We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Steve Chapman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Steve thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission the drives your brand?

Our mission is succinct–Serve the Show. Everything in our company is focused on those three words. Serve. The Show.

From our website (simple, easy to use) to our tours (two dozen stories jammed into 90-minutes) to costuming, the use of technology, research, training, and a detailed review of every tour, we have the obsession of serving the show.

But what does that mean?

Early on, we recognized that we were in show business. All of our guides are entertainers. We are not museum docents or protectors of the past–we are actors and teachers and comedians, all rolled into one, and our mission is to be memorable and spreadable. Basically, our guides perform live, one-person shows. One of the happiest moments a tour guide gets is reading a review where a guest states that the tour was the highlight of their vacation. In these times, helping guests get out of their brains, allowing them to escape the real world for a few hours is an honor and a responsibility.

From the moment a guest arrives until they depart, our team focuses on serving the show, delivering an exceptional experience, and ensuring we will be a topic of conversation on the ride home. Serving the show can be difficult to achieve. We are all humans, so a lot of the training guides receive is setting ego aside, remembering the purpose of every tour, and remaining ‘on’ and in character throughout the show.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

Salida Walking Tours began almost as a lark.

In 2018, after selling my consulting business, I was looking for inspiration–what next? History has always fascinated me, particularly the wild west days, and I’m fortunate to live in a town with 136 buildings preserved from 1883-to 1910. With time on my hands, I began digging into the early days of Salida. What I found was fascinating–shootouts, a lynching, multiple fires that devastated the area, and even the murder of a marshal. Add in the architecture, and a question bounced in my head–why are there no tours here?

I’ve never been a tour person. I’m more of an explorer, preferring to discover details independently. And I’ve never been a performer of any type. So this idea was intimidating and completely out of my league. But I like a challenge. I’d heard about walking tours, but as I have never taken one, I started researching and, in the summer of 2018, decided to dip my toe into a new pool. Wearing a basic t-shirt, I offered a one-hour history tour. It went okay but certainly wasn’t an immediate success. Continuing to look into the industry, I noticed something called ghost tours. I was out of my depth because I am not a believer in the paranormal. But I was curious and started educating myself. In 2018, I added a ghost tour to the mix.

Salida Walking Tours took on a separate life from those early days of me wandering around talking. Today, we have four guides, a social media manager and a guest services manager. That early one-hour history tour expanded, and now we have a 90-minute version (Outlaws, Whores, & History Tour) and a three-hour version (Expanded Salida History Tour).

The first ghost tour is now 90-minutes (Ghost & Murder Tour). Additionally, we offer a tour of Cleora Cemetery and, new in 2022, is the Craft Beer & Brewery Tour, where we go behind-the-scenes of local breweries and do a good bit of sampling. On a different note, prodded by friends, in 2019, I wrote my first book about Salida’s history. That original book became the Salida Sam historical book series, and there are now four published volumes. In 2021, I started something new, the Salida Walking Tours Biographical Series. Each book focuses on one individual from our past, covering their story from birth to death.

We also produced a radio program, A Salida Moment in History, which won the 2019 Colorado Broadcaster’s Association Best Regularly Scheduled Program. And in 2020, our podcast, History Does Rhyme, was nominated for best podcast in the State. The support of this community has been overwhelming, but I’m most proud of the dedication from our team. They all bought into our goal (Serve the Show) and are top-notch performers, which is why we are rushing towards 600 5-star ratings across all the platforms.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media appears to be this murky, mystical thing that only the best experts understand. But it’s pretty simple. And extremely time-consuming. You’re not going to build a meaningful presence on social media quickly, and you certainly won’t grow your brand by investing only a few minutes a day. Success in social media (and success is a relative term) involves a lot of planning, interactions (with other businesses and people, as well as your followers), creativity, and time. I’m going to say that word again–time.

To build an active social-media base, there are two primary choices: put in the time yourself or hire someone. There are no shortcuts. We devote an exceptional amount of resources to social media. It’s advertising, sure, but it’s also a way to gauge interest and obtain feedback. We monitor the analytics obsessively, revising and testing and abandoning and reworking ideas weekly.

What platform is best? I can’t say. Every business has a unique audience, and there are now more options than ever.

My best suggestion would be to pick one social media outlet and learn it inside and out, building your community and getting them to engage. When that outlet is flowing well, add a new one. For instance, we focused exclusively on Facebook for the first two years. Our audience isn’t the largest (closing in on 1000 followers), but they are highly engaged. Our engagement rate is nearly ten times what is considered successful in social media circles. But it took time. Next, we added Instagram. That also took time but has become an excellent source of connecting with past and potential future guests. Tik-Tok is now on our radar, but I don’t know enough about that and have yet to see it translate into sales for most companies.

Whether invested or paid for, time is the key to social media success. If all you’re doing is posting an advertisement, you’re wasting your time and money. Be interesting, meaningful, engaging, and spreadable. Think of social media as a fence in your backyard. If you’re always discussing only yourself, your neighbor might stop chatting. But if you’re engaging, include them and their interests from time to time, and have a memorable personality, the odds are that fence time might increase and lead to something meaningful.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

This is one of the easier questions to answer–details. That’s how Salida Walking Tours gained an excellent reputation (over 500 5-star ratings). We obsess over details. If a joke or story doesn’t hit with an audience, we break it down to determine why. We shop ourselves, using our website and systems to see if things are easy to understand and use.

Every smile, every social media post, every single thing that goes into our business is one element of an overall experience and we are consumed with getting it right. It’s all the details.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.salidawalkingtours.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/salida-walking-tours
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/salidawalkingtours