name by the end of the season, or halfway through. To do that on a larger business scale, I don’t see how you can do that.”
For Watling, that’s not a nostalgic detail, it’s the thing the entire guest experience rests on. “Those very human things boil down to the customer experience at the end, which is what we are focusing on,” he says. “It’s not an expedition. It’s not necessarily a skiing experience. It’s a customer experience. The skiing can be amazing, but if the other side of it is lousy, then you’re dead in the water.” He’s confident the terrain does a lot of the work. “The skiing almost speaks for itself because of the terrain we are blessed with, the trickier part is the delivery.”
Part of that delivery comes down to the people, and Watling is candid about how much the roster turns over each year. A lot of staff at the heli ski lodge in the Skeena Mountains are seasonal, and while many return, plenty don’t. He sees upside in both. “It’s good to have a very solid management structure with the same faces, so there’s some consistency,” he says. “But to have new faces and new experiences, people bringing those to our business, really keeps things fresh. Just because they’re new doesn’t mean they haven’t got plenty to add.” The job, as he sees it, is building a structure where that mix of returning veterans and new arrivals can do their best work. “It’s always great to see how the various characters sort of melt together and produce what we produce. The key for us is trying to provide an environment within which those folks can operate and shine and give our guests a good time.”
Looking further out, Watling isn’t making bold predictions about where the industry lands in five years, but he’s not worried either. “There’s headwinds with all businesses. There are headwinds for the heliski and the snowcat industry. But I also think the future’s bright,” he says. He points to how much more accessible new technology has become for small and mid-sized operators, and he’s watching one application in particular. “I’m super excited to see how it’s going to get used towards predicting snowpack stability, so avalanche risk. I think that’s a really interesting angle that I assume is being looked into very closely by the universities and the powers that be.” His read on the road ahead, in his own words, sums up how he approaches most things in the business: “I’m cautiously optimistic, and sometimes cautiously pessimistic.”
Thirty years in, four partners still sitting around the same table. For Last Frontier Heli Skiing, that balance seems to be working just fine.