Guiding opportunity advice?

[libidilatimmy]

Have you asked this fella why he's short on experienced guides and needs your services? Are he and his guides inexperienced with archery hunting elk? I'd talk to other guides he employs, or has employed in the past, and get a good feel for the type of business he runs before committing to anything. One experience I had with an inquiry of the same sort sounded good off of the start, but when I started researching how he ran his business, I learned some things that turned me off to the proposition. After I turned the guy down, and I actually had the deer tag he wanted me to guide for, he basically started started following me around the area to figure out where the good bucks were. Come opening day of the rifle season, guess who had two pickups full of hunters slam on the brakes going down the road and park in the same pull out I'd parked in. I was onto his little game by this point and had parked there as a decoy. The point is I don't regret turning the opportunity down at all, but would have regretted working for an individual whom I had thought had high character initially, which obviously turned out to be false pretense. As is the case with hunting, a little research can go a long ways.

 

[tim]

if you can swing it do it. I was a river guide, not hunting, but getting people in and out of the woods safely is the main responsibility of any guide. There will be people you won't like, and there will be people you do like. But when it is all said and done, no one can take the expierence away from you.

 

[RICMIC]

My retired career during the summer is as a wilderness canoe guide in Canada. I love what I do, but surely miss the opportunity to make trips on my own. If my buds hadn't stopped doing canoe trips years ago, I would still be going with them, but other than the guiding, I likely wouldn't be going at all. I actually turned down a job offer that I had been pursuing from an outfitter that I respect, because I had deer and elk tags in that state this year. The advice given so far sounds solid. I would suggest that you see if you can fill a nitch and may find something that you love to do. Your client will make or break the trip though, so good luck.