← How I Built My Small Business
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- [00:00]
Rue Hill
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Ann McEntee
Welcome to How I Built My Small business. I'm Ann McEntee, your host and today we have Rue Hill on the show. Rue is the founder of Surf Simply, a globally renowned boutique coaching resort in Costa Rica that has transformed the way people learn to surf. Unlike traditional surf schools, Surf Simply takes a science based, technique driven approach, breaking down the complexities of surfing into teachable, measurable skills. This method has attracted everyone from complete beginners to seasoned surfers looking to refine their craft beyond the waves. Rue is a deep thinker on business, leadership and intentional growth. His grassroots journey from coaching out of the back of a car to running a world class surf resort offers invaluable lessons on entrepreneurship, scaling with purpose and building a high performing team without sacrificing company culture. His resort has been featured more than once in the New York Times and if you want to check out what you're missing, just watch any of the inspiring weekly videos you can find on the Surf Simply YouTube channel. You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description before we get started. A Quick Favor that Means the World Whenever someone writes in, I always ask how did you find the podcast? And overwhelmingly the answer is the same. A friend, family member, or loved one shared it with them. If you've enjoyed this episode or any episode, could you do me a quick favor? Share it with just one person in your life who might love it too? If each of you did that, we'd instantly double our listenership overnight, allowing us to bring in even more incredible guests and continue producing content that inspires and empowers you. Just one episode to one person. I massively appreciate it Ru. I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks for coming on the show.
- [02:18]
Rue Hill
It's really a pleasure to be here. I was just listening back actually to some of the conversations you've had recently and I really enjoyed them. So I'm looking forward to diving back into your back catalog after we speak today.
- [02:29]
Ann McEntee
Oh, that sounds great and I am so excited to hear your story. So speaking of that, can you take us back as far as you'd like to go? You're from the UK and started a surf resort in Costa Rica. Where does this journey be begin for you and how did the idea for Surf Simply even come to life?
- [02:51]
Rue Hill
So it's an interesting question because it's always quite tricky trying to compress like 30 years of professional development into a few minutes. But and I'm going to just shamelessly kind of do a flex and show off here. I was invited A couple of weeks ago to go and speak at MIT Sloan about Surf Simply, which was really cool. And I was like super nervous before I went. And it got me thinking, all right, well, what parts of this project are actually interesting in a broader business sense? So I'll try and answer your question, as I did for those guys, by just talking about the things that I think are more broadly applicable. Because obviously a lot of your audience aren't going to be super interested in surfing specifically. So I'll sort of like skirt around those parts. But I actually went to art college before I started Surf Simply, and I had this one brilliant teacher. And I think if anyone's lucky enough to have one great teacher in their life, then you're in the luckiest 1% of people in the world. And this art teacher that I had said to us, you guys are just teenagers and you really have nothing interesting to say to the world as artists yet. So what I'm going to do is teach you how to be technicians with all these different materials, with paint, with a camera and so forth, so that when you've got something interesting to say, then you can say it. So when I started teaching surfing a few years later, and I started doing it because I loved surfing, I grew up going to the beach with my grandparents when I was a kid, and I loved like salty hair and sand dunes and just all of that. So I left London and I moved down to Cornwall, which is sort of the bit of England that sticks out into the Atlantic underneath island where you get the. The big fall swells coming out of the North Atlantic. And I thought, well, I'll spend my summers teaching surfing there and my winters traveling around the world and surfing. So I was living in this little caravan by the beach to save money. And I did that for seven or eight years. And while I was teaching surfing, I was really interested in this idea of how you could take something as intangible and subjective as art and you could actually break it down into mechanisms and teach it. And I saw a lot of parallels with the way that surfing was being taught or perhaps wasn't being taught. And I was kind of uniquely placed because I was doing all of these entry level surf lessons that you may have done and you've certainly seen at beaches where entry level surfers are sort of learning to wobble in on small waves. But I was also lucky enough to be doing some work with the British junior team. And that kind of like elite level coaching is very different. You're on the beach, sitting way back with a camera up in the sand dunes and the surfers out in the water on their own, performing whatever drills they've been given and coming in every half hour for feedback and then going back in the water again. So there's this kind of coaching for like the beginner 1% and the elite 1%. And there's really nothing for the 98% in between. And I'm using the present tense now, but, you know, this was back in 2000 or 1999, I guess the year 2000. And so I became really interested in the project of trying to connect the dots from that beginner 1% to that elite 1%. And I was fortunate because the surf school I was working at, which started with three coaches and perhaps 30 people on a busy day, expanded to 28 coaches and about 600 people on a busy day. So I was doing four two hour lessons a day with 10 or 12 people. So over that decade I taught about 15 or 16,000 people. So with these just massive numbers, I could do this sort of a B testing and tease out from all of the chaos of the ocean and different body shapes and personality types, which coaching mechanisms actually worked. And from that we sort of came up with what we now call the surf simply tree of knowledge, which actually is a kind of a flowchart of skills that sits on the wall of the surf Simply resort about 20 meters long in big relief and kind of forms the basis for our whole coaching methodology. The other thing that I was doing that I thought was kind of interesting was I was teaching coaches how to teach surfing. And it became quite evident that anyone who was sort of capable enough to command a year round salary and could really do anything they wanted to, was quite quickly going to leave a seasonal job. So I thought, well, if I want to create a center of surf coaching excellence, which is something I really wanted to do, then I need to be able to pay people year round so that, you know, the best and brightest can justify making surf coaching the principal project of their adult professional lives. You know, so that was how come I moved to Costa Rica. And then the rest of it, I mean, is the story of a business. I started teaching at the back of my car in Nosara in 2007, in the car park, and gradually moved to a shop space, borrowed some money and bought some casitas, some little sort of places to stay, and started transitioning into doing week long courses, built the team up. So with more coaches and brought in, you know, massage therapists, gardeners, cooks, drivers, and built the whole thing up. And now Fast forward to today and I've resisted and will continue to resist the seductive sort of pull of people wanting to invest and to scale. And we've actually chosen to stay quite small. Our team is about 35 people. We have a maximum of 12 surfers a week and two non surfers. We now are at a new facility which was custom built by this wonderful architectural firm called Gensler who did Google's buildings and various other projects. And we actually built this version of the resort that we're in now from the ground up, as I think it's probably the only sort of purpose built, high end luxury residential surf coaching resort, if that's not too many adjectives. And we charge about $9,000 a week now, which is about 3x what other people in the surf travel coaching world are charging. Although it's, you know, it's not a lot compared to Four seasons resorts and stuff like that. But in the world of surfing it's a lot. And we're booked out about a year in advance and we have a wait list every week, about 50 to 100 people. So the business is doing very well. But more importantly it's got this really wonderful team of people that I really enjoy working with who are all personally very invested in kind of making it incrementally better week on week, which is just a really fun project to be involved with and is the main reason why I've resisted the urge to like grow it and expand it. So there you go, that's, that's a seven minute compression, as concise as I could do.
