“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”
Combining career success AND passion
Name: Tariq El Kashef
Business: Threshold Sports
Location: Brighton
Key takeaways:
Career success and living your passion and purpose don’t have to be mutually exclusive
Invest in yourself and your skillset
Consider what your transferable skills are
In this week’s post, we’re finding out about a rather different career path into the business of adventure. While many of our posts feature small business owners or people who work largely on their own, the subject of this profile is Tariq El Kashef, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Threshold Sports, an £8 million turnover company which employs 30 full time staff. Threshold is one of the leading organisers of major events and challenges for corporates and charities in the UK, and we’ll be returning to their business story in a later blog.
But first, we’re sharing Tariq’s story as it’s a fascinating insight into how you can build a successful business career out of a passion for adventure and travel, while retaining a strong sense of purpose.
The lure of travel and adventure
His love of outdoor adventure doesn’t have immediately obvious roots. He talks about how, as a child, an outdoorsy existence wasn’t part of his upbringing:
“Both my parents were immigrants, my mum is from the Netherlands and my dad's from Egypt, and going camping and things like that just isn't a recreational thing in North Africa. So I don’t think I’d even been hiking until I was an adult and left home.”
He goes on to talk about how his childhood was, however, full of amazing travel experiences visiting family abroad which bred an obsession for travel in him. By the time he reached university to do a psychology degree, he says that all he could really think about was that there was “a big old world to see and I wanted to go and have adventures and travel around the world.”
He laughs at his first experiences of outdoor adventure during his backpacking trips. “I went and did the Annapurna base camp trek in Nepal, and I was woefully ill-equipped wearing my Reebok trainers and jeans, walking around in the snow. Looking back I had no idea of that world, but I knew it was something I wanted to be part of.”
A Himalayan ‘aha’ moment
After a couple of years of travelling, Tariq had his ‘aha’ moment in a little tea house in the Himalayas. He’d been thinking a lot about what he was going to do when he got home, and whether it was possible to combine his love of adventure and the world of work. He goes on,
“I was sitting in a little tea house in the Himalayas and this French guy walked in with 20 people, following him like the Pied Piper into the tea house, and he was sorting them out and getting them checked in to their rooms and answering their questions, and I was curious about what was going on.”
Over a whisky that evening, Tariq found out more about what the Frenchman did for a living, which was leading groups on adventure holidays. He recalls, “I just didn't know that was a career that existed, you know, no one had spoken to me about that at school or careers fairs or university or anything like that.”
Leading adventures
On his return to the UK, he started applying to adventure companies for work. We talk a bit about the skills and qualifications that they were looking for; while he recalls that some of the people he met and later worked with had mountain leader qualifications, or backgrounds in botany or biology, or had lived in the jungle, ultimately it was, and is, people skills that counted.
He reflects that employers are looking for patience, tolerance and ability to remain calm in all kinds of different and potentially difficult scenarios, where much of what’s required is a customer service role and looking after guests on your own in remote and sometimes dangerous places.
Having landed a job with Explore Worldwide, one of the leading operators in the space, and done his initial training, Tariq began leading tours. While he started off leading fairly ‘easy’ trips in Europe, he soon graduated to more far-flung destinations.
“Over the seven or eight years I was with the company, I probably went to 20 or 25 countries all over the world, from Syria to Peru. I’d be abroad for 10 or 11 months of the year, leading back-to-back tours on my own so it was pretty full on but I loved it! “
He says that in the last couple of years with Explore, he began to think about trying to settle down in the UK and stop the tour leading, but then another tempting offer to lead a trip in somewhere like Tibet would come up and he wouldn’t be able to resist!
Using transferable skills to find a niche
However, eventually he managed to resist the lure of travel and focus on his skillset: “I felt like my skills were in logistics and coordination as well as communication, plus I’d become good at handling crises and emergencies, and working with a huge range of clients, often senior people with big egos, so event management seemed like a natural progression.”
Having met with some disbelief amongst prospective employers that he’d be ready to trade his life of adventure for work in their sector, he decided to take a course in event management to demonstrate his seriousness and to invest in his business skills and knowledge. While this course wasn’t specific to the outdoor sector, Tariq says it was hugely useful and helped him get an event management job, organising trade shows and conferences in a variety of industry sectors.
While he says he learnt loads from this job, his love of travel was still strong and he was keen to combine his organisational skills with his experience of travelling around the world and adventure. Eventually, an opportunity arose with a company called Action Challenge which organises expeditions and UK challenge events, such as London to Paris cycle rides and sponsored walks, as well as international charity challenges.
He smiles and says “And then I was just like, oh, this is it! I kind of knew I'd found my niche at that point. And I've never looked back.”
Career progression
After several years with Action Challenge, Tariq moved to Threshold as head of client events in 2015 and over time he has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer, one of the most senior roles in the company.
Like Action Challenge, Threshold is a major player in the outdoor events space, and its business falls into three main areas:
· mass participation events for individuals such as the Ride Across Britain
· corporate events for clients from DHL to RBS and Trainline, for example supporting client care, employee engagement and CSR programmes
· charity events that maximise fundraising and supporter engagement such as the MacMillan Mighty Hikes
We’ll come back to Threshold’s success story in a future blog, but for now we talk some more about what Tariq’s role involves and how it’s evolved. Initially he was working as an events director, planning and organising everything from endurance cycle rides to ultra marathons, sometimes for thousands of people.
As he’s become more senior, his role as COO now involves heading up the team of event directors and beneath them there's event managers and event executives who support them, plus a team of freelance and seasonal staff when needed.
“My job now is really helping to run the business. So that means managing how we spend our money, purchasing and all the supplier procurement, but mainly it's making sure that team have what they need to do what they do. Looking after our team is really important because we’ve got some talented people and we want to hold on to them.”
He observes that in many ways his role is similar to someone with his title in many other sectors, just with a different ‘product’. The difference for him is the sense of purpose he gets from helping people get into the outdoors and in some ways that hasn’t changed since he started leading adventure tours.
Passion and purpose
“Back then as a tour leader, I found it really rewarding to give people these experiences where they got to step out of their comfort zone, and I got to share my interests and passions with them.
“And now at Threshold I get to do that at a bigger scale, so instead of groups of 30 people at a time, it's 3000. Some weekends we might have several events going on at once and it’s our job to ensure that all the participants are coming away with a brilliant experience. So I'm very connected to the purpose of the company and that's connected to my purpose as an individual.”
As part of the job he still gets to use his expedition leader skills, and sometimes on some high-profile trips, such as a celebrity climb of Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief, or leading groups of famous entrepreneurs including Richard Branson. He comments, “I'm in a very privileged position that I've got this growth in my career and I'm working for a great company, but I still get to do amazing expeditions!”
And if that weren’t enough, he still keeps his hand in leading smaller expeditions for a company called Dream Challenges, using his own holiday allowance to do it. Plainly he’s truly bitten by the travel bug!
He sums up this passion for his career with an old adage: “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”.
Thanks to Tariq for taking the time out of his busy schedule to talk to us. Please do subscribe (for free!) in the box below to get future posts about what it takes to earn a living from adventure.
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