The top floor of the lodge at the Black Mountain ski resort in Jackson, New Hampshire, isn’t filled with red-cheeked skiers having lodge lunch, warming their boots by the fire, or taking a break from a day on the hill.
Instead, the space is a sort of mountain IT department. Engineers, developers, and designers are camped out at desks, hard at work on the hardware and software upholding the ski resort’s point-of-sale system. The team makes up a living laboratory for a small tech consultancy called Entabeni Systems that, in the last few years, has quite nimbly carved out an entrepreneurial niche in the US ski industry.
Company founder Erik Mogensen is an engineer ski bum who told me he “grew up in a blue-collar family that spent all of its disposable income on skiing.” In fact, when Mogensen was 16 and the local hill in his upstate New York town shut down, he spent the better part of a season building his own ski run in his parents’ backyard.
Now, Mogensen is at it again, this time with higher stakes. The US ski resort industry and the independent operators that account for much of it are facing the sad reality of increasingly snowless winters and the increasingly insane economics of the sport. The US industry has become ever-more consolidated through a bottom-line-focused Wall Street approach at Vail and Alterra. These companies own snow sports’ biggest multi-resort season passes—Epic and Ikon, respectively—and have bought up many once-independently-owned ski resorts across the country. This has led to them dominating the industry, since their deep pockets can support snowmaking and mountain operations on a scale the resorts’ original owners never could.
Overall, the tectonic plates of the industry are shifting as resorts big and small struggle to find the next right step. Late last month, Vail’s investors pushed for an overhaul of the resort’s executive lineup, grumbling about unacceptable performance, while a group of ski-devoted in Oregon are vying to buy their beloved local resort, Mt. Bachelor.
Entabeni, on the other hand, has quietly become the on-call expert shop for mom-and-pop US ski resorts that are still standing and working hard to uphold a relationship with their communities. The consultancy, which was founded in 2015, helps the mountains it works with streamline their tech—and in some cases introduce tech to begin with—while improving their operations to become more efficient and skier-friendly.
The company helps its ski-resort clients collect and analyze any and all data around how their business operates. Then, the Entabeni team will design and build hardware and software to solve the problems brought to light by that data collection, ultimately helping the resorts run more effectively and efficiently. A typical resort could employ Entabeni to analyze and collect data on skier behavior to find out where and how they spend their time on the runs and in the lodges. The company can trace the behavior of season pass holders to learn how often they show up, or break down lodge concessions sales and get behind a register during the lunch rush to see how things run.
Still, Mogensen bristles at the suggestion that Entabeni is a tech company. He prefers to say it is really just a ski company, as it’s in the business of promoting skiing and making it more easier to run a successful and profitable resort, while making the sport more accessible and more enjoyable for everyone. That’s why so much of what Entabeni does goes beyond the actual tech bit of design, engineering, and building both software and hardware. On the slopes, they’ll move some snow around with a cat, or stand in for a liftie if that’s what it takes to get a better sense of what customers experience in a day on the mountain. They’ll even staff the resort’s customer service line to field calls from local skiers and tourists.
Some who closely follow the ski industry have said Mogensen is out to save the sport. It might sound a bit overblown, but to Mogenson that just means he’s “making sure more people can ski more often.” Entabeni’s work may be rooted in tech and data collection, says Mogensen, but the endgame is mostly about making the sport “more accessible, more welcoming, and more human.”
Ups and Downs
Skiing in the US has become a luxury good. Mogensen points out that it’s nearly impossible to live in a mountain town these days unless you’re wealthy. Unless you’re living on a six- or seven-figure income, skiing more than once or twice a year can feel out of reach: Day passes to ski a random Saturday at Mount Snow in Vermont start at $169; at Deer Valley in Utah, a Saturday lift ticket starts at $329. (Skiing is much more affordable in other parts of the world, like Europe, where day passes average around $70.) Mogensen believes these high prices in the US do the industry no favors and ultimately miss the point of the sport to begin with. He sees skiing as a way to “connect more deeply with the natural world and others.” That connection, he says, is the essence of the sport and what makes it so special.
Historically, lift-served skiing in the US wasn’t really a thing until after WWII, says Stu Winchester, who founded, writes, and produces an industry newsletter and podcast called Storm Skiing Journal. That boom, he says, lasted until the mid-’70s when the industry’s first “extinction event” occurred. Between the ’70s and ’90s, says Winchester, the number of lift-run ski areas in the US went from 800 to 500.
“They failed because they did not install snowmaking,” he says. “The areas that installed snowmaking survived and found their niche. Now, we’re on the cusp of a second great ski area extinction event. This one will be determined by technology.”
When Mogensen entered the industry with Entabeni, he had a sense things were tough, but he now admits he didn’t realize just how tough. “It’s insane; these [resorts] are extremely fragile and there’s a lot of catching up to do,” he says. “The math is super difficult.”
At its most basic function, a ski resort carries people up the hill so they can ski down. At most independent resorts, that people carrier was built in 1965. Servicing, maintaining, and running that piece of equipment is a total money-bleed, especially for small resorts that can’t negotiate margins in the same way the big players like Vail or Alterra can. This is exactly where Entabeni can step in by collecting data about skier and rider behavior, mountain operations, sales, and snowmaking. By knowing which runs are getting the most skiers or which runs skiers like to hit first, a resort can target its snowmaking accordingly. After learning that hamburgers and hot dogs aren’t selling in the lodge between 10:45 and 11:45 am, the kitchen can cut back on waste and save money on labor.
Entabeni is also internally piloting an app at Black Mountain that will replace RFID cards next season, allowing skiers to directly access lifts just by tapping their phones. An RFID card catches only a swipe at the lift, while Entabeni can, through the app and the rest of the hardware and software it installs for clients, leverage a resort-wide system tailored specifically to skiing and how ski resorts operate, including the both online and onsite sales.