- [09:07]
Ann McEntee
I think that the way that you approach this is that you really were conscious about what you were trying to create. And I can see how your artistic background really played into your decision making process. I am really curious to dig in a little bit more about your philosophy behind why not to scale, which I totally understand and I really respect. But I'm just wondering a little bit more about what is the guidance that makes you so sure?
- [09:38]
Rue Hill
Yeah, so it's not just a good question. It's like this been the singly most important question in my adult professional life. And the short answer is it's really fun trying to make this whole thing better, more fun, more appealing and exciting. The endorphins in my brain fire up a bit more than the thought of duplicating it. And once you've scaled something up, with the exception of sort of software services, it's very difficult to reiterate them once they're at scale, if they're actual physical things. In the real world. So I really enjoy that project, and I really enjoy the project of. And this sounds kind of cheesy, but I don't know a way to say it that isn't cheesy, having all of the team personally, really trying to improve their individual corner of the business and standing back and have this kind of philosophy of management that you should be the person moving objects out of people's way so that they can get better at them, better at whatever is they do. Right. And the analogy I really like is rather than being a sort of a King Joffrey handing out orders, you should be more like Alfred to Batman. You're sort of more like a butler who's making sure that the Batmobile is full of gas and that the Batsuit is polished and ready to go, and then there to offer a little guidance when needed over a cup of tea. But mostly you're trying to sort of stand back and let people be the best version of themselves. So I really enjoy that project a lot. And I've grown very fond of all of the people I work with. And I love being part of this team of 30, 35 people. And then I was kind of thinking about that on a very personal level, and I was thinking, okay, well, how could somebody else in a different industry think about, like, what's the right way to put it? What are the right levers that someone should be thinking about needing to pull in their own professional life if they're asking themselves the same question? Because all the things I just talked about, very personal to me and very personal to this project and are quite subjective. And I came up with this kind of concept. And when I say I came up with it, this was actually what ended up being sort of the main thesis of the talk that I gave at MIT last week. So you can tell me what you think and please shoot it down. I came up with this idea of there being four buckets that you kind of want to fill professionally. And I like the idea of buckets because once they're full, if you keep pouring time and resources into them, it's just a waste. They're just kind of flowing over the side, right? So I came up with these four buckets. I'll bounce them off you, tell me what you think. There may be a fifth or a sixth. I may change my mind in a year. They're certainly not written in stone, but this is where my thinking took me. So the first one was economic security. The next one was your health. The next one was your status, and not the kind of two dimensional status of who's got the flashiest car, but the kind of authentic respect of people who are close to you in your life and people whose opinions really matter to you. And then the last one, the most important one, is the quality of the relationships that you have with the people that you spend the most time with. I can expand on any of those. But how does that land with you?
- [12:46]
Ann McEntee
You sound like an evolved business owner. I don't know. There's a maturity to your approach. It's very heart centered and I think it can take people a lifetime to get there sometimes, especially in America. So you're in Costa Rica and you've got a UK background, so I don't know how that impacts the way that you are and the way that you think. But here in America it's like, as you were saying, it's quite seductive. The idea of possibly growing, maybe franchising or popping up locations in other areas. But why like really thinking about what will that bring you, what will that bring your community? I think the only bucket that I would maybe change the name of is the one status or status. Maybe it sounded more like community to me or just like authenticity rather than status.
- [13:35]
Rue Hill
So I think that the word status or status, sorry, that's my British isms coming out there.
- [13:40]
Ann McEntee
My husband's from New Zealand, he says status too.
- [13:43]
Rue Hill
So yeah, I think it almost makes you cringe slightly to hear of it being included in that list. And I think we all like to think that we sort of don't play those status games. Let me offer like a counter, let me offer a pushback, right, A counter argument. So there's that very surface level kind of two dimensional status game which we all think about when we think about status, right? Who's maybe got the biggest salary or the nicest car or, you know, the best job title or whatever, right? Or even in a social group or in a sports team, who's the captain, who's the better player? There's that very like surface level status. And if we take the example of, let's say a Wall street trader who somewhere in the middle of their life has this sort of crisis of existentialism and decides to leave all of their material possessions and go to Tibet and study mindfulness in a monastery, right, you could on some level say, well, they've walked away from all of those status games and now they've let go of all of that. But I would put it to you that actually it really will matter to them what the other monks in that Monastery think about them and even how they think about themselves. And status will have not been given up, it just will have changed. From one minute it was about how nice the car was, now it's about how present one can be and how aware of one's own maelstrom of thoughts one is able to be and how articulate one can be when one talks about that experience. You know, and I see it all the time down in Nosara and Costa Rica, where Nosara is a little bit of a hub for a lot of incredibly successful people for a whole load of reasons. But we get lots of sort of type A Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, New York, finance type people coming down here and sort of stepping away from, you know, the American elite game. And then they come down and they start surfing. And actually you can see that the status within the community is just as important to them. But status, I think doesn't have to be a negative thing. It can be, for example, and this is something that I try to do and surf simply I make it very clear that I give status to people. I'll talk deferentially and openly give praise to people who not only are hard working and, and constantly trying to be