The Way I Work: Will Dean, Tough Mudder
We go on retreats every quarter to a house in the Catskill Mountains. There's no phone coverage, and the Internet connection is slow. We started the retreats to get everyone thinking about the future. We always have an event coming up, but we also need to think about how we're going to run events in 2014. If you're not answering these questions now, you're just getting less and less efficient and letting things fall further away from you. We've also come up with cool obstacles for our courses during the retreats.
Right now, we prototype the obstacles at our warehouse in Brooklyn, but we're moving into a new 48,000-square-foot office this year, which will have room for a testing facility. Alex Patterson leads our obstacle innovation team. My meetings with him are always about organization. We'll discuss how many obstacles we have at different stages of development, how people are reacting to new obstacles, and what our action plan is for changing obstacles that weren't successful.
A lot of our best obstacles started in different incarnations. Take Everest, our quarter-pipe obstacle. Our original idea was that it would be a ramp, and you'd have to take a running jump to get up. The trouble was, it was just too damn steep. People would run up and go straight back down. The next time, we built it too flat, so people just walked right up. The third time, we came up with this quarter pipe. It's perfect. You get part of the way up, and then you have to jump, and your teammates pull you up.
It's one thing to test an obstacle with 50 people in our warehouse and another to test it with 10,000 people on a course. The crowd mentality takes over. With Funky Monkey, our monkey-bars obstacle, we never considered people would climb up and walk across the top of it, but at the event, for some reason, they did. Our engineers built it so that you can dangle 500 people off it, but just like cars with good braking systems, it doesn't help if the driver's drunk. Now, we've reengineered it so you can't physically get up there.
Safety is a huge concern. We invest phenomenal amounts of money on safety. We have a medical staff at each event. We probably have more lawyers on staff than some law firms do. We have a book of contingency plans that every employee reads and takes a test on. If you don't pass, you have to go through training and have a discussion with a senior manager.
We've sold more than 500,000 tickets, and somehow, we've had no deaths. Statistically, it's amazing. You take that number of people, and if they were sitting at home that day, statistically, we should have had a few heart attacks. I have to tell the team, it's coming. We have to accept that it's going to happen at some point and work to ensure it never does.
My co-founder, Guy, and I don't spend that much time in meetings one on one, but we do have dinner together at least once a week. Guy and I have been friends since high school, and I think that's the most important thing in a partnership--having someone you know really well. You know each other's strengths and weaknesses, and Guy has many strengths that I don't. He's far more patient than I am.
Usually, by late afternoon I'm wiped out. I can probably do four or five hours of meetings a day. Then my attention span's gone. I don't let anyone invite me to last-minute meetings anymore.
I normally head home around 7 p.m. My fiancée, Katie Palms, will typically be home by then. She was at Harvard Law when I was at Harvard Business, and she's now a corporate lawyer. We met at a house party. I was pretty drunk, but she begrudgingly gave me her number anyway. I called her three or four times, and she was having none of it. Eventually, she gave in, and the rest is history. Usually, we have dinner together, and if I don't have some kind of work event, I'm in bed by 10 p.m.
I always tell people I'm probably fundamentally a bit lazy. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but it's true. I frequently gravitate toward slightly easy things, but now, the only things that come to me as CEO are really damn complicated. The great thing is, on a really frequent basis, you're reminded why you're doing this. Occasionally, I'm in a situation where people don't know what I do for a living, and Tough Mudder comes up, and they're talking about how awesome it is. There's nothing like it.