“No other company has that level of control or influence,” Mogensen says. “We don't need to integrate; we built the entire ecosystem.”
Parking Lot Handshakes
Entabeni typically operates on the road, with a small fleet of tech-outfitted trucks. Mogensen and his team will back one of those trucks right into a resort’s parking lot and get to work. Rolling right up to the client’s doorstep gives the team the visibility it needs into the resort’s ticketing, operations, and snowmaking.
In 2023, Mogensen bought Indy Pass, the season pass that works across a collective of resorts—many of them already Entabeni clients—that competes to some degree with the Ikon and Epic passes sold by the big multi-resort players. It was a first step in building out what Mogensen sees as a three-pronged effort to meaningfully shift skiing and the businesses supporting it to a more streamlined and tech-friendly enterprise.
The third piece of that strategy came in the fall of last year: Mogensen bought Black Mountain, the oldest ski area in New Hampshire. He shipped a handful of his team members from their base in Granby, Colorado, to New England. There, they have been focused on improving the point-of-sale software and hardware at the ticket counter and in the lodge.
Mogensen aims to eventually offload the new and improved mountain as a co-op where its skier members can become co-owners, a business model that's growing popular in Europe. In the meantime, Mogensen is using Black Mountain as a laboratory for the Entabeni approach–where, by the way, all the new hardware, from the point-of-sale systems used for ticketing and concessions to the intake system used by the mountain’s ski school, is built in-house.
The advantage to custom-built hardware allows Entabeni (and now Black Mountain) to iterate on the fly, with a purpose-built approach aimed only at the ski industry and without the extra step of integration. Competing companies, like Skidata, offer similar solutions for a broader customer base including stadiums, amusement parks, and ski resorts. Morgensen’s hope is that the deep dive he’s doing at Black Mountain will result in learnings he and his team can apply to the rest of their ski resort customers.
Geoff Hatheway, president of Magic Mountain ski area in Londonderry, Vermont, first met Mogensen through Indy Pass’ former owner, Doug Fish. Mogensen had pulled a conference together for the independent operators on the Indy Pass at Powder Mountain (now owned by Netflix OG Reed Hastings, who has made headlines with his plans to offer private memberships at the resort). Hatheway says he was immediately taken by Mogensen’s mindset and Entabeni’s ability to tailor its solutions to meet each resort’s specific needs and address its unique pain points.
“We are spending huge sums of money to put a product out on the hill,” says Hatheway, referencing the actual skiing and riding experience from snowmaking to ski school and lift operation. “We don’t have a ton of money to put a product inside the business—software and hardware—which requires a lot of upfront cost.” Entabeni absorbs that upfront cost for its resort partners and then takes a piece of the action (a single-digit percentage, and less for nonprofit resorts) on the backside. “They are in it with us. If we do better, they do better.”
Plus, says Hatheway, Mogenson’s overall ethos resonates, in that he’s all about the small independent operator and puts skin in the game as one, too. “Having those guys show up in our parking lot, drink some beers after work, have a little cookout to get to know all the players at Entabeni is part of the personal approach that makes skiing a unique business,” he says. Magic Mountain has weekly calls with the Entabeni team to talk strategy and possible software and hardware upgrades. “Erik takes that personal approach. The vans are one side of it: that he basically comes and lives with you for a week or two.”
Who Wants to Scale, Anyway?
Janlu Pretorius has worked at Entabeni as an engineer for three years. He is a member of the team that recently moved temporarily to New Hampshire to work at Black Mountain.
“The hands-on approach is fundamentally different from what a lot of engineers experience,” he says. “That short feedback loop is remarkable from an engineering perspective. You can iterate a lot faster and be a lot more dynamic in your iterations. It sparks creativity. When I’m at the mountain now, and looking at the slopes, I can imagine all of the things we can apply and integrate into Entabeni as a whole.”
Mark Schroetel, Entabeni’s COO, agrees, but notes that the company’s ethos isn’t just about solving problems but anticipating them. For instance, Schroetel says, three seasons ago the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours on building a point-of-sale system for its clients. While no Entabeni clients were complaining about the product, Mogensen and his team weren’t really satisfied with the way the credit card terminal was working. They were convinced they could do better. So, totally unprompted, they scrapped it and did it all over again—spending tens of thousands of dollars and burning hundreds of hours more—to build and reinstall a new version. “A small resort can’t afford $300,000 for a new point-of-sale system,” says Schroetel.
When resorts do need to make upgrades on the mountain, they’re dealing with things like chairlifts and snowmaking systems, which can cost more than the resort itself. Resort owners are shouldering impossible economics in every aspect of their businesses. And that’s where Entabeni has an advantage; its reach far outstretches anything its clients could pull off on their own.
Still, Mogensen seems acutely aware that in the ski industry, it is incredibly difficult to win the day. Data can be shoddy, and the economics of keeping an independent resort snow-covered and running steadily while leveling up its tech enough to fully understand its customers is impossibly tough. The math is hard and the competition is very real, Mogensen says. “I can’t imagine trying to open a homegrown hardware store with a Lowes and a Home Depot down the street.”
His hope, he says, is that with Entabeni, Indy Pass, and the model he’s cultivating at Black Mountain, another path opens: one that offers resorts a sustainable and nimble way of doing business that also keeps skiing accessible to anyone who’s up for it, not just the folks drinking champagne in first class seats.
“These little guys can change things a lot quicker,” Mogensen says. “They can make shorter innovations and pick up market share. It isn’t just about the money. We’re fighting for people’s time. We are trying to keep these places open. They provide an experience that’s different than what skiing has become.”
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