better at whatever their particular professional area is, but also people that are really thoughtful and supportive to other members of the team. So I'm sort of making it like if you behave in this way, you get props from, you know, the boss, the person who's sort of, you know, arguably at the top of the status pyramid within that little community. And so that behavior becomes okay in this group. This is how we beh. This is what gets you status. This is what gets you respect and admiration and genuine affection from people around you. So I'm sort of expanding the use of the word status. And I've stolen some of this from a brilliant book by an author and I'd like to say friend of mine, but he probably doesn't think as fondly as me as I think of him, just that he doesn't know me that well. But we've exchanged a few chats. But a guy called Will Store wrote a brilliant book called the Status Game. And I read it and it really struck me a lot. And I think bringing it back to small businesses. I think that as business owners we think a lot about things like salary and perhaps time off and perks. And I certainly think about that too. I think you want your team to think of you as fighting to pay them as much as they can, fighting to give them as much time off as you can give them as the business can allow, so they feel like you're their champion and you're in that corner fighting for them. And we do that as business owners, but it obviously costs us time, human resources. But the one thing I think we don't think about enough, and here I'm stealing from will store almost word for word. As humans, we need status like oxygen, because we've evolved for 150,000 years in these hunter gatherer groups. And if you had low status and you were ostracized from the group, it was a death sentence. And if you had high status, you had access to resources and it was the chance to live longer and pass on your genes. So it's really like deep, deep wired into us. And as a business owner with a team of, you know, 30 years I have, you can give status to people really easily, and it costs you nothing. And you can also rob people of status by being thoughtless and unkind. And that will just throttle someone's enthusiasm for, you know, dedicating themselves to your business. And I think as small business owners, we need to be really thoughtful of that. Have I talked for too long? I can give you two quick examples, of course. Okay, so here's an example of how I like to give status to people, right? Every week we make a video about called Last Week at Surf Simply. And we put up on YouTube, and it's lots of shots of people surfing and around the resort, and we have three people with cameras trying to capture the whole thing. I actually swim out every morning with my camera myself. It's one of my favorite things I do. So. And then at the end of the week, Pepe, our videographer, he interviews any of the guests that are happy to be interviewed, and they talk a little bit about the week. We make this movie, we put it on YouTube. It usually gets like a thousand, fifteen hundred views, which doesn't sound like a lot, but actually the ROI is great because even if like 1% of those people come and stay with us and perhaps bring a spouse or kids or come back a few times, you know, they're spending $50,000 or more. So the ROI is actually really good anyway. Even if the only people who saw the video were the families of the people who worked at Surf Simply, I think it would still be a fantastic ROI because it means all of that team, when they go back to their home, whether it's here in Osara or in San Jose or in another country, and their family and their friends are like, oh, we saw what you do. You know, and we, we read about Surf simply the New York Times and we saw it on CNN and we saw on the BBC and then we, we saw who you were teaching last week and we saw that footage of you making food or, you know, teaching. We saw it all. And like you're giving your team status within their people, within their family, their friends. The people are important in their lives. And I think that that kind of status is really healthy. I think that when we think about status games, we want to think like is the status game we're playing healthy or not healthy. And I think on a personal level it's good to think about playing multiple status games. You don't have all your eggs in one basket, otherwise you can start to get sort of a bit freaked out when you feel like you're going to lose status in some area and you become too precious with it. I think on the flip side, where a lot of business owners get it wrong is it's so easy to just cut someone off in a meeting, talk down to them, dismiss something that said, which all signals to everyone else in the room, I don't really care about what this person thinks about me and I'm much higher status than them. And just that kind of thoughtlessness, we don't realize how much damage it can do. And then you're sort of scratching your head like, oh, why does so and so want a pay rise? In order to be motivated. Or you could have given them status in that meeting that may have meant much more to them than an extra sort of percentage on their end of year paycheck or texting people late at night just because you're the owner and you've now got an idea and you want to text at 11:00 at night while it's fresh in your head. And people are like, oh, this person really doesn't care about my life. It's another way of just saying, hey, look, I'm more powerful than you. Don't forget just before you go to bed. So I think that's the kind of way I think about status and its.
- [20:55]
Ann McEntee
Importance in the context in which you were explaining it. I think it does make a lot of sense. It sounds like a mixture of culture, respect, authenticity, sort of like intrinsic reward, not monetary, real connection.
- [21:12]
Rue Hill
Yeah, I can't claim to have authored a lot of those ideas. You know, sometimes you read a book and you've sort of a lot of it, you've been intuitively thinking and it's like finally someone has articulated what you kind of felt to be true. Yeah.
- [21:23]
Ann McEntee
100%. Yes, definitely. I wonder too, how much surfing itself and just the sport, the meditative nature of it, being at one with the water, being in the water. I wonder how much of that also just plays into your overall sort of business structure and philosophy behind leadership. Because I think what you've figured out is something that should be taught in business school. I think that there are a lot of businesses now that are coming out and they don't have that alignment of like, happy team. You know, they might have the economic stability, as you were mentioning, but the status is all off. It's, you know, like the hierarchy is. It's not working well. And so what does surfing mean to you in your personal life and just the way that you operate? Is this where this all stems from, or is this childhood? Like, what made you understand these key, necessary components of running a sustainable, really thriving and like, team, happy business?
