Come to the edge with the Jedi
Introducing UK Bike Skills' Tony Doyle
Name: Tony Doyle
Business: UK Bike Skills
Location: Hertford
If you’re a mountain biker looking to up your skills, it’s likely you’ve come across or been recommended Tony Doyle - even though you may only know him as ‘The Jedi’. If you haven’t heard the name, Tony is one of those few people who just are very well known in their sector. Even roadies recommend his coaching (see below)!
Key themes in this post:
fears and overcoming them
friends and letting them help you
knowing and feeling what’s right to do (vs over-thinking)
His business owns a field in Hertfordshire and over the years Tony has built a wide range of jumps, berms, table tops, gap jumps, rock gardens, drops and North Shore features to help everyone from complete beginners to people looking for their first pro contract. Check out the TikTok video below for one of the more extreme features in the field that has, perhaps unsurprisingly, had 2.6million views at the time of posting:
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We’re looking forward to seeing what we can learn from the Jedi about making a living from your passion for the outdoors, but first let’s do the introductions and find out a bit more about the nickname.
How did you get into coaching?
“It feels like something I’ve always done, probably since the age of 12. Long before I earned from it I was helping people for free. When I was younger I used to teach all my friends how to jump on their BMX. When I was a triathlete I used to help people with their training programmes and things. I was coaching long before I was taught how to.”
The push to start earning a living from coaching mountain biking skills came about 15 years ago when Tony was made redundant from BT. (Where, coincidentally, he’d moved on from being an engineer to coaching others in the business once his talent for this was spotted.) When pondering his next move, friends were urging him to do what he loved and coach riders. Contacts on Singletrack (a forum where keen riders hang out and where Tony was actively contributing posts) were doing the same.
But he was reluctant for the best part of a year. Would he lose his love of riding and helping mates? What if he wasn’t as good at coaching people as everyone seemed to think? (These are two fears we’ve heard from quite a few people we’ve talked to. One of the things we hope these posts will do is help calm those concerns if they affect you or someone you know.)
What makes you different?
Before we get to the “what makes you different?” bit, Tony starts to reveal it when talking about qualifications:
“I’ve got coaching qualifications now, but I’d say they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. I said that to the people that gave them to me. That made me popular!”
This feels like his inner iconoclast breaking out. And is possibly part of the reason he got his “Jedi” moniker. Don’t expect the standard skills lessons you’ll see on the internet when you’re with Tony. The ‘feeling’ is strong with this entrepreneur (see the business tip on Think-Feel-Know in the discussion with paddle expert Sophie Dollar) and if you let him tune into what you need, he’ll supply it.
“I don’t teach what every other coach teaches. I don’t teach the way everyone is told to ride a bike. Because it doesn’t make sense for me. It doesn’t work with what I know of physics. It doesn’t hold water. And ultimately I think it’s really dangerous.”
So why get the qualifications? The answer includes another of the themes from Tony - the importance and impact of friends, both in persuading him into coaching and then supporting him in numerous ways when he started:
“When I started doing it for a living a friend was building my website. He said ‘I know you’re not going to like it, but get a couple of qualifications. Because some people don’t know you and want to see that sort of thing on your website.’ “
Where do your customers come from?
“My customers come from all over. From all over the UK, all over Europe and even New Zealand and parts of Asia. I had a guy fly over from China last year. It’s mad and it’s all word of mouth.
A couple of women heard of me in a pro-peloton in Italy in a road race. They were talking about mountain biking while they were going through a feed station and one woman said ‘you’ve got to go to this guy’ and I got a phone calling saying ‘you won’t believe this, but I’m in a road race at the moment’. That was nuts!
And there was this guy mountain biking in New Zealand and he was on a lift in Rotorua and was getting very nervous and someone said you need to go see this guy in England. So he did. He flew over, landed, got a cab to my field, had his session and got the cab back to the airport and flew out saying ‘I’m just trying to beat jet lag!’ And how nuts is that! But I’ll never take it (word of mouth) for granted.”
In reality and despite how laid back he is, we think there’s more to it than just word of mouth. It all appears effortless and (important bit this) feels effortless to Tony, but he’s also very good at helping the word spread. Those 2.6 million TikTok views didn’t just happen by accident. In the next post based on our discussion, we’ll look at the activities he does to help bring customers in and help spread word of mouth about him. We’ll also talk about his advice for others earning a living in the sector and what his three wishes for the future are.
For now we’ll leave with Tony’s favourite poem (from Guillaume Apollinaire), as quoted on his website. It applies as much to the scary aspect of turning your passion for the outdoors into a business as it does to the poet’s advice on life. Or the much more important matter of tackling your next mountain biking nemesis:
Come to the Edge.
Come to the edge, he said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them and they flew…
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