Building A Business In Adventure Travel With Matt Butler

Adventure travel is more than just visiting new places; it’s about connecting with cultures, building experiences, and making a positive impact. J.R. Lowry talks with Matt Butler, founder of Basecamp 2XL, about his journey from a rural upbringing in Canada to creating a thriving global adventure travel business. They discuss the challenges of entrepreneurship, the rewards of community-focused travel, and how passion fuels purpose. Whether you’re an avid traveler or curious about starting your own venture, this conversation offers insights and inspiration.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/matt-butler.

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Building A Business In Adventure Travel With Matt Butler

Founder & CEO at BASECAMP 2XL And Adventurebug Worldwide Travel

This is the show that’s brought to you by PathWise.io. PathWise is dedicated to helping you be the best professional you can be, providing a mix of career and leadership coaching, courses, content, and community. Basic membership is free, so visit PathWise and join. My guest is Matt Butler. Matt is the Founder and CEO of BASECAMP 2XL and Adventure Bug Worldwide Travel, which he co-founded with his wife, Julie. Matt and the Adventure Bug team plan and lead trips all over the world. I was with him on a fantastic trip to Jordan. In our discussion, we’re going to be covering Matt’s unique upbringing, how he got into adventure travel, his experiences as a small business owner, and his charitable work. Let’s dive in.

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Matt, welcome, and thanks again so much for doing the show with me.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Having a look at your show, I have been able to catch up on what you’ve been doing, and it’s brilliant work.

Thank you. You have a relatively unique upbringing. Let’s start with your upbringing because it feeds into what you’ve ended up doing professionally. You have Irish heritage but you grew up in Northern Canada.

I am Canadian, born, raised, and educated from a big family in the north of Canada. I always had a taste for adventure, so naturally, I gravitated toward the travel industry and personal development-type areas. Coming from a family of eight kids from the same parents, we were always always seeking adventure and seeking other destinations. I ended up living all around the world and settled here in Southern Spain.

What were some of the things that you took away from growing up in a sparsely populated and often cold outdoor-oriented environment that a city dweller might not have taken from their childhood?

I have a lot of time to reflect on that since I’m living on the Mediterranean coast, looking out to Africa, and I travel extensively with our work and our travels. When I reflect back on it, I always thought that all Canadians live like I did. I grew up in the wilderness. In the summertime, we had bears. In the wintertime, we had fur-bearing animals racing across frozen lakes. I took up snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. I played hockey like all Canadians in rural areas.

It wasn’t until I moved out of the North by about eighteen that I realized, “There is an urban side to this Canadian living thing.” That was a real eye-opener for me. Right then and there, I started to feel unique as a Canadian. I thought, “Not only have I grown up in a very rural and Northern part of my country, but also, I’m connected to the First Nations people.” I grew up in the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. Our town was partially a reservation and partially a White town. Due to the upbringing of my parents, particularly my father’s interest in all things in the wilderness, we spent a lot of time with First Nations Cree Indian people. That stayed with me. That’s drawn me towards wanting to travel to places of indigenous cultures all the time.

The Impact Of Technology On Culture

I saw an article on the news focusing on the fact that a lot of indigenous cultures are dying. As the world gets more integrated, all of these things that originally made all these different societies unique around the world before air travel and everything else modernized, like communications, the differences that were out there are slowly eroding. In some ways, we lose that part of humanity’s history.

You’re very right in the sense that the way that we live using multimedia and technology, which has so many great benefits as well as its downsides, has become a leveler for cultures. It squashes out the uniqueness of all the cultures we have. Anyone can have an Instagram, Facebook, or any of these social media personalities. When we’re not communicating face-to-face and sitting down around the table with people or in their lands and going on real-life experiences with them, we don’t truly know who they are. I’ve always been fascinated to return to that and try and connect to people that way, especially First Nations or Indigenous people.

Does Northern Canada still feel like home to you or with all the years living in Spain that you’ve had at this point, does Spain feel more like home?

I was doing the math. I calculate that I’ve been out of that region for 25 to 30 years and a few more years than that being based here in Southern Spain but also having lived in Central Africa, Southern China, the UK like yourself as a foreigner, and Australia. I have had all these different experiences. I can’t feel the same connection as I did years ago having been out this long, but there’s something about being a rural Canadian. I spend enough time with my family, my extended family, my nephews, and my parents which draws you back to being that Canadian rural person fairly quickly.