- [22:38]
Rue Hill
Well, I think that there's certainly a lot of life lessons that one can draw from surfing, and I'm sure that there's a wonderful coffee table book that could be put together. Maybe I'll even put it together one day with lots of kind of stoic lessons that one can draw from how much you have to put in and how inconsistent the feedback is, you know. And I think that the inconsistency of the environment with surfing and the ensuing frustration is one of the most important things you can draw from surfing as opposed to most other sports. Because I think, you know, all sports, like dedicating yourself to an athletic pursuit, is just so important. It teaches you so much and it gives you self esteem and it teaches you how to pick yourself up when you fail. And it teaches you how much more you can do than you thought you could. Like, when you think you're at your limit, you're usually about a third of the way there, you know. But surfing, I think, is unique insofar as the environment changes so much. The ocean is such a big, uncontrollable variable. I think that it would be analogous to if you were being taught to play tennis. But sometimes a tennis ball was coming at you and sometimes it was a watermelon. And sometimes instead of holding a tennis racket, you're suddenly holding a spoon. And sometimes the net is there and sometimes it's not you. Or that's kind of what learning to surf is like. For example, if you really wanted to learn how to get barreled, which is one of my favorite things in the world, probably the most fun thing you can do on the planet, you might not have the opportunity to put into a barrel for 18 months. Where if you compare that to tennis and you're just like, well, you can't have a ball for 18 months. There aren't any. So that's kind of what learning to surf is like. And so I think there is something in the process of learning to surf that forces you to have to let go of, I'm in charge and I want to do it my way. Because you just. It makes you realize how much is out of your control. And I think certainly there is a good lesson in there in business, insofar as I think entrepreneurs are generally tend to credit themselves with their successes and blame other factors for their failures. And I think the reality is that people like to say how much of it's luck and how much of it is hard work? Right. That's the common question people talk about in business. And at the risk of getting slightly philosophical for a moment, I would say it's 100% luck and it's 100% hard work. Like, both things are true at the same time. And what I mean by that is, you know, I'm incredibly lucky to have been born at a time where, you know, if I'd been born 10 years later, I think it would have been really hard for surf simply to create the kind of brand awareness that we did because there's so much noise on the Internet. If I was born 10 years earlier, the Internet wasn't around and we couldn't have created that brand awareness. I mean, so lucky just to be born when I was born. But I was also lucky to have been born with a brain that, when I stood on the beach and was doing these surf lessons, was interested in the project of trying to connect these dots together in terms of a coaching methodology. I could have not been born with a brain that was interested in doing that, you know, so in that way, I mean, it's all. It's all luck, right? But it's also, you have to work incredibly hard. You know, I've worked hard, as hard as anyone that I've ever met for, like, 20 years in order to build this business. And so I think it's important to acknowledge it's all luck because it allows you to be much more compassionate towards people that are less lucky than you and have a lot more humility around what might seem to be on the surface, your successes, especially when everyone around you is telling you, you know, oh, you're so great. You're such a kind of an entrepreneurial genius, you know, and it's so easy to get caught up in your own. If you're someone who most of your friends are on your payroll, you can pretty much guarantee that unless you put some guardrails in place for yourself, you're probably going to turn into an asshole. So I think remembering it's luck and that you need to have humility, I think is important. So I think whether you choose to look at it all in terms of luck or in terms of hard work is just a scale question. Sometimes it's appropriate to look at your professional life through one lens, and sometimes it's appropriate to look at it through another lens. I think that what really brought home to me the importance of, you know, we were talking about status and people and how they feel and how you make your team feel as an employer. And I. I actually had an awful experience, but one that I'm very grateful I had, which was about 10 years ago when I was with my dad through the last months of him having cancer and then dying. And it was. I was 34. I'm 46 now, and. And I remember my dad at 34, and I had this very visceral feeling of like, oh, I remember him at my age. And now this is like the end. And I, you know, I've lived one to 34, and I've seen 34 to the finish line. I was like, wow, that's really the whole thing. And it. There's no way of saying that that communicates to someone who hasn't had that feeling. And I think most people have some version of that kind of epiphany at some point, but it really does hit you. And for me, it caused me to go, all right, what's really important? Do I want to, like, scale this thing and be fabulously wealthy and have that kind of status or, you know, what is it that's important to me? And the thing that I feel is important to me, and I think there's good science to back this up, is actually the quality of the relationships that I have with the people I spend the most time with. And I'm single, I don't have kids. I'm very close with my nieces and my sister and their family. But the people I actually spend the most time with are the people I work with. And I have some friends outside of work, but. But realistically that those are the people I spend the most time with. And I think that's true for a lot of people. And I just thought, I want to make my relationships with them and their relationships with Each other explicitly the goal of the business. And of course, it has to be profitable, otherwise it's a hobby, not a business. But, like, this is selfishly what I want out of my life. This is what I'm going to cash my success chips in for. This is what's worth standing up from the table and walking out of the casino for. And so I've looked at a lot of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman and Richard Wiseman and all of these kind of people to try and understand how you can make a team work. Well, I think everyone really enjoys it. You know, I really enjoy my relationships with them. You'd have to ask them how they feel about me. But, you know, I feel, like, very lucky to work in an environment where people genuinely, really enjoy coming to work and working with each other. And no amount of zeros on my net worth. So here I am already with the thing that any amount of money I would want to spend on if I had it. All right, sorry, that was very clumsily phrased. You know what I mean?
- [29:00]
Ann McEntee
I mean, this is so inspirational. And I lost my dad three years ago. It was right as COVID 19, was starting. And it was just sudden. Right. I talked to him. Seven hours later, he was gone. And I think, like, what you mentioned with when your dad passed, it is so transformative, and it really does unlock this part of you that's like, what is important? And it is so beautiful that you figured that out for yourself and that you're also able to quiet the noise of society that is probably trying to tell you that you should be doing xyz. But you're like, no, because this is what is value to me. This is what. This is where I get the most rewards. So it's so inspirational.
- [29:45]
Rue Hill
Can I put the question back to you, if you don't mind, if you feel comfortable talking about it.
- [29:50]
Ann McEntee
Yeah.
- [29:51]
Rue Hill
What did you feel like were the things that were really important in your life after going through that yourself?
- [29:56]
Ann McEntee
So I would say, before my dad died, I was very motivated by money. And when my dad died, I reflected so much on his life as an immigrant, as a doctor, as someone who spent hours of his life on the side compiling old medical equipment from hospitals that were just going to throw away into a landfill. And he was sending it over to the Philippines because it had a second life there. So he earned a reward from the Red Cross, and when he wasn't even on the clock, would go and do rotations to see his patients because he had so much compassion. And I look back and since that moment when he died, the first five days, I sort of had this transcendence experience where I tapped into, I don't know, maybe it was deep grief and a flooding of hormones in the body or something. But it also may have just been that I was able to like sense things I couldn't before. And I could quote, unquote, sort of hear him guiding me to be more compassionate, find something to do that's more heart centered, stop thinking about the money so much. And as you're saying with your buckets, it's like kind of the stuff that you just mentioned.
- [31:14]
Rue Hill
Yeah, that's it.
- [31:15]
Ann McEntee
And it was crazy that it took such a vast and deep hole of grief to unlock this in me. And I have spoken to friends who've lost people the same way recently and they kind of thought I was a little bit nuts with the way that I spoke about the grief and what it had done for me until they went through it and then they were contacting me and saying, I had no idea you were so right. These things have been happening and like they're exploring the meaning of life, finding purpose, finding fulfillment, community, connection and not making the goal. As you're saying, zeros.
