How one whitewater-rafting company has had a surprisingly smooth ride on the Internet.
Web Awards: General Excellence
Recipe for revitalization: Take one 40-year-old family-owned river-rafting business. Add the Internet. Shake well.
Man, that sky is blue. What a gorgeous day.
You are on the first mile of your trip down the North Fork of California's Stanislaus River, but you're already in a section so rugged they call it Rattlesnake. Cutting through the craggy beauty of Sequoia country, the North Stan is a rafter's delight, offering miles of stair-step waterfalls and boulder gardens like the one at your feet. You turn and see three rafts shooting past the rocks.
Yet there's no spray on your face, no fresh river air to enjoy. You're not even really there. You're gazing at this scene from the comfort of the Web, on the site run by All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting.
The site's coolest feature may be its variety of such virtual tours of the river routes that the company serves. The sharp, three-dimensional, panoramic photographs are produced in-house using technology licensed from Internet Pictures Corp., in Oak Ridge, Tenn. With your mouse, you can look up, down, or around each tour as if you were standing in a spherical snapshot. Pretty sophisticated stuff for a business that to many is decidedly low-tech.
AO Rafting, as they call it, is a multigenerational family business started by a schoolteacher nearly 40 years ago. It's a regional company in a seasonal business, with about $2 million in annual revenues and fewer than 20 permanent employees year-round. (The company employs more than 100 people during its eight-month annual season if you count some 75 part-time guides.) Based in Walnut Creek and Lotus, Calif. -- right by the mother lode that drew the forty-niners out West for the Gold Rush -- AO Rafting seems isolated, deep in canyon country. Yet it has built a Web presence that puts to shame a lot of other businesses with more tech savvy and resources.
A business site doesn't win awards just because it has cool features, though. It has to work for both the company and its customers. That's what distinguishes www.aorafting.com. Sure, customers can tour the Klamath and Tuolumne rivers through the site's virtual tours. They can also plan trips right on the site, check the availability of tours, make reservations, access real-time information on water conditions, refer the company to friends, and find discounts on trips. The site has replaced almost all the traditional marketing that AO used to do.
CEO GREGG ARMSTRONG: "The whole key is that I can get the information to make smart decisions."
It helps that AO is a tight little privately held business that is 100% owned by the Armstrong family. Decisions can be made rapidly. The company is located within easy driving distance of Silicon Valley, where despite the dot-com bust, there is still an affluent, sophisticated customer base that will naturally look for the company on the Web. Most of AO's staff members have been with the company for years and know the business intimately. Almost all have been or still are guides, experts at the sport that is the company's core competency.
CEO Gregg Armstrong, who with brother and operations manager Scott now runs the company that their father founded, has always had an interest in marketing. Despite limited company resources, he has given a free hand and precious resources to Webmaster Jamie Low, a former guide who once had no other ambition than to spend every day on the river.
So this is a company with a product that generates passion in both its employees and its customers. It has a CEO who is committed to the Internet. It has very little turnover among its employees, many of whom have been with the company for years. The industry is well suited for presentation on the Web, where a good story is best told in photos and short blocks of text. And it has been very, very smart about the way it uses the Internet.
Patriarch George Armstrong was a real rafting pioneer. In 1961, when he and his brother first dropped an old military raft into the river, the sport didn't exist. The brothers were among a small group of enthusiasts who rode the rapids on weekends -- early adopters, if you will, not unlike the first surfers who were then bringing Hawaiian long boards to Ventura Beach.
Armstrong was a mechanical-drawing teacher in the public schools of Concord, Calif. He organized something of an outdoors-activities club for the underprivileged city teens he taught. He'd take them into the canyon, schlepping surplus rafts and old Mae West life vests, and show them a hell of a time in the country.
His own kids -- Mark, Sherri, Gregg, Randy, and Scott -- would spend summers and weekends at their riverside cabin. By 1964, when Armstrong officially established All-Outdoors Adventures in Nature for Youth, his older children were already experienced guides. The whole family spent a lot of the 1970s bringing tour groups into the waters. The company grew slowly, traditionally, by word of mouth.
Although their father carries the title of administrative supervisor, it's Gregg and Scott Armstrong who run the company on a daily basis. The two brothers each manage one of the company's primary locations -- the reservations office in Walnut Creek and the operations headquarters in Lotus. Siblings Mark, Randy, and Sherri serve as advisers. All of them have other lives but still spend days on the river guiding groups of customers. AO has always been the first workplace of choice for the Armstrongs. "Everybody has a stake in the company, some more than others," says Gregg. "Me, my dad, and Scott are the majority shareholders."
Scott and Gregg trace the evolution of the Web site back to a conversation they had on their parents' lawn in September 1993. It had been a very good season for rafting, and 1993 became the company's first million-dollar year. "We made a decision to hire some employees and grow," Gregg says. "Dad had never thought of it so much as a business. He enjoyed it as a way to teach people about the environment and how to enjoy the outdoors.
