Have ever stared blankly across the mountains and wondered what it would be like to live the life of a mountain bike guide? Well this could be your chance!
Bike Verbier is looking to hire a new Alpine mountain bike guide for the 2017 season. Anyone who is interested in joining the team is asked to send over their CV along with a cover letter stating how amazing you are to lucy@bikeverbier.com.
To learn more about Bike Verbier before you sign-up for your dream job then continue reading. The following interview was posted back in 2012 as a Premier Subscriber only piece of content, but we’ve brought it out of the vaults for you all to enjoy.
If you find that you enjoy the VIP life and want more Exclusive Premium content, then head on over to your Subscription page and see what offers we have available to you.
We first met up with Phil and Lucy back in 2001 just after we had published issue 1 of Singletrack. They approached us having just opened for business offering guided holidays riding around the Swiss resort of Verbier, better known for it’s tendency to host British royals during the winter. Mark went out there in that first summer following an invite from Phil and Lucy. He wasn’t disappointed [the results of that first trip can be found in issue 7 of Singletrack available in our Mag Archive to all subscribers] and he has been back many times since. Bike Verbier even hosted our own Reader’s Holiday week back in 2005.
As a company that started offering mountain bike holidays at the same time we started attracting readers we’ve always had an affinity with Bike Verbier and so, 11 years down the line Mark took a break from his annual holiday for an hour or two and armed with a couple of bottles of house red, asked Phil and Lucy how the last decade had gone for a couple who turned their hobby into a business.
STW – How did it all begin?
Lucy – Foot and mouth really. Phil was already here [in Verbier] working and I met him in a pub on a drunken night out and we became friends.
Phil – I came out the previous year to use up a weeks holiday staying with a mate and, well, just stayed here.
Lucy – Phil found out I was a mountain biker cos I leant a copy of MBR to a friend of his called Christer, who worked behind the bar. As an excuse to talk to me Phil started asking me questions about an article on suspension sag, which we had absolutely no interest in. Anyway, he said I should get my bike sent out, which I did and so we started biking together.
STW – What did you do before you came out here?
Phil – I worked in a steel stockholders in Hadfield (Royston Vasey)! I lived in Old Glossop, it was a great place for mountain biking.
Lucy – I worked for Wembley Stadium Ltd in Marketing but after a week skiing in Verbier I gave my notice to come and do a winter season. In the summer I worked at Seatoller house in the Lakes. That’s when I developed a business plan for a bike holiday company – only it was meant to be in the Lakes. I saw loads of people riding around, not knowing where to go or having anywhere bike friendly to stay. The following summer because of foot and mouth there was no work. So I came back out here, after a summer of biking with Phil I showed him my plan and said, ‘why don’t we do it here?’.
Phil – And I said no.
STW – Why?
Phil – Well I was really into football and out here you don’t get to play much and I didn’t want to lose that and turn my other hobby into a job. So we did other work – gardening, baby sitting, anything, and we were always skint so we decided we needed something more permanent so in the end we decided to do it. Really I wanted to be a porn star… But I wasn’t big enough.
Lucy – Hmm.. er.. So Verbier just because we had mates out here and no one had tapped it for biking.
STW – Did you go straight for the catered chalet option or did you guide first?
Lucy – We went for the catered chalet straight away. We rented the chalet from an estate agent who was a rider in the local bike club. No one else was doing anything like it in the area at the time.
Phil – Then we invited Singletrack and every other magazine to come out and Singletrack was the only magazine to respond.
STW – What was the biggest challenge in starting up a holiday business?
Lucy – The language.
Phil – And just getting enough money together for a deposit to start it all up.
Lucy – We were gardening and baby sitting and living off pasta and, if we were lucky, tomato sauce. We just came out here and decided, ‘lets do this!’. Luckily we had friends who had belief in us and gave us help when we needed it.
Phil – We got by on £2000 borrowed from Lucy’s brother.
