Leeds Business Insights Season 1, Ep. 2: Clark Jones Transcript

Listen: Season 1, Ep. 2: Clark Jones

Amanda Kramer: Welcome to the Leeds Business Insights Podcast, featuring expert analysis to help you stand out from the herd. My name is Amanda Kramer. We are thrilled to be discussing management of a mega-brand during the pandemic and change management with Clark Jones, Senior Vice President of Disneyland Resort, finance, revenue management, and special events. 

Clark Jones, Senior Vice President, and CFO at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, is a 26-year veteran of the Walt Disney company's theme park business. Clark leads approximately 110 professional cast members in various financial and operational roles that work closely with his partners on strategies and plans to further build the Disney brand, establish, implement, and maintain Disneyland Resorts' financial plans, and provide unique and memorable experiences for Disneyland resort guests.

Clark earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His Master of Business Administration degree was earned at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Clark currently serves as a co-executive champion of Disneyland's pride business employee resource group. He is an Executive Board Member of Visit Anaheim and sits on the Leeds School of Business Advisory Board at the University of Colorado. 

Disney's theme parks are never quiet unless a global pandemic means shutting them down. And while getting a green light to reopen Disneyland was a relief, it brought with it a host of challenges related to crowd capacity and social distancing. And getting it right not only means creating an amazing experience for your customers. It means setting an example that smaller players in the tourism space can emulate, not to mention the hotels, restaurants, and other industries that depend on your success. Today, it's a pleasure to welcome Leeds alumnus Clark Jones, Senior Vice President of Disneyland, to Leeds Business Insights to talk about what he calls the hardest two years of his career, getting through the worst of the pandemic and coming out on the other side. Welcome, Clark, and thank you so much for being here today.

Clark Jones: Thanks, Amanda. Absolutely. My pleasure. Excited to see you and hear you, I guess.

Kramer: Yes, absolutely. We're really looking forward to our conversation. And let's start with the big question, Clark. You know, Disney is a household name. Let's peel back the curtain. Tell us about where Disneyland is at today.

Jones: Great question. Well, one, I would say we are super excited about where we are today. We opened back up at the end of April, rolling into May. And to see those first guests come back through the gates after being closed for over 400 days was super exciting. The business is doing really well. The guests are super excited to be back. The holiday season was incredible. I think we're on the path to what our president calls a legendary comeback.  We still have a ways to go. We're dealing with the same challenges that other companies are dealing with right now related to supply chain issues and hiring and retaining talent. But on the whole, I think that everybody is enjoying the product, enjoying their time, and just the magic that Disneyland has to offer. And we're finally able to deliver that back to our guests. 

Kramer: We're so glad to hear that Disneyland is in a great place right now. And obviously, surviving during a challenge like COVID means finding ways to be innovative. That's a major challenge for giant companies like Disney. So, Clark, can you tell us more specifically about some of your successes coming out of the pandemic?

Jones: Yeah, Amanda. I would tell you, just like for everybody, the pandemic was, we hope, a once-in-a-lifetime event for us as professionals, individuals, society, so on and so forth. But I will tell you that having that break did allow us to take a step back and think about some of the things that we were providing. Were there different ways to innovate our product? Innovate the way things got done? 

Probably, the biggest one, I think, when we came back out of closure that people are acknowledging and noticing is the reservation system. We have been a business that, essentially, if you come, we had a space for you. Where there were some occasions where we would have to close parking down or close the park down. But we would work our way through that. But now, we took the time off to come up with a system that allows us to take reservations. It controls our capacity. We did it for a couple of reasons. One, we need to do it because we had to control capacity due to, you mentioned— social distancing and just for safety reasons. But two, I think from a guest experience perspective, is providing us more flexibility and more understanding of what the guest makeup is going to look like, how many people are going to be coming. And then, we can adjust accordingly based upon that.

Anytime you change something, it comes with its own set of challenges, especially with guests who love the product and the park as much as our guests do. But I think the reservation system has proven to be, I think, a successful change that, again, it helps us, it helps the guests. I think it's got a win-win aspect of it. It took a lot of technology. It took a lot of thinking about how we do things. If you think about it, you know, we're a 66-year product and doing it kind of the same way as far as the other guests came in and consumed a product, to make a change like that, I think, was pretty, pretty big. But I think it's being embraced effectively.

