We were lucky to catch up with Vic Rowberry recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Vic thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

There is something magical about being out in nature. Observing, feeling, and sensing that we are a small part of the grandure of the universe can be lifechanging for the good. My love of being in the mountains and spending time in the outdoors led to a long, wonderful professional career with the Boy Scouts of America. Most of the work was spent supporting amazing volunteers through training, providing activity and program options, and running camps.
During the summers of teaching leadership principles and outdoor skills, and observing campers, it became clear to me that there were thousands of people that didn’t have the opportunity to learn outdooor skills in a structured environment.
I love teaching and love seeing the lightbulb come on in individuals as they have success in learning new skills that they thought were difficult to master.
Working with my son Tim, we started on a journey of producing videos that would introduce people to outdoor skills in an easy, non-threatening, comfortable way, so they could be successful their first time in the out of doors.
And so it was that Outdoor Skills Made Easy was born!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

A sense of adventure was always in my blood! In addition to typical youth activities such as school, church, and sports, I was drawn to the outdoors. I could not get enough of camping, cooking over a fire, or learning new outdoor skills. I was a part of a small Scout troop that I loved but which had a hard time keeping a Scoutmaster. Not that we were a difficult bunch, but adult life issues (that we didn’t understand or focus on) of employment, moves, and personal family matters kept troop leadership in flux. As I look back now, my hat is off the the Troop committee for keeping things running. We just wanted to meet with friends and go camping, which we did!
During one of my first summers as a scout, the father of a fellow scout agreed to spend a week with us at Camp Steiner, the highest elevation scout camp in the USA at 10,400′. The week was beyond magical for me!
It was during this week that my love of camping, canoeing, cooking over the fire, and all things outdoors seemed to become cemented into my soul!
What followed was a series of summer camp staff jobs, high school graduation, 2-year missionary service for my church, beginning college, and marriage to the woman of my dreams! Incidentally, we spent our first summer in a tent outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming where I worked as a river guide and Carol drove to town to work each day in the local hospital as a nurse. Life was good!
My university training was focused on the field of Youth Agency Administration after which I landed a job with the Boy Scouts of America. A 39-year career with the BSA was a great mix that allowed me to use my business administration skills as well as spending time in the great outdoors.
During these years I continued to love teaching outdoor skills and was invited to teach many, many times in BSA’s National Camping School where camp leaders from across the nation spend a week certifying skills for their local summer camps. My final NCS was experience was as director of the National Camping School at the famous Philmont Scout Ranch.
The years passed and as my family grew, each of my boys became very accomplished and skilled in their chosen professions.
My son Tim has a love for filmmaking and is an amazing videographer, editor, and producer! Together we decided to produce a small canoeing tutorial and post it to YouTube. We got some positive comments but didn’t really follow up or think much more about it.
When I retired, Tim told me that the video had over 60,000 views and that we should consider producing more. With his love of film and my love of teaching, a father/son project was born.
OSME.tv (Outdoor Skills Made Easy) has the goal of teaching outdoor skills in a simple way so that the learner can be successful their first time in the outdoors.
I think Tim and I make a great team. We both have outdoor skills. I have a lifetime of teaching experience, and he has tremendous production skills, Rarely does a father get to work each week with his son on a project that they both have a passion for. I don’t take that for granted.
There are not many channels that teach entry level skills so we feel like we are providing a service to those who are new to the outdoors. We view our efforts as being a gateway to the outdoors.
The majority of our videos are shot on location in mountains. We often take advantage of family camping trips and plan time to squeeze in a couple hours to shoot while we’re out.
To come up with video ideas, we start with our own interests and skills that we have grown up with. At first I thought that many of these skills were commonplace and well know but after receiving comments, it became apparent that we really did have valuable information to share that many people were looking for.
To date we have produced well over a hundred videos on a wide variety of subjects.
Some of our popular videos include canoeing, useful knots, hiking daypack essentials, how to pitch a tent, or choose the perfect campsite,
One of our first tutorials on Dutch Oven cooking basics was so well received we decided to cook a new dish about once a month.
We have never used the common statement “like and subscribe” on our videos. We think if people like our work they will give us a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button because they enjoy our content. We are grateful for the gift of time people spend watching and learning.
One of the things that I’m most proud of is knowing that many people have benefitted from our work. It’s been very gratifying to receive positive comments from viewers about how their canoeing or camping trips were made better because they had spent a few minutes reviewing our tutorials before they headed out.
One of the personal side benefits for me is knowing that my grandkids will be able to see and hear grandpa long after I’ve passed. Although I’m not planning on that for many years!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Everyone that starts a new endeavor plans for success and growth in their mind. Translating that into true success is the trick. I have had enough business experience to ask the question “what will success would look like for us?”

