59. Dan Cockerell, Former Vice President of The Magic Kingdom

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It’s easy as theme park fans to focus solely on the design process when thinking about the parks. Walt Disney Imagineering excites us because it promises endless possibilities for new creations. This approach places less emphasis on how important the teams that operate the parks are to make them succeed. Walt Disney World falls apart without Operations keeping the attractions and resorts working smoothly.

This episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast focuses on that realm with Dan Cockerell, former vice president of The Magic Kingdom. He worked in operations and customer service for more than 25 years. Cockerell was also the vice president of EPCOT and Disney’s Hollywood Studios and a leader at several resorts. His vast experience at Disney makes him an ideal guest to delve into how the resort functions.

My discussion with Cockerell covers a variety of topics including these questions:

• How did he get started working in the Disney College Program?
• What were the challenges for him while working in France at Disneyland Paris?
• How can Disney strike a balance between preserving the past and adding new attractions?
• What the differences in operating a massive Disney resort versus leading a park?
• Why has EPCOT been a challenge to update, particularly with Future World?
• What made him decide to retire from Disney and become an entrepreneur?

Cockerell and I also talk about the next steps in his career, including his podcast Come Rain or Shine. He is taking the lessons from his time at Disney into the new role as a speaker and consultant.

Show Notes: Dan Cockerell

Learn more about Dan Cockerell and his work at his official website.

Listen to Dan Cockerell’s podcast Come Rain or Shine on Apple Podcasts.

Follow Dan Cockerell on Twitter and Instagram.

Related Podcasts

Episode 43 – Steve Alcorn on Building EPCOT Center

Episode 33 – Composer Bruce Broughton

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today’s podcast goes behind the scenes at Disney’s Parks and Resorts with Dan Cockerell, former Vice President of EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 59 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. When I look at the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, I tend to focus on the design and the Imagineering because I’m an attractions guy and I’m thinking in terms of what amazing things can they put together. But the other side of the coin is, of course, operations and these attractions and the resorts can’t function without ops working well.

I think back to when I worked at the St. Louis Zoo when I was in high school and I worked in food service, putting together just the scheduling and the stock and trying to look at the days in the past and think, how crowded is this gonna be? How many people do we need? That is a very small-scale example, but Disney has to do that on a massive scale.

And I know they have analytics and statistics that are well beyond what we were doing in our heads back in the 1990s. I would like to learn more about how that even works, which made it really exciting for me to talk to Dan Cockerell. He worked for Disney’s Parks and Resorts for 26 years, started out in the College Program and then parking cars, and moved all the way up to being the Vice President of The Magic Kingdom and also EPCOT and the Hollywood Studios, and he ran several resorts. Dan has a perspective that spans a lot of different areas of the Disney parks and how they function and is looking at it more from a service perspective, not from a design and attractions perspective.

And also I wanted to talk to Dan about his choice to leave Disney and strike out on his own to become a speaker, life coach, and even a podcaster, because you think about that kind of role, so many of us look at Disney and think, wouldn’t it be great to be a leader at Disney? But I’m sure it’s a consuming job. There’s a lot to it. So I was glad I got a chance to ask Dan about those questions too. So let’s get to it. Let’s go talk to Dan Cockerell.

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Dan Heaton: Let’s start at the beginning. So you joined the College Program. What was that like and what made you interested in doing that at the start?

Dan Cockerell: Yes, I went to Boston University. I was a political science major, so I really didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with my life. And I had worked in college. I worked at Marriott at Champions Bar at the Copley Marriott in Boston and worked in a bar as a bar back. And so I, I’d always worked through high school and worked in college. So I had gotten, I’d heard about the college program and I didn’t know, like I said, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I liked very structured environments and Marriott was very much like that.

I knew it was gonna look good on my resume regardless of what I did in the future. So I just kind of my freshman year, I waited tables with a bunch of high school buddies in Ocean City, Maryland, and sophomore year decided I’d go, you know, with a more well-known company, Disney, and came down and worked for a summer.

We employ about at any given time we have about 6,000 college students working at Walt Disney World. And now we have three housing complexes. We provide transportation. Anyone who’s studying hospitality can get college credits for most colleges. It’s a great program and they really talk about how you, it’s a living experience, a learning experience, and a working experience. It’s a good way for us to get people who are, you know, really excited about being there. And it’s a great way to market. Because when they go back to colleges, they talk about how it’s like to work at Disney. So we’re on the hook to make sure they have a great experience. And a lot of times a lot of people come back. There’s a lot of former College Program cast members now working at Disney at all different levels of the organization.