And there are some other things that we came out of, too. We just launched the Rise of the Resistance attraction at our Star Wars Galaxy's edge, hugely popular. And for anybody out there listening, who hasn't had a chance to, or will ultimately maybe get a chance to ride it, one of the best attractions I've ever been on. While we were down, we created a virtual queue. We've actually launched it before when we had launched Star Wars Galaxy's edge, but it allowed us to take it and rethink how we can use a virtual queue in these spaces. So, the guests didn't have to stand in four-hour, five-hour lines. And again, it allowed us to maintain, I think, the queue itself and manage the number of people that were standing in line, in virtual lines. And again, I think it changed the guest experience. So, you didn't have to spend four hours just hanging out in the line before you got onto an attraction. And again, I think a win-win for our guests as well as for us, as they've freed up time in their day. It also allowed us to have better management over the queue system, which I think everybody when they think about Disneyland, thinks about lines and queues. And anyway, we can make that better. I think it was a good thing. 

And we also launched another innovative product that we just launched in December called Genie+. And it allows the consumer and our guests to, when they're in the park, to make reservations, essentially, on specific attractions. What once was fast passes, which we no longer offer, but through the Genie+System, the guests has a way now of setting up their day. And it comes up with recommendations of how to spend your day, and then you can, essentially, reserve a time on attractions that you want to go to. And then we even have something called Lightning Lanes where you can specifically buy access to an attraction. So, again, I think another way to allow the guests to enjoy the park experience the park in a new and different way. And frankly, trying to alleviate some of the pains we've seen in the past related to lines and queueing.

And then, Amanda, I'll tell you, this is one of my favorites, is just around characters. When you think about the experience itself, before, we had meet-and-greets where guests would go stand in line, and they would walk up to the character, get an autograph, a picture, and then move on to the next character. Well now, because of social distancing and the need to separate the characters from our guests a little bit, it allowed our entertainment team to really rethink how characters can interact. And actually, we put them into environments in which they were interacting with each other, interacting with their surroundings. We've had Goofy and Max at California Adventure, the two of them, by the Wharf, fishing in the Wharf area, which we'd never done before. And, fun things ensue like Goofy catches a pair of underwear or whatever on the rope or on the hook. See, you just see things that you just never see them do ever before. We'd never done anything like that. And I think there are moments there that are just this interaction in this play between the children and, even, the adults, and these characters is just, you know, you're not limited to, here’s a 30-second interaction and now move on. You actually get to be a part of a dialogue or a conversation that's happening. And I think it just takes the whole thing to another level.

Kramer: Really, what it sounds like is the pandemic offered up an opportunity for Disney to pivot and provide an even greater guest experience through these innovations.

Jones: Yeah. And that is what we're hoping for, right? We are a guest-first organization, right? I mean, we try to do everything through the lens of the guest. That includes how they interact, but it also includes how our cast interacts, cast make up. I guess the other part of all this is, when you think about our cast or employees, we call them all cast. The cast is what makes the product come to life and what makes Disneyland, Disneyland. Without them, you know, it just would be, you know, a brick-and-mortar space. But the cast is what makes it happen. I think we're continuing, trying to look at how do we innovate the cast experience as well and provide them tools to understand what the guests are doing and answer questions. Continue to be a part of that guest experience because, I think when we talk to our guests, their interaction with the cast usually sits really high on the list. And so, we're guest-first when it comes to thinking about the experience, but I think we're cast-first when it comes to thinking about how we deliver on that experience. 

Kramer: Absolutely, that makes sense.  One question that's coming up, Clark, is as we think about guest expectations, there are high expectations associated with the Disney brand. How do you effectively introduce these changes and develop buy-in or acceptance from the guest?

Jones: Amanda, it's a great question. With the legacy that Disneyland has, especially with its avid fan base, anytime you make a change can be challenging. I think about— we have an attraction that was, Hollywood Tower of Terror. We changed that attraction to Guardians of the Galaxy experience. The same ride, as far as the ride mechanics go, but just a completely different experience. I remember, when we announced we were making the change, there was a lot of pushbacks and, you know, just a lot of concern about taking the classic attraction like the Tower of Terror, which we also have at Walt Disney World, and doing something different with it.

I think, Amanda, once you make a change and put it into the environment and let the guests actually then interact with it and participate with it, in most cases, they realize, “You know, sometimes change is good, and sometimes, it's better.” You know, you're never going to make everybody happy all the time, but, if we don't make some changes, we're just going to be the same Disneyland we were, you know, ten years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And I think, our guests expect more from us than that. When the guests have the opportunity to actually be a part of some of these changes and learn how to use them and get over the learning curve of how reservations work or how Genie+ works, and once they get into the system and understand it, I think their experience is just better. 

Kramer: And now, backing out for a minute, Clark, you've talked about planning for what you can't plan for or planning for the un-plannable. Can you tell us more about your approach to this throughout the pandemic and more generally as well?

