Iain Miller is a rock climber, guidebook author and hill walker living, working and playing on the sea cliffs, sea stacks, mountain ranges and uninhabited islands of County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. He has spent the last 25 years seeking and finding unclimbed rock and summits in both the Orkney Islands and in County Donegal in the north west of Ireland. He has acquired a unique set of skills gained over these years as a mountaineer, rock climber and a marine engineer and provides unique days out in Ireland’s wildest places.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is Unique Ascent all about?
We provide fundamentally two services, the first is a unique and extensive guiding service. We guide people on experiences of true adventure to remote unclimbed sea stacks, previously unclimbed cliffs, uninhabited islands, difficult to access sea caves and of course to the summits of Ireland’s and the UK’s mountains in both summer and winter conditions. These outdoor experience days are open to everyone and there are no requirements to have any previous climbing, kayaking or hillwalking experience.
Our guiding ethos for each and every day is quite simple, we will make the best possible use of our time together. We will have as much fun as is humanly possible, whilst visiting Ireland’s most beautiful, inaccessible and remote places.
The second service we provide is a mountain training service in which we provide Mountain Training courses and assessments. The courses we provide are both national governing body courses approved by Mountaineering Ireland and bespoke courses tailored to meet your needs, aspirations and current skill set. We provide courses covering a wide range of criteria and remits for trainee rock climbing instructors and mountain leaders. Our bespoke courses are only really limited to your aspirations and imagination.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
My name is Iain Miller and since 1986 I have been playing in the great outdoors. As the years passed and my experience in the vertical world of technical rock climbing grew I was drawn to the little know world of sea stack climbing. Since 2007 I have been climbing the previously unclimbed sea stacks of County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. Standing on the summits of these sea stacks involves a mixture of sea kayaking, swimming, tyrolean traverses to simply gain their bases. To date, I have climbed about 60 new sea stacks and about 180 routes on all the stacks different faces. On the vast percentage of these climbs, I was alone, told no-one where I was or what I was doing and carried no means of contacting help. To solo, you must be totally and utterly alone.
In 2009 I was the lead climber in a team of three who made the first ascent of Cnoc na Mara. Cnoc na Mara is a 100metre high sharks fin sea stack in a very remote location off the west coast of Donegal. Its pinpoint summit is 20 kilometres from the nearest main road, 3km from the car, 300 meters from mainland Ireland and 100m above the ocean. For the previous 20 years, I had sailed the world’s oceans as a ship’s engineer. Standing on that summit at that moment, my life changed forever. From that day I went from being a ship’s engineer to being the world’s only full-time professional sea stack climber that I am today. In 2015 to celebrate the continued success of being self-employed I returned to Cnoc na Mara and did this Sea Stack Freesolo. What perhaps makes this sea stack so significant is that in my opinion, it is one of the best sea stack rock climbs on earth and if I find it before it was climbed, what else is there to find.
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
I am currently running at capacity as I have more enquiries for work and employment than I can ever fulfil in the average year. This is where I want to be as I have enough work and I don’t consider what I do for a living to be work. If I was to employ lots of people, then the product my company supplies would be of a much lower standard of adventure and my UPS would perhaps be lost. Whereas if I simply carry on as the near solo operator then it is a near impossible task to scale at the current level of unique adventure I provide. It is the classic conundrum of an unscalable unique niche product versus going more main stream with a scalable less unique product.
I am currently exactly where I want to be regarding running a business and having as much fun as it humanly possible.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
By far the biggest problem I had when I started my business was I was the only person who knew the potential of County Donegal as a global adventure tourism destination. Being part of the province of Ulster, Donegal is physically in the north of Ireland but politically it is in the south as part of the republic of Ireland. Being on the border of Northern Ireland, Donegal’s tourism infrastructure and visitor numbers did not really exist.
What I did was to promote Donegal first and foremost, then its potential as a rock climbing locating and thirdly, I promoted myself. I promoted sea stack climbing through you tube and attracted press visits from The Guardian, Redbull Canada, Forbes Magazine, National Geographic in 2013 and 2016, Outside Magazine and Globe and Mail. To name but a few of the paper and websites that came to Donegal to climb sea stacks. Perhaps the biggest name I was involved in attracting to the county was Star Wars and they came looking for a suitable sea stack location to film at, I showed their location scouts Malin Head and they filmed there. County Donegal is off course, much better known now with its visitor numbers at approx. 10 000% higher than 10 years ago and year after year the tourism figures rise.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from them?
