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Steve Crown, executive chair of Chicago-based Henry Crown & Co., which owns Aspen One, the parent company of Aspen Skiing Co. and related entities, sat down for a brief interview with the Aspen Daily News at the Limelight Hotel on Tuesday morning. Aspen One CEO David Tanner also participated in the discussion.
Crown and Tanner addressed rumors that the company is positioning itself for a future sale. They vehemently denied those claims and said Aspen One will be a part of the community for the long haul, based on the wishes of a new generation of the Crown family. They spoke of the need for continued innovation, community acceptance of new people managing the company’s diverse operations, and the critical housing and infrastructure (through public-private partnerships) necessary to keep the ski business and the hospitality division viable.
Crown also spoke of how his brother Jim Crown was working to facilitate changes in the structure of Aspen Skiing Co. and the creation of umbrella company Aspen One well before his death in mid-2023.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Aspen Daily News: You scheduled this meeting with me. What’s on your mind?
Steve Crown: I guess what I wanted to at least say out loud is that our family is very, very committed to Aspen. It’s one of the few precious holdings that we have that is intergenerational.
I’m third-generation, and the fourth-generation family members — there are 47 of them, along with spouses — they had a retreat last year. They’ve done this now a couple years in a row, but this one was very meaningful, because about half of them were there, and they came away both knowing each other better, which was one of the reasons for doing it, and talking about some topics that were relevant, because they’re getting into their 30s and 40s.
And what they came away with [was that] of all the assets we have in the family portfolio, Aspen is one that they never want to see us divest. They want to see us involved as long as we possibly can. And that’s a pretty strong statement coming from fourth-generation family members.
It was really a consensus among those that were there, and I think that’s a consistent feeling across the fourth generation. We have a number of homes out here. Our families do both winter and summer activities out here. We’re involved in a number of the different organizations: Anderson Ranch, the Aspen Institute, the music school. We’re involved in a variety of different activities in Aspen, and it’s sort of the go-to for the family.
The one [rumor] that I was hearing was that we had sold to Jeff Bezos [of Amazon]. Never met the man. Met his father, Mike, who’s involved in the Aspen Institute. Met him a couple of times. Nice gentleman.
That rumor got started somewhere, and as you well know, the minute four or five people start talking about it, and they hear it a second or third time, they say maybe there’s something to it. Never met him. [There’s] nothing to it.
ADN: Well, I think there were rumors [about selling or positioning to sell] even before your brother’s passing. It’s Aspen and there’s always rumors.
SC: I guess the best way to look at it is that bringing [Dave Tanner] on board is maybe the best statement we could make that we want to perpetuate our position here. We wouldn’t be bringing on someone of his caliber and experience without wanting to continue the legacy that exists here and continuing the family’s involvement. I think Jim and Dave started talking almost three years ago.
Dave Tanner: Before I took the biggest leap of my career — at the peak of my career — I made sure I did the diligence on what the family’s plans were, and obviously their intent is what Steve said. We’ve said it in print and I’ve said it internally 1,000 times — there’s no plan to sell this business. There is an intentional effort here to evolve this business, to keep it innovative, to keep an amazing guest experience, to keep it at the top of its game, to keep it resilient.
And when you hear of moves we’re making internally, that’s what that’s all about, and what the family wanted and what Jim wanted. That’s why they hired me — to drive the evolution in the business with the goal of keeping it independent, of taking care of this community, of taking care of our employees, and keeping this the special place that it is, with the values that it has, which are very unique.
Steve Crown on rumors that his family’s company is looking to sell Aspen One and the local skiing and hospitality operations: “Our family is very, very committed to Aspen. It’s one of the few precious holdings we have that is intergenerational. We have a number of homes out here. Our families do both winter and summer activities out here. … We’re involved in a variety of different activities in Aspen, and it’s sort of the go-to for the family.”
Andre Salvail/Aspen Daily News
SC: The company is built on people, and that’s the most important asset, the most important part of any business. … Change is going to happen at any point in time, and a number of the transitions that have taken place really were going to happen anyway. … There’s going to be transitions for some [long-term] positions over time, and there’s going to be a need to bring in newer folks that understand the culture and at the same time, help bring us to the next level.
DT: I’m a guy who’s worked across 30 companies in my career. Very few of them do vision statements and have values that mean anything like they do here. And so when you’re recruiting people, and you talk about culture, the idea of taking the long view that’s enabled by the family, and investing and thinking in decades and not quarters, the idea of honoring people in place — these are super important things that are at the core of our organization, that are also interlinked with this community.
SC: One of the things I’m most proud of our business back at home and here is the longevity and the tenure of the folks that are here.
ADN: But a number of those people are leaving, right?
DT: Let’s not blow this out of proportion. There’s been a handful that have left. Remember I said there was an evolution going on; this evolution started planning long before I was in the door, under the family and Jim’s vision of how they wanted to evolve this organization, how they wanted to create Aspen One, how they wanted to offset the pressures that exist in the ski industry by finding sources of growth in hospitality and other parts of the business outside of ski.
The ski business here is a high, fixed-cost, capital intensive business that doesn’t have any volume growth. We intentionally hold our volume growth down for guest experience to not have lines. The game of taking price that has gone on for the last five, six, seven years is over. We, as a resort, are too expensive. We’re facing pressures because of it. Lodging here is too expensive. It’s not easy to get here. Congestion is becoming more of an issue. This is why solutions like the airport [transformation] and the entrance to Aspen and long-range thinking on housing and infrastructure are super important to our business.
[Within that context] we’re going to cherish this asset in the ski business, and we have to innovate and evolve as an organization as we grow outside the valley and build.
There’s real pressure here in the ski business. We have to continue to innovate, invest, elevate our guest experience, elevate our experiences overall, to maintain what we have, because there’s a lot of competition out there. Consumers have this whole idea that we can all sit back on our heels, and, you know, milk the cow forever. That game’s over.
ADN: Do you think part of the local concerns and the activity in the so-called rumor mill is just a basic aversion to change? Aspen’s gone through a lot of changes since the pandemic; the demographics of the town are different.
SC: I’d say it’s a function of two things, really. One is change; I think you’re absolutely spot on. And two, it’s lack of information: They have one data point, they have another data point, and they try to fill in the gaps.
And I think Jim’s passing was traumatic. Jim was very involved in Aspen, very visible in Aspen, spent time with the folks in Aspen. This is something he loved. And I think with his passing and then essentially, the changing of the guard — that was not planned by any stretch. Dave coming on board, I think, really added a lot of clarity and expertise as to what we’re doing. But the community wasn’t really thinking about how does that all fit into play.
Jim and I worked together. I was sort of his second on a lot of this. I worked mostly on the Snowmass activities. He sort of spearheaded most of what was going on in Aspen. I think Aspen felt very comfortable working with Jim. And now there’s a change. There are different players sitting at the tables.
I think the rumor mill is a function of not having heard from us. We want to get across that nothing has changed our values. Nothing has changed our attention. Nothing has changed as to our vision or commitment to the community. What has changed is there’s some different people sitting in chairs, and that’s just going to take relationships getting established over time. And working relationships are something that we are very much looking forward to.
DT: I would add one more thing to the analysis of why the rumor mill exists beyond change and beyond lack of information. It’s fear, right? People are fearful of what can happen. Everybody realizes how special this situation is. Everybody values it. Everybody wants to protect it. We want to protect it. I want to protect it. We work tirelessly every day to do that.
ADN: You brought up the industry pressures, but I want to talk a little bit about the political climate. As you know, there’s a lot of concern about what’s going on in Washington, D.C., and the tariffs, and day-to-day presidential decisions that either may or may not make a whole lot of sense to the public or to business operators such as yourselves. So with any expansions and new projects you’ve got to read the tea leaves of what’s going on in the capital. Do you have any concerns there?
DT: I’ll take this first. Any business relies on a few things for its health: stability, predictability, understanding that there’s a rule of law, and ideally, lower interest rates and lower inflation.
We have an environment right now that is highly unstable on a lot of different fronts. So that does not just [affect] us, but every business; and I know a lot of other CEOs as I sit on other boards.
People pull back investment. They pull back growth expectations and they hunker down. Thankfully, when it comes to our expansion, the family, like I said earlier, thinks in terms of decades. We can take a longer view. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at international tourism to the U.S., that it’s likely coming down.
As we begin our planning for our next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1 — and we’re talking about it offsite with my leadership team, literally this Thursday — we’re getting conservative, and that is, once again, to protect the company and to protect what we have here. But we can still invest for the long term and look through the short term thanks to the support of the family.
Construction costs were already bananas to begin with, and then you add steel tariffs on top of that, and wood tariffs. And so none of this is good for any business out there. Maybe some people can make good out of this but it’s a tough environment. We get paid to weather it, though.
SC: I think one of the advantages, Dave pointed out, is that we play the long game. So this isn’t a private equity approach, where you’re looking at turning a profit, either quarterly, or being in a position to bulk something up so that you have an exit ramp in four, five, six or seven years. I think because we’re private, we can be very nimble.
I think Dave’s team is on top of this on a daily basis. And as we see things changing, we can adapt and adjust. I think the important thing is we have a long-term plan, and we’re executing until such a time as the long-term plan either becomes problematic, and we have to slow it down, or we have to prioritize things a little bit differently.
From my standpoint, we’re going to continue to move forward with a lot of the capital programs that we put in place, but there are a lot of other things that need to also take place. Dave pointed out how the airport is critically important to the ski company, critically important to the community. That is something that we feel needs to be addressed.
ADN: And I think we addressed it in the November election with the vote to transform the airport.
SC: You did address it in the election with the two different referendums. We still need to get the [federal] funding. … It’s important because the airport’s falling apart. We have to make it safe. And transportation [and housing] are really critical issues within the valley.
DT: Just to give you context on housing: This links to the longevity of our workforce. We have 1,200 units up and down the valley now for employee housing. Our projections going forward — when you look at the aging of our workforce and the people that are going to retire here that are housing secure — we need roughly 400 more units over the next seven years. And so we have invested, and have plans that we will reveal over time, that are going to take partnerships with the community. The stance of blocking constructive, engaged, community focused, employee-housing expansion is only going to blow up in our own face by making this place harder to bring in people, and making it more miserable with people commuting from an hour-and-a-half away.
I feel good with our conversations with community leaders and the new leaders, like [Mayor Rachel Richards] who Steve and I sat down with yesterday. You know, there needs to be an elevated level of coordination and engagement in future thinking to solve these [issues] and to keep this place what it is.
SC: It’s a comprehensive plan that we have to be looking at. And, you know, everybody’s got to play a part. This is a partnership and a collaboration with the town and the county. There should be a win-win for everybody. That’s really what we should be striving for.