For those fly fishers who relish taking a peek under the hood of the fly fishing business world now and again, Angling Trade’s November issue posted yesterday, offering (at least IMHO) some genuine meat on the fly fishing business bone to chew on.
[Disclosure: We have a deep personal interest in the field of small business. I left a ‘professional career’ several years ago to develop several small businesses; we have enjoyed the fruits of success with several and the humbling failure of another. The understatement of the century might be that it ain’t an easy world to make a small business go these days and yet there’s incredible potential for the right models and niches to flourish now.]
Look beyond the spate of ‘we’re on your side and here’s our latest and greatest’ ads from Simms, Sage, Orvis and the gang and the product highlights from IFTD (yawn) to a few gems – consider these…..
Fantasy Trout, Fantasy Football and a Reality Check. Deeter takes on the increasingly prominent and oft alarmingly sacred cow of pay to play (fantasy) fly fishing. A of couple of excerpts…
Well, fantasy fishing is where you choke a river with oversized, stocked trout, have rich people pay a fee to catch them; you take pictures and record the score, and go from there. You protect the boundaries around that stretch of water like an NFL GM guards his roster, making trades only when necessary… only when you think it will help you post more points down the road.
It’s also as much a fantasy believing that those trout might actually exist in the wild, and the pay-to-play angler might catch them if they did, as saying said angler might be able to quarterback the Green Bay Packers.
And this…
I’d suggest that for every fantasy angler this market cultivates and capitalizes on, we might be losing an aficionado of real, authentic fishing. We’re losing the kind of angler who realizes it takes years, not minutes, to catch a two-foot rainbow trout on a dry fly. We’re trading instant gratification for devoted anglers who will toil and sweat (and buy product, travel, and education) to get themselves through that threshold. And, by the way, we’re also breeding the type of guide who lives for the photo-op at any cost (literally), yet wouldn’t really know a wild fish if one swam upstream and bit them squarely on their butt.
(One of the most profound examples of the fantasy fly fishing game sits about thirty miles south of where I’m sitting in Austin this morning.)
Is Your Business Plan Out-of-Date? Steven Schweitzer knocks one out of the park with a common sense and well fleshed out overview tailored to the fly shop owner.
Toweling Off & Trending. Geoff Mueller highlights some key trends – dig the Spey line development and growing interest in the two-handed world. Missed a key one – Tenkara.
Pro Guide Direct: The Program that Has Guides Seeing Green and Some Dealers Seeing Red. Deeter pretty well outlines the arguments in a single page, perhaps not as easy to do as you might think.
Training…Should You? Lance Gray tackles what is probably the biggest achilles heel of most local shops – poorly trained or untrained staff. She Who Must Be Obeyed has spent some time training sales staff for a large national retailer – the benefits are astounding.
Moving the Needle (Is Economic Pessimism Keeping Our Industry Down). Tom Bie offers five real time suggestions for fly fishing shops and business. Somebody’s been looking at consumer spending demographics (and more in the biz should be).
Two thumbs up gentlemen (except for the low-res pdf).
