#ALB58 The PE teacher who climbed a mountain (or six…)

Our guest today is Ben Knight from High 5 Sports and Activity Camps. There’s a saying: all who wander are not lost. This would probably be a good way to describe Ben’s life so far. Wanderlust means a strong desire to travel.

And this is certainly something that Ben can relate to. The planning, challenges, new experiences, that feeling of stepping out of the comfort zone is and has always been something which both excites and scares him in equal measure. Be it through travel, extreme sports or more recently, endurance sports challenges.

Ben is one of our One Percenters and has several businesses, including sports camps, bubble football and tennis coaching. He’s also a qualified Bodyboarding instructor, Ultimate Frisbee leader, Beach Lifeguard and is mountain medicine trained. 

He’s run two half-marathons and a full, in aid of charity, an alternative triathlon, doing stand up paddleboard, bike and run. And has won several tennis double tournaments and represented his county, Devon as a Junior and a Veteran. 

He’s been bodyboarding and snowboarding all over the planet for the last 25 years. And most recently climbed the six highest peaks in six different countries, raising money for a local charity. 

He’s making us all look lazy. 

Please welcome to the podcast, Ben Knight.

– Firstly, I’ve gotta pick out from this wonderful bio that we read out to you, is Ultimate Frisbee.

– Yes.

– What is Ultimate Frisbee?

– It’s sort of a cross between Netball, as in you can’t move with a disc, so to speak.

– Okay.

– You can pivot, but you can’t move and I guess, American Football, in the sense that you have to pass it into an end zone.

– Not that you can tackle it.

– It’s not a contact sport. Again, it’s not a contact sport. You pass the disc to your teammates. If it gets dropped, it gets passed to the other team. And you have to pass it to someone from your team, who successfully catches it in an end zone, to score.

– Ah, touchdown!

– It’s a good game, yeah, good game, very exciting, big in America.

– Okay, you think that’s something that’s going to take off in the UK?

– We’ve used it in our holiday camps, probably over the last ten years, I guess since we started almost, the leaders course. It’s good, you need to be older kids, really, teenagers.

– Yeah.

– ‘Cause you need to be slightly more competent in throwing the frisbee. But yeah, it’s a good game.

– Okay, what are the secrets and what’s the tactic to throwing the ultimate frisbee?

– Getting the frisbee to go where you want it to go, get it to go straight. If you don’t hold the disc flat, it curves, which good players use that angle to make it curve around people, to teammates. But if you can’t get it flat and get it to go straight then that tends to be where people come unstuck.

– You met Chewie, my little cockapoo, earlier.

– Yes.

– He would love to play Ultimate Frisbee with you, I think.

– Yeah.

– Not so good at throwing,

– So I pinched a lot of this bio obviously I asked you to send it over, some of it I pinched from your Facebook bio. I saw this line on there: “one life, live it.” Now, to many, this will be a cliche, but you really are living it.

– Yeah, I’m trying.

– So what does that “one life, live it,” what does that mean to you?

– So for me, I’ve always had a real, I guess, lust for life. A passion to sort of see and do everything. Well, some stuff, I don’t actually want to see and do everything.

But there’s so much I do want to see and visit and places I want to go and things that I want to accomplish. And to a certain extent, it always feels like there’s not enough time. And every year that ticks by and every time I have to waste time on things that I don’t want to be doing, I sort of sat there thinking, there’s so much other stuff that I need to be doing instead of this. Again, it’s sort of linked to my work and my changes in my work to try to help to facilitate that and tick off as many things on the bucket list as possible.

– That’s good, I remember reading, years and years ago, in “Life and How to Attack it” and it talks about, not how old you are, not how many years you’ve lived but how many days you’ve got left, and every single day that you waste, is just another one that you ain’t gonna to get back.

– You’re the youngest you’re ever gonna be again.

– Exactly, that number’s never gonna be higher.

– I heard you had your 40th recently, didn’t you?

– I did, yeah.

– I’m a couple of years ahead of you. But every time someone says, what’s it like to be 42, it’s like I’ve never been so old, but I’ll never be that young again.

– Exactly, yeah.

– Travel is a big, big thing to you. How did you fall into that? How did you discover this wanderlust?

– I suppose some of it probably came from when I was a child before I even appreciated that some of the stuff I was doing wasn’t what everybody did as a child. You just do what you do. And my dad was a PE teacher and so every winter, he used to organise the school PE, the school ski trip, and we all got to go. 

So from when I could walk, I think, I used to go for two or three months to this ski slope in Plymouth, and practise skiing. And then meet the people from the school who were always a lot older than me. And we’d all go in the coach and sit in the coach together for 24 hours, end up somewhere snowy and I’d spend the week skiing in the Alps with them. 

For me and my sisters, I grew up being quite a confident skier, and just took it for granted that everybody skied for three months of the year, on the dry slope and then went somewhere snowy and that’s just what you did. It was only when I got older and met people who couldn’t ski then suddenly realised that actually my dad’s job and the free places we got on the ski trip was really a kind of lucky thing to be able to do. 

