Naturally, Ben Roberson and Stuart Jordan first met each other outside.
Long before they were co-founders of Guide Book Co., they were members of the same Louisville church, Third Avenue Baptist — and both avid outdoorsmen — but did not know each other until they were chatting around a bonfire at a church social event in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“[Covid] pushed me a little bit to think, ‘OK, what else is out there? What do I feel called to do? What do I want the future of my family to look like?'" Roberson told me recently. “I think Stuart was in a similar boat. He didn't verbalize it quite that way, but I got this impression that he’d be willing to talk about other ideas.”
Before starting the company, Roberson had spent 10 years working as a teacher and later a counselor at three high schools in the Jefferson County Public Schools system. Jordan had spent 16 years working in finance in the oil and gas industry.
As a way to supplement his income, for five years, Roberson has run a fly-fishing business, River Hawk Fly Fishing, where he guides customers down the Cumberland River on his drift boat while fishing for trout in an area near Wolf Creek Dam in Russell County serving as the main access point.
He knows firsthand about the pain points of being an outdoor guide, with one of the top ones being managing your business after you are done with the day’s trip — and how much that can cut into family time.
Jordan’s brother had drawn him into fly-fishing in 2016, which led to him taking about one or two big fishing trips a year with a large group.
The two exchanged numbers after a brief conversation. Shortly thereafter, Roberson invited Jordan to meet up to “pick his brain” on an idea that would eventually become Guide Book Co.
The two looked for companies that were already in the outdoor excursion booking space, such as Yellow Dog Flyfishing, which charges $10,000 or more for week-long, high-end trips around the world.
Eventually, Jordan realized Roberson’s dream of trying to create an alternative platform that could help fishing guides — who were charging a fraction of the price as Yellow Dog — run their businesses more effectively by pulling together all of the tools they need in one seamless location.
Roberson added the average cost of a fly-fishing trip in the U.S. is $500 for a full day of guided fishing, with the average in Kentucky costing around $400.
After about three months, they had written a 30-page business plan, which turned into a pitch deck — and then a series of conversations with app developers.
Eventually, they were put in contact with Perry Azevedo, a managing director at Prota Ventures, who also happened to be a big outdoorsman located in Washington State. Azevedo quickly jumped on board with the idea, asked to be a co-founder and built the app’s website for sweat equity.
The next steps
As of recent date, Roberson and Jordan have not spent any money of their own outside of some legal fees, as Azevedo has so far bootstrapped the app’s development. The startup is currently in a pre-seed round, having raised about 25% of the $500,000 total, mainly through friends, family and undisclosed angel investors.
Meanwhile, the app and the website are slated to launch on iOS and Android platforms on March 31 (currently there is just a landing page at guidebookco.com). It will solely focus on fishing to prove the concept, but will then expand to hunting, rock climbing, photography and other outdoor activities. The company also hopes to offer international trips within a year of the app’s launch.
When I spoke with them, Roberson said that he had a list of 200 guides that he would be contacting within the next month. Jordan said the hope is to have 650 guides signed up within a year.
The startup's business model centers first around hiring direct salespeople who they will pay on a commission based on how many trips are booked in their regions, which will be divided up into four across the U.S.
Traditionally, Roberson said, that most fly-fishing guides would derive business from outdoors outfitter or fly-fishing shops — and would then pay out 20% to 60% of the income from a certain trip to that source. In contrast, Guide Book will charge guides an 8% fee from their trips, but only for the first 15 trips of the month.
“The reason we’re doing that is it’s really integral to our company and our mission to make guides’ lives better,” he said. “It’s our opinion, but also through market research, talking to all my guide friends … that we will get better quality guides and more quantity of those better quality guides, the better we take care of them.”
When it comes to looking at the potential of their prospective growth, Roberson and Jordan hope to lead — perhaps fittingly — a sea change in their industry.
“You could run a bed and breakfast 15 years ago, and you can do that independently. No problem. Until Airbnb and Vrbo [showed up],” Jordan said. “Now it's almost not possible to run a bed and breakfast without those two platforms. We hope that eventually in the coming years, it's difficult to book a guided fly fishing trip without our app, in a similar way that Airbnb and Vrbo have cornered that market.”