Lucy – In the first year we had 57 people come out to stay with. At one point we were emptying out our change jar and banking it so we could buy food for the guests.
Phil – One week we had some American guests and they left a good tip, which we used to buy food for the next week’s guests!
Lucy – That was the plan though – we tried to do it with minimum commitment in terms of bank loans.
Phil – At the start we did everything ourselves. Some days were from 7:30am until 10 at night. But we got through because there were some weeks we didn’t have any guests so we recovered.
STW – So once you’d made it through the first year and knew you had a business what was the next challenge?
Lucy – Getting the right staff. We have done that now. Gill has been here for four years running the chalet and cooking. Sam was a guest for nine years and has now been a guide for two years. They are both back with us again this year. Getting that good team together has made a massive difference.
Phil – Getting the right guides. Rob was good [RHS of several Singletrack covers and photo gallery features]. Jon [Woodhouse] was… er… [pause].. ok [winks].
STW – Verbier is predominantly known as a winter resort so what do you do in the off season?
Lucy – We now have a year round business so we also run ski holidays, which we started doing after our fourth year. We run holidays similar to the biking weeks but without the guiding, we also rent the chalet on a self-catered basis. But we have done other things too. I’ve done nanny-ing, teaching, cooking…
Phil – I’ve worked in bars and the last 6 years in a ski shop.
Lucy – We make the most of any down-time during the inbetween seasons finding new trails, chalet maintenance and giving our bodies a rest. We sometimes go back home to see family and friends for a week too.
Phil – Weddings and funerals 🙂
STW – The current exchange rate for the Swiss Franc is just horrible. How has that affected you?
Lucy & Phil [together] – Massively!
Lucy – We took the hit ourselves for two years. Our guests were so loyal that they came every year and we are really lucky to have a business with such a strong annual return rate. Like everyone we didn’t think it was going to go on for very long so we kept the prices down. We thought we could cope with it for a year or two and we lost 40% of our income. Finally we realised we were suffering to pay for people’s holidays and we made the hard choice to price our holidays in Swiss Francs instead of pounds. All our outgoings are in Swiss Francs so we really had no choice in the end.
Phil – Last year the exchange rate went down to around 1.2 to the pound and I had to use my first wage of the winter season working in the ski shop to pay the last wage of the guides – it was that tight! So we have changed to Swiss Francs. We are not as busy but all our loyal customers who keep coming back every year have kept on coming despite the exchange rate – we are pretty lucky to have such loyal regulars. It’s a fact that you can get a lot cheaper holiday in other countries but at least it is improving now that the Swiss franc has been fixed against the euro. 2012 is looking better already.
Lucy – We can only keep improving our holidays as we can’t compete on price with anyone outside of Switzerland. We just can’t otherwise we just won’t be in business. We’d rather not do it at all than do a budget version of Bike Verbier.
Phil – But also we don’t want to get too expensive. I think the more you go up in price the less keen bikers you get and we don’t want to end up with corporate groups. We want to bike with real mountain bikers.
STW – Tell us about when it goes wrong. Tell us about your worst guests.
Phil – We are quite lucky. We do get really nice people.
STW [pushing hard!] – Come on! You’ve had ten years of guests! They can’t all have been lovely!
Phil – Ok.. there are maybe a handful of guests who if they asked if they could book a week we might say we were full.
Lucy [Reluctantly] – Ok, there was one person that we were almost on the verge of giving his money back to half way through the week. He was drinking pints of red wine and said he’d rather have rubbish food and more booze and then threw up on the first night. He was rude to our staff and just wasn’t very nice.
Phil – His friends came back out later in the season without him and they apologised for him.
Phil [continues…] No.. well seriously, there were two guests who asked if they could ride with us on our day off. I’m afraid we said we were really busy, which we were. No really! – We were trail hunting – But still, we felt so guilty we had to ride all day in full face helmets and goggles. We were riding XC and we actually rode past them!
