Running the thing, not just building it.

The park had been closed since 2007. The prior owner had lost county approval to hold races, and stripped the property of its assets before the sale — including all water access, on a site in the high desert where water is the precondition for everything else. What transferred was land, a derelict track, and a bad reputation with the two offices whose sign-off the business depended on.

I bought it with two capital partners. They were the money and the relationship that sourced the money; I was the sole operating owner. Every decision downstream of the purchase was mine to make and mine to answer for.

Racing could not resume until the county and the sheriff's office were willing to permit it, and both started from active distrust of the address. I rebuilt those relationships in person and over time, then did the work the permits actually required: commissioned a new survey, commissioned an environmental impact review, and drilled a water well — under budget and ahead of schedule.

With water secured I contracted heavy equipment crews to reconstruct the track. A wildfire season ran along the property's ridge during the same window, which meant coordinating with fire authorities and holding a construction schedule against a moving hazard.

I did not come from motocross. I recruited experienced riders as advisors and let them tell me what a track should be, what racers would tolerate, and what would get the park a reputation worth having. I organized community volunteer labor for cleanup and sold sponsorships to fund capital improvements, including bleachers.

There was no payroll budget for event staff, so the volunteer workforce ran on in-kind compensation: ride time, meals, and camping. That was the trade, stated plainly, and it held. At peak I directed 120 staff, contractors and volunteers across a two-day weekend of roughly 6,500 attendees, 1,200 riders, 800 RVs, hundreds of tents and dozens of food trucks.

I designed and staffed the on-site medical program before it was needed. It was tested when a professional rider was injured mid-event and required a helicopter evacuation. The plan executed without incident: the landing zone was cleared and held while the event was managed around it, and the rider recovered fully.

That documented safety record was central to securing and maintaining liability insurance, which is the constraint that decides whether an event of this size can exist at all.

During my tenure the park hosted the founding of the Corey Herring Memorial race, in memory of a boy who loved the track. I ran one edition of it. The race continued annually through 2023 — five years after I sold my stake — which is the part that matters: what was built at the property kept running without me.

I held full P&L responsibility throughout: pricing, sponsorship sales, staffing, and marketing. I exited by selling my ownership stake to my partners after becoming a parent.

Thirty-three sites, each staffed twice a day, is 66 discrete posts that have to be filled before the first bell and again at dismissal. A post is either covered or it isn't; there is no partial credit and no way to defer it to tomorrow. The roster of 50 guards had to absorb illness, weather, car trouble and no-shows without ever producing an empty corner.

The schedule itself was the easy part. The hard part was the difference between the schedule and the morning.

Crossing-guard work has notoriously severe turnover as a job category — comparable public programs consistently cite low pay, no benefits and a split shift that eats the middle of the day as the reasons. I made roughly 25 hires over two years against a 50-post roster, so about a quarter of the workforce turned over annually, which is well under what the category normally runs.

Holding it there meant treating recruiting as continuous rather than reactive: interviewing before there was a vacancy, training people properly instead of handing them a vest, and being specific with candidates about what the shift actually is so the ones who took it stayed.

The job sat at the intersection of five groups with genuinely different incentives: the county sheriff's office, school principals, parents, the district, and the guards themselves. The sheriff cared about traffic enforcement and intersection design. Principals cared about their own bell schedule. Parents cared about one specific corner. The district cared about the contract. The guards cared about hours, weather and being treated like professionals.

None of those were wrong, and they routinely pointed in different directions on the same intersection. Most of the work was translating between them early enough that a disagreement stayed a phone call instead of becoming a complaint.

Coverage gaps were solved through relationships, not scheduling software. What actually filled a 7:15 post was a deep bench of people who would take a 6:45 call — in the rain, in January, on twenty-five minutes' notice — because the relationship was worth something to them.

That bench was built deliberately over two years and it is the part that doesn't show up on an org chart. The zero-injury record and the unbroken coverage are downstream of it.