You went to school, I know, in Manitoba originally. What did you envision yourself doing at that point? I would imagine it probably wasn’t running an adventure travel company.

When I finished high school, I didn’t do much in my last few years of high school up in the North because I was an athlete. I was a cross-country ski competitor. I was at the national level and dipping in some international things. That was a far reach for somebody like myself from way up in the North to be suddenly exposed to that kind of lifestyle, so I was seeking something after high school that kept me on the sports adventure side of things. I was really excited to pursue that. I was naturally drawn to travel.

The subjects I chose when I initially went to university and did an undergrad degree were things like physical geography and human geography. My first degree was in geography. I pursued all that and social anthropology-type topics. I retrained some years later. After living around the world, I retrained as an educator or a teacher, which is how I met Jules, my wife, who’s our co-pilot with Adventure Bug here in Spain. I was drawn towards education because I knew it would get me back out in the world and to integrate myself into different cultures and countries. I used that as a jumping point, being an educator, to continue my passion for travel.

What were some of the places that you taught in your years teaching?

Outside of teaching in the North of Canada, I taught on First Nations, the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. I taught on that reservation. We also taught in Malawi in Central Africa. That was an interesting one because that was a combination of a Hindu, Muslim, and local Malawian school all combined together. There are few places where Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all share the same curriculum, staff, and leadership. It was a brilliant experience. That was Africa.

We then moved on to Guangzhou in Southern China. We taught in an old age school there. That was in the mid-’90s. That was a time when the Shenzhen district was keen on distributing its goods to the rest of us. There was a time with our kids when they never knew that China hadn’t been constantly providing us with goods. It all began at that time. We were working in the private school sector there and watching it flourish.

I taught in Central London in East London, teaching in some of the tougher and more impoverished parts of the city, like Tower Hamlets. I taught around the East end and all over the place before moving down to Spain. We taught in Spain for a couple of years as a hopping point off to start Adventure Bug, our adventure company.

When did the idea come together to start this company?

Adventure Bug was brewing in my earliest days of teaching where I felt initially that I hadn’t got the travel adventure side out of my spirit to want to settle down and be a career teacher. I loved education and I still do. Fortunately, we work with a lot of schools, kids, and teachers, whether it’s doing adventure travel programs for education, staff training, or teacher training, which is brilliant. I was trying to find a way to marry those two aspects that I wanted to travel. I felt that I was naturally fairly good at putting trips together and guiding. I had the confidence to be a leader in these places. That transition from education into outdoor education, so to speak, was how it began.

Were you explicitly focused on kids then? This is a part of the story I wasn’t really clear on.

No. In fact, we weren’t. We didn’t know that there was an exclusive market for adventure travel for schools. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, it found us based on our history of being educators and working in some of these international schools here in Spain. They found us and said, “Adventure Bug, can you do a day here, a day there, or an overnight trip?” We started to create that.

We were aiming to do mostly walking and hiking tours, specifically in the South of Spain to begin with. We had sussed out that this is a really beautiful area with a wonderful climate. There was a market as well. There weren’t many English-speaking operators or adventure tour outfitters here. It was at the dawn of the Internet for travel. It was the late ‘90s. Everybody was putting these things called websites together and using email in a more sophisticated way. That’s how it began.

You were focused initially on the Spanish region. How else did you get yourself set up in terms of building the business?

We’ve got a 2-night, 3-day program that’s very regional. We bought a little minibus and communicated with hotels. The whole time, we’re learning the language too. The language was foreign to us, which was Spanish. In fact, when we moved to Spain, I was still working on my Mandarin. From living in China and I was really passionate about Chinese, I thought, “What a great language.” Maybe we’ll move back there one day. Who knows?

It happened by osmosis that as we started guiding adventure tours here and hiking, we got into biking or cycling trips because people were primarily asking me and going, “Adventure Bug, can you take us? There’s a beautiful place where there’s a canyon. We’d like to walk through the canyon,” or, “Do you do rock climbing?” All of these were part of my skillset and my qualifications but I didn’t quite know how to build them into a product straight away.

All we had to compare to to learn about what the industry is doing was to pick up brochures. Every time we were back in London, I’d go past, back in the day, Lunn Poly or the travel stores like Trailfinders, for example. I’d grab a brochure, look at it, and go, “There are multi-adventure companies. They’re doing rafting, hiking, and biking. They provide this.” We explore all these big brand names. We’re taking their ideas, creating our own Adventure Bug brand here in Spain, and pitching it out there.