Dan Heaton: Right. And you kind of did the same thing because, you know, you left and I mean, did college and then came back a few years later and worked frontline as a cast member. How important do you think that was to work kind of even in the College Program and then on the front lines parking cars to when you moved up down the road?

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, that’s a very common story at Disney. We promote mostly, I mean, almost exclusively from within the company. And you know, when we need expertise, IT, and marketing and other areas, we’ll go outside the company to bring in that expertise. But we’re really good at Operations and we have 74,000 people working at Walt Disney World and we have a lot of great talent there. So I think it was key for me because as I moved up in the organization, you know, understanding what that frontline interaction is with the guest, that’s what the value of Disney is.

That’s really the value of any customer-focused organization is it’s the frontline employees and the interaction and the how they can help the guests they’re dealing with. And so it was, I think it’s really important and we really value that at Disney, that we like our leaders, we like our executives to understand that piece of the business, have a good understanding, but more importantly a respect for it because we know that’s what makes our success.

Dan Heaton: When you moved up, were you able to connect a lot of your old times and stories and even be able to, do you think that helped you to connect with the frontline people you worked with?

Dan Cockerell: Absolutely. It’s funny, my last role when I was the Vice President of Magic Kingdom, I still knew cast members who were, you know, my leads and fellow cast members when I worked at EPCOT in the parking lot 26 years earlier. And I had great relationships with them and for them, I wasn’t the Vice President of the Magic Kingdom. I was Dan the college kid who just came down to to work down there. And I really was able to, they were, I called them my listening posts because we got the chat about things and they would tell me stuff they wouldn’t tell anybody else and help me make decisions in my job.

And then talking to other College Program kids who were down here and they, they were always, you know that it’s a common story where you’re in college and you’re down and you end up at Pecos Bills or you end up in custodial or you end up on an attraction and you’re kind of scratching your head saying, this has nothing to do with what I’m studying. I was able to talk to a lot of those college kids and say, look, it is not what you’re studying, but you’re learning a ton right now.

You’re learning about teamwork, you’re learning about discipline, you’re learning about being reliable and how to handle the public and whatever you do moving forward, you’re learning a ton right now, believe me, I’ve been there and I see it. And people, you have a lot more credibility when you can, you know, tell people you’ve done it before.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. Yeah. I even think back to jobs I had in high school and college that were like customer service at our local zoo and stuff. And I think I learned more about how to deal with people than any job I’ve done since. So I think it’s more important.

Dan Cockerell: Sure, yeah, I have, I’m a huge fan and a huge supporter of this idea of lifelong learning and diverse experiences. And I’ve learned over time is what any moment in any situation you’re in, when you’re talking to someone or you’re just paying attention, you can learn something and whatever you learn is gonna help you tomorrow, a week from now or 20 years from now. But there’s always things you’re taking in, you don’t even realize it. And that’s the power of having, getting experience.

Dan Heaton: I find it interesting that you went then and worked at Disneyland Paris for a decent amount of time and I was, I went there probably in the mid-2000s. It’s a gorgeous park, especially in the main park, but it’s very different. How was that experience for you working in such a different culture and even how Disney and how the parks run is very different?

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, I think, you know, as they say what does not kill you makes you stronger and going over there, it was, that was probably one of the toughest times in my life. And not because it was a bad experience, but it was extremely challenging. You know, I went from working then on parking cars at EPCOT to being a management trainee in parking in France. And we got there, I got there about three months before the park opened and you know, I went from living in Florida and everyone speaks English and you know what you’re doing in your job and all of a sudden you’re in another country, you’re trying to figure out the language, you’re opening a new park, which is stressful in itself and you’re just, you know, it’s, I call it the kind of fog of war.

You’re just not sure what’s going on and you come in every day and whatever happens, you just sort of roll with it. And I grew a ton. And that six month period I think it was really difficult. But it’s incredible how fast you can adapt if you have to. And you know, when you come in every day and all your cast members are speaking French, you figured out really fast.