- [31:56]
Rue Hill
Yeah, that very much mirrors my experience also. And I think of a lot of people and you know, the way that I think about it is rather than thinking, okay, one minute I'm looking for the, you know, all of the zeros, and then the next minute I'm sort of looking for something more nurturing to, you know, my, I don't know, use whatever language one feels comfortable with. But your sort of mental well being or whatever, your emotional well being, and it's kind of an either or thing. And I actually sort of, just because I've got the sort of brain that's, that pulls at loose threads, I was like, well actually why did I want the zeros to begin with? Rather than saying like, that was not the right idea. Now I'm going to point the ship in this direction, but actually rewinding right back to the sort of the beginning, you know, because no one, no one really would care about having, you know, however many dollars in your bank account if the dollars had no value out in the real world. Right. Just as a thought experiment. So, so obviously it's not actually the dollars, it's what you can do with the dollars. Then one needs to ask yourself, well, what do you want to do with the dollars? And you know, I think there's a few sort of low hanging fruits in terms of just wisdom that one can find on podcasts, hopefully, like this one, things like experiences are more valuable than buying goods. And I think that the one piece of advice that I find the most useful is that one of the best things you can spend money on when you've got an excess of economic security is to pay people to do the things that you don't want to do. So you can spend time doing the things that you do want to do. And especially as I get older, I become very aware that I've got more money in less time. And so the trade offs become different, like the equations are different. So, you know, rewinding back to let's imagine the most ferocious entrepreneurial capitalist that you can possibly think of. I don't believe that that person doesn't want to be happy as much as a human can be happy, you know, which is, let's say, if you can be happy 30% of the time, you're doing really, really well, you know, So I think that a lot of people get so in the habit of trying to accumulate success mostly in the form of money, but also in the form of, you know, prestige and that sort of two dimensional shallow status we talked about. And then they get to a point where they've filled the bucket up, right? And now they could be trading the chips in to fill up one of the other buckets, but they forgot why they started filling the bucket in the first place. And they're really good at filling the bucket, they're really good at making money, they're really good at playing that game and they forgot why they started. So they just keep kind of playing the game and they grind on and on. And the analogy I like is sort of like a, you know, a poker player that's so good at poker that they're sitting alone in the casino at 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, winning more and more and more money, but not really thinking about, you know, the life that could be lived out there in the big wide world. So rather than thinking of it in terms of like, I'm giving something up and exchanging it for something else, I like to think of filling your buckets in terms of your status, your quality of your relationships, your health, and then your economic security too. You can fill all of those and be the most secular, non spiritual, selfish, ferocious capitalist ever, but just have a healthy science based view about the fact that those are the buckets. That if you want to be mentally well and feel good about life most of the time, or at least a third of the time, then you need to fill those buckets up because you've inherited this homo sapien brain that evolved in these hunter gatherer groups of about 150 people for 150,000 years. And so you can choose the meaning of your own life in the same way that you can choose what you eat. But you have inherited this brain which will fundamentally do well if you give it a certain diet and won't if you give it, you know, cheesecake all the time. Right. Does that analogy kind of thing. Some philosophical backflips there, but does that make sense?
- [35:49]
Ann McEntee
It does, and it aligns with a lot of the thought processes that I've had just from traveling to maybe places that don't have as much and then seeing extreme wealth through the clients that I used to work with and the dichotomy between the two. It's been a topic that I've really thought a lot about. And I agree with what you're saying. It's like, at some point, enough is enough, and how can I make something better or like, improve someone's life or give back or do something more meaningful.
- [36:19]
Rue Hill
Yeah. And, you know, and I'm not meaning to say that economic security isn't important, but it's a kind of a curve. And as your salary goes up, I think the happiness that you get from your salary sort of levels off and you get diminishing returns at some point. And there was that study a few years ago which kind of drew this line at $70,000, which I think is not quite actually what the data showed in the particular study, although that's what the headline said. It's different depending on what city you live in and whether you have kids and all kinds of other variables. But certainly if you go from $10,000 a year income to $100,000 a year income, there's a good chance you'll be 10 times happier. But you're not going to be 10 times happier going to a million dollars. And if you're not happy at a million dollars, you're not going to be happy with $10 million. So figuring out where you are on that curve and figuring out whether you are still filling up your economic security bucket or whether now you've filled it and everything is just running over the side and is a waste of time and energy. I think that's the useful question to ask oneself.
- [37:21]
Ann McEntee
It is a really great analogy, and I could talk about these things forever. I would love to ask you some of the questions about just the actual beginning of the business and what it was like starting out of your car and then eventually building. Like, how did you really make that happen? I mean, how much capital did it take for you to eventually acquire the land and get plans and build and hire staff and brand and then launch? And how did you get the resources?
- [37:53]
Rue Hill
Yeah, so I'm really comfortable talking about the figures, actually. I think it's really important that people talk about figures more. I think that people quite often feel uncomfortable talking about it, but I think it's important so that people can get a sense of where they are on the playing field. So I actually came to Costa Rica in 2007 with about $7,000 that I'd saved up, and I bought a 1992 Suzuki Sidekick, which nearly bankrupted me, getting it fixed, and three surfboards. And I had about $1,000 left in cash. And I was literally just pulled up on the beach with a sign, sat in my car, and I would do lessons at 8 and at 10 and at 2 and then sometimes at 4 o'clock and I would go back to my little shack that I was renting. And then I was trying to build a website in the evenings off this old laptop that used to overheat and I used to have to shut it off every half hour and put it in the fridge to cool it down and take it out again. The one thing that was unusual to me, I guess unusual compared to other businesses that were starting up, because obviously there was lots of people doing surf lessons, was that this kind of very systemized methodology, which I had not at the time actually drawn up as a graphic, but was just a system I was using to teach with, really resonated with even back then, these kind of like quite type A personalities that were coming down to Nosara and very, very quickly, a bunch of people at Google and then at Facebook, and this is 2007, so it's like no one's heard of Facebook back then, right? I think it was even called the Facebook then. And I guess some internal memo went round that's like, hey, if you want to surf, like, there's this guy in Nosara called Ru Hell who's like really good. And a few people said that they'd heard of me through, you know, work chats there. And anyway, so I was really, really busy. So very quickly, within a month or two of having opened the door of my car, I already had this backlog of, at the time, tens of people wanting to do lessons. I had way more demand. And that's actually been true from within a month of opening in 2007, right? Up to right now in the bookings, we're about booked out about a year or so in advance. And I put that down to the fact that I spent the best part of a decade figuring out how to do this with like, you know, 15, 16,000 people. So I talk to a lot of younger people who are thinking about starting businesses, and they quite often just want to sort of skip over, you know, the 10,000 hours thing is very much a rule of thumb like that. Anders Ericsson's research wasn't really what Malcolm Gladwell actually said it was, but, I mean, it's kind of irrelevant. The point is, you do really have to put a lot of time in to become really good at what you do. You know, if that's a key part of your business, which I think it honestly is, in 90% of businesses, it's very hard to find a way of growing a business where you don't have some area of expertise. That being said, I think that people often say, well, I can't start a business because I don't know enough about this. And really, most people can become experts at most things with just the application of enough time and curiosity. So, you know, mostly you don't have to be a genius to be good at most things. You just have to apply yourself. So anyway, I was very fortunate because when I was at school, I was very dyslexic and I have adhd, as you might have been able to infer from our conversation. And so academically, I did very poorly. So when I started teaching surfing, with the exception of art, which I never really thought was going to be a career, I really had no other options. So I was never like, oh, I'm teaching surfing, but maybe I should go and finish that law degree or whatever. It was just like, I'm doing this, this is what I'm doing with my life, and there's no plan B, and I don't have the option of doing anything else, so I might as well just do this. And I feel like that was actually kind of an amazing gift to have had. As I said, I was very lucky to have met some really smart people from the tech industry who mentored me into how to create an online presence. So I was really fortunate to have learned from some really smart people. And honestly, a lot of what I've done, I think that's made surf simply successful, has been really smart people who otherwise I would never be able to get in a room with, coming and wanting to learn how to surf and then becoming, you know, friends or acquaintances with them, such that we can have conversations where I've learned a lot from them. So learning from my customers in a most literal sense has been the secret weapon.
