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Bristling with energy, brimming with ideas, cell phone at his ear, Les Otten doesn’t look any worse for wear these days after his ouster from the huge ski company he built and lost.
Otten keeps an office in Maine, but his base of operations has shifted to Boston because he’s angling with partners to buy the Boston Red Sox. But everything else in Otten’s universe is much the same as it was before: He’s still focusing on the future and ignoring past failures. And despite the painful events of the past few years, he hasn’t lost a bit of his enthusiasm for Maine, for New England, and for the world.
“In order to accomplish great things, you may have to try numerous times,” Otten said earlier this month as he sat in a Boston restaurant.
It’s been a wild few years for Otten, 52, a self-made ski tycoon who started out in 1972 working at the then-small Sunday River resort in Newry, Maine, and then soared to prominence when his company purchased Attitash in New Hampshire and then Sugarbush, Killington, Mount Snow, and Pico in Vermont.
By August 1997, Otten’s American Skiing Co. was the country’s largest alpine ski resort operator, with holdings in New England, California, Utah and Colorado.
Otten’s sudden prominence brought him an avalanche of publicity about his investments in crumbling ski infrastructure; his ideas for the environment; and the 1997 initial public offering, with much fanfare, of stock in the company at the New York Stock Exchange.
It also brought him lots of high-level meetings on a host of subjects dear to him, including rail and the environment, with leaders in northern New England. In May 1998, Otten joined the board of the Conservation Law Foundation, one of many ways he fulfilled his wish to see environmental groups work with the ski industry instead of working at odds with it.
That fall, he was honored at a Rutland, Vt., dinner put on by the regional newspapers as a “Significant Vermonter” for his contributions to the ski industry, notwithstanding the fact that he lived in Maine.
Almost anyone with an opinion about skiing or the environment in the region had an opinion about him.
“I was very aware it was fleeting,” he said of his popularity. “I enjoyed, and hopefully did not abuse, the period of time when people were interested in what I had to say and what I was doing.”
Not everybody shared American Skiing’s vision for shops, hotels and conference centers at the mountains. Ski-town locals from Sugarbush to Steamboat Springs in Colorado sported bumper stickers saying things like “More Snow, Less Otten.” Financial analysts predicted his company’s fall.
But that didn’t get Otten down. He worked hard to change his critics’ minds, and continued charging ahead.
Some of the dire predictions did come true for the heavily leveraged company. By mid-1999, poor winter weather and the consequences of big debt had left American Skiing $400 million in hock. The debt stemmed from borrowing heavily for acquisitions and to build speculative real estate at the new properties. The company began to falter.
Otten doesn’t deny he might have tried to do too much, too fast.
“If I meet someone that has never made a mistake, I’m totally convinced they’ve never pushed themselves to understand where the outside of the envelope is,” he said. “I was a person who had to know where the outside was, and now I know how to step back.”
Otten says that for him, the outside of the envelope was the terrible weather combined with the poor reception his ideas got at some of the company’s resorts.
By fall 2000, Texas-based Oak Hill Capital Partners had increased its stake in the company and taken control. The following spring, Otten resigned as chairman and chief executive officer, although he continues to sit on the board. These days, the stock price, offered initially at $18 a share, is hovering around $1.
And the new American Skiing is shedding some of the resorts, including Sugarbush and Steamboat. The sale proceeds are reducing the debt load.
Otten was battered by those developments, but these days he’s looking on the bright side.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have a strong enough sense of survival,” he says.
And while he won’t say much about his personal finances, he will say he managed to leave American Skiing without any personal debt, and with enough money to join a group angling for the Boston Red Sox.
“I’m financially viable enough to participate” in the Red Sox deal, he said.
Otten spends much of his time in Boston now, as he works with a group of investors on a bid for the Red Sox. When pressed to talk about the ski company he built, he recalls the achievements tucked behind and around the profit and loss figures.
Those included overcoming environmental issues in Vermont so that Killington and Sugarbush could make more snow, something he felt was vital to their continued growth.
“At the end of the day, the future is still there; the future wouldn’t be there were it not for the innovations and concessions that I was willing to make.”
American Skiing isn’t crumbling, he said; it’s making a strategic decision to sell off some assets to help it move strongly into the future – though probably not with him at the helm.
“I’m in that awkward position of watching from the outside,” he said.
And does he belong on the outside?
“Let’s just say that I’m convinced that although I’m not in the industry today, someday I may have a role to play in New England as it relates to business, politics and recreation,” he said.
Politics is something Otten has been considering for years. A run for statewide office could happen in Maine or in Vermont, where he said he owns a lot of land in and around Warren, Vt.
“I’m a great believer that opportunities always re-present themselves, and one needs to be patient,” he said.
He added that the decision to leave American Skiing was his.
“It was a very hard decision to leave; probably the toughest decision that I ever made,” he said.
Proud as he is of American Skiing, Otten has always had other interests, among them his family, and his roles in various charitable organizations.
He helped found Maine Handicapped Skiing, an organization that now has a yearly budget of about $1 million. As chairman of the board of trustees, he helped resolve serious financial problems at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine.
“You’re hard pressed to find someone that walks down the street in northern New England who has done as much as successfully as I have,” he said.
He still loves to ski. And as for the roller-coaster ride of the past few years, Otten refuses to write it off as a loss.
“All I feel comfortable about saying about the past is it prepares you for the future,” he said. “To that extent, I feel very well-prepared for the future.
“I’m ready to do something great,” he added. “Always have been, always will be.”
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