I think I sort of fell in love with the mountains from those experiences. The travel probably was linked to my love of the beach and the sea. And the fact that the best waves, in this country, are in the coldest conditions. The colder and stormier it is, the better the surf is, but I think of the West Sea. 

So, obviously, growing up, it was South America, Australia and Indonesia, you know, these places, where people surfed, in Belize. It was great actually to get out of this country and get to see these places. Surf the waves in Belize and say, it probably stemmed from that.

– So you developed a love of the cold?

– A tolerance of the cold, more than a love. Some of the products out now, you’ve got dry rayon towels, which are amazing, they’re really thick, and you’ve got one of those on I mean, they’re not cheap, but it makes a difference getting changed, because a lot of it’s wind chill. The wet suits are so good now. 

The neoprene’s quite stretchy, so although you’ve got fibre net around you, you feel like you can move a bit. I can remember back in the really early days, up at Croyde, my mom would take us because we couldn’t drive and we’d go in the middle of winter and my friend who always went too, had a sort of wet suit that was like a hand-me-down that his dad had got him. The zip didn’t really work on it. He couldn’t get it on and off. And literally he was hanging off the bumper of my mom’s car with me and my mom, hanging on, trying to get his legs out of there, in February and about -10 windchill. So yes, things have moved on from then. And I can tolerate the cold, but if I’ve got choices: cold or Belize, then it can be Belize, any day.

– I remember one of the first One Percent Club meetings that you came to, I think, I was doing the cold showers at the time, and you picked right up on it, cause you’re familiar with Wim Hof.

– Yeah, Wim Hof.

– And I was like, “yeah, yeah, I got this”. And I think I dropped it after two weeks. And at the next meeting, you’re like “how’re you getting on with those cold showers, John?” Cold showers, cold showers, yeah, I remember something like that!

– Yeah.

– Do you know what, I’m back on it again?

– Are you?

– Yeah, so we’re recording this mid-October. I’m about a month in, now, and I’ve not missed one. Every hot shower I have, the last minute now, is cold. And do you know what? I’ve adapted. Because now it’s two seconds where it’s like, that’s uncomfortable and then you adapt and it’s like, that’s really weird. So I can run a cold shower, get myself under a cold shower now, absolutely fine. Stepping into a cold shower is completely different to having a nice, hot shower or a nice sauna followed by cold. But obviously, there’s lots of health benefits to the cold on there.

– For me, the ice bath has been, I say ice bath, pro-athletes use ice treatment after endurance sport to reduce the inflammation on the muscles. They have a bath of cold water and a lot of them do it in wheelie bins, I’m told, sort of water with loads of ice chucked in it. So I don’t go crazy with the ice. I find a freezing cold bath, with nothing other than cold water put into it, is adequate. Anything which is a sport where you’ve pushed your body further than you should’ve, a nice bath afterwards definitely definitely takes away some of the soreness the next day.

– From my tennis, we used to use it a lot. When we used to take kids on tour, we used to take them and jump in the sea afterwards in the tournament, down at Penzance. It became one of the most popular things. You had an epic battle and then we went down and jumped off the pier in the sea, swam around. Myself and my doubles’ partner used to always take a cold dip in the sea after a big match. That was part of our post-match rituals. I think there’s a lot of benefits in terms of recovery for the body. I mean Wim Hof takes it to a whole ‘nother level.

– Oh yeah, yeah, climbing Everest in shorts.

– Yeah, yeah. But also the whole, he takes, I mean, they’ve tested him, his immune system, he’s more able to fight disease. And he’s almost created a super-human version of the human immune system by all of that exposure to the cold. Yeah, some of his stuff is really interesting.

– Yeah, I was listening to a podcast the other day, and it was with a chap who had swum around the coast of the UK. And I can’t remember how long it took him but it was either 60 days or 90 days, it was around two, three months. He didn’t touch land the entire time. He literally just swam, then got in the boat, slept overnight, and was back in the water the next day. 

And he said that he was so tired, at one point he was swimming through raw sewage, he’s just throwing up, then he’s swimming through his own vomit.

– Yuck.

– But, at no point during any of that, did he get ill. He said he didn’t even get colds, he didn’t get a sniffle, not a thing. He said the only thing that he could put it down to is the cold therapy. It was in the sea, without a wetsuit, just ’cause wetsuits chafed him, the entire time. So in the sea, just constantly. It’s cold therapy that’s done it. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

– What’s your main business normally about?