We invested quite heavily at the very beginning of 2000 in web design. We all sensed that this was going to be the way to get your portfolio or what you offer out there. We’re not a booking site. We don’t take reservations, but we are an inventory. We provide, “Here are all of our products,” in every capacity. If you are interested, we will build it for you. We are that kind of tour operator.

Were you doing scheduled trips that you were looking to book people into in some capacity or was it all private stuff?

In the beginning, it was spray and pray as all startups do. We were dropping brochures into hotels and guest houses along the coast here in Spain, printing our brochures, having meetings with city halls and town halls, and saying, “We’re an English-speaking licensed travel company here in Spain. Can you help us to get exposure?” They say, “We’ll spread the word.”

This time, there are so many digital publications, which is interesting because if you want to learn about what your competitor’s doing, you can get right down to the nitty-gritty or right down to their personal reviews and even read their responses to hear how it all unfolds for people. Back then, it was really in the dark. It was fun creating a travel company in a foreign land with a foreign language at that time because it was an adventure in itself. That’s the skillset that Jules and I had. We were willing to pursue the unknown as opposed to now where there are a lot of known variables to work with.

Even the way you’re describing your early days, it’s similar to a couple of groups that I hike with here who do a mix of day trips, weekend trips,  and week-long trips, mostly in other parts of Europe. They do go to Northern Africa. They do all of their solicitation on Meetup. That’s what they use for ultimately bringing people into the group. Eventually, they get them into their own email distribution list. That’s available, but the basic crux of the business model you were describing is very similar to what these groups are doing even well into the internet era.

What’s really exciting about travel is people, by and large, are more hungry for experiences. We’re looking for experiences. If we can find something that fits our budget, fits our comfort level, and has the right community around it, whether it’s a throw-together hiking club on the weekends that could be a freebie or that’s facilitated through a local guide. It doesn’t have to cost a lot. They’re great little enterprises as well.

Matt Butler: What’s exciting about travel these days is that people, by and large, are more hungry for experiences.

Meetup is not just for hiking and outdoor travel. Those kinds of groups have made it a lot easier for people to build a group of people who are interested in doing the kinds of things that they’re running a business around. Was it tough in the early days or was it fun from the get-go?

It was fun from the get-go. That’s how we’ve always been wired. We’re one of those annoying groups of people where the glass is half-full and remains that way. We do count our blessings always. We’re so grateful. I meditate on gratitude all the time, and I always have been. It was easier as well when we started because we didn’t have many liabilities. It wasn’t a startup cost. Our 3 kids would begin to arrive 5 years later into our startup. We were in a comfortable place when we started. I didn’t have a fallback plan. I knew that I could always revert back to education. Muhammad Ali said, “There’s no falling back. It’s fall forward. That has always stuck with me and still does.

You get hurt a lot less when you fall forward than when you fall backward. There’s probably some reason for that metaphor in addition to the forward-backward thing more generally. You mentioned that in the early days of the internet, people were building websites, marketing, and their capabilities that way. I would imagine around the same time you started doing trips outside of Spain, information wasn’t super easy to come by other than in guidebooks. How did you build your knowledge of where to go, what to do, where to stay, how to navigate local cultures, and all of those kinds of things?

That drive came from what was always seeded quite deep within. That was that quest for venture or quest for learning new destinations but also following the call of our newly formed groups and returning client base that was saying, “You’re always talking about your trips in the off-season to Morocco,” for example, or, “You’re always talking about your surf trips to Portugal. Is there any good hiking there?” All you need is that little bit of leverage from people you’re comfortable with and then you start putting in that groundwork. That’s how we grew. It’s like an osmosis.

Also, I would go to these destinations and check it out. I’d do recce all the time. Even on holidays, it would be a form of a recce. I’m taking notes, meeting hotels, and establishing roots. I got my dog team out there answering to this as well. The point is that it was based on a quest from within but also from clients who were requesting new destinations, and then it snowballed. I became a very good salesman for the places that I’m passionate about. Generally with sales as well, you can tell when somebody is truly authentic and very earnest about what they believe in and what drives them that it can radiate or resonate with others. They’ll go, “Tell me more about that. Let’s fill in the details on that.”

The Importance Of Authenticity In Sales

You’ve done trips all over the place. I know you’re passionate about Morocco. We’ll come back and talk about some of the work that your foundation does down there. What are your other favorite places?