- [42:11]
Ann McEntee
I think, if anything, what an incredible business and life you have that you've set up for yourself. So, okay, you had seven grand, you bought the car, you only had like a thousand left and you're teaching lessons. How long did it take for you to save up enough, enough capital so that you could then create a resort?
- [42:29]
Rue Hill
Oh, right, yes, sorry. That's the ADHD kicking in. So, yeah, I was very fortunate insofar as I had the opportunity to borrow about £200,000 from an English bank, right, which was guaranteed by some family members, so wasn't given any money, but I was able to borrow it, you know, which was something a lot of people don't have access to. And I was incredibly lucky. That was early 2008, and I used that to buy these four casitas. And then of course, the 2008 crash happened, which for me was amazing from a business point of view, because all of these finance people got laid off. They came down to Nosara with their severance packages and wanted to learn how to surf.
- [43:07]
Ann McEntee
Oh, my gosh.
- [43:08]
Rue Hill
And at the same time, I was earning dollars and the pound crashed against the dollar after the 2008 housing crisis. So nearly a third of my mortgage, my 200,000 pound mortgage, nearly a third of it got paid off in a month just when the crash happened.
- [43:22]
Ann McEntee
Oh, my gosh.
- [43:23]
Rue Hill
Which is amazing.
- [43:24]
Ann McEntee
There's that luck, there's that.
- [43:26]
Rue Hill
So I've been incalculably lucky and I think everyone has, if you stop and think about it. But anyway, we stayed in that facility for a while, but it was a little far back from the beach and as we wanted to get more and more high end, and I really did always want to be small and high end rather than big, you know, I'd seen how that surf school that I worked at in Cornwall affected the beach and the community. And I saw what it was to have a growth business with a finite resource, which is to say space in the water. And I just knew that's not what I want to do. Again, there's probably an analogy there that can be made to economics more broadly. But anyway, when we decided to build a new version of the resort, which is the version we're currently in, which you can see all the flashy photos of on Instagram and on our website, that was in 2016, and I had quite a lot of people who had got to Know me through the business offer to invest, and it was really, really, like, seductive wanting to take all this money that was being offered. And I said no. But what I will do, if it's okay with you investor, is borrow the money and pay you a really good rate of interest. But ultimately I will pay you back and retain ownership of this whole business so that I can choose not to grow it. Because I think in the US we have this. Scott Galloway said it really well. We've decided that we put shareholders first, customers second, and employees third. And that's what we've all decided. And I'm not saying that that's wrong, but I do think it doesn't have to be like that if you don't want to do it like that. Like, I don't think there's anything wrong with growth. I just don't think you have to grow. You can just choose to do it a different way. It shouldn't be the default. It should be a decision you make proactively. So anyway, I borrowed money and I borrowed about two and a half million dollars. I sold the old resort for about a million. So I had about just over 3 million to build what is the current resort. And that borrowing, we've got about a million left to pay off on it. So that should be paid off by about 20, 29, by when I hit 50, and then that will feel really good.
- [45:27]
Ann McEntee
That's amazing. You just made it happen. And how savvy that you knew you wanted to retain ownership.
- [45:35]
Rue Hill
Yeah, and I will say, actually, I did give ownership away to five members of the team that have been with me a long time. So it wasn't that I wanted to hold all the equity myself. I just didn't want to give it away to people who are specifically investing with growth and maximizing profitability in mind.
- [45:51]
Ann McEntee
It's more of a cooperative.
- [45:53]
Rue Hill
Exactly. Yeah.
- [45:54]
Ann McEntee
Super cool. So what has been the hardest thing that you've had to deal with?
