- CEO Hack: (i) Phone (ii) Being me
- CEO Nugget: Keep your overheads as small as possible
- CEO Defined: Absolute freedom of how I spend my time
Website: https://uniqueascent.ie/
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/UniqueAscent
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uniqueascent
Twitter: https://twitter.com/uniqueascent
Full Interview:
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Transcription
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00:18 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:46 – Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Ian Miller of Unique Asset. Ian, it's great to have you on the show. Definitely super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I wanted to read a little bit more about Ian so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Ian 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. Ian, it's great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
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01:22 – Iain Miller
Yeah, good man.
01:24 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CO story. Well, let's get started with all the awesome work you're doing.
01:33 – Iain Miller
Well, I've been rock climbing and hill walking in general, and playing in the outdoors since I was 14. I'm now 50. And pretty much my entire life has been spent playing outdoors. But you can't make money by playing outdoors. So I was a seafarer for 20 years, ships engineer, and chief engineer, and sailed the world, dozens of times. And once you get, once you do something for a certain amount of time, especially only to earn money, you get fed up with it. And when I was about 30, I suddenly realized that I wasn't having it at sea anymore. And I became a full-time rock climbing guide and instructor.
It's, It's the course of events that makes you what you are today and been able to play since I was in my teens and play quite hard in the hills and mountains and the sea cliffs. It's just led me to make a living from it now, which I couldn't have done in my 20s because you don't have the experience to go about these things. You learn as you go on. And that's kind of how I arrived where I am as a combination of skills between playing in the mountains and playing with rope and the sea. The sea plays a big part in my life and always has.
02:49 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I appreciate you for sharing that. And even that kind of tidbit as well too about having and gaining the experience that allows you to be able to kind of take those steps. Because I think so many times we try to fast forward through life and we try to skip over the steps that it takes to really get us to where we want to be. So I appreciate you for sharing that.
03:09 – Iain Miller
Well, what you find is that when you're a certain age and you have no experience of something then you have to go to university and get a degree and once you've got the degree you then become a practitioner of whatever it is. After a certain amount of time, your education doesn't really mean very much because your experience is who you are. So for me, it was just my degree, if you like, 20 years, 25 years doing before I became.
03:40 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a big believer that a lot of times you can learn a lot more from that. Not to say you can't learn anything from university degrees, but I feel like as you said like I'm definitely the type to once you get to do you get to learn from the ups and sometimes the not-so-high ups, the downs as well too on things you can learn from and how to get better and how to improve.
04:00 – Iain Miller
Well, I think actually the downside in being self-employed is when you learn the most. Anybody can sing when they're winning. It's when you're losing that you keep going. That's when you learn more about not so much about business, but a lot about yourself and how you can operate. No 1 likes to be on the downs, but you do learn from them.
04:21 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. It's always better to kind of look back and be able to say, okay, that's what I learned from that. But when you get through it, you do learn a lot about yourself. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more about Unique Ascent. I know we touched on it a little bit. Could you take us through how you work with your clients and what that process looks like?
04:39 – Iain Miller
Well, I run a business, it's pretty much in 2 parts. The first part is I guide people. I take people to the tops of the sea stacks. Now sea stacks are towers of rock that stick out the sea and West coast of Ireland surrounded by white water, Atlantic ocean. I take people to summits that are very, very rarely visited. In fact, I'm the only person doing it, certainly in Ireland. And the second part of my business is I train people to be me and I've got trainees not so much at the moment with Covid and all that sort of thing but certainly prior to that I had trainees all over the place hundreds of them. And what a strange thing is that a lot of people will tell you in business that you should fearfully get competition. I create my competition and you give people a good start, and good training and they always reward you in so many different ways.
05:33 – Gresham Harkless
I definitely appreciate that. And you might have already touched on this a little bit, but I want to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And it could be for yourself or your business. It could be your unique selling proposition. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?
05:47 – Iain Miller
Oh, my unique sale, my USP is absolutely cast iron. I'm considered by quite a lot of people to be a world authority on sea stack climbing And my unique selling point is I take people to the summits of these towers that stick out to sea. Nobody else in Ireland is even climbing them recreationally and certainly nobody's providing that same service. It's the most adventurous commercially available activity by a long long way in Ireland. That's my unique selling point and to add to that the barriers to entry for somebody else to provide the service.