Jones: I think that's a great question, Amanda. You can never plan for everything, and we would never have thought that we would need to plan for a pandemic that would shut the Disneyland resort down for 400-plus days. But at the same time, you always need to be thinking about the dynamics of the business that you're in and what are some of the possible things that could be happening, above and beyond, just straight growth, or straight beyond business results.

So, we do a lot of scenario planning. We do think about recession periods. We do think about what would be the impacts of those. While you always try to plan towards, you got to be thinking about the three or four scenarios that have happened. You don't want to spend a ton of time on them because they may or may not come to fruition, but you got to be, at least, mindful that they exist. And then I think things like thoughtful analysis and really understanding, all right, so if this happens, if this scenario takes place, what would we go and do? And then put on the shelf some of those ideas.

And then, lastly, it's about the flexibility, right? You need to be flexible. You need to be nimble. You need to be able to make choices and decisions and just know that they might not be 100% perfect, but you're going to have to make some hard calls and try them and see what happens. And hopefully, you've done enough thoughtful analysis, enough scenario planning, that you have at least an idea of the decision you're about to put into place and what the impact of that will be in the longer term decision or offsetting, whatever it is, the environment that you're in.

One of my favorite quotes right now is coming from the film Encanto, which, hopefully, the listeners have had a chance to see. And it's such a great film. And there's a character in there who is the perfect daughter. She says, “It doesn't have to be perfect. Sometimes, it just has to be.” And I think when you think about planning, it's like, it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be spot-on all the time. But you have to have it, and you have to be thoughtful about it, and it needs to be there, so when the time does come, you're ready to act upon it and you've got at least a starting point to think about how you're going to get through whatever the challenges that you're facing at that moment.

Kramer: Let's pivot a little bit into managing the cast or employees. When this pandemic hit, it sounds like you're sitting down and having a conversation. We have these tools in the toolkit, and we also need to be nimble. Could you peel back the curtain and share with us, from a leadership perspective, what that conversation might look like? Or how those listening might be able to manage change and unpredictability with their employees?

Jones: Yes, Amanda. Yeah. You opened this by saying this was the hardest two years of my career. And I think that that was part of it. The management of the cast, to work your way through all of this. So, let's dial the clock back to March 13th, 2020. We say we're going to be working from home. And we thought we'd be working from home for about two weeks. We didn't know what that meant, and we didn't really know how to work from home yet. And so, I sent my team home. We started working virtually, and I think when we say working virtually now. We all kind of forgot what it was like to do that in the first couple of weeks and did not know. We were using a different communication tool, and then Zoom took over. Now, we don't know a world that doesn't have Zoom.

And I sat with my team on a regular basis. One of the interesting things, too, that came out of this was I now meet with my entire team—so, the hundred-plus cast members that I have—every Wednesday for half an hour. And I use that as an opportunity to communicate with them, things that are going on. Now that we've reopened, we're communicating about things that are going on within the park. Every leader I have gives a quick update on what's going on in their space. We talked a little bit about what the business is doing. And I think it keeps everybody informed and in the loop of what's going on around them, in an environment where they're not always around each other and can't always hear and see what's going on around them. So, even though we're virtual, keeping them together as a team, I think it has had huge, huge value. And I've been doing this going all the way into the closure period. So, here we are, we're shut down, two weeks go by, three weeks go by, four weeks go by. And now, all of a sudden, we're having to make some choices about having to let people go. And again, one of the hardest conversations I've ever had, where you don't know what the other side of it is. You don't know what the answer is as far as when they're going to be coming back and what this all means.

But, you know, again, I think the key to it all is about communication and openness. You need to have an environment of trust before any of this happens. So, if there's no trust within your team today, or back in 2019, before these all happened, when you start having to send people home virtually, and you have to start furloughing people, and you tell them, “I don't know what's going to happen, but I can tell you that I'm going to do everything I can to get this team back together,” if there's no sense of trust, those are just empty words. And I think that, in those moments, that's what the teamwants, is the team wants to hear that their leader, their leadership teams are doing everything they can to get out of whatever this environment is and into the other side. If you've got frayed edges, those are going to be highlighted during a moment like that. But if you have a solid core and a solid sense of who the team is and who the leaders are and respect for that leadership, and trust and belief in them, it makes those conversations a little bit easier to get through. And I want to believe that because the team was all on the same page and a sense of “We can get through this,” it allowed us to get through some of those darkest times.

