The director of Hyvinkää's Swiss ski center has an exceptional background. Matias Petäistö is a former special forces soldier who has been trained to withstand shouting, pressure and extreme conditions.
Swiss a man who is a trained fighter is sitting in the ski resort's slope cafe.
The man's face is familiar from the Special Forces TV series. There he is, stern, stone-faced, looking at the camera from under his brows. He yells at the contestants and bullies them.
She is Matias Petäistö. Former special forces soldier, current CEO of a ski resort, coach and television series trainer. He says that work has to be done for 16 to 20 hours every single day.
Now there's a cup of coffee in front of you and behind you is the landscape of the “Very good Alps”. The atmosphere is calm, the ski center has not yet opened. Hit songs of the moment are playing on the radio in the background.
It will be interesting to hear if he manages his ski resort with the same attitude as the contestants in the TV series.
Matias Petäistö has a long day at work. He says that his work ethic has always been high and as an entrepreneur it has become more prominent. Sometimes he gets tired too.
When young Petäistö did not dream of a soldier's career. He practiced endurance running, at the final stage at the SM level. He wanted to be a professional athlete and trained at the school's expense.
In 2009, he went to the paratrooper company to do conscript service. He got excited about it, and a year later got into the special forces course.
The course lasted a year, and through it Petäistö passed the special jaeger company entrance exam. He became part of the elite group, which the Finnish Defense Forces describes as “the most efficient part”.
Special jaeger officers serve on a five-year fixed-term contract, and the maximum career duration is 15 years. Petäistö renewed his official relationship once, and had time to go abroad three times during his career in crisis management operations. In 2013 and 2014 in Afghanistan and in 2017 in Iraq.
He had a terrible itch to go abroad, but after Iraq there were no new operations in sight. After his second five-year relationship, he decided to switch fields, and it was the worst moment of his special forces career.
“You have to think about if there is an opportunity to do something else. The last vitonen doesn't seem like a very long time ago anymore. It's pretty rough to drag it all the way to the end and start thinking about what to do next.”
In the fall of 2020, he bought a Swiss ski center and has been working there ever since.
The Aspen dog keeps Petäistö company. In February of last year, a container bar with the same name was opened in the ski resort.
In the Middle East Petäistö was supporting the authorities by training and mentoring local soldiers. In Iraq, the operating cycle was tight, and they were constantly in extreme conditions, as the temperature was 40-50 degrees. Still, it has not remained in Petäistö's mind as the hardest experience.
“I'd rather go in the heat than in the extreme cold,” he says.
He remembers the almost two-week reconnaissance exercise in Lapland from the severity. His job was to be on a sled patrol in the open air without any accommodations. It was cold all the time, and at night it was over 30 degrees below zero.
He does not feel that he has had real near misses in crisis management operations. Most of them are probably the situations where he was shot at or when he was driving on roads where there could be roadside bombs.
When asked if he has ever killed on the job, he thinks carefully about his answer:
“I don't know if I dare to say that. I have used the gun several times, but that killing is a bit of a taboo in Finland. I haven't said it directly yet. Maybe using a gun is better.”
Special Forces series in the first season, fourteen public figures participate in ten days of special forces training. The program is shown on Nelose, which belongs to the same Sanoma group as Helsingin Sanomat.
In the first season, for example, the participants fall from a helicopter into the water with their backs first. Participants have to perform heavy tasks under pressure, and they often cannot control the circumstances.
Mind control is required of a special forces soldier.
“You have to be extremely aggressive and violent, for example, in a certain kind of combat situation. But at the same time you have to stay really calm and clear in your thoughts”, Petäistö gives an example of the mind control of a special forces soldier.
He doesn't remember ever feeling fear during his career.
“If I think about the hardest moments in my military career, I have been very focused then. You're in the wrong field if you're afraid. In my opinion.”
One of the reasons why Petäistö enjoyed being in the special forces was the work community. They worked in small groups where everyone was like-minded, because they had been selected through long selection processes. “At my age, they were also best friends. And almost the only ones.”
In March the series is getting a second season. In Petäistö's opinion, the condition of the participants in the second season is tougher than in the first. He believes that people who know their strength and physique can withstand it applied there.
Petäistö has not seen the episodes himself, but says that there will be new assignments in the new season.
The series imitates the special forces selection test. The trainers do not have sympathy for the participants, but they also shout and bark at their performances. According to Petäistö, there is a good reason for that.
“We want to make the situation as unpleasant as possible to be alone. That way, we see behavior in an extremely hard and stressful situation,” he says.
“At that stage, when all the comforts and sympathies are sucked away, you get extreme reactions.”
In the Special Forces course, he didn't want to give the trainers reasons to yell at him. When it did, he got pissed off about it.
In the military world, coercion works, in the civilian world it doesn't. He manages the ski center in a different way, Petäistö laughs.
He often smiles at the slope cafe. However, seriousness comes naturally from him, and he sometimes shows his tough side to his coaching clients. Customers want it because Petäistö markets its coaching as “Finland's most feared”.
Petäistön believes that he has always had mental toughness and ambition. They were needed when he was involved in endurance sports when he was younger.
From a military career there are many lessons left in the entrepreneurial career. One of them is not to give up. Petäistö also talks a lot about it on social media.
He also has a high stress tolerance and is able to make quick decisions.
A soldier may only have a fleeting moment to decide whether or not to fire. As a ski center entrepreneur or coach, decisions are not quite as quick and no one's life is directly in the balance.
In several places, it also becomes clear that Petäistö thinks very straightforwardly. The past is not left to regret or worry about, but the direction is forward.
Of course, not all the good qualities of a soldier serve in civilian life.
“I don't think it's good in everything to be ready to make quick, big decisions. My ability to take risks is also quite strong. Even though it has worked in business life, I wouldn't count it solely as a good thing.”
Petäistö says that many people buy his coaching because they want direct talk and feedback. “They don't need to be stroked and to be told that 'everything will be fine', even if it isn't,” he says.
Ski resort the slopes have been driven. The season has been long and good, because it already started in October. The second week of the Christmas holiday was bad because the frost was so bad. It was unusual.
Petäistö has made renovations to the ski resort in all four of its winters. The most recent of them are the opening of a new long, gentle slope called the banana slope and the installation of LED lights on the entire slope area.
It has also gone well on the coaching side. Petäistö boasts that it has been “Finland's fastest growing coaching brand” for a few months now. He bases his claim on turnover.
The goal is that customers could also achieve the strength, fitness and endurance of a soldier. Petäistö believes that he can help with that even after his military career.
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