You know, people always say, well gosh, how did you speak another language? I said, if you came in every single day and that’s all you had to speak every single day for six months, you would be fluent in any language in the world. And like I said, it’s painful and small things became difficult. Like when the phone rang, I’d break out in a sweat because it’s just, you know, body language and seeing people talk, you can communicate a lot with non-verbally, but man, when you’re on the phone you’re just trying to eek out a word or two.

So it was, it was a huge learning and it’s really taught me a lot about the world as a big place and really respecting other cultures and really now I respect people, you know, who English is a second language. I never judged them on how they communicate because I was that guy for five years that had the funny accent and couldn’t always, you know, remember the right word when I was explaining something. And it, I grew a lot outta that.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I can imagine. And in terms of how the parks operated coming from being, you know, in Orlando and then going back later and comparing that to Paris, what were some of the differences beyond the language and just how the parks or even how they had interacted with guests?

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think one of the big things that we learned early on is the parks in France, when we first opened were extremely seasonal. So you could have, you know, you could have, I don’t know, 10,000 guests in the park or 6,000 guests in the park during the week in the winter. And on the weekend you could have 60,000 and that makes it really challenging to have to ramp up and go and have that big swing in your attendance, in your occupancy.

That’s what is a big advantage of all Disney World. We run at a high occupancy year-round, so it’s a lot more steady. So you had to really get good at that. The languages were always challenging, you know, back then the Euro didn’t exist. So our ticketing system we could accept all the currencies in Europe and give change back in French Francs.

So when you think about cashing out at the end of the day and, you know, five or six different currencies. And you had to worry about the exchange rate, and post that every morning because that changed constantly. Then I think just culturally, we opened the park with without alcohol, you know, no beer and wine. Walt Disney created these theme parks with family entertainment in mind. We learned really quickly in at Disneyland Paris, people had a respect for Walt Disney, but they didn’t really care about his beer and wine policy. They said, look, if I’m gonna pay a lot for a nice meal, I drink wine with my meal and I don’t really don’t care who Walt Disney was. And we made that, we made a change pretty quickly within just a few months of opening.

We had beer and wine in the parks and you know, it was a cultural change we make. So I think every time we go to another country, whether it’s Hong Kong or Japan or Shanghai, a different place in the world, we learn a lot about the cultural preferences. And you know, Europeans are just, is something as simple as merchandise. Generally if you buy a t-shirt at Magic Kingdom to Florida, you have a giant Goofy on the front of it, right?

That’s how we kind of walk around and France, we learn that people still like Goofy, but he should be like as big as a dime embroidered on your shirt. And that was big enough. So the preferences and the styles were much different, but at the end of the day, guests, they want to visit with their kids and have these magical experiences and escape reality for the day and spend time together. I think that’s the thing that transcends all the countries we’re in. The preferences may change on food and drink and how people behave. But at the end of the day, they really are just trying to have a happy time together.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s great. And I’m sure for you that when you came back, it had to be such, you probably felt so much more confident having gone through, like you said, such a difficult time. You also were in charge of several hotels including All Stars, and then you worked at the Wilderness Lodge. And so what were kind of the unique challenges with working on the hotel side versus working in the parks?

Dan Cockerell: Boy, that was a whole different world. When I left EPCOT, I was an Operations Manager there and I went and became an Operations Manager at the All-Star Resort, which is one of the three hotels, the All-Star. And eventually I got promoted and ran the Wilderness Lodge in the campground and I went back to the All-Star as a General Manager for a couple years. That is a detailed business. When you think about an a theme park, a guest may come for one day to the Magic Kingdom and they’re gonna spend a day there.

Everything they’re gonna see is probably the first and last time that day they’re gonna see it. But in a hotel, people come back every single day and they go to their hotel room every single day for days on end. And so the quality level, the detail, it’s a very intimate space, the hotel rooms, and you want cleanliness is a big deal and as I tell people, I’ve never had a guest call me and, and complain about a piece of hair on Main Street, but I’ve certainly had that conversation with a guest in one of our resorts and, and it’s our responsibility to make sure they’re clean.

I mean, that’s what safety and cleanliness is, number one. If you can’t get that right, nothing else really matters. And so I learned a ton about process and a ton about how good we had to be at the All-Star Resort, which I calculated one day, if you clean 99% of the rooms at the All-Star Resort to our standard, you still have 60 dirty rooms, 1% is 60. And if you’re at 99.9% perfection, you still have six dirty rooms. So when you think about the level of performance that team and those housekeepers have to have, it’s, it’s pretty impressive. And they do an incredible job.

