Smells Like Victory – Olympic Style

According to NBC’s Olympic coverage, a Freestyle Mogul Skier races “down a slope with an average incline of 26.5 degrees over large uniform bumps called moguls.” Such a skier has to be able to use the bumps in the mountain to direct their path, effectively absorb impacts, and jump when the run calls for it. Sounds like many successful entrepreneurs. So it’s no surprise that former World Cup Silver Medalist and Current Freestyle Mogul National Champion Michelle Roark is returning to the Olympics with a successful business behind her. And just like the mountain runs she loves, there have been bumps in her path before.

Roark has been on the US Ski Team for 16 years, placed 18th at Torino in 2006, and has qualified for 2010 at the age of 35 (making her one of the oldest skiers in Olympic history.) But she’s not just about the skiing. With a degree in chemical engineering, Roark saw a business opportunity to create something new – a line of natural perfumes made the old way – before today’s chemical synthetics and alcohol bases. In 2006, Roark launched Phi-Nominal, bootstrapping her way into the scent business. She was determined to have a business that would help support her desire to ski. Though she’s had sponsors, her career includes a time when she lived in a tent and on friend’s couches so she could train. Roark overcame this mogul and bought a house which turned into a very good investment.

“I have an engineering background, and I’m a World Cup Skier, but there are a lot of marketing and business plan things I’ve had to learn,” says Roark. Her husband has an MBA and has helped her create marketing copy and design the plan to move the company forward.

Her newest fragrance, “Inspiration,” is the one she wore to qualify for the Olympics at Deer Valley. “Humans develop a sense of smell in the first trimester in the womb. It is our most important and often overlooked sense. Inspire comes from the Greek root that means to inhale.” Roark wants all her senses aligned when she’s trying to win. She also wants to inspire others – a fan telling her she’s an inspiration is her biggest compliment.

One recent bump that Roark took like a champ relates to her downtown Denver business space. She bought a building with room for her perfume creation on the top level, and room for a storefront at street level. There was enough room that she offered to rent out part of the space to a salon. Four days before opening, the salon owner’s financing fell through. Having built out the space, Roark took over and created the Voila Salon, Spa and Parfumerie. The spa has a lot of potential, and she’s learning about how to run that business while also training to appear at Vancouver in a few weeks.

Her lessons for other entrepreneurs? Differentiate your products. Roark’s perfumes have “all natural ingredients, mixed in proportion using the Phi Number (or Golden Ratio) and they’re about the wearer and his or her relationship with themselves. A confident person is a sexy person.” Roark’s mission statement is to have Phi-Nominal make the scent for the first woman president.

How does she make time to run a business and train at the World Cup level? “If you can’t make your passion work – what can you make work? I don’t own a TV, I don’t sleep very much, and I just make everything happen.”

You can learn more about Roark’s skiing at her International Ski Federation profile or at the NBC Olympic site and see recent video of her run on YouTube.