Surf Simply: A Surf Camp in Costa Rica that Charges $5.000 for a Week and is Sold Out

A surf coaching program that costs $5,000 for a single week – sounds like a risky business plan.

However, this is exactly what the crew at Surf Simply has done to a level where they’ve become a household name with surfers across the world.

Today with us is Rupert Hill, one of the four owners of Surf Simply, to tell us a little bit more about the company and how it works.

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What exactly is Surf Simply?

It’s a program that offers technical surf coaching in a luxury boutique resort environment in Costa Rica. What makes Surf Simply unique is that they have a very limited number of attendants – only 12 per week. The program has achieved immense popularity, to the point where it was mentioned on CNN and the New York Times, and it is now fully booked until August 2021, at the moment of recording this podcast.

The early beginnings

As Rupert says, he began his career in teaching in a surf school that put the focus on numbers. With around 30 coaches, they would teach a large group of students at an entry level of surfing. He says that he taught approximately 15,000 students at that time. This vast experience allowed him to learn some of the nuances of teaching at a large scale, which he was able to apply later on.

A problem Rupert realized is that most courses on the market focus on one of two groups – complete beginners or the top elite, with 1% of each group being present in the market. Needless to say, the remaining 98% didn’t have a place to go in either of the two groups and that’s how Surf Simply came into play.

The challenges of retaining great talent

As Rupert says, it takes quite a long time to come up with a surfing curriculum for one of his programs at Surf Simply. At the same time, you need at least two years to coach a surfer to become a good enough teacher to be able to function well in their role. As a result, they had to pay teachers well enough so that they wouldn’t leave after a certain time and those two years really pay off later on. The solution was to pay teachers a good salary so that they wouldn’t leave, which is a huge part of the Surf Simply price tag.

In the first couple of years, the biggest struggle for the company was convincing the cynical majority that Surf Simply was something worth their time and money. They thought that it was another course for beginners or elite professionals. However, word of mouth quickly spread to the point where they didn’t have to prove their worth anymore.

Educating potential customers with great content

One of the reasons why Surf Simply is at a place where they are is the stellar content on their website. They have a coaching curriculum that is completely free to download and print out, along with a range of videos they have published. All of this information shows potential customers what Surf Simply is and allows them to make an educated decision about whether to spend their money or not.

Over the years, there were other companies and individuals that wanted to benefit from this free information and who wanted to launch their own course similar to Surf Simply. They would even join the course and openly state that they want to open another Surf Simply, but as Rupert says, he’s not concerned.

“We only take 12 people a week out of a huge marketplace, there’s room for another 500 or 1,000 Surf Simplys to be as successful as we are, without it impacting us as a business.”

As he says, it’s like buying a ticket for a plane ride, flying across the Atlantic and thinking you could build a plane. Just spending a week at Surf Simply is not enough to grasp all the fine details to be able to replicate such a project, but he hopes it inspires people to start their own ventures.

The value of people and why not to scale

As our guest says, the people that are the biggest value in Surf Simply. If something were to happen to Costa Rica, he is confident that the entire operation could be moved somewhere else, as long as the same people were in the project. He wants to establish great relationships with everyone at Surf Simply, which is why he strives to make their lives better.

At the moment, there are 35 people in the company and everyone is wondering, with their success, why isn’t Surf Simply scaling and getting bigger? Rupert gets the same question several times every week and his reply is always:

“It’s really fun making Surf Simply better. Duplicating certainly isn’t as much fun.”

While there are some attempts at growing the company, for the most part, having money come in doesn’t necessarily equate to a better quality of life for anyone at the company.

“If my income level tripled, my happiness might go up 5 or 10%, but it wouldn’t grow 300% On that side of the bell curve, scaling wouldn’t necessarily bring me a lot of happiness.

He even supports his own employees who want to branch off and start doing their own version of Surf Simply. As he says, within a week or two, they always come back because of how good they have it at the company and don’t intend to start their own business.

Mistakes in building a business

Seeing how happy his customers are with Surf Simply, it seems like there weren’t too many errors along the way. Rupert says that his major mistake was micromanaging at the beginning of his career, which he is now aware of and does things differently. When it comes to hiring new people for his business, he says that:

“It’s much easier to teach a good teacher to teach surfing than it is to teach a good surfer how to teach”

Now he stands back and lets his teachers make mistakes and take ownership of what they do. That sense of autonomy really allows you to get the best out of someone’s talent.

If you want to learn more about Surf Simply and Rupert Hill’s story, make sure to listen to the full podcast!

Surfpreneurs podcast is hosted by Peter Fabor, the founder of Surf Office.

Surf Office helps surf houses, hotels and villas boost their group bookings by hosting retreats with tech companies searching for productive team building experiences.

Learn more about how to become a property partner of Surf Office.