– I’m slowly moving away from tennis coaching, which has always been my profession, I suppose, my trade, as it were. I run multi-sport holiday camps for children. We’re called High 5 Sports Camps. And we run out of three sites now, in Devon. I’ve got aspirations for that, I would like to see it grow. I’d like to see it really develop. That’s the key thing I spend a lot of my time on. And we also acquired, we’ve been doing Bubble Football, which if anybody doesn’t know what Bubble Football is, they’re these giant inflatable balls that you get inside, your legs poke out the bottom. And you got a harness in there and some hand straps. You run into other people and bash each other over and go head over heels and you can attempt to play games of football in them, which is pretty funny. It’s a real laugh out loud. It’s as much a spectator sport as it is for the players. We’ve been doing a bit of that for a few years. We’ve acquired another business with Absolute Bubble Football, took that on last September. We’ve been doing a lot more of that now.

– You started off as a tennis coach and I think you said before we came on air, that this was very much you, the business, it was Ben the Coach, selling you, people wanted you.

– Yeah.

– But you’ve moved away from that, why did you move away from being the face of the business or being the business?

– I think, probably like most people, you get told when you go to school, you work hard at school and get your results. You know, the more hard work you put in, the better results you get. And that sort of drummed into you from a young age. And so when you go out into the world, and I always knew I wanted to work for myself. 

I’ve always lived by my own set of rules a little bit. I don’t like people telling me what I can and can’t do. I see that more as a challenge than as something to follow. So yes, when I left school and wasn’t really sure what I was doing, thought I could be a professional surf bum, but there’s no money in being a professional surf bum, those people have all got trust funds. So when I ran out of money and needed work, I started coaching. Really enjoyed tennis, really enjoyed working with people, the social side to it, helping improve a sport, and really sort of fell in love with it and took my coaching badges and thought I’d found the thing that was to be for life.

And I’ve done it for twenty years, so it has been a big part of my life. But I think, probably, once you get over that initial honeymoon period of, and it lasted quite a few years, I slowly started to realise that with tennis, as we grew the business, like you just said, it was all about me or not just about me, but me and my business partner. 

We were the faces, but we were the ones that everybody wanted. And so, you could work many hours and you could put so much into it and we were running a really successful business and we were making good money. But actually, there’s a finite number of hours that you could be working.

And we bring on new people and then those people wouldn’t be as passionate or they wouldn’t be as trained. And there’s quite a few hoops to jump through to be a qualified tennis coach anyway. So, finding staff, training staff, keeping staff, is a challenge as well. 

But I think for me, it all changed when I had kids. That was probably the big turning point. Up to that point, me and my now wife Amy, we had a camper van, we went caravanning in Cornwall. When I wasn’t coaching tennis, I was either down in Cornwall in the caravan or travelling around Europe in the camper van. We had a nice life.

Tennis paid for the lifestyle, essentially. So, it kind of worked. And then she fell pregnant with our first child, Brody. And when he was born, my hours in the tennis programme were 7:15 to 8:45, four mornings a week, before school and we’d run some adult stuff during the day and we’d do admin in the afternoon and we’d coach 4:00 ’til 7:00 after school and then we’d coach all Saturday morning ’til 2:00 in the afternoon. 

And I suddenly realised that I had a son that didn’t really know me because my wife was single person parenting and actually that wasn’t sustainable long term.

Then my psyche, I suppose, my mind set, a little, started to change and I started to think that perhaps, I needed to find a different way.

– Yeah. I think so often kids are just the driver for a big change like that.

– That’s how it was for me, I found out Sarah was pregnant, like, that’s it, everything’s changed, everything’s up in the air. I’ve told the story before, reading Alan Sugar’s autobiography, I came across that line: “I never really saw my kids much when they were growing up.” And it just hit me like a sledgehammer that this isn’t what I want.

it’s amazing how these little humans, who have no inkling of what they’re doing, can actually influence you in that way.

– Yeah, and I think as well, for the first couple of years, it probably wasn’t quite as like sledgehammer when Amy was pregnant. Because initially I thought, my primary purpose now is to provide for my family.

– Yeah.

– And so when I was at work for all these hours, I was trying to go into business, I was driving it, I was bringing in the money. Actually, that was now my role. But actually, it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got. Your time is more valuable to those kids than any amount of money or any five-star holiday. I think for me, it took me a little while to suddenly realise that my presence was more important. And as I started to realise that, that was the big thing for me. 

But even this week, I was coaching an older teen and we were talking about some of the families at Mount Kelly and the money that the families had. And it was really interesting. He said, he’s a really interesting character, but he’s a really nice lad. He’s a complex character, he’s about 15 and he was telling me how successful his mom and dad were, they’re not together, but actually how little he saw them.

And he, at 15, I could hear it in his voice, the way he was talking about it, I said, “what’s more important, having all the money or seeing more of them?” He said, “I’d much rather see more of them.” And it just made you think, doesn’t it? It’s not all about the money.

– Kids would rather have your presence than your presents.

– Yes, that’s it.

– And I think so many people try to buy children gifts and things because well, that’s what they want, you know, my job is a provider, so therefore I must provide a nice car and a big house and lots of Christmas presents and a nice family holiday and that’s what they want from me. Well, actually, no. A nine-pound fifty holiday caravanning in Cornwall, would be more than enough as long as you’re there.