It's taken me 20, 30 years to get here. Nobody else is going to pop up out of the ether and do what I'm doing. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to kill yourself or you're going to kill the people you're with. And that's what makes it unique. It's, it's, and unfortunately, I cannot expand. It can only ever be me. By the time to train somebody else to do what I do, I'm gonna be a very old man indeed. So it's just me. And it's kind of what I've always wanted, is to have the freedom of being self-employed and doing what I want. If that makes sense.
07:08 – Gresham Harkless
Definitely appreciate that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
07:23 – Iain Miller
Okay, okay. I think we talked about the phone. So the phone is definitely my technology hack. And I think in any business, if you are the face of your business you need to be you and you need to be as close to you as possible because if you try to be somebody else or you try to be who you think people want you to be, what the random strangers and people you're meeting expect, then it's really difficult to come across as genuine and the genuine person and most adults over the age of say 35 will sniff out somebody who's not genuine. So for me, the life hack is just to be me and sometimes you don't win and that's fine but you don't win by being you rather than trying to please everybody. You just can't do it, man. Just cannot do it.
08:24 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely love that hack. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. And you might have already touched on this, but it would be something if you were to happen to a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.
08:40 – Iain Miller
The best piece of advice I can give to anybody who's starting up a business, and it's you keep your overheads as small as possible. You don't borrow money. You don't stretch yourself unless you're organically earning the money to do it. So many people start up a business and they get a loan for 3 minibuses when they only need 1. They get bigger offices when they only need half the size space. So they stretch themselves with money they're not yet earning. And that puts pressure on anybody to earn.
And when that happens, you take on business just to make money, just to pay back what you've borrowed. So I'm not saying borrow, I'm saying keep it as, try to be organic, expand organically as best possible. There are so many people who just make that error. For me, I like to just earn and then spend. If I need to borrow money, it's very rare, if that makes sense. And economies of scale, if you scale up into bigger businesses, the same is true. No matter what the size of your business, you don't need offices around the world. If you're only selling in 1 country.
I think when people start up afresh, a lot of people have the idea that they want to appear established before they give the impression that they're trustworthy because they don't have many, say, TripAdvisor. They don't have a big client base. They don't have word of mouth. So having a plush office or 3 or 4 vans traveling about gives that air that they've been around a while, but that comes with a financial cost. I would say to anybody, if you don't have to borrow, then don't.
10:31 – Gresham Harkless
I agree with that. So Ian, now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Ian, what does being a CEO mean to you?
10:46 – Iain Miller
When you get to a certain stage in life, you realize that your time is precious and that you're not getting it back. So for me, being a CEO and running my own business means that I have absolute freedom in how I spend my time. It's a strange phenomenon that I never realized that when I'd run this business for 5 years, I realized I was now totally and utterly unemployable in the long term. If you offered me a job, I would say to you, great, but next Wednesday, the weather's looking good, I'm going climbing, I won't be in.
And next Thursday's looking pretty bad as well so that is that for me the greatest thing about being who I am and what I'm doing is that I have time and freedom. And I don't think I could ever go back to being an employee. I thought I never thought I'd say that prior to being self-employed.
11:46 – Gresham Harkless
Ian, truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best I can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.
12:00 – Iain Miller
I would I would say to anybody. I would say to anybody when you decide what it is, a lot of people don't know what it is they want to do. A lot of people sort of drift. And if you don't know what you really want to do, and it doesn't matter if it's something outrageous or something totally impossible or something that you'll never in your head make money from. I make money from climbing sea stacks and there's nobody else making money from climbing sea stacks. Whatever it is you want to do, just do it.
And if it's going to take 20 years, pick away at it. And me, it took me 25 years before I pretty much got underway with what I'm doing. And I, to summarize, I'm living the dream. Pretty simple. It's every year, so much goes on and it's fantastic. That's all I can say, man.
12:51 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome. So for people who want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?
12:55 – Iain Miller
Oh, they just, the unique ascent. ie or Instagram, unique Ascent or Facebook, rock climbing in Donegal, rock climbing in Ireland, or sea stack climbing, you're guaranteed to find me.
13:07 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well. But Ian, truly appreciate that reminder. And I think so many times we get caught in, you know, and not, you know, great energy towards where we're ultimately hoping to go. So I appreciate you for, you know, reminding us of how important it is to kind of lean into who we are, what we're passionate about, and especially things that we may not necessarily see a lane for, but we get that opportunity to kind of create that lane if we continue to kind of chop at it and again, climb that tree, so to speak. So, Ann, truly appreciate you for doing that and reminding us of that today. And I hope you have a great rest of the day.
13:43 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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