Meeting challenges in the outdoor sector - tech, Brexit, competition...
A look at some of the issues facing adventure guides and how to solve them. Mountain Journeys part III
Name: Mark Eddy
Business: Mountain Journeys - family adventure days, guided walking, navigation workshops, rock climbing, rock scrambling, gorge scrambling, abseiling, canyoning
Location: Lake District (UK) & Costa Blanca (Spain)
Key takeaways
Size is not important! Does your work create energy?
Having a sharp focus on what you want to be known for (“Positioning”) is a great defence against price competition and unexpected market changes like Brexit and the rise of the freelancer business.
Don’t get lured by shiny looking marketing activities (like SEO). They are not always the next best thing.
It’s a while since we first wrote about Mark Eddy and Kate Ayres of Mountain Journeys. What stands out is the enjoyment they take from ensuring their customers have an enjoyable time themselves (just check out their TripAdvisor reviews). We subsequently wrote about three of the key things they have done well to grow their Mountain Journey business over the years – positioning, packaging and promotion.
In this post we talk about some of the challenges facing the sector and Mountain Journeys’ plans for the future.
Challenge 1 - capacity
The first challenge for Mountain Journeys is the busy time they have ahead. As discussed in a previous article, Mark seems to have ingested the book on how to market an adventure business. He is great at making it clear what sort of experience customers will have and then delivering on that promise (Positioning). He is also great at creating packages that make it easier for people to buy Mountain Journey experiences. And he naturally seems to do the right amount of the right activities to promote the business. But some enquiries, to Mark’s surprise, seem to come out of the blue
“Some of this is from people finding me from my blogs. Which I don’t quite understand because there’s no SEO done on it at the moment” [because of a technical issue].
As an aside, this doesn’t surprise us. There’s a lot on the internet about the importance of SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – if you want your pages discovered, and the relative merits of paid and organic search (see the link at the end of the article for more info on this). Investing time and money in paid SEO is probably worth considering if what you are selling is undifferentiated product to a mass market at the cheapest price possible and/or you need quick results: it’s one way to achieve visibility fast, but at a cost. But if, like Mark, you have a good story to tell then improving your organic search results is probably going to be of more value to you. Developing compelling content works, especially if it’s made easy for the search engines to find, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The search engines, after all, do want their users to find what they are looking for and are good at putting sites with strong content matching what people are looking for at the top of the results.
So it’s no surprise that business is busy. Capacity, though, is something Mark feels confident they can manage. He has a great network of people who have worked for him and who he has worked for in return. So he has a lot of trust that the experience Mountain Journeys has promised their customers will be delivered in a ‘Mountain Journeys way’ and not by some disinterested stand-in. A few months back he had cause to test this when a prolonged foot injury took him out of action for a while. The TripAdvisor comments didn’t suffer.
Challenge 2 - Brexit
Brexit also casts a shadow. Not in terms of declining sales, more in terms of how they operate.
“Since Brexit it’s more delicate taking on work in Spain. I’ve got to be stricter how I do it. I’ve not had to tweak things very much, I’ve just got to be very clear when people book how things operate.”
It’s our guess from talking to Mark that he’s good at communicating the requirements.
Challenge 3 – The rise of the freelancer business
The outdoor sector is changing in one potentially challenging way according to Mark (and others we have spoken to in other areas like paddle sports and mountain biking):
“The freelance community of outdoor instructors isn’t what it was even just three or four years ago. So many have decided to set up their own website and Instagram account which is much easier now.”
To Mark it’s good and encouraging that more are creating their own businesses. Some of these are obviously new to the sector and offering their services at unsustainable prices as they get to grips with what their true costs are. This can and probably does exert an overall downward pressure on prices across the sector, but Mark isn’t being affected by this and we are confident this is because of his strong track record promising great experiences that he can deliver – and then delivering them. (The “Positioning” that we keep on about.) Where it could affect his business is in the shrinking of the pool of experienced freelancers in his network as they experiment with more direct ways of getting work.
The adventure business is a very enjoyable mechanism for making money
One thing that is NOT an issue for Mountain Journeys, although it can often be for businesses that have been doing well for a long time is motivation. There isn’t that sense of frustration or that the good times have been and gone:
“The adventure business is of course a mechanism for making money. But it’s a very enjoyable mechanism for doing that. Yes, there are times when you are knackered and you’ve got to go back out in the rain again. But they are fleeting, they go away. What I do is a lovely thing to do and I feel quite lucky to be doing it”
Plans for the future
Whilst we have worked in sectors where companies often want to be big for big’s sake (notably the tech sector, where it’s an unchallengeable shibboleth), one of the joys of working with smaller professional service firms, including those that deliver adventure, is the confidence that there is a good living to be made without having to just grow and grow. So it is little surprise that Mark’s key wish is that “things continue as they are for the foreseeable future”.
More specifically, growing larger wouldn’t be “success” but could lead to more time managing people, increased amounts of admin and a life increasingly spent behind a desk. Ultimately the worry is that Mountain Journeys would lose touch with what people want and wouldn’t be there to deliver it personally on a regular basis.
That said, Mark is sanguine about the risks of staying small. Notably that it can feel less financially secure and that there is a real risk of losing potential customers because you don’t have the capacity to help them. So while he doesn’t want to grow to the stage where he ends up renting office space and employing a host of people, he is open to outsourcing tasks like admin every so often to allow him to focus on customers. (Indeed, he does this with the online and web work he does at the moment). As he says:
“Maybe I do rely on myself too much to do everything!”
For now the plan is for Kate to move back to a more full-time role in Mountain Journeys after selling the BnB side of it. This will give them more capacity to deal with the increased bookings they are getting. She will also be leading the charge to offer more packages targeting walkers. Expect to see more writing from Mark, producing mountain adventure guides in new areas.
“I would love to be spending half my time researching and writing, and half out with people in the hills. But the reality seems to be that guide writing doesn’t pay enough so we shall wait and see.”
We wish Mark and Kate well with their adventure business plans!
Thanks once again to Mark for taking the time out of his busy schedule to talk to us. We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned from reading about Mark and his adventure business. Please do subscribe (for free!) in the box below to get future stories from those who work in the field of adventure guiding and coaching.
Related links:
Mark’s book, Costa Blanca Mountain Adventures
Paid vs Organic search - an explainer
Mountain Journeys part I. Balancing business and a life outdoors.
Mountain Journeys part II. A better way of doing things.
Mountain Journeys on social: