15 years ago, as the world’s attention gazed steadfastly upon the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, I was ten thousand miles away in Melbourne, Australia—

Launching a global winter sports venue that I was utterly unprepared to be leading.

Which meant that at the same time Olympians were nervously puking before competing on the world stage, I was doing the exact same thing on the other side of the globe.

So… that’s special. ♥️

How am I possibly qualified for this?

My new boss called me the “most interviewed” candidate of all time.

The reason I held this title is because he kept calling me in for round after round, desperately trying to find a reason to NOT hire me—

Because I was only 22 years old.

Which, in itself, would typically disqualify someone from being put in charge of sports programming at the largest ice sports center in the Southern Hemisphere — a shiny new $84 million venture. 👇

All of the other candidates were 20+ years my senior, with long resumes, fancy degrees, and buckets of references.

I was just some uneducated kid from America who definitely didn’t know how to dress appropriately for an interview (🤦), or tactfully think through the questions being asked of me.

But here’s the thing—

The reason I didn’t think through my responses is because I wasn’t speaking from my brain, I was speaking from my gut.

The unique quality I had, and the others lacked, was practical on-the-ground experience building ice sports programs.

I might have only been 22, but my family had been in the ice sports business since I was 10, and my first job outside of the family business was running one of the busiest ice entertainment venues in the world.

My instincts were simply unmatched. 

Interview after interview, question after question, it became clear to the executive leadership that I was the gal for the job.

.

.

.

Until my first day — when they asked me to build a spreadsheet.

F*ck.

I was absolutely shitting myself

In all the interviews, not once did anyone ask me:

“Hey Kristin, do you know how to build elaborate financial models in Excel?”

So you can imagine my surprise (and horror) when I arrived for my first day of work, and my boss sat me down at a computer to do just that.

He handed me some preliminary budgets he had compiled, but he told me that they were all just numbers on a page—

They didn’t reflect a viable operating plan.

And I had convinced him that I knew how to operate. Which wasn’t a lie.

I knew how to develop a skate school, establish figure skating programs and hockey leagues, and hire and manage coaches (which is far easier said than done).  

I also understood how these programs all needed to operate like points of inertia on a flywheel, driving the business forward.

But nobody had ever asked me to write that shit down—

Least of all build a variable budget model in a computer program I had never even looked at before.

About an hour into my torture, my boss came to check my progress, and found me typing away on a calculator, then putting those numbers in the spreadsheet.

Y’ALL — I didn’t even know a spreadsheet could ADD SUMS. 

I thought it was just a bunch of nice boxes to keep numbers orderly. 

The color drained from my boss’s face when he realized the dire mistake he had made by hiring me.  

This $84 million venture was, of course, corporate-owned. By an investment bank, actually. 

And the person responsible for creating and managing the lion’s share of the operating budget didn’t know how to work a f*cking spreadsheet.

I was certain that my first day would also be my last.

Screw that, I have Google.

I slogged home that evening, utterly defeated. It had been one of the most traumatizing days of my life.

…And I had to go back again tomorrow? 😣

Frankly, it would have been a relief if they just fired me. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about the embarrassment of not knowing something that I should know.

But then I realized—

There’s another way to not be embarrassed about not knowing something.

👉 Learn it.

The year was 2009, and if Google could teach me how to make a lamb roast and do the Single Ladies dance, surely it could teach me how to use Excel.

So I typed “Excel for beginners”, and a few hours later, with help from some YouTube tutorials, I had mastered the basics— 

Which was certainly enough to begin translating my vision and expertise into something an investment banker could digest.

Excel was simply a tool that I had never used before.

And tools are easy to learn.

The reason they had hired me wasn’t because I had the proper education and training — because clearly, I did not. 🤦

It was because I understood the ice arena business better than anyone else in that whole damn country.

When I confidently walked in the next day, armed with my newfound ability to build spreadsheets, I was no longer concerned about being fired—

But I quickly had the opposite problem.

Hey Kristin, can you help with…

After the spreadsheet fiasco, I was thrilled when I began getting asked to provide input on business planning outside of the purview of my role.

It was hella validating. 🥳 

I was one of eight senior department managers, ranging from Sales & Marketing, to Facility & IT — yet I was the only one who had ever actually operated a venue like this before.

Everyone wanted to run their plans by me. They all had questions about what was actually going to happen once this arena was built, and there were customers inside.

I was applauded for pointing out stuff that was, to me, the most obvious shit ever:

• How are you going to get 300 people off the ice at the end of a public session without some sort of announcement? Are you planning to just run them over with the Zamboni?
  

• Why TF do we have fabric on these benches? Skates are going to rip this to shreds in five minutes.
  

• How did we decide to buy a computer system that’s built for ski resorts? The only thing we share in common with that business operation is that we both wear scarves to work.

Our launch date drew closer, and every time I ticked something off my to-do list, 10 more things appeared — most of which couldn’t be tied back to KPI’s that I owned.

A few weeks before the launch, when I should have been solely focused on finalizing my department’s operating plan and training my team, my boss took me out for coffee.

“You’ve been doing such a great job on everything Kristin, and we’d love it if you could produce our launch event.”

Um — what?

I knew there was going to be a launch event. The marketing team had been working on it for months. 

But it had stayed on the far edge of my peripheral because, of all the crap that had to be coordinated before we opened our doors to the public, it was pretty much the only thing that had absolutely nothing to do with ice rink operations. 

But all the marketing team had done was line up some dignitaries to speak and cut ribbons.

They wanted something bigger—

An ice show with professional athletes, theatrical lighting, and even some dazzling pyrotechnics.

In three weeks.

Surely this was something I could take ownership of, right?

After all, I was the only one with experience doing stuff on the ice.

My heart dropped into my stomach, and I was suddenly wishing I had been fired for being shitty at spreadsheets.

Because dying is worse than being fired.

And this was going to kill me.

To be continued next Thursday…

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

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