From paddle to pedal
The value of adaptability: introducing Campbell Coaching
Name: Ally and Bob Campbell
Business: Campbell Coaching, MTB skills coaching and coached rides
Location: Afan, South Wales
Key takeaways:
Be open to how you can use your skills in different ways, or even industries
Develop a ‘portfolio’ to insulate you from seasonal or market fluctuations
Find a niche and grow it if you can
If you’re a regular reader of the Business of Adventure (and thank you if you are!), you’ll know that we’ve recently run a number of articles about Tony Doyle (aka ‘The Jedi’) – a well-known mountain bike (MTB) coach in Hertfordshire who has a successful ‘maverick’ approach both to coaching and to building his business.
This post gives us the opportunity to introduce another mountain bike coaching business but this time in Afan, South Wales, run by wife and husband team, Ally and Bob Campbell. Their philosophy when it comes to coaching is a bit different to Tony’s but they have some equally interesting learnings to share when it comes to making a successful living from work in the outdoors. In this post we’re going to give you an outline and we’ll follow up with some further posts on some of the key themes in future.
The over-riding learnings from talking to Ally and Bob are the value of flexibility and adaptability, to the extent of developing ‘portfolio careers’ rather than focussing on one ‘product’ or market. And, as part of that, being able to translate a core skill set to new activities and markets.
From water to wheels
To illustrate the point most vividly, both of them began their professional lives in the paddle sports industry. Bob is a former World Kayak Champion, undertook kayaking expeditions and then became marketing director for Pyranha Kayaks. Ally was an exhibition paddler and expeditionist, laterally sponsored by Pyranha (which was how she met Bob). Both of them were heavily involved in leading expeditions and coaching paddling skills for a number of years, gaining plenty of qualifications along the way.
So, you may be asking (as we did), how come they are now coaching on wheels rather than water? The answer lies in the weather, their flexible attitude and their highly transferable skills. We’ll come back to this in more detail in a later post but, essentially, unreliable river water levels in the UK make running a paddle sports coaching business an unpredictable affair. As keen amateur mountain bikers, they saw an opportunity in the early 2000s to benefit from the growth in interest in the sport and realised that existing coaching standards were pretty low compared with the extremely structured system of coaching and grading in the paddling industry.
Bob comments, “We were sitting in a café after a day out riding our bikes and overheard a coach doing a debrief with his clients and it didn’t sound like he’d met many of their goals for the day! On the way home, we said to each other, ‘We could do better than that!’. While we didn’t have a great deal of mountain bike experience at that point, we did know about how to break skills down and deliver them.”
Over the next few years they were to take those skills and frameworks from paddling and adapt them to create an approach to coaching mountain biking. So successfully, in fact, that for a number of years both of them worked for CTC (now Cycling UK) training other coaches.
This structured approach to skills development is what underpins the Campbell Coaching approach and is what generates most of their business through word of mouth and referrals.
Five things
Another key learning from our conversation is the value of having a ‘portfolio’ of capabilities. Ally credits an accountant they worked with in North Wales for giving them some valuable advice in this regard:
“He worked with a lot of outdoor guides and coaches, and I remember him saying that you need to develop five different things you can offer and earn from, and it’s good advice!”
We’ll find out more about the Campbells’ diversified portfolio in a later blog but, in addition to coaching mountain bikers, they offer training in a variety of other related skills, including ‘training the trainer’, and Bob is also employed by Natural Resources Wales.
Sisters sending it
And the final part of the conversation to which we’ll return is their market niche coaching women mountain bikers. As we’ve discussed in other blogs, including this one with Adam Evans, coaching the ‘wetware’, or your mind, is as important as technical skills acquisition. Ally Campbell has recognised that women often tend to lack confidence rather than skills and so has developed specialist courses that help them boost their confidence alongside their technical ability. Although it has to be said that men are now seeking out her courses too as her reputation has spread! And as more and more women take up the sport, Ally’s also been at the forefront of building the female MTB community as a co-organiser of the Sisters of Send festival.
Related links:
https://www.campbellcoaching.eu/
https://www.sistersofsend.com/info
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