It’s a tough one. I get this question a lot 25 years into adventure guiding, designing, and leading our own trips. The one that stands out the most always is a country like India. It’s so exotic still, so vast, and so diverse in every way. It challenges me as well. I’m trying to always create the best experience for everyone there. We do have really great trips there and smooth-running trips but I still don’t feel like I’ve scratched the surface of those destinations. Morocco, yes, because of our foundation.

I like going to far-off destinations, perhaps trekking in Bolivia with groups, integrating with local cultures, flying down into the Amazon, and spending a few days down there. Places like Antarctica where I’ve led a trip to, you feel so small on this planet when you are there. You feel so grateful for what we have. You come away from that going, “We really do need to respect this planet. It’s an amazing planet.” You feel humbled and grateful.

I certainly feel that. As time goes on, I want to experience more of the natural beauty of the world. The cities are a little bit less interesting to me than they were when I was a bit younger. There are only so many cathedrals and museums you can go to in your life. There are places in the world that are so very different from where any of us spend most of our time living.

You take a place like India. I’ve not been to India. Apart from the fact it’s a country of 1.4 billion people or something like that, it’s very diverse. You’ve got a massive coastline and beach areas, and then you’ve got the areas bordering the Himalayas. There’s a lot of difference between those two and a lot of local cultures and regions that make India. There’s a lot to take in there, so I can appreciate that as many times as you might go there, it’s hard to completely feel like you have a full understanding of the country. It’s too big.

The question about what would be a favorite destination, as you were saying that and I was going through your experiences and the fact that we’ve come back from Jordan in very sensitive times with conflict all through the Middle East and we came out unscathed, touched, and warmed by that incredible society and Bedouin people of the desert, those are the experiences that are the highlights that stand out for me.

I do a lot of trips through the Mediterranean part of Europe and medieval Europe. It’s beautiful. The architecture’s incredible. The history thrives around the cathedrals, the Duomos, and the beautiful medieval towns, which gives us so much. I then would spend time in the East. I’m soon to be traveling through Thailand and that area. When you’re out in Asia, it’s so oriental. It always teaches me something, being a Westerner.

I’ll be in the Western part of the world in South America and Central America. There, they teach us something as well. What I learned from South and Central Americans is our deep connection to the forest, nature, and the concept of Pachamama, which is the mother of our planet. You’re taking away so much learning from different societies and different cultures. That’s what we thrive on.

The more places I go, the more places I want to go. That’s what wanderlust is, right?

In a nutshell.

Finding The Right Business Model

Let’s talk a little bit about being an entrepreneur and running a small business. What’s the shape and size of the business?

We still have a very small infrastructure. Our travel company and our personal development company, BASECAMP, are based on our property here in southern Spain. We have our office here, and down below, we have our storage space with our equipment such as bicycles, kayaks, surfboards, and all the usual multi-venture supplies.

In terms of our team, we have a team of guides that are primarily consultants. We’ll bring them in. When I say consultants, they’re already trained and experienced in the travel industry. They may be specialists that work in adventure depending on their qualifications and their skillset or they may be more historical and contribute more to a softer version of travel and tours.

We have specialists that work with us that will work exclusively with our kids groups in our adventure travel groups. They’re more leaning towards education. As a travel company, we can bring them in on short-term contracts and have them for the peak seasons when we need them. That’s brilliant because that allows us to be a little bit more flexible in terms of we can do winter travel projects or workshops away from this region and not have to hold up the business end and the staff here because when it’s off-season here, they go off and do other things. We can float around the planet a little bit more, so to speak.

You’ve mentioned Jules a few times. You run this business together. Husband and wife teams in business usually go one way or the other. It sounds like yours has been a positive experience.

It’s been an incredible journey and remains to be. She’s grown up in an entrepreneurial family in England, so she has experience. Her parents ran the family business together, both in the factory of engineering and then taking it home to the dinner table sometimes. She has learned how to navigate around that. It was a very cordial relationship. Their parents are in a wonderful place, retired. They have been good mentors for both of us. I’ve been able to lean in on her experience that way.

It’s the fact too that running this business from the startup here in the late ‘90s and early 2000s in a foreign country with a language we had to learn, we didn’t have any family around us, and we brought three kids into the world who went exclusively to the local Spanish schools, we were really in this together. We had to be a strong unit together. From the get-go, it was all adventure. It was all taking a chance to make it work.

What were some of the hard lessons that you learned in those early years?