Dan Heaton: I can’t imagine some of those, like you said, the resorts are so large and then people are paying a good amount of money and expecting so much because it’s Disney. How, as like a leader or even within the Operations, what’s the key to making those resorts successful? I mean, how do they get to be a situation like you said, where there aren’t 60 rooms or there might be a few or none hopefully, or you know, where the service is so high where people want to come back?

Dan Cockerell: Sure. Well, you know, a lot of it is there’s, you build relationships with people. You show them you respect and trust them, you reward and recognize them when they do things well. You set really clear expectations for performance and make sure you have great auditing processes in place. And the leadership team is out there. And as a general manager, I was inspecting rooms every week to make sure everyone understood how important that was.

But what I learned over time in every job I’ve been in at Disney is it’s all about talent. It’s all about picking the right people. Because at the end of the day you can have all the recognition you want, you can inspect all the rooms you want, but if you don’t have great housekeepers, nothing gets done. And so that was the group that you gotta hire the right people for.

And it’s funny, it’s kind of ironic when we interview for housekeeping at Walt Disney World, we ask lots of different questions to people. What we discovered was the great housekeepers, you know, what they do on their days off and when they’re not at work, they clean. They have a personal issue with cleanliness and things being orderly. And the amount of pride that, that they would have every day, you know, they clean at the All-Star, they clean 18 rooms a day and just the pride factor when I’d go out there and they wanted me to go see their rooms and how great a job they were doing. And I figured, you know, who would want the general manager inspecting their rooms? But they had this pride that was just incredible and they took it personally.

And they personally knew that there was gonna be families and kids in these rooms and they wanted to be perfect. And so they wanted to be clean. The towel animals was something that just kind of came up as a viral thing, that they would create these incredible towel animals when the family got back to the rooms, they’d find these magical moments happening. The funny thing was, when I talk about this talent, I trained as a housekeeper for a week and executives, when you go into new places, we put costumes on and we go work in all the different operations to understand what’s going on and meet people. And my last day of training, they had me clean rooms and I only got up to like 13 or 14 rooms without break, without lunch. I mean, I was just killing myself.

And they came in after and helped me finish ’em up. But my trainer, she said she went in the bathroom and she looked and she said, did you clean the bathtub? And I felt like, you know, I was back 10 years old. My mom was asking me like if I clean my room. And I said, well, it’s clean, you know. She said, well, no, did you clean it? And I said, well, no, how could you tell? She said, well, it’s not wet. I said, all right. I said, but it’s clean. She said, you know why it’s clean. I said, why? She says, cause I clean it every day. She said, you clean it when it’s clean.

It never gets dirty if you start cleaning it, when you start seeing mold or mildew form, it’s too late. And that’s the, that’s the attitude they have. They’re just, it’s a science for them and it’s a passion. And the more so the, you know, the secret of Disney is we don’t hire just anybody and train them and motivate them. We hire people that are already wired that way and then we just help ’em do their jobs. And that’s you know, we’re hiring a lot of people. It doesn’t always work out for everyone, but that’s sort of the model we have.

Dan Heaton: Well, I think you have to, like you mentioned, you have to have, everybody in almost any role has to have that same level of detail or commitment because if not with this size of this resort, it’s, it’s never gonna work. I’m sure.

Dan Cockerell: Absolutely.

Dan Heaton: Okay, so you mentioned you were Operations Manager at EPCOT and I believe, I think you were in World Showcase at a few pavilions there. So EPCOT is kind of an odd park in the way that it’s split into two big areas and every pavilion almost seems like it could be its own thing at World Showcase. So what are kind of the big challenges even down the road when you’re a VP, but it, going back to when you’re Operations Manager to make a park like EPCOT work?

Dan Cockerell: Geographically, it’s a huge park and it’s very spread out and it’s hard to kind of use efficiencies and synergies between the pavilions. Because first of all, they’re physically far from each other and they’re also very specifically themed. And so they have their own life in each of ’em. So that was, that was one of the big things is just I was, when I worked at you know, Hollywood Studios and even Magic Kingdom, although it’s a big park, you can get around there pretty easily. And you know, when I, sometimes I’d set out to walk World Showcase and I’d be out there and I’d be on the other side of lagoon and I had a meeting I had to get to and I’m like, all right, I’m a mile from my office. How do I get back now?

