Business AND Joy

Dealing with the most important questions in your business. UK Bike Skills part III

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Jul 15, 2023

In previous posts we met Tony Doyle of UK Bike Skills, saw how his intuitive understanding of what a rider needs contributes to his Jedi nickname and learnt how to do lots of marketing while not doing any marketing. These are the things that all of us do in our businesses on a daily basis to bring in this month’s money. (This is the Blue bucket discussed in The Awesome Black Bucket of Growth post). Here we look at the other calls on his time and what we can learn from how he deals with them.

Key takeaways:

How you spend your time in the business is the most important decision you will make.
There is always stuff you have to do in your business that doesn’t bring in money (the Red bucket). Who can help you with this?
There is yet more stuff it would be good to do, but despite being incredibly important rarely feels urgent enough for you to attend to right now. (That Awesome Black Bucket of Growth again). How do you make time for it?

Bonus takeaway:

Learn from The Jedi – remember why you are doing what you are doing and don’t forget to enjoy each day at the same time as you grow your business.

So, apart from the getting customers, training them and sharing his passion for bikes we’ve covered in previous posts, what else does Tony do in the business?

We talked about how much of his time is required to do the back-office stuff. The paperwork, the tax returns, the process stuff: all the things you need to do that don’t actually bring in money. (This is the “Red” stuff in the article on the “Awesome Black Bucket of Growth”). And while Tony might protest that he does hardly any admin it’s a bit smarter than that.

For example, he uses a good accountant to do the things that need doing and give him the accounting advice he needs. The way the company is set up (a Limited company), the structured way he takes income (a mix of salary and dividends), whether to be VAT registered or not. Tony listens to what his accountant says and gets them to do it. While there’s a lot of potentially maverick “letting it flow” in Tony’s business, there’s also a more considered approach on many aspects. For example, it wouldn’t be difficult for Tony to do more business, and cross the VAT threshold, but he hasn’t buried his head in the sand and ignored it, he has decided he doesn’t want to ruin the enjoyment of what he does now and doesn’t need to.

Growth and succession

So what happens next? Friends have told him he should grow, and he does get that. But he comes back to:

“ Whether I’m doing it right or wrong what I’m doing just works. And it works for me. I don’t want to change it”

Moreover, when you are as so differentiated from everyone else that you are known as The Jedi, it can be hard for others to give clients the same experience you do. Much as a Jedi master does, Tony has trained up others to coach, but he says it doesn’t happen fast. Perhaps this is where the tension comes between the way Tony wants to train clients and his possibly confrontational views on coaching qualifications (see the “Come to the edge with the Jedi” post). I’m not sure he’s dismissive of qualifications per se, just making the point that you need more than that to really help people.

We don’t talk in depth about succession, but he acknowledges that the difficulty in finding or creating other Jedi-style coaches makes things hard. For us, this is another difficulty many small businesses, and especially adventure businesses face. If it’s hard to do things like find the energy or inclination to do marketing, it can be even harder to find the time to think about longer term, bigger picture questions. (The sort of questions that are in the Awesome Black Bucket of Growth). Many businesses would be rightly jealous of the position in the market that Tony has created and the value of the asset he has built in his field. But how does he turn that into income for the future, to support that oft-dreaded thing – a pension?

The biggest lesson about the big questions

Are the big Black Bucket questions like growth and succession important enough to spend time on now? While you are busy running the business and, hopefully, enjoying yourself as much as Tony?

We are clearly strong advocates of thinking about how you run and grow your adventure business in order to earn a better, sustainable, living from it. And like the mountain biking skills Tony imparts, there are business skills that you can learn and apply to do this.

For Tony we suspect the questions are not important enough to spend time on now. It’s not that he’s unaware of them (he has lots of friends who help him, after all), more that he has learnt to pay less attention to fears of the future and put more trust into his strengths and abilities.

We think that perhaps the biggest lesson here for anyone earning their living from adventure is that how you spend your time – the most important decision you make - is not a binary choice. It doesn’t have to be think about and grow your business skills OR enjoy the teaching you are so passionate about. It’s not Business or Joy. It can be Business AND joy – the way The Jedi does it.

We’ll leave the last words to Tony:

“When I get an enquiry about a course it’s like someone’s just knocked on the door and asked my mum if I’m in and can come out and ride. I just want people to feel the way I do when I ride my bike!”

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