Why You Should Start a Tour Business

I’ve just finished running a 5 day tour, through remote Western Australia.

When it started, it was with a group of complete strangers.

When it finished, it was with a group of people I knew better than most people ever get to know their customers.

I have developed life-long friendships with people over the course of this business, even though they first entered my world as a profit making exercise.

I started this business, with a desire to achieve a good lifestyle balance.

But, with completely different expectations of what that means.

I love the remote regions of Australia, particularly the harsh and sparse northern regions. My idea of great lifestyle was the idea that I’d be getting to these places more often. That is the case, but is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lifestyle benefits of being an owner/operator tour guide.

The Problems of Modernity

Digital Minimalism/Deep Work/Slow Productivity – the Work of Cal Newport

Banishment of Solitude

If you’ve never read Cal Newport’s books on the intersection of technology and society, you’re missing out. If you’ve ever thought that technology may be interfering with achieving the highest possible quality of life, then you should read his books.

Of the recurring themes across most of his work, the one that sticks out to me the most is the idea of the “banishment of solitude”.

If you accept the idea that solitude is not necessarily physical isolation, but rather being free from the input of other minds, then you’ll also accept that we live in the first time in history where we’ve effectively banished solitude.

This is a problem.

Solitude is an important aspect of life.

The networks and pathways in the brain responsible for social interacting are incredibly complex. They’re designed to take in massive amounts of simultaneous inputs such as judging speaking cadence, tone, facial expression, volume, body language, trying to predict what the other person is thinking, and more.

These pathways are supposed to be fired up to take in the rich interaction that happens with face to face communication.

Digital connection, is such a poor mimicking process of this, that replacing face to face communication with a digital interaction, leads to all sorts of issues.

These brain regions are supposed to go through times of being fully engaged, but then conversely go through times of complete down time.

We’ve replaced face to face communication with digital mediums, and have also let them be constantly interfering at all times.

So, we now have the issue of complete interaction being rare, but down time being completely banished. Our engines are stuck on idle, never being turned off and never being revved. The cylinders of our minds are becoming glazed and we’re blowing mental smoke.

The Tour Operator’s Solution for Embracing Selective Solitude

Running a tour business – as an owner operator that runs the tours myself – provides an inbuilt variation for social interactions. A lot of it is spent alone, working from home and then flips completely to spending a week or more in close proximity with a small group of people all day.

The trick is to make sure you’re leaning into actual solitude.

If you let the time alone be constantly intruded by digital devices, you’ll miss the benefits of genuine solitude. Then when it comes time for the rich face-to-face human interaction, you’ll be ill-equipped to properly handle this and will just face social burn-out.

For me, this requires a complex relationship with technology. I do everything I can to maximise my use of it when it will provide benefit. There is a reasonable amount of tech sophistication that goes into running this as a hybrid online/analog business. But then there is a complete rejection of most consumer technology when it does not benefit me.

I use an iphone on tour for navigation apps and taking pictures. When I’m home, I go back to using a Telstra Lite 3, that lets me make calls and send short text messages. This requires the complex setup of a self-hosted Matrix server with Mautrix bridges to allow me to communicate with customers via Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Instagram etc on the computer, but in a way that doesn’t have any interaction with the social media aspects of these services. It also lets me keep my phone on me during the day so I can answer any calls, but it does not intrude in nearly the same way that a smart phone would.

All this is to say, that running a tour business is one of the rare endeavours that lets you change consistently between embracing technology and rejecting it. It sounds esoteric, but truly is one of the great and unexpected benefits.

Work at a Natural Pace

Humans worked at a naturally varying rate for all of history, up until the agricultural revolution.

Similar to the socialising/solitude predicament, we’ve moved from a natural variation to an artificial consistency in terms of workload.

Prior to modern agriculture, we had hunter-gatherer societies where we were working at an aggressive pace (chasing prey), or resting. We’re now stuck in a constant drone of work that isn’t enough to be truly stimulating, but is still too engaging to allow for meaningful rest. It’s akin to being designed for high intensity interval training, but power walking for 16 hours a day.

This is perhaps a long bow, but I’ve often noticed that dogs are either sleeping or running around. The abundance of energy they have when engaged, seems to relate directly to the level of deep rest they achieve when not engaged. If dogs – like us – were stuck in office jobs or sitting on the lounge in front of a TV with this constant mid-level-stimulus I don’t believe they would have the energy that they do and would conversely not achieve the deep rest that they do.

The Tour Operator’s Solution for Working at a Natural Pace

This is one of the more obvious aspects of a tourism business.

My tour season runs from April until the end of September. That’s a reasonably condensed time period to fulfill my entire years’ worth of economic activity.

But within that 6 months, I’m running 4 to 6 tours. So that further exaggerates the on/off nature of my workload.

I find this suits me personally, but I also think it is a more natural way of working. My workload varies and is sometimes intense, but conversely is sometimes very light.

Talking With Strangers

Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Talking With Strangers” was something I picked up at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, because I had nothing else to read on the way home.

What an unexpected gem that title was.

Without trying to butcher the delicate complexities he untangles in that book, I’ll try and summarise it.

There’s a whole host of reason why we are not good at understanding strangers and their intentions. I’ll leave the specifics alone and recommend the book to anyone who wants to understand it, but there were some fascinating examples including how the British Prime Minister (before Churchill) met with Adolf Hitler several times, and believed him when he said he did not intend to go to war.

Suffice to say, there’s a threshold of interaction required with people we don’t yet know, before there can be much meaning to what we take away from those interactions. Basically, it requires a lot more then some cordial exchanges before we can get anything of real value from those interactions.

This – at least in part – goes some way to explaining how we can go about our day having many interactions with people, but never really gaining any rich human meaning from those encounters.

The Tour Operator’s Solution to Talking With Strangers

This article opened with the fact that I recently started a tour with a group of strangers, and almost a week later finished that same tour with a group of people I now know quite well.

The shortest tour I run is 5 days, so I understand this wont apply to all tour businesses. But even day tours provide for a deeper level of interaction, than what most of us receive on an average day.

Benefits of Running a Tour Business

I’m an adamant believer that humans are supposed to have deeper, more engaging interactions with other people, than what we’re getting presently.

This is in part because of the transactional nature of the short interactions we frequently have.

It’s in part because digital interactions are a very poor proxy for face to face.

It’s also because we’re not allowing our social circuits to rest, when we’re constantly receiving input from other minds.

If you’ve ever considered running a tour business, do yourself a favour and give it a go.

They’re not the easiest businesses to get off the ground, but they are rewarding.