And then when we started bringing the cast back, some of the casts never went on furlough, and they were through this whole thing. And then we started bringing the cast back, now you've got, Amanda, two populations that you're trying to manage your way through. You've got a group that has been through the whole thing, has been working, and they've got their challenges and stresses and anxieties of going through the whole thing while working. And then you've got a population of people who are coming back from furlough who have their stresses and anxieties and experiences. And now, you've got to bring them all together and rebuild the team and rebuild the relationships.

And again, that's why I think like this Wednesday meeting, if there's anything I can tell the listener about getting through moments like this, it's been that the Wednesday meeting has been an opportunity for us to welcome the cast back, recognize the amount of work we have ahead of us, and recognize it as a team, instead of—As you said at the beginning, I've got a pretty interesting makeup of an organization. I've got finance. I have revenue management. So, very analytics-based organizations. And then I've got an events team that we're doing events strategy. But we're also working towards the programming and working with our operating partners and our entertainment partners, and actually implementing and launching and creating these events.

So, it's an interesting makeup of people. And I think the more that they can share and the more that they can understand each other's worlds, I think the tighter we become as a team. And it gets you through some of the darkest times when you feel like you've got family around you that believe in each other and trusts each other. I think that's what got us through, frankly. So, hard conversations become less hard when the people you have them with believe in you and trust you as their leader to get you to whatever it is that we're about to get through.

Kramer: Thank you so much for that information, Clark, and grounding us in some leadership principles in dealing with one of the toughest times in all of our lives. In every episode, we have an LBIdea or a main takeaway. You've talked about finding the silver lining in COVID, and I think that might be something for our listeners to take away here. With so much change and so many opportunities, what is the takeaway for an early career professional who maybe sees a better way to do the same old? And then conversely, what about for a higher-level manager who needs to be in tune with a workforce that is more willing to quit in search of more fulfilling work? 

Jones: So, I think it's an exciting time to be a brand-new cast member. I think we are creating—whatever the new normal is, we now have an environment where I think all voices are being heard. And I think, as a new cast member, you have an expectation that your voice should be heard. And I think new ideas and new approaches, we talked a lot about innovation and we talked a lot about how do I think about things differently. I think, as somebody brand-new to the workforce, you're bringing that to the table. You are bringing a brand-new perspectiveto organizations and to companies.

And I don't think you should be afraid to say what you're thinking and say how you might change an organization. Because I think that is your expectation that the company should be listening. And I think we, as leaders, know that that's your expectation. And we need to create an environment in which you can do that. So, don't be afraid to come in and really provide perspective and add value and question things and really take a look at the environment around you, because I do think the environment is new, and it's changed. And this is the new thinking versus the old thinking. And you're going to create that new thinking.

And then, I think, as leaders, we need to support that. We need to create an environment in which our cast are coming in, and they feel that we talked about trust and respect, they feel that they have that environment and that they can be open and they can think about ways to change. I think, as leaders, we need to create an environment where our casts know they're creating value, the work that they're doing is respected, and it is appreciated. And the only way that we can do that is to let them provide input and provide perspective. They need to learn from us as leaders. That is still our job, is toteach them how to work and how things get done, and what is the culture of the company, so on and so forth. But also, we need to create an environment in which they have a voice, probably a bigger voice than they've had in the past because they're expecting that. And I think we should be looking for that.

Kramer: Absolutely. That makes sense. So, Clark, while we have you here, are you able to share with us some of what's coming down the line for Disneyland and, or Disney World? 

Jones: Sure. It's an exciting time, frankly, for the domestic park business. At Walt Disney World, we're celebrating our 50th anniversary right now. So, a number of new things.  We have a new Nighttime Spectacular, Harmonious, at EPCOT. We've got a new Fireworks Show at the Magic Kingdom. We've got coming a new Tron Attraction at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. And we've got a Guardians of the Galaxy attraction that'll be coming at Walt Disney World at EPCOT as well. And then here locally at Disneyland, we've got Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway, which will be coming in the next couple of years. Construction and that is moving along great.

So, I think there are a number of things on the horizon. We're about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the company. So, a lot more to be shared in that space as we get closer to it. But just again, it's an exciting time for us, for the company, overall, a lot of happening.

Kramer: Absolutely. So exciting! Thank you so much for joining us today, Clark. It's been informative and wonderful to have this conversation with you.

Jones: It's my pleasure. I'm glad you are doing this. I think this is an exciting opportunity to hear from various business leaders and what they're facing and going through, I think. Hopefully, we added some value today and the conversation was insightful, maybe fun.

Kramer: Thank you again for listening to Leeds Business Insights, and a special thank you to my guest, Clark Jones. Make sure you don't miss a single episode. Subscribe to Leeds Business Insights wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.