So that, that was a piece of it. And to your point, it was really two separate theme parks, right? You have Future World, which was a whole different theme and the World Showcase we were doing, we were delivering, I think a whole, a whole different experience in both of those. And when I was there, I think we all agreed World Showcase. It’s, that’s a home run. I mean, it’s just, it’s got a soul and it’s just a great place.

And the way we recruit and the authenticity of that, and I think Future World, you know, that’s, that’s a challenge, trying to be Future World. I mean, how do you do that today when the future is being invented every single day? How do you keep up with that? And I know they’re doing a lot of work right now on this strategically figuring out what Future World’s gonna be in the future.

But you know, originally that the idea with that was it was Walt’s city of the future, right? And the people were gonna live there and they were gonna, and this is where all these big companies were gonna come and innovation was gonna happen, and different countries were gonna be involved. And he had the vision for that and never got quite to that point. It certainly is a place that people are very passionate about because the message there is that the future is bright. Technology’s gonna make the world better, countries are gonna get along, and we have all these people from all these different nationalities living together and working together. And that the way the world should be. So I think it’s a little microcosm of kind of how we, I wish things would be throughout the world.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. EPCOT, going back to when I went as a kid, has always been my favorite place to go. And like you said, Future World, it’s had new things that have been amazing. And then some things have closed and they’re currently doing a lot of things to it. I know you weren’t VP of Epcot the most recently, but even from your time there and just time at Disney World, how does a company like Disney even keep that going? What they’re looking to the future? I mean, what do you think it should be or, or where it’s going?

Dan Cockerell: I think every time we are successful at Disney, we are able to tell a story. And I think that’s going to continue to be the goal of Future World is whether it’s from our, our movies or synergy in movies or it’s gonna be the, you know, the other things, the Seas and the Land. If we can go in there and tell compelling stories that inspire people or, or leave a great impression upon them than we’ll have done our job. And I think there’s always a, a tension between, okay, how much should we be teaching and how much should we be entertaining?

You know, I think a lot of guests say, well, of course when I go on vacation, I wanna learn. I want my kids to learn, I want the family to learn. But when they get here, they’re like, all right, we wanna learn, but we’re on vacation, we really wanna have a lot of fun too. So we’re always trying to thread that needle of, okay, can we teach you something? And as I think Walt Disney said, you know, the agitate edutainment, right? Yeah. Can I, can I get both of those things and teach you without you not even realizing it?

Dan Heaton: Yeah. And that brings up kind of another thing that I’m sure you’ve run into over your time. There is, unlike even some other theme park vendors, Disney’s fans have all this nostalgia for the past and some of it is good and there’s rides that have been there forever and that people love. But you always run into these decisions of how do you balance that out? Like you need to put in new things and they’re doing a lot of them right now, but still recognizing the history of the parks. How do you find that balance?

Dan Cockerell: Well, everyone will judge us on how well we find that balance. And I think that’s kind of on one hand the hard thing about it. That’s the great thing about people being so passionate about the brand is they’re so concerned with that. And it’s a little, you know, it’s, there’s really, I don’t think there’s a winning formula because people I think generally say, don’t change anything.

I want it to be like, it was the last time I was there, but I want new things also. And so, you know, there’s not enough room to do both of those things. And I think what, you know, my kids will think is relevant and cool is much different than what I think is relevant and cool. I mean, my wife and I, you know, we, we keep telling our kids all these eighties movies like, have you ever seen TRON, the original one?

Oh, it’s a classic, you gotta see it. Or how about Blade Runner? Or how about, and you talk about these and they watch ’em for, you know, an hour. Like, these are really bad science fiction movies, they’re really bad effects. We’re like, well, come on, give us a break, man, this was like 35 years ago. So I think everyone has a different point of view and it’s a line you walk because you’ve seen a lot of companies that try to hold on to heritage and tradition and that’s the way they’re successful and they’re afraid to step away from that formula and they’re afraid to do anything new. Inevitably, if they don’t change, they go outta business because they’re protecting that. And our guests clearly will tell us whether we’re making the right decisions or not. And everyone’s always gonna have an opinion.