STW– What? So you’ve had guests out here that were so bad that you disguised yourself on your day off?
Lucy [laughing] This is awful… We sound terrible. Our guests are always really nice!
[Mark pours more wine in Lucy’s glass]
STW – 10 years on. How have things changed for you personally and for the business?
Lucy – The bikes have changed for the better, people seem to have settled on slacker 140-160mm trail bikes. Before people came out on 80mm xc hardtails at one of the spectrum and 50lb Josh Bender hucking bikes at the other. Shorts have got baggier and we have more responsibility. We are settled here really… But the standard of Phil’s jokes hasn’t changed at all.
Phil – I think we are more professional now. We have improved everything we do. In 2008 we moved to our own chalet which we renovated to suit bikers and skiers. We are now located in the valley which has opened up so many more riding options. Down here we are in a community instead of being in a resort. In our first few years almost all of our riding was in the Verbier area, which is great, but now we have discovered so much more. All this exploring and the new location have opened up the whole of the Valais region.
Lucy – In the first year we were running around doing everything from the cooking and cleaning to the riding. Now we don’t do everything ourselves. In the first year we’d get home after cooking, riding, cooking and cleaning and sob! For the first three years we didn’t have any help. We were always exhausted! Now we can go away in the evening knowing that Gill and Sam are looking after everyone. Although we are still always on call, we can step back a bit more now and that’s why we are now constantly thinking about how we can make it better.
Phil – I think the standard of riding has actually gone down slightly because more riders are coming from just riding in trail centres. We have had guests who have only ridden at trail centres who have improved massively in a week here and gone home motivated to ride more natural trails.
Lucy – But trail centres have brought more people into the sport.
Phil – The hardest thing is getting across to people what the riding is like. We cannot compare it to a trail centre red or black which a lot of people tend to base their comparisons on. We try and get across what the riding is like on our website.
Lucy – Personally though we are still together – we still bicker and we still tell rubbish jokes. But I think that the last couple of tough years has probably brought us closer together. It’s a bit cheesy but it probably has.
STW – So the whole couples working together thing? That’s worked?
Lucy – It works better now we get a break and we have some time at home.
Phil – But we are lucky in that although we work together if we take different groups we may just see each other at breakfast then ride with different groups and not see each other until 10 o clock at night. Some times we see each other for ten minutes in the day.
Lucy – But we are really good at ‘down timing’ and relaxing now. Whereas before we always felt we should be doing something.
STW – So you are saying the key to being a couple in business is to avoid each other?
Lucy – No….Selective hearing. Having a laugh and trying not to talk about work all the time.
Phil – But even when we are talking about work we are talking about rides – Can we take guests up there? Can we do this or that? But now we’ve been here for ten years we have such a knowledge of the trails and riding that we can switch off after work. I used to wake up in the night and go for a wee then end up staying awake thinking about trails and where we can take the guests. But now we have such choice of trails it’s much easier to plan for different guests.
STW – Riding bikes is your hobby but it’s also your business. How do you keep the enthusiasm for riding when it’s your day to day job?
Lucy – It’s the exploring part of the job. Finding new rides to take the guests on.
Phil – We have so many rides to do that we don’t do the same rides each week. So some rides we won’t do for a month or more and we usually ride on wednesdays [Day off]. It makes a big difference to me to have an XC bike, a Freeride bike and a Down Hill bike because for me XC riding is a completely different sport to down hilling. So if I’ve had a hard Sunday to Tuesday doing XC rides I’ll go down-hilling on my day off. Or the opposite if we’ve been doing more Downhill stuff.
Lucy – We do still manage to switch off when we ride for ourselves. I did that the other day. After leaving you at lunch I went up and did a couple of runs down the black run, challenging myself. I wasn’t thinking of anything else other than staying on my bike. The nightmare would be getting to the stage where we have time off and we don’t want to get on a bike. And the point is that we love riding with the guests. This year especially we’ve had some brilliant weeks. Last week for example, every ride we did we would choose to do on our day off.
