Attitude is all

Age is irrelevant. (Leam Boat Centre's Sophie Dollar part I)

Adventure Collective

and

Paul Griffith

Apr 06, 2023

Name: Sophie Dollar

Business: Leam Boat Centre

Location: Leamington Spa

Key takeaways:

Being open-minded and curious is a great way to make a difference
Admin and back office stuff are part of enhancing the customer experience
Age is irrelevant. Attitude is what counts.

Introducing Sophie

Sophie Dollar may be younger than the coaches and guides we have talked to so far, but she started young, was working young and, most importantly, is open-minded and curious – so we’ve got a lot to share from talking to her.

She started on paddling sports when she was twelve, attending a birthday party at a water sports centre and enjoying it so much she went back for more, signing up for the children’s kayaking courses they ran. By 15 she had started work, helping out at the centre before opting to work full time as a shift supervisor when she left education. Now, at a stage when many of her cohort are scratching their heads about what to do when they leave university she is a manager of Leam water sports centre – which recently won the 2023 British Canoeing’s “Quality Experience Award”. The centre aims to get as many people out on the water as possible across a full range of paddle sports. As well as offering boat hire and kit sales, the centre works with a wide variety of people including school groups, youth organisations, the WI, as well as charity groups from beginners up to professionals and people training to be coaches themselves. To deliver all this, Sophie manages a team of four full time and a larger team of part-timers.

“I also like doing admin and back office stuff”!

Now this next part may sound odd, especially in the world of adventure, adrenaline and excitement, but Sophie positively likes the mix of admin, customer service and actual time on the water that her role entails.

“Just doing stuff on the water, day in, day out risks getting a little bit boring. It can get quite repetitive. And what I have learned is that the way you improve the centre is mostly by focusing on stuff behind the scenes, not what’s going on out on the water.”

Career choice time

For the record, choosing this course of action wasn’t an easy decision. At school Sophie did well at A-levels and applied to read Chemistry at university.

“I knew that I really enjoyed working in the outdoor industry at the boat centre, but I was very aware that in reality it is an industry that’s low paid and lots of hard work and lots of weekend work.”

In the end she applied for uni with a gap year and decided to use the year to explore her options and make a decision. After considering many different options she came back to the boat centre, feeling it was the best place to be and started just as the pandemic moved into the lockdown phases. Which was not as bad as it sounds. As we are beginning to hear through talking to people in the sector, Covid led to a surge in interest in outdoor pursuits in the UK and also heralded a boom in Stand Up Paddleboarding. Not long after, Sophie withdrew her application for a student loan and committed full time to paddle sports coaching eventually becoming manager of the centre.

“Once I had made the decision I was so relieved. It was the kind of thing that I was so unsure about for a long time and was really humming and ha-ing about. But once I had made the decision I was fired up and ready to go for it.”

Business tip – Self-awareness and making decisions

Sophie’s early career choice illustrates something that we have come to realise is important in many ways to anyone running a business – an awareness of how you, personally, process information and make decisions. We all do it differently. Some seek data and more information and want to analyse options before committing to a course of action. Some feel their story strongly and vividly imagine their way through the various alternatives. Some just know calmly (and maybe wrongly!) what needs to happen next.

So, quick pause: which is Sophie? which are you?!

And do you just know that’s you? Or do you perhaps feel that it’s what you’re like? Or maybe it’s more a case that you think that’s the way you operate?

We hope to return to this theme of Think-Feel-Know in a later post because there’s so much richness to learn from it that it deserves more space. If there’s one thing we’d like to get across now, though, it is how an awareness of your processing and decision making habits can help you straight away:

If you are mainly a THINK-er you may have experienced how difficult it can be to make a decision, how you have so many facts for both sides of a decision, how you yearn to find a bit more information that will decide things for you. If that’s you, hunt for tricks (like artificial deadlines) that force you to decide now and not wait for more data.
If you are mainly a FEEL-er you may also have found yourself going round and round in circles and you may have noticed friends and colleagues looking like they wished they understood your point. If that’s you, then focus on the things you feel strongest about – and remember that “focus” suggests only a small number of things (no more than two or three).
And if you are a KNOW-er you are unlikely to have read this far cos you got the point straight away and have restlessly moved on. Perhaps consider that you may know wrong and try and make yourself consider more options, facts and feelings.

What is it that Sophie enjoys about the role now?

“The thing I enjoy most is being able to develop the centre. I really like bringing in new ideas and then seeing the improvements they make. I like being able to do stuff quickly and see it work its way through. It’s great seeing customers come back again and again because they really enjoy it here.”

And customers clearly do like the Leam Boat Centre. The British Canoeing’s “Quality Experience Award” was won recently on the back of multiple nominations describing it as high quality, engaging, brilliant, organised and the word repeated most often ‘outstanding’. “That was quite a cool thing to win”, says Sophie.

Thinking a bit more about what customers like about the centre, she says:

“I think it comes down to a feeling of community. Particularly in the last year or so. And customers like to see that the staff are enjoying what they are doing and are happy to help others and just want to get more people out on the water!”

Another aspect that Sophie enjoys and has strong views on is helping especially the younger staff develop.

“I’ve always enjoyed seeing the younger staff develop. It’s quite cool that we employ quite a few and can help them grow and get them into the outdoor industry. It makes me feel we’ve done something right!”

If you’re wondering where she gets her ideas from to develop the centre, Sophie quotes a number of sources:

When starting, it was all about common sense and questioning “why are we not doing this or that?”
More recently it’s been about actively researching what others do and learning from them
She also observes other courses and gets ideas from those
Finally, she mentions just meeting freelancers and exchanging ideas with them. (Something we’ve heard from others in the sector)

In other words it’s the attitude of being curious and open-minded that has helped Sophie achieve so much to date. Age is irrelevant, apart from perhaps the feeling that a younger manager has to work harder to prove themselves. “But I like challenges, so I’m not worried about that”, says Sophie.

In the next part of our discussion we’ll hear about the challenges she and others in the sector face, where she focusses to improve the experiences of customers and the biggest question of all “When do you know when you’ve done enough?”

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Finally, if you know someone who has a different way of processing than you please do share this article with them. (And when we come back to the subject we’ll explain why it can sometimes be difficult to work with people who process differently from you – and how to handle, and indeed, benefit from an awareness of this.)

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