Which brings me—somewhat improbably—to an outdoor hockey rink in Fernie, British Columbia, the small mountain town my family and I are lucky enough to call our second home. For more than a decade, every winter, I have tried, and occasionally succeeded, in constructing a roughly 30x60 square foot sheet of ice. At first on a giant tarp placed on dirt, bordered by 16-foot long 2x10 treated boards of SPF (Spruce-Pine-Fir for the uneducated)…

…and, eventually, on a fancier, though, ironically, less cooperative, concrete bordered asphalt surface that is covered in sport court tiles in the ever-encroaching non-winter months.

The photos sprinkled throughout this piece chronicle the journey, the memories made, and the struggles to get it perfect. The words try to explain why that matters.

You see, it turns out there’s a big difference between freezing water and making ice.

How tough can it be, you might rightfully ask? Canada in January. Add water. Wait. Freeze. Enjoy. And yet, year after year, that damn rink humbles, delights and confounds me. Kind of like running a business, but more on that later.

What looks effortless from the road—a smooth sheet of ice, kids ripping around, sticks clacking—is the product of dozens of small decisions, constant adjustments, and a surprising amount of restraint. The real work happens quietly, usually at night, often when no one’s watching. Again, kind of like running a business.

The first mistake rookies make is assuming cold weather is enough. It isn’t. Cold helps, but it’s only one variable. You need a base. You need patience. You need to resist the urge to rush the first flood, no matter how eager the skaters are or how perfect the forecast looks. Dump too much water too soon and it never quite sets. The surface ripples. The ice weakens. Air pockets form.

And before long you’re staring at a mess that has to be chipped out and rebuilt from scratch, as happened to the 2026 edition, hampered and eventually aborted, by double-digit high temperatures through much of January and early February.

The counterintuitive truth is that good ice is built thinly. Carefully. One layer at a time.

This took me years to accept. My wife and kids would tell you I still haven’t, as they watch—annually—my neighbour and ice-making partner and me “flush” our cul-de-sac fire hydrant directly onto the 30x60 slab of ambition, debating how much is too much. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing immediate progress, about drowning the tiles and declaring victory. But that satisfaction is fleeting. The ice remembers shortcuts. It cracks where you rushed it. It buckles where you forced it. It fails where you were impatient.

The weather, of course, doesn’t care about your plans. Freeze–thaw cycles arrive uninvited. A warm afternoon can undo three perfect nights. Snow falls at exactly the wrong moment, insulating the surface and trapping heat when what you really need is exposure. Leave it too long and the rink suffocates under its own good intentions. Clear it too aggressively and you risk damaging what you’ve already built.

Every winter, something. goes. wrong.

Cracks appear—sometimes big ones. Early on, those cracks felt catastrophic. Proof of failure. Evidence that I’d misjudged the conditions or overestimated my abilities. Over time, I learned that not all cracks matter. Some heal on their own with a cold night and a light flood. Others signal deeper issues—problems in the base, mistakes made earlier that are only now revealing themselves. Experience doesn’t eliminate problems. It just teaches you which ones to panic about.

Standing out there late at night, hose in one hand, beer in another, watching steam rise as water hits cold ice, I’ve come to appreciate how much of rink-making is about attentiveness, rather than solely about effort. You watch the temperature. You feel the ice under your boots. You listen. You wait. You talk to yourself. And sometimes, despite doing everything “right,” nature has other ideas.

That, it turns out, is exactly what makes the rink such an unexpectedly good teacher.

In executive search—and in building a firm—the temptation to rush is constant. Markets heat up. Clients feel urgency. The conditions look perfect. Surely this is the moment to pour aggressively and get it done.

But just like ice, leadership doesn’t set properly if the foundation isn’t ready. Role clarity matters. Alignment matters. Context matters. Skip those early layers and you might still get something that looks solid at first glance—but give it a season, a strategy shift, a change in temperature, and the weaknesses reveal themselves.

The best searches tend to unfold slowly at the start. Not because anyone is dragging their feet, but because the early work—the listening, the calibrating, the framing—is what everything else rests on. You don’t notice it when it’s done well. You notice it when it’s skipped.

Firm-building works the same way. Growth is intoxicating. New opportunities. New people. New offices. It all feels like momentum. And it is. But momentum without layering is fragile. Systems lag. Culture strains. Trust thins. Eventually, a warm spell arrives and exposes what was poured too quickly. Trust me, we know.

What I’ve learned—on the rink and in business—is that durability isn’t about brute force. It’s about respect. Respect for process. Respect for variables you can’t control. Respect for timing. Some nights, the smartest thing you can do is nothing at all. Let the temperature drop. Let the ice harden. Trust that restraint is not neglect—it’s judgment.

Which brings me back to that distillery in Scotland.

That day, we were unapologetically focused on the product. We were tourists. The magic was in the glass, not in the germination schedule. Process was optional.

Rink-making has taught me the opposite lesson. Here, the product is fleeting. A warm spell can erase it overnight. A careless flood can undo weeks of effort. The only thing that truly endures is the process itself—the patience, the sequencing, the judgment to know when to act and when to wait. Oh, don’t get me wrong, when it all comes together and we’re out there skating around, making dekes and memories, parents and kids, cousins and neighbours it’s worth all of the hours of toil.

And it turns out that’s the same lesson that applies to executive search and firm-building. It’s hard, it’s tedious. It’s layered. It takes time and there are setbacks, but what keeps you going are those fleeting wins.

Growth, like ice, can be rushed. It can even look good for a while. But durability—the kind that survives market shifts, leadership changes, and the occasional unexpected thaw—only comes from respecting the process. And while there will always be variables outside our control, when the process is right, the product usually takes care of itself.

One of the harder lessons the rink keeps teaching me is that outcomes are not a reliable proxy for effort. I can spend countless nights flooding, scraping, shoveling, checking forecasts, waiting for the perfect temperature window—and still end up with a season like this one.

The elements don’t care how committed I am. And the inverse is true, too: occasionally the conditions align, the temperature behaves, and the rink practically makes itself. Same builder. Same intent. Different result.

That dynamic feels deeply familiar in a business like ours. We don’t make a widget. We don’t control demand. We can’t compel our clients to transact. What we can do—what we work relentlessly at—is be ready when they do. Some years the phone rings. Deals close. Mandates flow. Other years, markets stall, decisions get deferred, and activity dries up. A good year doesn’t mean we worked harder than a bad one, and a bad year doesn’t mean we worked less hard than a good one. It usually just means the conditions were different.

Which is precisely why process matters so much. When the outcome is variable and largely outside your control, the only thing you can really nurture is the foundation—relationships, reputation, judgment, trust—so that when the ice does set, or when the market does move, you’re the one people want skating with them.

And maybe that’s the quiet gift in all of this. The rink—despite the cracks, the false starts, the seasons that never quite cooperate—has hosted laughter, growth, bruised knees, high sticks, and memories that will long outlast any single winter. The business has been much the same. Built carefully, tested often, occasionally humbled by forces beyond our control, but ultimately sustained by the people who show up, stay late, and care deeply about doing things the right way.

And then there’s the whiskey—best enjoyed slowly, with good company, after the work is done—less a celebration of perfection than an appreciation of time, patience, and shared experience.

None of these things endure because they’re flawless. They endure because they’re tended. Layer by layer. Quarter by quarter. Season by season. With restraint when restraint is called for, and enthusiasm when the moment is right. The product may come and go—but the process, when it’s respected, leaves something far more lasting behind.

Regards,

Adam