(upbeat music) - My name's Austin Royer and the COO of Gilson Snow.

(soft music) As COO of Gilson, we are a startup company, so I do a little bit of everything from coming in and helping out on the line, on occasion to you know, developing new equipment, to analyzing, you know how efficiently we're producing those skis and snowboards to kind of reduce cost there.

So I have a lot of hats to wear and, you know as we continue to evolve those get a little bit more specific and specific.

I'm not a typical systems analyst kind of position but what I do now is, I'm constantly looking at the flow of materials, and the flow through the shop and evaluating how well we're producing those whether it's time or material consumption just to make sure that our system is properly, you know firing on all cylinders so that we have the maximum amount of output with the maximum amount of efficiency.

A typical day for me is, is typically atypical, I would say.

So it, it really depends on the day.

I'm still a big part of making sure that things are working properly here as well.

So if we have an emergency in the shop say a machine goes down or a process is is failing, you know, I'm probably the the second person to look at that, but then, you know, I'll have to come up with a solution for that.

When you look at a snowboard and the process that it takes to manufacture it from the surface level, it's pretty simple, right?

We have, you know five different layers, plastic, glass and wood.

And we combine 'em all together to make a snowboard.

The basic process is pretty simple.

We have, we make a wood core, we make our top sheet plastic and we put a graphic on it, and then we sandwich it all together with fiberglass and epoxy, and then we cut it out and we have a snowboard.

For a physician like mine I would say the most important aspect or skill set that you you need to have is one resilience.

So, you know, there's a ton of roadblocks that always come up, you know when you're analyzing systems or when you're developing new systems you never get it on the first try or typically the second, but what you need is you need to have the ability to see a roadblock, predict roadblocks and figure out ways around those roadblocks.

And that happens with even general operations as well.

So, you know, as we are growing in entrepreneurship, there's always a hundred problems and, you know constantly looking for those, you know future forecasting so that you don't have to deal with them in emergency.

But also just making sure that you can figure ways around them coz everything's possible.

It just takes, you know, a lot of will and some ingenuity.

(upbeat music) Some of my hobbies definitely include skiing and snowboarding.

I love to do both.

I love the mountains.

I love to get out west and ski those big mountains and snowboard, learn some new tricks.

When I get the ride with some of the riders they always push me a little bit.

So, you know, I think I was 32 when I did my first back flip on skis, which is exciting.

The importance of my job, you know from a personal level, I would say that, you know it really hits home of some of the aspirations I had from when I was very young.

I used to tell, you know, my mom, my dad when I was 10, 11, 12, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Well, I want to be a professional soccer player or an inventor and you know, obviously I'm not a professional soccer player, but, you know in my position I'm constantly inventing new processes.

I'm constantly inventing new, you know, ways to do things.

So, you know, that that creativity really fulfills some of those, you know, lifelong desires.

(upbeat music)