# 424 The Thinking Woodsman – Tim Kjellesvik

The outdoor industry is full of folks waiting for the next best thing. To know how to set yourself apart and be successful, Tim Kjellesvik, host of The Thinking Woodsman podcast, shares his wealth of information on what makes you saleable, marketable, and promotable in the outdoor industry. His article called Five Ways to Set Yourself Apart in the Outdoor Industry answers questions on how you should run a business in this space. He also talks about the hunting tradition and the lessons he learned from his most memorable hunting experiences. — Our guest is Tim Kjellesvik. Tim is the host of The Thinking Woodsman podcast, and the show is dedicated to help us all think, think about hunting, think about strategies, think about our industry, think about how we can get kids in the outdoors. He’s got a great podcast going on and the thing that he’s going to share is that the outdoor industry is full of folks waiting for the next best thing. You know how to set yourself apart and be successful, because he’s going to talk about what makes you saleable, what makes you marketable, what makes you promotable in the outdoor industry. Tim’s got a wealth of information and I can’t wait to share his story with you. Listen to the podcast: The Thinking Woodsman – Tim Kjellesvik Tim, welcome to the show. How are you? We’re doing fine. Thanks so much for taking time off. We’re going to talk about collaboration, but I like doing this. I like two guys in the podcast space and the hunting space to get together and share what the heck’s going on, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and some of the challenges we have in the outdoor industry today, so welcome again. Thanks for having me. There’s definitely a lot to talk about within that. There sure is but let’s start right off with your podcast. Why you started it? What challenges do you have? What successes do you have? What are you bringing to your listening audience? My listening audience consists mostly of my mom, so it’s a relatively small audience. We’re in the growth phase. We have only been at it since February of 2016, so relatively new in the podcast space, but the reason I got in was partially because all the great bow hunting podcasts that I love to listen to kept going away. People would start them and they’d run them for a year or two and you’d get invested because that’s what it is. You establish a personal relationship, or at least what feels like a personal relationship, with the host and then they stop doing it. I appreciate being able to listen to interesting talk and debate about things that go on in the hunting community and the fishing community and just in the outdoors in general, but I want someone that I can count on because I’m going to invest time in this show. I want someone that’s going to be there, show up your show for me, and so I thought maybe I should start a show also and share some of my perspectives because they’re a little different than what I was seeing out there. I already had a website. I already had TheThinkingWoodsman.com. I was already writing, and so I already had a following and a Facebook profile for it and it seemed to fit. Besides people are like, “Why don’t you do a TV show?” Everyone and their brother has a TV show, the market is saturated with hunting TV shows and frankly many of them aren’t very good and I know video is not one of my strong suits yet, so I thought, “Let’s do something that requires a little bit infrastructure, relatively easy to get started on, but I’m going to do a quality show, and I’m going to show up month after month after month.” That’s what we’re doing.