– Yeah, yeah. And you say that and my wife, I met her through the tennis centre I used to work at, She used to nanny for a boy and he came from a really successful family and they were self-made and they used to go on all these incredible holidays, and she still says to this day, the holiday that he talked about the most was the caravan holiday in Cornwall. And he’d been everywhere five-star.

– So you’re kind of sliding out of your tennis age now, you’ve founded another company, with multi-sport, multi-activity things for holiday camps. How did that, what made you go there?

– They ran alongside each other. It started, we used to run a tennis programme at Stover school. And the head at the time came to us and she said, “we need sweat the assets.” It was 2008, I suppose, 2009, there’s was quite a bit of financial stuff happening in the world. 

One of the first things to go would be your school fees for your kids. So she wanted some income from the holidays and initially she asked for tennis camps. The tennis facilities at the school weren’t great but the facilities overall at the school were incredible. And so, we sort of hummed and hawed and came up with this idea of doing some multi-sport and holiday camps. 

We went back to her with the idea and she really liked it. And my, you know, growing up, I used to do a lot of different sport, played a bit of everything and had fond memories of school holidays with something we used to do, called the Plymouth-Liverpool project where kids from inner-city Liverpool came to Devon or Plymouth and stayed with families. 

We used to have a beach day and a big rounders game to fill the nights at people’s houses. All this different stuff. I just remember going to Dartmoor and it being great. And so actually, multi-sport, loads of different activity, they’re interactive, they try everything. There’ll be something that suits each and every person. And so it grew from there. 

And I think we hit on something at a time when more families were working, during holidays, both parents working, again. It started to get a bit of momentum and pick up some steam. And I wanted to do more of that and I saw an opportunity in terms of getting more kids active and getting more kids involved in some form of sport or physical activity through it, which was something that I was really passionate about. And the tennis, although tennis is a great sport, it’s a tricky sport and you can go through your whole life and never play tennis and still have a great life. But actually, you need to do something that’s active. 

So I could see this High 5 concept being something that had the opportunity to impact more kids over a wider area. Also, the work force that we could get to work within the camps was much bigger. Because anybody who had a sporting background, a coaching background, a teaching background, anybody who could bring something a bit different to the camps, well, actually, that’s who you want. So rather than being all about me, it’s about facilitating with good venues and great staff, bringing them together, giving these kids incredible holiday camp experiences. And that’s where the passion really came from.

– A lot of what you’re doing is kind of, getting those kids away from the phones, the tablets, the Xboxes, the “I’m gonna be a Youtuber.” My abiding memory of my childhood summer holidays was to get excited, it’s a lovely sunny day, let’s go out and play. And I just remember jumping on my bike, leaving home in the morning, going off exploring the woods and literally, “what time do I have to be back?” “When it’s dark.” And I didn’t worry about, “what about my phone?”, “my phone battery doesn’t last that long!” or “How will people know if I’ve jumped off the ravine into the river unless I’ve got someone to film and put it on YouTube?”

– How do you tear those kids apart from the technology?

– Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it, really. Technology is amazing and what we can do now with technology. It has its place and I’m a big fan of it. I’m a big Apple user. But I’m a little bit addicted to my phone and I’m a little bit addicted to social media. And probably the last thing I do at night is check Facebook. And probably the first thing I do a lot of mornings is look at my emails. It’s the last thing you do at night and the the first thing you do in the morning, you’ve got problems.

I understand that. And I’m an adult so I can get my head around it and I can police it and sort myself out. 

But for kids, I was reading something that said, the dopamine levels in their brains, when they’re on these tablets and stuff, the reason they go so crazy when they get taken off them suddenly, is that they’re on this big high and it equates to, if you were watching a big football match on the telly and somebody stood in front of the screen so you couldn’t see it at a crucial moment and how would you react? 

And these are kids who can’t regulate their emotions as well as adults and don’t understand things as well as adults. These kids are being put in this stimulating environment and some parents are, perhaps, using it as a babysitting tool, a little bit. And it keeps them quiet and you can get on with stuff. So there is a time and a place for it but we don’t really know what the long term effects for these kids being on these devices is. 

And actually, the research shows: kids are less active, their throwing and catching is not as good as it used to be. They aren’t always as able to ride bikes, they’re running less, they’re moving less, which is all the things that you did without even thinking you were learning skills when you were a kid.

And so for our holiday camps, what we do is we’re screen-free. In the early days, we had a Nintendo Wii and we decided to get rid of it. It goes against what we’re about, which is, there’s loads of other ways to have fun. And it’s: be active, try new things and find something that sparks that interest in you.

– I’m so glad you got rid of the Wii because I have an issue now with the Nintendo Wii.

– What?

– So, I’ve just started boxing training.

– Okay.

– And it turns out that the way I’ve learned to box on the Nintendo Wii bears no resemblance whatsoever to real boxing.

– You should film it.