I suppose when the kids were really young and our business was growing, there was more demand for this guy, Matt, or me to be out there because Adventure Bug at that time was primarily Matt, an adventure bug. Like a band would have the lead singer and the name of the band behind it, I was the central figure that would get the bookings. Until we find competent people who could step in, the name Matt didn’t matter to client groups coming from all over the world. I was forming myself out a lot and that put pressure on us as a family in a foreign land. That would’ve been one of the key ones at that time.

The Importance Of Prioritization

Have you changed your approach to running the business over time?

Yeah, only that we prioritize what is meaningful and what we can be our best at. That’s important. We’re 25 years in. We went through a stage about ten years in which we were approached by a lot of bigger travel companies. They said, “Will you do our products? Will you wear our hats and our shirts and be the face of our brand?” We did that for a long time. The only benefit of doing that when you source yourself out to a larger franchise is regular groups or regular work. Like anything in business, the margin shrinks more because they’re coming down hard and they want to maximize their profit.

We started looking over our shoulders, seeing the blind spots, and realizing two things. One, it’s not worth our time and the effort we put into these travel products that are ours. We design them and they’re bought by other companies who then benefit from it. The second thing is that we are losing control of the Adventure Bug delivery. We’re a very personalized company. Hopefully, you picked up on that a little bit on our Jordan Adventure.

I’d like to think that it’s very client-centered as a travel company. We want you to meet people. We want you to integrate with people. It’s not a bucket list tour that we offer. We’re going to hit the main attractions but we like to deviate off the beaten path as much as we can. I can’t help it. We were losing that freedom so we dropped that. We faded that part out. That was a big change for us.

Matt Butler: It’s not just a bucket list that we offer. We’re going to hit the main attractions, but we like to deviate off the beaten path as much as we can.

Are you doing any pre-scheduled trips anymore or are they all privately scheduled things with clients or groups?

We still operate for other tour operators. Those are pre-scheduled ones that the public can join on to. We’ll send them links. Regularly, we’ll get people going, “Adventure Bug, we’ve had a look at your cycle tour programs in Portugal or Southern Spain. Do you have anything going out? You don’t have any dates.” We’ll send them directly to the middleman, so to speak, so that they can join their tours, which are our tours. We still do that primarily around bicycle tours, but for the most part, we operate private group-organized tours from group leaders or other organizations that approach us.

You do some charitable work too. Can you give us an overview of some of the things that you’ve been doing over the years?

The charity industry for adventure travel has its roots in the United Kingdom. The London Marathon is a perfect example. These are primarily events that require fundraising. It’s a give-back. We were approached in the early years. Even in the first 5 or 6 years, charities were approaching us. These were big UK charities saying, “Adventure Bug, we’d like to put in an expedition. Could you give us a quote? This is what it would look like. All the proceeds will go towards a good cause.” We’d learn about that and discover how it was done.

We worked for a number of different charities and started bringing them to other destinations besides Spain. We go into Morocco or trek in the Canadian Rockies, for example. They’re very successful for these charities and rewarding for us as well. When we do them, we always shrink down our margins and do it at an operational level to give back and contribute as well. It was a win-win.

We discovered something over the years of doing them for other charities that operated in Morocco. I do this because it’s right there , The mountains of the Rif. I was putting in quite a few expeditions there with a great team from Gibraltar in the business world. What we discovered after 2 or 3 expeditions for a big charity was that the profits they were making for fundraising weren’t staying locally on the ground where we were making these expeditions. That really pulled on the heartstrings of all these fundraisers and these folks that came out and did these hard trekking challenges.

We put our heads together, myself and a few who were really passionate about doing a local project. We created our own foundation in 2008. It’s called The Rif Community Foundation, which is in reference to the Rif Mountains of North Africa. That’s different from the Rif Valley that’s on the East side of Africa. This foundation primarily serves to help in the areas of education and health all through the North Africa region that we’re associated with. We do that through fundraising projects, expeditions, outright grants, and microloans in a sense.

The thing with us is that we’re really hands-on. We don’t let any projects get going until we’ve been there, we have a chat with the local community, and there’s some paperwork to make sure that it’s fully established. It’s not something that we hand over money to and walk away from. There has to be a commitment on their part as well to pick up where the project begins. We’ve been at it for sixteen years and it has been growing and is very successful, The Rif Community Foundation.

The direct relationship, paper being passed back and forth, and a commitment that they’re making, is that the key to how you’ve made sure that the money stays in the local community, or were there other things that you found that you had to do as well?