- [46:01]
Rue Hill
You know, it's funny that the hard things are usually very unsexy and unglamorous. They're usually like details, you know, and it's. And sometimes it's building things like, you know, the ceiling in the back of house, kitchen suddenly fell down or the. The grease trap is in the wrong place and now we've got to dig up the car park to move it or, you know, really like, not exciting. Sometimes these things go wrong and they're like, there's no lesson to be learned here. I just, I just need to fix it. And some days, some weeks there's like, you know, layer upon layer upon layer. And then some days you're just like. It's. There's too many small logistical problems. And I feel totally overwhelmed. And, like, every business owner has felt that feeling. And I just, like everyone, you know, I'm painting this rosy picture. But of course, there's been, like, times like that where I've felt like I'm at the edge of a nervous breakdown trying to just solve lots of small problems. And it was really interesting listening to your conversation, and I'm so sorry, I've forgotten his name, but the guy who was talking about brokering businesses and Lauren Vandegrift. Yeah. Yeah, it was really interesting listening to his conversation because he said something to you about, you know, rather than thinking about walking away from your business, think about empowering other people to solve problems. Yeah, those problems that came at me, I was like, well, actually, I'm not gonna walk away from this. I'm so happy with this big picture, but I just feel overwhelmed. I'm gonna concentrate on trying to empower people to solve problems so it becomes manageable long term. And I'm really pleased that I did it that way. And when I heard him say it, I was like, yeah. Quite often, I think small business owners want to sell because they're overwhelmed. But actually, if they empower other people to solve problems and find the right people, then they don't want to sell because suddenly they start really loving it again. You know, the hardest thing for me, like, every business owner has been when I've made bad hires, when I've employed people that didn't work out. And you fall over yourself trying to make it work, trying to solve whatever they say the problem is. And then you realize, oh, it's always a different problem. So maybe what they're saying is the problem isn't the problem. And at some you're like, I just need to get rid of this person. Like, my responsibility to the rest of the team is to fire this person. That's part of my job. And I think people who talk about businesses in the way that I've talked about mine very often don't want to talk about firing people because they like to pretend that they're able to inspire everyone to be the best version of themselves. But sometimes you have to fire people. And I think you need to, like, fire people quickly and hire them slowly is the old cliche. I think that when you fire people, you need to make sure that they leave with as much economic security as you can give them. And that they leave with dignity and that everyone else who stays behind can see that you gave them as much dignity as possible when they left. Again, like thinking about what kind of status you're giving them within, especially a small community like the beach community I live in here, when you fire someone quite often when you leave a bad relationship, you're like, why didn't I do that two years ago?
- [49:00]
Ann McEntee
It's because you believe in them and you want to give them a chance. And so then that probably blindsights you for a little bit longer than it than it should. Well, so okay, you're a team of 35 now and what's your operational season?
- [49:14]
Rue Hill
So that's interesting. So that traditionally the busy season in Costa Rica is the US winter, sort of like Thanksgiving until Easter, more or less. And that's partly because it's the dry season down here, so it doesn't really rain at all during those months. And also it's partly because obviously it's nice to escape the cold and come down to the sunshine, but actually the waves here in Nosara, there's more swell, so the waves are generally a bit bigger from June to September during the summer months.
- [49:41]
Ann McEntee
Oh, so you had a long season.
- [49:42]
Rue Hill
Yeah. And so although it's called the wet season coming from England, it's actually very often less rainy in the wet season here than it is in a summer in England. It can rain all day every day for like months, you know. So we're actually equally busy all the way through the year. And part of that is because we've tried to keep the focus on technical surf coaching. And we're like, if you come along and it's cloudy and raining, you're still going to have a fun and productive week.
- [50:06]
Ann McEntee
Yeah, you're going to be in the water anyway.
- [50:08]
Rue Hill
Yeah, we've kind of, as a point of marketing positioning, we've tried to detach ourselves from sunshine, you know. So the way we actually operate is we're open for eight weeks and then we close for two weeks and everyone gets two weeks break and then we're open for eight weeks and then close for two weeks and we do that all the way through the year and then we close September. October is when it's quite rainy here. So we close the first week of September to the end of October for six weeks. So the whole team gets these breaks all together, like 16 weeks paid vacation every year. And what feels really nice from my point of view is they often go away on vacation together. Actually, the two metrics that I really like to use to measure how well things are going is one, how long people have stayed with the business. Right. So our average employee's been with us for more than eight years, which feels good. The other is how often people choose to go on vacation with people that they work with when they're not working. I feel like just quietly, I keep a little unofficial tab of that in my head. That makes me feel good.
- [51:06]
Ann McEntee
That is amazing. You have set this up so well. I mean, I don't really see any more efficiencies or improvements that you could make. Are there any that you think are left to be done?
- [51:16]
Rue Hill
Oh, well, I mean, like I was sort of alluding to before, I think what makes surf simply really good. And you know, I'm talking about it in very glowing terms because I'm very proud of it and it's been my life's work. So I hope you'll. Thank you for indulging me. But what I think makes it really good is not any one thing. You know, this tree of knowledge surf coaching methodology was certainly a unique selling point. But, you know, like, when people sort of say, well, what's the secret? But it's like saying, what's the secret that makes a 747 fly across the Atlantic. It's like there's 10,000 little things that have to be done really well. And, you know, everyone at Surf simply just incrementally is improving small things. Whether it's like, you know, this morning everyone was out surfing and we were like, oh, if we can get another 800 mil lens further down the beach, then we can capture all the ways sideways so that when we're doing the video feedback later in the morning, we've got two angles on someone's foot position rather than one angle. It's like, okay, that's quite an expensive lens. So, like, let's figure out when we can get that in our media budget. Or, you know, if we switch the mattresses over, then the guests are going to have less sore backs when they're paddling out after they've been paddling the day before. Or can we bring in another massage therapist and do two massages per week for the guests instead of one? You know, just all these little, tiny little improvements week on week, and the whole thing keeps moving forward slowly and keeps getting better. And there's so much cool stuff. I hate to sound like everyone on every other podcast, but there's so much cool stuff that can be done in terms of using AI for video coaching, particularly with less experienced coaches. I Had an hour long conversation with ChatGPT about how artificial intelligence might be able to help with surf coaching. And it was so interesting. ChatGPT was saying to me, well, you know, I will be able, when I can render video footage, to be able to spot patterns of how people move and which patterns they're consistently getting wrong in terms of biomechanics. So being able to upload, you know, we have like five terabytes of footage a week, right, from our five cameras on the surface. If we could upload all of that, have AI sort it into who's who, and then look for like body movement patterns that are consistently being done by a surfer and then we can isolate. Okay, well, which thing is the most consistent mistake and therefore the first thing we want to address. And then, you know, being able to use AR and VR headsets to like put people inside a wave. And where should you be looking? Can we see where your eyes are? I mean, there's, there's so much that can be done in terms of improving the coaching experience, even if nothing else. So there's no shortage of things to keep having fun playing with.
- [53:49]
Ann McEntee
I think give us a couple years and it'll be pretty mind blowing.
- [53:54]
Rue Hill
Yeah.
- [53:54]
Ann McEntee
So just looking back at your whole journey, is there anything that you wish that you had known before you started?