– It’s so daft I’m not doing the hooks. He’s like, “why are you doing these massive, over-exaggerated hooks?” I’m like, “it doesn’t register on the Wii otherwise.”

– How’s the training going?

– It’s tough, very, very tough. Very hard. But really, as we record this, about two weeks in, the gloves have only really just gone on. I’ve got my first bruise on my side, which is good.

– Yeah.

– But I’m really enjoying it. It’s very, very tough. And I’ve actually done it to challenge myself.

– Yeah.

– But really enjoying it. And it’s immense, I thought I was quite fit, cardio-wise, no, turns out I’m not. But then I’ve also done things that I would never have thought possible. I think we ended last night’s session, we started with “seven minutes of hell”, which was a minute of press-ups, followed by a minute of mountain climbers, followed by a minute of burpees, followed by a minute of…

– No breaks?

– Yeah, no breaks, just straight into it. Then we do 45 minutes of sparring and finally they say “okay, you can finish as soon as you’ve done this last exercise: all you gotta do is a hundred straight punches, your partner will then do a hundred straight punches, then do a hundred hooks, then your partner will do a hundred hooks, then you do a hundred upper cuts, then your partner does a hundred upper cuts, then you get on the floor and do 50 press ups and then you can finally sit down… and do 50 sit-ups, then you can go. As soon as you’ve done all that, you’re free to go.” It’s easy. Now if you’d said to me at the start of the evening, John, you’re going to do a hundred straight punches, a hundred upper cuts, a hundred hooks, 50 press ups and 50 sit-ups with no breaks, after 52 minutes of intense exercise, I’d be like, no, I can’t do that. And yet, when I’m in a room with 50 people doing it, I’m not going to be the one who says I can’t do this.

– Great group exercise is a good motivator, isn’t it?

– Oh, isn’t it just? Exactly.

– So, six peaks, in six countries, over about a two month period. That’s an interesting summer holiday. How did that come about?

– I spend quite a bit of time in Chamonix, snowboarding. I’ve spent quite a bit of time maybe sitting in apres bars, looking up at Mont Blanc and talking about the fact that it’s a pretty impressive mountain. Saying, “I should climb that one day”. I think I probably said it more, one time too many, maybe and it sort of got to that point where if I don’t actually go and climb Mont Blanc then I’m all talk and no action.

And I wanted to do something big before my 40th. So it kind of came from reverse engineering. I wanna climb Mont Blanc. So I think that was the initial idea. Gonna try Mont Blanc. And then thought, well, I’m gonna have to do some training to get fit enough to do it.

– You thought five other peaks was a good training programme?

– Basically, basically. It was actually meant to be the whole five so I could keep up my business. 

So I thought I would do the four in the UK and then Mont Blanc. So the four UK ones would be the training ones and then that would get me ready for the big one. 

And then I met Ruth from Families for Children. And I knew somebody who worked with Families for Children. We’ve worked with quite a few adopted kids. 

And the thing that, I suppose, resonated with me was having worked with families and worked with kids for all these years, is actually, when you meet people who work in adoption agencies, who work with adopted kids, when they talk about the children, a 14-year-old isn’t a 14-year-old, a 14-year-old probably, emotionally, is seven. And actually, although these kids may look the same age as their peers, because of what’s happened to them, if they were off on their own, they’d be damaged, essentially, from a young age. Emotionally, they’re so far behind children of the same age. 

And so people who foster, they’re not just taking on another person in their custody, they’re taking on a person whose, actually, got a lot of emotional baggage. And when I started talking to her and the more we talked and thinking about the kids that we’d had, understanding a bit more about maybe where their challenges were coming from, it just sort of fell into place for me. I need to do something to support these guys.

So I told her about the High 5 challenge and then, it went from there really. The High 5 with the guide books, the programme to do Mont Blanc. We actually went up Gran Paradiso, which is the highest peak in its league as a training climb to get us ready for Mont Blanc, so that 4,070 metres. 

They want to get you up to altitude. They want to check that you’re okay up there. You sleep two nights at altitude so you get used to what it’s like. But that took the High 5 up to the high six, actually.

So, we started in Northern Ireland, with Slieve Donard, which is the highest one over there. That was a nice one a few over, on a solo mission. So I sort of left the house at 3:00 am on the Monday morning and drove to Bristol, flew to Belfast, hired a car, drove to Newcastle, which is a couple of hours down, went up, climbed to the top, came back down, grabbed my tent, climbed halfway back up again, pitched my tent, sleep up there, and then came back down the next day and then drove back to the airport and flew home. I think I got home at 6:00 pm on the Tuesday. So that was a nice little solo mission, a couple of days.

And that was the first one. And actually, when I did that one, where I walked back up to there was a river running down. Saw the river and I didn’t have anything to do on my telly, but I did have 4G, so I was posting a bit on Facebook. And I said, if I can raise over 200 pounds tonight then I’ll jump in the river at first light. And so I woke up at first light and I had 200 pounds of extra sponsorship mainly from my family and friends.