OSME.tv is not the traditional business whose initial goal is to generate boatloads of cash to live off of. Our goals, although challenging, are much simpler because money has never been the primary driver for success.

Success for us includes some of these targets:
1. Set aside time each week to do what we love doing. Filmmaking and teaching outdoor skills together.
2. Produce accurate, high quality content, in an easy to follow format.
3. Guarantee high quality audio and video production and editing.
4. Attract followers, beyond family and friends.
5. Attract enough subscribers and views to trigger the YouTube algorithms for revenue generation.
6. From a financial standpoint, we would like to generate enough income to sustain our efforts.

After the initial excitement of planning, choosing subjects, writing scripts, filming and editing, the scope of our planned undertaking began to hit home! This was a lot of work! Each video we produced took an average of 20 hours of work. After about 6-7 months of consistent, weekly work, the results, measured only by subscribers and views, was simply put, disappointing.

Feeling that our initial goals of working together were being met, and knowing that Tim’s time commitment was greater than mine (me being retired), I asked Tim if he would like to dial back our efforts because the pressure of weekly filming, editing, and posting fell to him. He had constant demands on his time from other filming projects and I was beginning to feel like I was creating a burden for him.

Together we determined that we could easily control our failure, not our success. By that I mean if we quit, we were 100% guaranteed to fail, If we kept going, success was a possibility. Knowing how to work hard and consistently is not a new thing to our family and so we chose to keep going!

What to do next? Talk to someone who has had success and get some coaching!
I have friends who has been extremely successful in launching and running multiple well known businesses and asked if we could come for a visit. They were very gracious and agreed to sit down with us to review our plans and efforts to that point, and make suggestions to move forward.

After a couple of hours talking business and going over plans, he concluded that we were on a good course.
He finished our visit by telling us about a piece of granite rock that sits on his desk.
It is engraved with these words, “If nothing changes, nothing changes”.

Obviously, nothing was going to change unless WE made it happen, so we renewed our efforts and commitment! Sometimes a little encouragement is enough to restart the seed of resilience that is within each of us!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I am not a social media guru but was determined to start getting the word out about our channel As a team, Tim creates Facebook posts and I try to get things posted to Instagram with each weekly video. I also spend time answering questions and writing articles on a variety of outdoor topics on the website Quora. These are pretty basic steps and definitely not my forte.

My real efforts in marketing started in an unlikely place.
Reasoning that people who read the newspaper would be motivated to look us up on the web, I reached out to our local hometown newspaper to see if they were interested in the story of a father/son team launching a YouTube channel. Frankly, I was surprised when they said yes!
The article ran and our subscriber numbers got a boost!

Small successes lead to others.
A local videographer from KSL TV saw the article and came with us as we shot a segment in the local mountains. His feature was shown on a Sunday evening and again, the number of our subscribers jumped.
Then the local Scout Council started posting our videos featuring outdoor skills and Scouting volunteers began following us!.
Soon after we were contacted by Bryan Wendell who ran the official site of Scouting Magazine, “Bryan on Scouting” requesting an interview which, of course, we were honored to do. Again, a bump in subscribers!

We have had a couple of requests to do live segments on local tv and an occasional invitation to teach skills to local youth groups which always give us a local boost.

Currently we are working to increase our regular social media presence knowing that consistency is the key to success.

To date we are coming up on 6000 subscribers and have well over 500,000 total views. At first glance that looks impressive (and it is to me) but in terms of internet numbers it’s small amount!
However small, we’re proud that we’ve achieved that with solid content, and without showing silly pranks, dancing girls, or clever animal tricks!
We invite you to check us out!

Contact Info:

• Website: OSME.tv
• Instagram: www.Instagram.com/OSMEtv
• Youtube: www.YouTube.com/OSMEtv