I was recently given an assignment by one of my clients, to help him in the recruitment of sea kayak operators. The client in question owns a huge number of sea kayaks. From time to time, he has to hire people to operate the sea kayaks on his behalf . This works under a scheme where the people in question share the money they make from the kayaks with him, on a commission basis. Because he is too busy to do the recruitment of the sea kayak operators by himself, he often gives that assignment to someone else: and this season, the assignment fell on my shoulders. And in the course of attempting to recruit the sea kayak operators, I made several observations, which I will be sharing in today’s blog post.
Firstly, I observed that there are very few truly qualified sea kayak operators out there. Most of the people who applied turned out to be folks with whitewater kayaking skills. They seemed to be unaware of the fact that sea kayaking is quite a different affair from whitewater kayaking.
Secondly, I observed that the few qualified sea kayak operators out there lack the business skills necessary to succeed in this sort of work. The few qualified sea kayak operators I encountered turned out to be folks who only have the technical skills (on how to operate the kayaks), but who lack the business skills necessary to make money from the whole venture.
Thirdly, I observed that the few qualified sea kayak operators tend to have unrealistic financial expectations. This became clear as I asked each potential employee how much they expected to make, as sea kayak operators. I kept on hearing very astronomical figures, hence my conclusion that the sea kayak operators have rather unrealistic financial expectations. They seem to forget that although the sums of money paid by clients for use of the sea kayaks are indeed huge, the clients are usually not so many. In the real world, the clients are usually few and far between. This means that in the final analysis, one has to be modest in terms of the expectations of what is to be made from sea kayak operation work/business.