– “Friends”, yeah?

– It was cold, man. They were looking forward to seeing this. So yes, I jumped in the river at first light and that was peak one. And then, I came back, did a bit more training. I did peaks two and three back to back. So we went up to Scafell Pike in the lake district. I managed to twist my dad’s arm and he did a thousand mile road trip with me, which I’m sure he was really glad to be doing, but it was nice to have a bit of father son time. 

So yes, we drove up there and we went up Scafell Pike. Yeah, that one was all right actually. The weather we had, it was iffy weather, there was a short, small weather window, so we, one of the two days looked really bad so we decided it was better to do Snowdon in the bad weather and Scafell in the good weather, because it gets a bit hard to work out where you’re going when you get higher up Scafell. And again, I was doing it on my own. I didn’t have anyone showing me the way. I’ve got a fair bit more of experience now, but I didn’t want to get lost. I went up Scafell, got up it really quickly, just under two hours, and pretty much jogged back down there. I wanted to get onto Snowdon. So we jumped in the car, drove to Snowdon.

– I’ve climbed Snowdon.

– Yeah? Climbed that up?

– Yeah, I went up in the train. Doesn’t take you all the way, but it takes most of the way up

– Most of the way, yeah, yeah. I followed the train track down there, actually, I’ve seen it. So we actually did that the following day. And we sat in the hotel in the evening, we worked out there was this lumberous path, which is an easy route up and I thought about walking up that way and then walking back down. 

And my dad had run into someone in the tourist information and asked them and they told him that was the safest thing to do based on the weather. But I didn’t want it to not be a challenge. My partner had done it a few times and said the big track was a good one. So I decided to do the big track up. Scafell in the morning, and having been on Scafell before with quite a lot of other people walking it, it was a bit of a change. It was misty, foggy, wet and windy. And I didn’t see a soul. I started going up it. 

The path gets a bit lost, so I got my map out, realised I didn’t have a water proof map, so I got in my sandwich bag, so it wasn’t getting soaking and managed to navigate. Yeah, it was a proper challenge, that one. ‘Cause I didn’t really see anybody. It took me out of my comfort zone. I had to really navigate and it tested my map reading skills, my compass skills. Eventually, I got to the top. That was peak number three. And from there, I had a weekend up in Scotland with my friend and doubles’ partner, Reese. We went up, he’d climbed it before, so it was nice to have a tour guide for that one. It’s a nice bit of scenery out there.

So, we went up that one, we had a good weekend up there. That was only ten days before I went to France. It was good to get some training miles in my legs. And so, got that one ticked off. And then flew over to France for the final two.

– That sounds brilliant. So you put this challenge together and you go and take some time out of business to go off and do this adventure. How did you manage to do that because it was during silly season which is recreating this and that and summer season is when you ought to summit that’s where you’ve got your bicycles and running and things like that?

You’d think if you’ve got a seasonal business, you’d go during the quiet time, wouldn’t you?

– I just took the last trip of the year up Mont Blanc, actually. The season was finished. Part of moving out of tennis and moving into High 5, as I mentioned, was having other staff who were as capable, if not more capable of delivering really good quality activity to the kids. I mean, we ran a team of about 35 this summer. So it’s a big operation. We’ve got some fantastic staff who work with us. They come from many different kinds of backgrounds and walks of life. 

We’ve got some TAs who work in inner city schools during term time. We’ve got people from the universities with teaching degrees who’ve got qualified teacher status. And all these different people who are just fab. They all bring something different to the table. And actually, my role now, whereas it used to be to go in and give the kids a really good experience, is actually to facilitate all of them doing that. So I do a lot of logistics, a lot of the pre-planning, a lot of the organization’s rotors. I am always there if things did go really amiss. I can always step in. But due to the state of it now, I need to be behind the scenes organising and obviously, behind the scene organising can be done with a phone and a laptop. So you can do it anywhere.

– Statuses are in place and rotas are in place. And you’ve now got a lot of business that you can do challenges like trying to climb up mountains through the busiest period.

– Yeah, that’s the plan. It seems to have worked.

– So if there are any seasonal business owners listening to this podcast now, what would be your key takeaways for them, wherever they are in their journey, whether they’re swamped, silly season, or starting to think about evening things out a little. What would be your key advice for them?

– Automation, any software, any thing that you can use which takes away the human input, is fab. We’ve got an online booking platform which has been really helpful. Our accountancy stuff is all done through online accounting. Everything is Cloud based, so you can access it everywhere. That’s all really helpful. Modern technology, having a laptop or a iPad Pro. Something you can use on the go and having it be linked to the Cloud.

So you’ve got access to all your documents. And then it’s like you said, it’s the processes, it’s the paperwork, it’s the systems.

– Having a good team to be able to do the stuff.

– That’s the most important, yeah. It’s that team of people and recruiting well and having people you can trust who know how to deliver, the way you want it delivered, definitely.