- [54:05]
Rue Hill
Yeah. And this is something that is uncomfortable to admit. Whenever you start a business and stick your head above the parapet, right, you're always going to have some percentage of people who love what you do, some percentage of people who are kind of ambivalent about what you're doing, and some percentage of people who really despise you for no reason that you can put your finger on. And I've got that like everyone else, and I think I've let it affect me way too much. And I'm sure that again, other business owners can relate to that feeling of, you start your coffee shop or whatever, your software services company, and someone's really kind of coming at you, not because they know you or anything about you, but you've stuck your head up in the marketplace at a certain time and you're presenting in a certain way and they don't like that for whatever reason. And I spent a lot of time and energy trying to like, make that 1% of people like me, you know, because I, I felt so uncomfortable not being liked. And as I get older, I've just realized, like, some people are just not going to like you. And that's part of, just part of the noise and you shouldn't Let it keep you awake at 2 o'clock in the morning. And I, and I know that in my logical moments. But you know, when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're staring at the ceiling, those kind of things can really upset you. And I, and I wish that, that a younger version of me had known to just like let yourself be less affected by that stuff and be okay with a few people not liking you, assuming that you've, you know, genuinely made a good faith effort to do everything right and make sure that any dislike they have isn't justified.
- [55:45]
Ann McEntee
You know, every industry there's always going to be someone. And I think you probably experience it a little more in, in the UK with the tall poppy thing, which I know is also an issue in New Zealand and Australia. Just the hacking down of like anybody who is rising. But it takes so much strength. I mean, it's easier said than done to not care what other people say.
- [56:09]
Rue Hill
Yeah. And you know, since 2020, a third of all of our net profits at Surf simply have gone back into community projects here in Nosara. And telling you that now is the first time I've actually said that publicly. It doesn't say it on our website. Maybe it's a British cultural thing, I don't know. But I was always kind of brought up wrongly to think that when you're doing charity work or something like that, you should do it for its own sake and you shouldn't publicize it. Right. And actually I now disagree with that. I think you should publicize it because it prompts other people to do it too. Right. You know, if I put that on our website, which I know I should do, and I probably will, you know, I hope other businesses in Lasara would be like, oh, wow, we should step up and help too. So I know it'd be a good thing. But. But going back to what I wish I had told younger me, I wish I'd felt more comfortable saying, hey, we're doing all of this really good stuff in the community. But I always had this cultural maybe hangover of just feeling super like an ick factor about talking about that stuff out loud. As I said, I'm saying it to you right now. This is the first time I've ever talked publicly about it.
- [57:15]
Ann McEntee
You should definitely tell people about what you're doing. It's kind of the heart of the business.
- [57:19]
Rue Hill
Yeah, yeah.
- [57:20]
Ann McEntee
Now I know a third of profits is significant.
- [57:24]
Rue Hill
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's really fun. We have a kids club that we run that does Free surf lessons for the local kids. And we've just started an intern program so that kids from the local schools who want to become surf coaches can come and do work experience at Surf Simply. We're starting a elite coaching program for local surfers who want to go and compete. So. And then we work with a women's health charity nearby as well and a local schools project and a reforestation project. So.
- [57:48]
Ann McEntee
So much.
- [57:49]
Rue Hill
Yeah. But again, you asked me what I should have done differently and I wish I'd spent the last 10 years talking more comfortably about that, but it's makes me feel super uncomfortable saying it to you right now. Like in this conversation that is so.
- [58:00]
Ann McEntee
Fascinating to me that, that it is though, because I feel like that is what a lot of times people really want to know about too when they're looking at a business is like, are they giving back in any way? And if they are, how? Because it's very revealing about whoever is behind the business.
- [58:17]
Rue Hill
Well, after I spoke at mit, someone said to me, why didn't you mention anything about that? Because they asked me about it afterwards. And I, I said I felt uncomfortable talking about it. And then when we had this conversation scheduled, I promised myself that I would say it if it came up. So you'll know, you're like, this is live therapy happening right now. And you'll know if there's a page up on the website that I really followed through on what I said I would do.
- [58:40]
Ann McEntee
I hope you do. Ru. It has honestly been so fun to have you on here and I love the way that you think about business and life and I think you have a very grounded approach. I really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us.
- [58:55]
Rue Hill
Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation and thank you for letting me sort of self indulgently rabbit off on my ADHD thought trails. I've had a really good time talking to you.
- [59:08]
Ann McEntee
Today's Key Takeaways Saving money takes time, but prioritizing discipline now leads to greater opportunities down the road. Spot market gaps and connect the dots. Rue identified a lack of coaching for the middle 98%, not just beginners or elites. Mapping out solutions for an unmet need could be the foundation of your business. Scaling with intention matters, choosing to stay smaller, refining internal efficiencies and prioritizing a high performing cohesive team can be more rewarding than unchecked growth. Seasonal businesses require proactive planning. Address challenges like seasonal employment by creating year round opportunities through location, diversified services, off season training or strategic partnerships. Resourcefulness fuels success. As mentioned, Rue started teaching from the back of a car, proof that a grassroots approach fueled by determination can build something big. Be a leader who removes obstacles. Support your team by clearing the path for them to grow, improve and contribute meaningfully to the business. Create an environment where employees feel valued. Do your people see you as someone who fights to pay them well and prioritize their well being? A thoughtless, unkind employer will throttle enthusiasm and loyalty. Rethink the traditional business hierarchy. The American model often puts shareholders first, customers second and employees third. But you can design your business differently. Be intentional about what you're creating, whether in business or life. Consciously define what you want and how you'll get there. Seek wisdom from those ahead of you. Get in rooms with people who are smarter than you and absorb what they know. Dedication outperforms raw talent. You don't have to be a genius. You just need time, curiosity and consistent effort to become great at something. Let go of the noise. No matter what you do, there's always going to be a percentage of people who just don't like you. But that's just part of the noise. Don't let it take up space in your mind and find ways to be less affected by that noise. A close loss can shift your perspective. When someone you love passes earlier than expected, it forces you to ask, what truly matters to me? What do I value most in my life? Check your buckets professionally. Rue mentions filling four core economic security, health status or status, which I interpreted to be authenticity and community and quality relationships with those closest to you. If your buckets are full, stop pouring more in and redirect your energy where it's needed. Athletic pursuits Teach business lessons. Surfing teaches adaptability because the ocean is an uncontrollable variable. The same applies to business. Firing with dignity matters when parting ways with employees, ensure they leave with respect and some book recommendations from Rue the Status Game by Will Storr and behavioral economics books by Daniel Kahnerman and Richard Wiseman. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.