We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jeremy Asgari. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jeremy below.

Hi Jeremy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

Coming up with a name for a business is always a challenge. The only way to go about it, is to throw a bunch at the wall and see what sticks, but we wanted to make sure that we had something that represented our mission and the feeling of our company.

We were brainstorming with our team trying to think of ideas for a good name and the one that seemed to be perfect was Outsiders. It seemed too good to pass up on. But most importantly, it had multiple meanings in one name.

Yes, Outsiders for folks who love the outdoors made sense, however, the bigger meaning of Outsiders represented those who feel like they don’t belong. I wanted to make sure that our social club, our company, was a welcoming place for those who might feel like outcasts, especially in the outdoor space.

Jeremy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve always been in the experiential world with events and entertainment. I worked in nightlife for 15 years and I produce concerts as well. I also started working with brands creating experiences to market products. I found myself creating very similar experiences every time, we were doing out best to come up with unique creative experiences but because there’s only so much you can do within four walls with music and beverages I felt somewhat limited. I wanted to create more interesting experiences that were active and healthier for people.

The bottom line was I was tired of eating and drinking in order to socialize. I started dabbling in outdoor adventures in 2016 when we produced our first bike ride. When I saw the value and the happiness it brought people I realize we were onto something, but when I looked around at the experiences provided by outdoor groups, they didn’t look appealing to me.

The sad thing about the outdoors in my eyes is that the people who typically work in that industry are drawn to it because they feel comfortable in the solitude of nature. Many seemed to feel awkward in social environments. What happens because of this is many of the outdoor groups are led by folks who don’t feel comfortable in social gatherings, therefore might be a little socially awkward. My goal was to take what I learned from hospitality and entertainment and apply it to the outdoors with guides who also were great hosts, and made attendees feel like they were out with their friends as opposed to a tour guide.

Another problem I wanted to solve, was the outdoors as a brand, was that it always felt very granola, very white, and not cool. I wanted to bring a cool factor to the outdoors, and when I say cool, I don’t mean exclusive. I wanted to make the outdoors, inclusive, and not so thought of as a white place. We are still trying to rebrand the outdoors in that way. We are doing so the same way other companies create their brand identity with fresh design, content, and messaging.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Social media is the best way to keep your clientele in the know of what you have going on. Interacting with them tagging them sharing their stories and posts shows them that you actually care. I mean after all, we’re a community, and community engagement is the only way scale and create those relationships.

For us this also means, internally as a team, we need to make sure that we have a great bond because if our members see how tight our team is and how much fun we have together they’re going to want to join in on all the fun.

Another tool, which might also be classified as social media is community chats like WhatsApp. Using technologies like these different community chats allows people to connect before, during, and after our adventures solidify the connections for long-term relationships

The same goes for brand loyalty the only way to achieve brand loyalty is to keep your clientele engaged. For us our goal is to make people feel like our group is a chosen family a secondary family that you’ve made through memorable experiences you’ve shared together.

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

Our business has multiple revenue streams, and what I love about it is that it provides people and organizations a variety of memorable and unique, custom experiences. Below are our various revenue streams.

Partnership (Sponsors) –
This is our largest revenue stream. Being able to offset the cost of our trips for our attendees is part of our mission. Being able to operate as an agency has been a huge part of our revenue model since we first launched. Because we have access to a very unique network and a large net work at that, brands benefit tremendously from working with us to grow awareness of their products.

We also have an amazing content creation team that creates studio quality content for our brand partners, which then is followed up with multi-level amplification.

What I mean by that is this; I’ll use the partnership we had with Volvo as an example.
For Volvo, we were provided with 4-6 of their fully loaded, luxury vehicles to transport our attendees from the city to our outdoor excursions. This made for a very unique experience, because most people going on a hike, would expect to be in a van or a bus, but because they were in amazing luxury vehicles, they felt inclined to capture content of themselves being transported from the city to the rugged outdoors in style. Not only did they share their own stories on social media, but they also shared the content we created with our team which was more polished. After all who doesn’t want a good photo or video of themselves for their social media accounts?

Lastly, Volvo was using the content we were creating for all of their East Coast dealership’s social media accounts. Every weekend we were providing them with an entire album of photos and videos from our excursions that would normally have to be staged which would cost them a fortune to replicate with that frequency.

Ticket Sales from local day excursions –
This is self-explanatory, but we generate revenue from selling tickets to our adventures. We sell around 4,000 to 5,000 tickets a year between all of our chapters.

Ticket Sales from international and domestic trips ranging from 5 days to 10 days –
This revenue has been tremendously helpful in sustaining our business, especially when marketing budgets are cut. Because we relied so heavily on partnership dollars, when they aren’t available we have to find other ways to generate that kind of revenue. Revenues from destination trips provide that for us.

These destination trips offer our local attendees the opportunity to attend international trips, offering experiences they may not have access to with their network. These trips also allow our members in different markets to connect and create a truly global network. This has proven to be a great addition to our business model, and something that we plan on scaling.

Corporate and private outings –
This is our newest revenue stream, and the one we believe will likely transform our business. To put it simply how many more happy hours can a company have before their employees are bored. The typical work environment is an indoor unhealthy and sometimes depressing environment. Being able to produce these fun nostalgic outdoor and active experiences for companies will help grow loyalty with their employees. These excursions can also be used as team-building outings to build better relationships among coworkers.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://joinoutsiders.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyasgari/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-asgari-6412083/
• Twitter: https://x.com/JeremyAsgari
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@joinoutsiders

Image Credits

Photographers Mario Cuadros & Alaina Blay.