The biggest mistake I made in the very early days of my business was to apply for grants for money to buy equipment, marketing and to build a website. The grant system is a lengthy process and involves several interviews and application forms. It was during this process that I was earning a little from my business as I was a brand-new start up. The money I made during this time I bought the equipment I needed rather than what I had applied the grant for. It was also during this time that social media was beginning to become popular and so I self-taught myself photography and built my own website. All the things I had applied for in the grant application I either did not need at that time or I purchased and built myself. It was an incredibly valuable lesson in that you only need what you need at that time. It also meant I had the skills for building my website to further update and modify it and It was only going to cost me time. It is perhaps the nature of my business and the unusual nature of the subject material but nobody can market me as effectively and economically as myself.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Since day one I have never considered myself to have any competitors. If I view another company as competition it would mean that I thought, they provided an equal or better service than me. My unique selling point is sea stack climbing and its road to market is an incredibly long and difficult road. Therefore, for someone to replicate what I do would be impossible without at least a decade of sea stack climbing on top of the same amount of time outdoor rock climbing. To up the game a little further the Donegal coast has the largest collection of climbed sea stacks in a small geographical of its size on earth. I was the person who climbed 99% of them first over a 10 year period, usually alone and with no means of communication. I am currently considered the world’s only full-time sea stack climber.
What this means is I have raised the bar regarding my unique selling point to a point where it would be impossible to replicate what I do without many years of effort, experience and research. I spend no time watching what other people in my industry are doing as I have very clear ideas where I am going and what I am doing next. What this means is I am wasting no time in trying to copy, imitate or keep up with anyone else, my time is devoted to driving myself forward.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
For all new entrepreneurs I would highly recommend they do a “How to Start Your Own Business” course but select one which is being facilitated by someone with a proven track record within your specific industry. It is the industry specific information that will be a perfect foundation to how you will perhaps initially run your business. This is until, off course, you work out what works best for you.
A second but equally vital course is a bookkeeping and industry specific tax course. It is worth bearing in mind that niche industries can avail of certain tax rules that don’t apply to other industries and to understand the rules requires either research or an accountant who knows your niche. Before you begin your venture, is the ideal time to complete a suitable course of this nature. Many start-up businesses omit this set of skills and either rely on an accountant or do a course at a later date. From experience, good bookkeeping requires a routine and good discipline from day one on your entrepreneur’s journey. Leaving your bookkeeping course to a later date can and does backfire as for the first few years you will be incredibly busy, and your time will be at a premium.
A third course that will potentially be of great benefit but is often neglected is an industry specific social media course. This can simply be an introduction to how social media works and with the right approach how you can harness an almost infinite sized audience for near no capital outlay.
There are many other skills and courses that I highly recommend start-ups to consider such as building your own website and SEO. It could be argued that all the above are better to be outsourced thus saving your time for other more important or pressing tasks. In my own experience, knowing how every aspect of your business works gives you a greater insight into how, when, and what to outsource at a later date.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
Over the last decade of running my own business many of the things you learn can only be self-taught as you gain experience and knowledge through your self-employment. One aspect of my business that has become vitally important over time is the ability to take good quality photographs and capture good quality footage. I have off course, got better and better in these two aspects over the last decade of self-employment but it would have been of great advantage if I was much more knowledge prior to founding my business. Not only does this media make my website visually more interesting, but good media skills are also essential with the current explosion in social media usable by the western world. An unusual, seasonal or simply good photograph or short piece of footage can potentially be seen by millions of people and all it has cost is the time it took you to take it and post it on-line.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
My marketing strategy is incredibly simply and highly effective, I am simply out doing recreationally what it is I do professionally. I am continually exploring, discovering and climbing in new places. This means I am continually adding new content to the online guidebooks on my site which in turn increases the profile of the rock climbing in the north west of Ireland. This strategy has attracted a huge amount of interest both nationally and globally. As an example this climb Downpatrick head sea stack climb and the associated short film, Dun Bristé sea stack climb film made news headlines in over 20 countries and travelled as far as New Zealand. What I am doing is what every other successful business does, I am gaining authority for my business by the actions of the owner. For me a big difference is, if I was not running my business, I would be out doing exactly the same things as I am doing as a business owner and professional climber as I did as a recreational hobby rock climber. In essence, I have created a symbiotic relationship between what I do recreationally and what I do professionally, I am simply living the dream.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
The best piece of advice I can offer a wide range of new entrepreneurs is to simply keep your overheads as low as possible for as long as possible. What I mean by this, is expansion and growth is the natural and healthy progression of a successful business, but this growth needs to be appropriate to current income and profit. Many unsuccessful and struggling businesses try to expand too quickly and find that they then struggle to meet their overheads.
What is your favorite quote?
My favourite quotation and I’m not sure where it originally came from is:
“Limitations only exist in the minds of those who consider them to be a problem.”
The human race has progressed since the dawn of time through the endeavours of those who push boundaries and accept risk. As someone who is perceived to take huge risks, the opposite is much nearer the truth. Risk is an essential and fundamental part of our existence, but it is our ability to calculate the risk before committing that will define our successes or failures.
How can we get in touch with you?
My marketing strategy means my website Unique Ascent is at the centre of my online business matrix and it is of course, where I have a huge amount of information about Donegal, adventure sports in Ireland, and myself.
An email or message for my site will get read and answered by myself, usually the same day but sometimes the next. I do regularly post on Facebook as Unique Ascent, Instagram as Unique Ascent, on YouTube as Oisinfab, and Twitter as Unique Ascent.
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