We’ve just come to the conclusion that whenever we do something, it’s gonna be controversial. And as long as the majority of our guests like that decision and it seems to keep the entertainment going and it’s delivering, then we’re in a good place. And sometimes we’ll make mistakes and sometimes we’ll walk it back. That’s what the hard thing about, you know, staying ahead and trying to be a successful company is pulling upon what your heritage is and what you’ve always valued, but trying new things.

We talk that every day with our cast members. You know, the base of our experience there is safety. We want to keep you safe and make sure you have a safe experience, that we’re gonna be really nice to you, that you’re gonna be immersed in this environment where you feel like you’ve escaped reality and it’s gonna be efficient. You’re not gonna have to wait and we’re gonna get you around and we’re gonna do everything we can to do that. And those four are four keys. And then on top of that, technology changes, the attractions change, the characters change, but we wanna deliver that base experience. So I talked a lot about it, but it is certainly challenging and you’re never sure if you get it right.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. I’m not sure there’s a comparable company in any field, maybe Apple or something that has that much passion from its fans and that also is gonna always get criticism for whatever they do.

Dan Cockerell: I mean, it’s funny you say that because just the recent update on the iOS there was that huge, I’ll call it a scandal about what, how the, what the bagel looked like, the bagel emoji and you know, people from New York say, that’s not a bagel. Where’s the cream cheese? It’s not even sliced and talk about passion. But I thought that’s great. That’s how big a deal Apple is. If people are, if that’s what they’re worried about, they’re doing a pretty good job.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s the same thing at Disney, I’m sure when, you know, there’s like they just recently put back in a car by the sci-fi restaurant and people rejoiced. And so like you said, it’s, that’s not, I’m not making fun of people. That’s the passion that all of us have for it, for sure. So you mentioned changes like during your time as a leader, what’s like a change or something that you incorporated that you’re really proud of that you look back upon?

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, I think just, you know, obviously we were always working on new attractions and new experiences and we had the Imagineering team and that was a huge effort by everybody. But personally, just being able to have a connection with our cast and using our common sense to do that, using technology to do that, to keep connected with cast members and understand what was going on and being able to listen to them. And that was I think just the way we were be able to be intertwined culturally to make sure they knew how much we cared about ’em.

But also, on any given day, me and my executive team, we were on a text group and every day we were live, what’s going on in the park, we’re in meetings, we’re talking to each other. Hey, we’re in this meeting deciding this, what do y’all think about this? And I’m still really just impressed with how technology is advancing and the fact that I’m on my phone sitting in my daughter’s room talking to you and you’re recording this, it’s going to, you’re gonna push us outta the podcast. That’s incredible. And I think we just take that for granted how much helped us to to advance. And it’s pretty cool.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it ‘s crazy. I’m sitting in St. Louis, Missouri and you’re across the country and it’s like, we’re sitting in the same room. And it’s just, just one little thing. So on the flip side though, you mentioned the time in Paris being difficult, but what was like a big challenge that you faced that you overcame, but that was something that was difficult at the time?

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, I mean, man, there’s a lot, 9/11, and I think everyone remembers that that was, that was a tough time. I remember being at the All-Star meeting with my executive housekeeping manager and someone came in and said, a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Of course you’re thinking, oh, it’s one of those six-seaters. And, and all of a sudden it was like real. From that day for the next year and a half, I mean, I just remember listening to news and all of a sudden tourism just dried up and we were like trying to figure out how are we gonna get through the next couple years. And at the time, our president Al Weiss, he came to us and he said, look, we need to cut costs because we have a huge fixed cost base.

Obviously you have to opens parks every day and all these hotels. And he said, we have, we have a lot of costs to cut, but I don’t wanna lay off one cast member. So you all figured that out and we really rallied with the cast and found all these, all these ways we could sort of save money. And when the economy got better, we were poised to really take advantage of that because we didn’t lay people off and we hung in there. But that was a really, that was a really tough time for me personally when I was at the All-Star. We introduced Disney’s Magical Express. Oh yeah. And, and so that’s for the, the listeners, I think a lot of people know what it is.

We basically came up with a new system that said, if you’re coming to Walt Disney World and you’re visiting from an airport in the US we will mail you your luggage tags, you’ll put them on then, you’ll check ’em in in Chicago or Sacramento or St. Louis, wherever you’re coming from, and you won’t see ’em again. Or they’re in your hotel room.

