Climber Uses Life Skills to Scale Up Life

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

I've been to Royal Ireland a couple of times. It is truly a beautiful place. It's been a long time since I've been there. I haven't been traveling very much recently, but as I've been thinking about getting back to travel, like where do I wanna go? I think I'm gonna put this on the list.

I thought about it while I was working on this story, 'cause it's all about Ireland. It's all about Ireland's remote C-stacks. If you don't know what a C-stack is, well, I'm gonna try to explain it in this story. The story itself features a ship's engineer who hopes to turn his passion for climbing into stacks of cash, C-stacks into stacks of cash. He becomes an adventure guide, not motivated to get rich.

He wants to live his life. Good for him, but even though he doesn't wanna get rich, he's still able to make a good income doing something that he enjoys, which I think is so wonderful. So how did this hobby turn fascination of climbing, which I'll tell you about, turn into a side business and now a full-time income? The story, "Climber Uses Life Skills to Scale Up Life." It's coming to you in just 30 seconds. [Music]

Ian Miller always felt a kinship with the sea, with the sea itself and being close to the sea.

Growing up, he lived in several different coastal towns in Scotland, and naturally, after he went to school, he joined the Merchant Navy as an engineering cadet where he spent the majority of his time on a ship. Over nearly 20 years of service, Ian enjoyed the water, but his love of mountains, climbing, and the great outdoors in general is what kept him sane. Eventually, he moved to Ireland and began to climb its many sea stacks and cliffs. Now, for those who don't know, I'm not sure I knew before this episode either, sea stacks are large rock towers that stick out of the ocean. They are formed by the continuous pounding of the ocean over thousands of years, and they're often fairly inaccessible.

However, people like Ian, who has now been climbing for over 30 years, can safely venture out to these breathtaking landmarks. So, when he moved to County Donegal, he started to explore some of the unclimbed areas around town, and I guess around the sea. It says around town, but I'm thinking it's around the sea. He noticed that other people wanted to explore, but didn't have the expertise he did, so he began to take them along. In 2008, he was involved in the very first ascent of the Croc-Namara Sea Stack, and my apologies to all of our Irish listeners.

I probably said that wrong. Ian was getting paid to climb, and it felt amazing. He started to wonder what his life would be like if this was his job. With additional requests for guided climbs coming in, he already had confirmation that people valued his services enough to compensate him. After that first expedition, he decided to take all of his earnings from it and start a business.

He calculated the minimum he needed to earn, annually, monthly, weekly, and that gave him a starting point to base the rest of the business around. He knew that he eventually wanted to make it a full-time gig, so he tried to determine what his prices needed to be to make that reality. Then, Ian built a website, registered his new company, Unique Ascent. It cost about $400 to build that site, and he made sure it was not just an advertisement, but an actual information hub. And instead of just broadcasting his services, Ian wanted to provide value for his customers right off the bat.

He published free, detailed PDFs about rock climbing and the surrounding areas, and to this day, he consistently updates the site with new climbs and information. Now, while this was a lot of work without getting paid for it, at least directly, Ian said his tenacity paid off immensely in the long run. Not only did he build credibility, people came back to his website over and over again. Now, when search engine users look up adventure in Ireland or things to do in Ireland, his business frequently comes up near the top. And in fact, it's where he gets 80% of his customers.

As he says, the better and more informative your website is, the easier it will be to find by people not directly searching for you. In addition, he suggests not following what other people are doing, at least other competition, in his case, other C-stack guides. He believes that far too many people focus on what others are doing, and as soon as you consider yourself to have competition, you are admitting that their services are potentially equal to or better than yours. Those are his words. Instead, he focuses on bettering his own skills and products.

He now charges anywhere from $200 to $500 a day for private guiding, and this figure is very dependent on the nature of the climb. He usually only takes a single person or maybe a couple of people out at once, but sometimes with groups, he can make up to $1,000 a day. Ian is now the world's only full-time professional C-stack climber. On average for a year, he earns about 50,000 euros. That's about $56,000.

He doesn't feel the need to increase his profits, at least right now. His motivation is to create enough free time to do more climbing. [Music]

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thank you for tuning in today. I hope you enjoy the story.

Perhaps it gets you thinking about something you could do. Maybe it's something obscure or unusual or something you never thought you could make money from. But in fact, if it's something that not just you, but other people like to do, perhaps there is a path. And that's what I'm trying to show through all these different stories, case studies, examples, questions and answers, and so on. Check out Ian's website, by the way, uniqueassent.ie.

We're gonna link it up on the show notes page, but it is uniqueassent.ie. Really cool, lots of information, lots of great photos. I learned about SeaStacks. So maybe you wanna go and check it out too. If you happen to be visiting Ireland or if you happen to live there, well, this sounds like a pretty incredible adventure to undertake.

All right, that's all for today. The show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1893. Links to everything mentioned in the episode and more. We've got a comment or question for us. You can leave that there as well.

And I hope you will subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You've been listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]