Easy Doesn't Do It
Forget a quiet game of golf. Some folks make business networking a real adventure
For many executives, that's a good thing. Cathey Finlon, 60, the CEO of McClain Finlon, an advertising agency in Denver, has always been active and outdoorsy. Her husband plays golf, but she finds it "too slow" and instead prefers skiing and bike riding. She's taken a series of long-distance rides during vacations where she's met other business owners and executives. On one ride in Vietnam from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, she hit it off with another entrepreneur whose cycling pace matched her own, and she recalls, "We would go for miles talking about business books we were reading, decisions we were making, ideas we were working on."
But the attraction for some is that you don't have to be away for days at a time on a distant continent to have a satisfying experience practicing these sports or to use them to grease the gears of your business relationships. A climber with a mountain nearby can get out of bed early, do a series of short climbs, and still be in the office at 9 a.m. A surfer in Southern California can catch a few waves on the way home from work to release the day's stress and run into other surfers doing the same thing.
Additionally, these sports are highly individualistic, require discipline, and tend to inspire intensity in their adherents. So practitioners see them as not just things they do but reflections of who they are, and they readily identify with others who share their passions.
Forte settled in Las Vegas so that she would have mountains nearby and went into business for herself so that she would have the time and flexibility to climb whenever she wanted. She says her clients who are also climbers understand her lifestyle choices more easily than those who aren't, and thus "a significant chunk of my business are people I meet through climbing."
Schaye recounts a weekend in the Hamptons on Long Island, N.Y., when he saw someone cycling alone and invited him to join his group. It turned out to be another banker whom he'd talked to on the phone but had never met. "We talked and got to be friends, and by the end of the ride we said we should find a way to work together," he recalls. They haven't ridden together since, but they did reconnect during a few investment deals their firms shared. And when Schaye wanted to start Chestnut Hill a few years later, this fellow rider persuaded his firm to put up the seed money.
Trust. Then there's the team-building aspect of adventure sports. "We interact with more strangers and have to get to know each other and build trust quickly," Schweitzer says. "Maybe after 10 years of golfing with you I'll feel a great bond with you, but it might only take two rappelling trips or a handful of rafting trips to feel really close with someone."
The bonding happens so quickly, he says, because whether someone is helping you change a flat bicycle tire in the middle of nowhere or holding your belaying ropes on a cliff face, "you're relying on the other person to keep you safe. That builds instant trust, and the trust transcends the experience."
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