Snow deals: Business on the slopes.

• Author: Fox, Cheryl
• Position: Eexcutive Lifestyle - Brief Article

A few short months from now, Utah's ski resorts will be firmly planted in the center of international attention. As a result of all this publicity, you may find your out-of-town clients eager to see the places where Olympic history will be made. Of course, the ski slopes can be a great venue for an informal business gathering. Plenty of strategies have been cemented on chairlifts, and alliances solidified through sharing a run covered with Utah's famously light powder. But whether you're an avid skier or one who hasn't seen ski boots since college, hosting clients on the ski slopes can be fraught with both real and figurative humps and tumbles.

Say you have an out-of-town client who tells you that he is a great skier hack home. So you take him to the top of your favorite blue groomed run (colors specify level of difficulty: green circle beginner skier, blue square = average skier, and black diamond = expert skier). Oops. It turns out that your client is a really good skier at some molehill of a mountain in the Midwest. If he's still speaking to you three hours later when he's made it to the bottom of the run, he probably isn't saying anything that can be repeated in polite company.

This kind of thing happens more often than you would believe. Even Deer Valley's perfectly groomed blue runs can scare the wits out of someone not accustomed to the steepness or the altitude.

So, how do you ensure that you and your client survive a day on the slopes with both your person and your business relationship intact? Hire a private ski instructor.

I'm not talking about the kind of ski lessons where you and 15 others are trailing behind the instructor like a line of overgrown ducklings. Private instructors tailor the lesson to meet you and your clients' needs.

Private instructors often function as more of a guide than a teacher. Instructors understand what runs work for skiers of different abilities. There's a run at Deer Valley, for example, called Sunset, It's a green run, but some instructors don't advise taking novice skiers there because even though the run...