We came up with a sorting service at the airport, Orlando International Airport. We had our own team picking all the bags out of the planes, putting them a separate sorting facility, putting them on trucks and driving ’em to the resorts. Once they got the resorts, we had to sort them, cross reference with the front desk to find out what room those guests had been assigned to, and deliver those bags to their rooms. And that was just an undertaking. When we first kicked off that, that new program, we were gonna do it for a moderate and our premium resorts, and we weren’t planning on doing the value resorts. And probably a couple months before we rolled it out, they came and told me that they were gonna do it at the All-Star.

And overnight, the day that we started, we became the largest regional airport in the United States. We didn’t have any planes, but we had the bags, we had the suitcases, and it took us, it took us a few months to figure it out. I mean, I’ve never seen so many suitcases in one place, this pile that’s like six set feet high and 20 yards across, and you’re looking at and saying, we gotta get all these in the right rooms and the next three hours, how are we gonna do that? So that was that was challenging, but that those were always the fun moments where everyone rallies and you always figure it out.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I forget, I mean I’ve taken Magical Express multiple times and I forget to think about, especially with something like the All Stars, the amount of logistics now, but thinking back to when you started it, it was like you were inventing a new process on the fly.

Dan Cockerell: Right. And when you think about that 99.9% rule, think about being the 60 guests who don’t have their clothes. So it was it was pretty challenging, but like I said, we always figured out after a few months.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So you’ve achieved a lot of success at Disney, but I know you decided earlier this year that to move into working as a sole proprietor in your own business. So what made you decide to make that change and move on to a new stage of your career?

Dan Cockerell: I think it was probably insanity. I’m not sure, my wife and I, we, when we got married, she’s so, you know, a little background. Her first job was working at the French Pavilion back in 1987 and she was recruited from France and came over and lived here for a year and was part of that. So she’s always been, when she was 16, she moved to London and learned to speak English. She’s always been this wanderer and this traveler.

And when we met, we decided we were gonna see the whole world together and that we didn’t know what that was gonna look like, but that was our plan. And we traveled a ton with our kids. Most of our discretionary spending is spent on travel, visiting her family in France. And we’ve been to Japan with the kids and we’ve been to Morocco and Tunisia and we’ve just, we’ve been, and we plan on going a lot more places.

So about a year and a half ago she said, well, okay, our son is outta college. Our daughter’s in college and our youngest son is gonna graduate this spring. What are we doing? What’s the next step here? And I said, well, I’m gonna retire with Disney. I mean, of course, you know, I have a castle and a moat and princesses and horses. And she said, well, I think we could go do something else. So we chatted for a year. It took me a year to come to the conclusion that I was ready. Because you know, you just, after that long at, at one company, you get hooked and you’re hooked in and you’re emotionally connected and you don’t, you just can’t imagine doing anything else. And you know, my dad left Disney 12 years ago and went out on his own.

And you know, he’s written four books and podcasting and does speeches. So he’s been a huge support. And I talked to him about it before I left and he said, you could do this. He said, you know, I got some contacts, I’ll help you, you know, any questions you have, but you have a story to tell and go for it.

And I talked to my wife about it and she said, I’m good. She goes, you know, we can downsize the house. We just, let’s simplify and let’s go get a ton of experience here and go do stuff. And I said, well, what if it doesn’t work out? She said, well, I just, she said, I just, I guess you’re just gonna have to go get a job. I said, well, I don’t want a job. I wanna do this. She goes, well, then make it work out.

So she was very supportive. And so I got my website up and running. It is what I tell people is, being an entrepreneur, it’s about planting as many seeds as you can and knowing that only a few of ’em are gonna sprout. And, but you gotta, you gotta get a lot of opportunities out there. So I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to people, networking telling my story. I say yes to everything.

Anyone calls me, hey, I wanna chat. I’m like, yes, I’m in. You know, because you just, one door opens and then 10 more open and then 10 more open after that. And it’s been great. We just got back from Croatia three days ago. The two of us I’m consulting for a hotel company over there. I was there in June, I was there, and we’re going back in January to help them.

They’re, they’re growing really quickly. And I’m going to Brazil next week for a leadership conference down in Campo Grande, which is Western Brazil. And these are all sort of contacts that happened randomly where talking to people and finding these opportunities. So it’s a little bit of that fog of war. You know, I, after being a big company with all those resources for so long, and all of a sudden it’s my wife and I and the dog now.