– And I guess it’s for you, is particularly clever way of recruiting and that is, you’re taking teachers that would have a normal six week holiday or longer, and using their time that would be off time, to go do stuff and enjoy the stuff that you’ve got off with your kids as well, haven’t you?

– Yeah.

– Your recruitment base though be it seasonal, you’ve found staff that are also seasonal, so obviously you haven’t got to deal with it year around.

– No, no, that’s it. Students always start up here looking for summer work and holiday work. And like you said, in schools, there’s lots of people now as well as the teachers and I suppose the teachers are, they command the highest salaries but actually the TAs work incredibly hard and do a great job as well. 

They don’t get half the recognition financially that the teachers do. Some of our best people are even qualified teachers who want a bit of extra holiday money, holiday work or TAs particularly, who don’t need 30 weeks holiday but actually do need to supplement their income. I think though as well that the people who work within the school environment quite like the freedom that you get in holiday camps.

– I was gonna say, it’d be like a holiday, when you say your TAs like coming down, actually they’re having holidays in the Westcountry. Actually to enjoy themselves with that freedom that isn’t the classroom.

– Of course, yeah.

– Just have a normal group of children and stuff and is actually having fun with kids, which is what I guess most educationists were going into education for, is to actually enjoy the kids

– Of course.

– and actually having fun, isn’t it? Essentially they’re able to do that with you in Devon versus straight to the classroom.

– Yeah. I think looking straight to the classroom is a big thing, isn’t it now. It’s a lot of number, number crunching data, collecting and box ticking exercises going on and that opportunity to have the impact that you go into teaching for in the first place is maybe dampened a bit for a lot of people. So we’re not an anti-school but we’re like the cool school where they’re doing all the fun stuff during the holidays that you want to be able to do more of during the term time during the term time, but actually the government says that, computer says no.

– Which do you think is more important, as a seasonal business, is it more important to maximise revenue during silly season or is it more important to try and create revenue during the close season? ‘Cause I’ve seen businesses try and do both.

– See, I think Ben’s done that because he’s got this motley academy, with all the activity camps and things but then he’s also gone for Bubble Football and other things who actually get supplemented during the other months as well, haven’t you?

– Yeah, I think for us, with our business, we want to be and we are striving to be the best provider of holiday camps in the Southwest. We want to be up there with the Centre Parcs with the experience that we give to the kids.

– When Central Parcs are talking to parents, that’s where we want to be. And to do that takes a lot of time and planning and effort outside of term time. There are other businesses who do holiday camps who spend a lot of their term in the school delivering PE sessions to the kids. So they have more of a year round business.

– Yep.

– But actually, again something from the One Percent Club, one of the audio books that I downloaded was “The Experience Business” which I absolutely loved–

– James Sinclair, yeah?

– Yeah, that’s right. I’ve listened it four or five times. That’s my go to when I’ve got any spare time, just to get another nugget. I think we want to be that experience. We went to Disney last year with our family. And we want it to be that wow experience when they come to us. And so to do that wow experience, actually, outside of holidays, we’re planning, prepping, so that in the holidays, the kids get something that is above and beyond what they getting elsewhere.

– Yep. I see, it’s that kind, obviously it does maximise revenues during the silly season but also, as Jase said, you’ve also set up these complementary businesses, that work during the close season.

– Yeah.

– I’ve seen it in the seaside towns where people are trying to flog the last few visitors that are here on a rainy seafront day, in November. Like, just shut up shop. Paint the shop, replace all your systems, make sure your staff are well looked after. Literally, just treat it as close season. And then, when you open the doors. When summer comes back, next May, for that two week period, what we call summer. You’re ready to really hit the ground running.

– So many business owners, they try and flog the last few remnants of things when things get quiet. And then when they’re busy, they’re like, “well, I’m busy, so I don’t need to be good. I don’t need to maximise revenue ’cause look, the till is ringing.” It may be ringing but it could ring 20% higher. And then you wouldn’t need to flog yourself silly, in November, chasing customers down the street, trying to force them into your restaurant. Not that I’m bothered about being forced into restaurants.

– I think actually that’s one of the biggest takeaways I’ve had from being part of the One Percent Club, is that whole not chasing the customer down the street in November, not feeling the need to say yes to everything and chasing every pound and every customer. It’s thinking more about, strategically, what do we want to achieve, who are we, what’s our identity and what do we do to make sure we are working towards our one big thing rather than everything on the could do list, all those shiny objects, being something I need, every single one of those shiny objects now. It’s like, no, this is my one thing, narrow my could do and this is my to do. And that’s been the big thing for me to help me to focus in.

– Yep.

– And work out what that thing is, is the best for us, as a business, to do. That’s a big thing I’ve taken from the last year of being part of the One Percent Club, definitely.

– I love it when people stick to the plan. It’s brilliant. It’s all about words, buzzwords there, the could do list, shiny objects, plan it. Ah, brilliant.

