When sales employees Jim Brown and Brian Stapleton showed up for work Monday morning at AFN Logistics in Niles, never in their wildest dreams would they suspect that in just a few hours they’d be jet-setting to game seven of the Blackhawks-Blues playoff series in St. Louis.
That afternoon, as Chicago prepared for the do-or-die first round of the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Brown and Stapleton—along with 13 other lucky Hawks fans who work at the transportation logistics company—joined their boss, CEO Ryan Daube, for a first-class trip to St. Louis.
Stapleton, 36, was just leaving the lunchroom when Daube approached him and asked him if he wanted to go to the game, he said.
“I just said ‘of course I’d like to go,’ but then I went into shock when I realized what else was entailed,” Stapleton said.
The group of employees, selected for the trip based on a combination of their sales performance and their exceptional love of the Hawks, boarded a bus after work that took them to a private charter plane waiting in Milwaukee to take them on the 45 minute flight to St. Louis.
Cans of Coors Light were passed around as the sales team got settled in and began celebrating the unexpected surprise.
“It was interesting to me that all of us work in different parts of the company and wouldn’t normally hang out after work together, but we were suddenly like a group of crazy kids on their way to a hockey game,” Brown, 38, said.
Daube was at home watching game six of the Hawks game Saturday night when he decided to surprise a group of his hardest-working employees with the trip to the game, he said. On a whim, he sent out an email to 25 employees who were known Hawks fans around the office, asking them to name their favorite Hawks players (aside from star players Patrick Kane and Jonathan Towes). He also asked them to rank their hockey fandom from 1-10.
Instead of asking his executive-level counterparts to join him on the trip, Daube said he went straight to some of his longtime employees—people who are “real workhorses,” said Nick Fryer, director of marketing for AFN Logistics.
“This wasn’t the executive team jetting off, so it had little to do with title and tenure, but more to do with how our company culture operates and rewarding the attitudes of our employees,” Fryer said.
The 200-employee company, housed in a building on the 7200 block of Crawford Avenue, has staged outings to Cubs and Bulls games in the past, but Daube described the trip to game seven of the Hawks-Blues series as the “pinnacle” of all outings.
Daube spent all day Sunday putting his plan into motion, booking the jet through a former employee who now brokers private flights and ordering a bunch of tickets to the game on StubHub.
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“I walked around the sales floor Monday and asked people if they wanted to go to the game without actually going into the semantics of how we’d be getting there,” Daube said. “I told them we were taking a bus to the (Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling), and then suddenly we were on a plane and walking into the stadium—it was unbelievable.”
Despite the Hawks’ heart-wrenching loss, the employees said it was an experience they would never forget, especially since the Hawks had returned from a 3-1 deficit to make it to game seven.
“We all wanted a win, but after getting over the loss, we all were still looking forward to getting back on the jet and flying home together, and that’s something I’ll always remember,” Stapleton said.
Natalie Hayes is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.