A Better Fishing Guide Business Plan - How to start a fishing guide service business the right way

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What's up everybody? It's Simon from Lake Hub. Today I want to share some tips if you run a
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fishing guide business on how to improve your business and book more clients. These tips are going
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to include improving your communications with your clients, especially when we're talking about
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sales, automating your calendar, and also managing digital payments better. Now these tips can work
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for any service business for somebody who's in basically a one-man operation
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This could be fishing guides, of course. This could be photographers. It could be music teachers, house cleaners, anybody like that who has a calendar and is
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booking time slots is running a business by themselves without any front office help
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and who needs to take payments on the spot. So first and foremost, we want to talk about your communications
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We know just from talking to all of our fishing guides and all of our lake sites that it is an extreme challenge for somebody who's in business for themselves who wants to be out on the water is great at putting people on fish
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When you're out on the water, when you're working it, when you work in the lake and you're working with customers and your clients and you're putting them on fish and the phone rings, you can't answer it right away
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or you're in a low signal spot like that and it's hard to manage especially if you're using your
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personal cell phone as your business number you never even know what kind of call is coming in it
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could be a spam call or you know some kind of vendor call or just a friend or just random like
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who knows who it's going to be so what we recommend is we recommend getting a digital number
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that is dedicated for your business there's some really easy ways to do to do that these days
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and we used both of these recommendations number one is google voice set up a google voice number it cheap it easy uh it can even be free if you set it up that way you can get a local area
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code number and uh you know when someone's calling that number you can set it up to forward to your
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cell phone you know that when someone is calling that number that it is important they're either
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a new sale or they're an existing client and you need to take care of them if they leave a message
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then you know that you need to get back on that number right away as soon as you get back to the dock or whatever
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Number two is the other option is Evoice. Evoice is another great alternative to Google
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And in my opinion, Evoice is a little more of like a clear signal
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It's a little bit easier to kind of map out, you know, how you want your calls, how many times it rings
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It can go to multiple phone numbers. You can have, you know, a backup number. if you know you have a business partner you know a buddy or something like that or a significant
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another who can who can take your calls as kind of a backstop service so that's another great one
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you can use toll free numbers or local numbers with the voice as well okay the second way to
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improve your fishing guide business and this one is really really clutch this is to automate
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your calendar so if you think about your time as inventory that's your product
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right if your product is a service then your time is inventory so if you have typical time slots
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then you know let's say you have if you take clients out you're only going to go out in the mornings
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then each day is one unit of inventory so you can set up a calendar like in a service like calenly i'll
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put a link down below for that too so that you can go just directly to that and check it out
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That is a fantastic way for people to be able to look at your calendar see what available see what days are not blocked out or already booked and then claim it Basically claim that booking And so that is a really
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really, really great way for people to help themselves. It's a self-service calendar booking
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system and it's it is inexpensive and really intuitive it's easy easy to use your
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customers aren't going to be confused they're going to click and look at your counter go oh okay okay what look at this day and then book it and from there you
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can then manage them you can collect a down payment and then either you know
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accept or reject the booking and so on and so forth but at least from there
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they know exactly what you have available you don't have to go back and forth
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texting and emailing to figure it out okay third don't overlook this is collecting payments you
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might think i've already got that taken care of but there might be better options you don't know about
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so i want to talk about a couple different options sure you can take cash sure you can take a check
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but these days everyone wants to swipe swipe swipe so what are the best credit card options for
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on site um the three uh that i have to recommend from personally using it for different businesses is PayPal
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PayPal has a service called PayPal here that you have to sign up for once you have a business
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PayPal account. Then they give you a little piece of hardware that connects to your phone and you can actually
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take cards, swipe or chip. Same thing with Shopify. Shopify is a little bit more, I would say, complex if you have a simple
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business that's probably overkill but if you have a complex business it's actually a really good
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fit and they have they have a Shopify in option as well and it it very similar to PayPal here Same thing Takes credit cards attached to your phone
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As long as you have a data signal, you're good to go. The other one is Square
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Square is very popular. It's very easy to use. Some people run their entire business on Square
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In fact, some people run their entire business on Shopify POS. That stands for point of sale
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That's what they call their in-person. service so i've known people who've run entire retail options operations multiple stores
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the whole thing you know looks like a cash register all on shopify pOS same thing with square
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many people it's a very popular option for small businesses you know coffee shops don't shops and
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sandwich shops and stuff like that to run their entire business on square so there those are
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three options that are really easy to set up. I know a lot of fishing guides like using Venmo
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but the hang up with Venmo is that not all of your clients are going to have Venmo, and we're
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talking about collecting payment. This is the lifeblood of your business. You run the business
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you need cash to come into the business from your sales. It has to happen. It's very, very critical
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These are all three very critical steps to running a fishing guide business. So if you can take care
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of these three things digitize them make it easier for people to self-service then you can focus on
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what you do best which is getting out of the water and putting people on fish we're here to
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help your business grow we're passionate about sharing the joy of lake life that includes
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sharing with visitors awesome things about the lakes and helping the lake businesses grow that
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makes it better for everybody. That's our mantra here at Like Hub. If that's your style too
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go ahead and subscribe. Don't miss out on future videos. I'm Simon from Lake Everyone. We'll catch you
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next time

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