– So, Ben, this podcast is called the Ambitious Lifestyle Business. We talked a lot about lifestyles today, but without putting words in your mouth, what does an ambitious lifestyle business look like to you?

– So for me, it’s the freedom of time and that doesn’t mean all my time because everybody has to do something otherwise you’re retired. It’s the freedom of time to be able to make choices about when I work and that doesn’t mean that I don’t ever want to work. I’m happy to be put into situations where, at certain times of the year, I have to work. 

And I have to work a lot and I have to work even long hours at some points, but actually, for periods of the year, to be able to step back and say, okay I’m gonna do the school run every day. I’m gonna spend the weekends with my family. We’re gonna book those holidays and we’re gonna spend some time at the beach or we can spend some time in the mountains. And actually, I’m not off work, on holiday because I can take my portable office with me.

– Yeah.

– And the phone and the iPad come and the laptop. And actually, you can work wherever because it’s not about having two weeks a year where you take your family holiday, it’s actually, we have extended periods of the year where we work remotely. For me, it’s about that remote working. And I’m happy to work hard as long as I can play hard.

– Yeah.

– Yeah, it’s a bit of flexibility in there.

– Yeah, I think we get this notion of the laptop lifestyle and it’s this classic image, isn’t it? There’s a beach, there’s a palm tree, there’s a pina colada and there’s a laptop. I have no idea where the power cord is for it but it’s clearly not a Apple product, is it? That’s risky. There’s sand all over the laptop and the glare from the sun, no, no, no, no. So ultimately, but you’ve countered that and said this is what the remote working is really about. It’s about taking the crew with me so that I can almost, what, keep the business going, whilst away?

– Yeah. Keep it going or even if or when it gets to the point where it’s offering me the financial freedom that I hope it will one day work. We could be away for extended periods at certain times of the year. And I could work from another location.

– Yeah.

– Don’t get my wife started on the schooling system. That’s a whole ‘nother podcast, right there.

– That’s definitely it. We must get my wife and your wife to have a podcast about that. It would be a very interesting conversation.

– How’s the homeschooling going?

– It’s going okay, yeah. We’re about six weeks in now. We’re coming up to the end of our first half term and it’s going well. The kids are relating to it, they’re enjoying it. They’re thriving. More than anything, they are really, really, absolutely motoring ahead. I mean, Sarah said, they’ll probably have done a year’s worth of work by Christmas. And we’re not doing as many hours. We’re almost working smarter, not harder.

– Yeah.

– We’re taking the could do list of all these topics and all these things we could learn and we’re ascertaining what actually needs to be done. And obviously, with school, you can only move as fast as the slowest person. Actually, we’re doing one to one coaching, one to two groups. It’s been fantastic for us, so far. Don’t get me wrong, there are days when I think, God, can’t you just go to the state sponsored, babysitting service along with everyone else!

– Yeah, yeah. I was listening to somebody who home-schools, quite recently, and she said they do three hours a day.

– That’s pretty much what we’re at.

– Because, she said, when you take out the assemblies, the play times, the lunch times, the queuing up outside classrooms, the other bits and pieces that they have to fit in and they probably only do three hours of work a day.

– You go and do this work and then you’ll finish it but it will still be half an hour before the end of the lesson because now I have to get around everybody now. It’s just optimising things. And we are done, we probably start at half past nine and we’re done by 1:00 pm every day. And that is actually fitting in a lot of breaks. We worked like Pomodoro technique where you have like 20 minutes on, five minutes off, 20 minutes on, five minutes off. It works brilliantly for them.

Harry’s had it hard, he’s got vision impairment, so he was really struggling in the school with headaches, feeling sick, tiredness, complaining every day and touch wood, he’s not been complaining for about three weeks now.

Not a single headache or sickness or anything. He’s full of energy and he’s moved up three reading bands. He’s much further ahead on maths than the school had marked him at. Just absolutely thriving. It’s not for everyone. Again, we’ve designed the business so that I can be Mr. Lamerton on Monday and Tuesdays.

And Sarah’s dropped hours at school so that she can come in and actually help, help teach as well.

As I say, It’s not for everyone. But we’ve designed the business so that we could do this. Now I’ll say our plan is at the moment that the kids would go back into the school system for secondary school.

If that changes, then we will get our caravan and we will just tour the world and they will see the world. Because, if you can work remotely from halfway up Mont Blanc, then I can take the kids to Sydney and they can learn there.

– Exactly, yeah.

– I mean, we can go to Rome and they can learn about the Romans in Rome.

– Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. When you take children, even things like going to the airport, packing a suitcase, working hard to get on a flight, the different money, the different languages, the culture, there’s so much that they learn. How can people say that you learn more sitting in a classroom in the same building, every day than you can out in the real classroom which is life. 

– Ben you’ve been fantastic to have on the podcast.

– Thank you. I’m gonna go and have a cold shower now.