STW– So ten years on you are now property owners with two mortgages. That’s a big commitment so what’s the future for Bike Verbier?
Lucy – Well a lot depends on what happens with the exchange rate. If things stay as it is and the Swiss Franc stays strong then we are going to have to hope that people consider our holidays are worth it. It’s tough right now and it’s frustrating because it is out of our control. The mortgage thing though was about paying less for a mortgage that we were paying for the rent of the chalet. We were lucky. It all happened very fast. We weren’t looking to buy a chalet but a friend told us about this place and it was too good an opportunity to miss.
Phil – We wanted something that we could convert into the perfect biking chalet, with a garage & workshop (the man-cave is very important). When you rent a chalet you can’t even put a nail in the wall. We can make this place into exactly what we wanted for the guests.
Lucy – We’ve never really had a plan. Things have just happened and we’ve reacted to the opportunity. It’s the same with us personally. We never really sat down and decided to move in together. We were mates and it just happened (with the help of beer goggles!!).
STW – So you are both from the North of England originally and you still have family there, so where is home?
Lucy – We are from the UK but this is home now. Most of our friends are here. Luckily our families like to come and visit us.
Phil – But when I’m going back to visit I always say I’m going home.
Lucy – But when you come back here you always say this is home. For me this is home. I live here. Most of my friends are here. Our life is here. It would be hard to build everything we’ve got anywhere else.
STW – Who has the better grasp of French?
Phil – Moi!
Lucy – Non, Moi! It’s really hard to learn a new language here. Everybody speaks English! Moving down here, out of the resort is better because we have French speaking neighbors who don’t speak a word of English so we have to speak French, which is brilliant! But they also don’t judge you so they are happy for you to make mistakes, so long as you try.
STW – I’ve been here many times over the years and each time I come you two seem to ride better and better. Have you ever had guests who can ride better than you?
Lucy – plenty of guests are faster than me. Up and down.
Phil – You never know really because on your home tracks you have such an advantage. These are our local trails – they aren’t for the guests, so I reckon there’s been riders here better than us.
Lucy – Neither of us have big enough egos to think of competing with our guests and when you are guiding you aren’t going your fastest. You have to ride at a sensible speed so really guests shouldn’t ever see you riding at your fastest.
Phil – Some guests you can ride fast with (grinning).
Lucy – Yeah. For us finding a good guide is picking one that doesn’t feel they need to show off to the guests. You don’t want to be guided by a big ego otherwise it just ends in tears.
STW – So economy aside for a moment what about your aspirations for Bike Verbier?
Phil – Keep going as we are but introduce some overnighters. More back country style rides. We’ve got some some really good routes pretty much sorted out for overnighters into Italy and down the Valley.
Lucy – This year we have reintroduced our women’s week which we are excited about as we have Tracy Moseley in charge of the coaching. We are also thinking of offering a couple of weeks a year as self-guided road biking holidays. Since the Tour de France was here in 2009 we have had a lot of interest in this.
STW – So do you still see yourselves doing this in another ten years time?
Phil – Oh yes! Maybe guiding a bit less myself. Maybe three days guiding instead of five.
Lucy – I might go back to doing more cooking if we have kids or if I just get old and decrepit. But I don’t want to not be around people. I love that side of the job. In the end we know we are never going to get rich but we are going to have a nice lifestyle. We get to meet really lovely people and spend all our days out in these amazing mountains. The best thing is we get to see the grins on people’s faces and they are the things that make what we do fantastic.
For more info visit www.bikeverbier.com
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If I was 25 years younger and had the riding skills it would be my dream job.
If you have the fitness Tracey you could be the MTB equivalent of the gnarly old bloke on the road club ride who’ll tear the legs off youngsters without trying. Underestimate them at your peril.