And it’s like, okay, well who, who am I gonna sign that to? I’m like, well, it’s either me, my wife, or my dog. You don’t have that huge team of people around you. And it’s been humbling and it’s been really exciting. And so it’s been fun. So we got our house for sale here in Orlando and in the spring, once our youngest son graduates from high school, we’re moving out to Boulder, Colorado for the near future. And we’ll travel from there and just see where life takes us.

Dan Heaton: Well, that sounds amazing. I know you start recently started doing the podcast, Come Rain or Shine with Jody Mayberry, who also does the podcast with your dad, Lee Cockerell. How have you enjoyed doing that?

Dan Cockerell: It is fun. And I mean, Jody, he’s got that voice. I could just sit there and listen to his voice all day. He’s got a great radio voice and he, he is just very motivating. And we get on, he knows all the technical pieces how to do this, and we kind of do it the same way he and Lee do his, he gets on, he says, well, what are you talking about today? I said, I think I’m gonna talk about this.

And he said, all right, let’s go. We don’t have a script. And you know, obviously I think a little bit about it in advance, and I always think that the podcast is gonna go one way, and then he listens and he asks questions I didn’t even think about and ends up being totally different. Then we record it, he gets it edited and we push it out, and then you wait to see if anyone listens.

Dan Heaton: I know that feeling.

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, yeah. And it’s been it’s been a lot of fun. It really, and it, and it’s funny how in this, this role I’m in now, everything connects, you know, when I get on a podcast and have to talk about a topic, I’m doing a speech three days later and I’m actually using the podcast for my thoughts, and then the speech becomes the article, the newsletter I send out the first Friday of the month, and the newsletter becomes a chapter of the book I’m writing. So all these are all connected.

Dan Heaton: That sounds like a really exciting time. And so I just have one last question. I want you to let all of us know where to learn more about what you’re doing, but also what, what are you looking to do in the future? What are you excited about beyond what you’re doing right now?

Dan Cockerell: Yeah, well, first of all, it’s Dan Cockerell, one word, dancockerell.com. And you can sign up. I do an article of the week. I’ve been doing that for 18 years with my leadership team at Disney. And so I decided just to carry that forward. So I curate articles that I think are really good and make some comments on them. And then I just started last month, the first Friday of every month, I’m doing a newsletter called The Perch.

Everything sort of revolves around the weather. The book I’m writing, the working title is “How’s The Weather in Your Kingdom”? The logo I’ve created for my company is a rooster. A rooster is a young cockle rooster, is the, the animal that represents France and all the sports, and it’s a weather vane. So these are all kind of connected together, but dancockerell.com is where you can sign up for that newsletter.

As you mentioned, Come Rain or Shine is the podcast you can find on iTunes. And the future for us is how many places in the world can we visit and go see? And every day I’m meeting really interesting people that I would never would’ve met at Disney. Entrepreneurs and people have been so open and gracious and very generous with their time and their resources, and I think that’s the way the world should work. You help people out, they help you out, and everyone moves forward.

And then you know, I think we have this window of time right now where we don’t have any son or daughter-in-laws in our near future. We don’t have any grandkids in our near future as far as I know. And my parents are in really good health. So I think we have this little window of time where we can, no one’s really counting on us a hundred percent of the time, and we can sort of just kind of go enjoy ourselves without having to worry about things. And then, you know, we’ll, we’ll settle down again and at some point, but right now it’s just an adventure and who, how many things can we see?

Dan Heaton: Well, awesome, Dan, that it all sounds really exciting and I really appreciate you being on the show. It was a blast to talk with you.

Dan Cockerell: Well, thanks for having me, Dan.

Dan Heaton: If you’d like to keep up with everything I’m doing, you can go to tomorrowsociety.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at tomorrowsoc or Facebook or Instagram at Tomorrow Society. You can send me an email to dan@tomorrowsociety.com. And don’t forget about those reviews on Apple Podcasts, which make a huge difference to help the show. The Tomorrow Society Podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Dan Heaton. The music was written by Adam Hucke and performed by The Sophisticated Babies. Next time I’ll be talking with producer John Walker about his work on Tomorrowland and the movie plus The Incredibles one and two and The Iron Giant. Thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again very soon.