What’s really important with nonprofits and NGOs, and bear in mind that we’re non-political, non-religious, and nonprofit, is that it’s important in the developing world to establish a local association on the ground over there. Otherwise, we’re nothing more than more Western imperialistic-type people coming in and going, “We’ve got money. We’re going to paint buildings. We’re going to fix this. It’s going to look beautiful and we’re going to leave you in peace.” We never felt in our hearts that that was making a difference. It’s the old adage about rather than providing fish for the community, provide them with the fishing rod and the tackle and show them how to use it. It’s that type of metaphor or analogy.

This is what we do. We align ourselves with local associations. We have a small management team for RIF Comm on that side. When I say that side, on the African side. We have some relentless volunteers from Gibraltar where our charity is founded and based or officially registered who are actively visiting the Rif to see that these projects are carried out the right way and ensuring that their commitment remains as strong as ours in terms of it being self-sustainable.

Making A Real Difference

You’ve got a group of people who do these kinds of trips with you and commit hours and commit their skills.

Adventure Bug as a tour operator or an outfitter, we will put in a bigger expedition every year and see that that is carried out in a safe and professional way wherever it may be around the world or in the Rif. That’s one of our nonprofit projects that we do. On a smaller scale, there are regular trips over to the region or the Rif where our projects are taking place and they’re volunteer-led by our team.

There might be a football camp that goes on or a football tournament every spring. We’ll align ourselves with our sister charity, the UK Dental Mavericks. They’re volunteer dentists and dental assistants who will go and do a load of teeth over a week-long period for children. We align that with our football tournament or else we’ll run separate mini expeditions to raise funds.

We might bring community members from here on this side of Spain, Gibraltar, and the UK. We’ll bring them over to the Rif for even a 3 or 4-day experience where they’ll attend meetings. They’ll meet the local associations like the women’s associations and visit the nursery schools that we’ve established. They can even do makeovers in the classrooms with the local kids and refurnish them so that everybody feels like they’ve rolled up their sleeves and gotten involved in the projects. Rather than that traditional photograph of shaking the hand of men in suits on that side with us handing over a check, we’re so reversed to that. We’d rather be there and contributing.

What’s different for you? What do you take away from doing this kind of trip relative to doing a pure tourism trip?

It’s that emotional attachment that you have while you are doing it, and then when you leave. It’s that sense of congruency between us and that community, particularly there in Morocco because we’ve worked so hard for sixteen years to build trust. You have to imagine that we’re coming from Europe, which is primarily labeled as a Christian realm.

We don’t have any ties to Christianity or any religion as a charity, but you can’t shake that when you go into these small village areas, they see you as how we’re portrayed traditionally in the media. We’re rich, religious, Christian, and all these things that are falsities. We ignore that and try to integrate at their level. As much as we can, we’ll try to use the local language, the local Moroccan Arabic and French.

We sit at the tables with them. We have a great time socially with everyone at every level of that community. Including the ministers of various departments like education and health, we have to establish a good relationship with them so that inevitably, they give us the go-ahead to go in and do these community projects. When you come away from all that, you feel really good that we’re doing stuff the right way, at least following our personal mission.

Your passion comes out. You were talking about the foundation on one of our long bus trips in Jordan. I sat there thinking, “This would make a great story for the show.” It was in particular the charitable work that you do that sparked the idea of setting up time with you.

Thank you.

It resonated with me when you were talking about it when we were together.

Thank you.

When you look back and think about what you’ve been doing over the years, what strengths have made you successful and what have you had to work on developing?

We’re all still on the journey as entrepreneurs. We’re evolving each decade, whether you are a startup or you’ve come out of college and then you are a startup, and then you become a parent, and then you  reach that comfort level with your business like, “I can sit back a little bit now and have a little bit less anxiety about where this is going.”

Despite volcanoes from Iceland shutting the airspace, Coronavirus, and wars in the Middle East, you tend to go, “We’ll work around it.” That’s one thing that I’ve really taken on board. I wouldn’t say that it’s completely stress-free, but it’s more like Hakuna Matata or In shaa Allah. What will be, will be. That’s a skillset that is nurtured like a good wine over the years. It grows on you.

Feedback from our client base, our community, and our friends has really helped me to understand who I am as an entrepreneur, a father, and a husband sharing a directorship of a business with his wife. That’s a big area. I do a lot of personal work on myself as well, on a daily basis that is personal development in various capacities, whether it’s through regular fitness, a good diet as much as I can, meditations, and breathing work. I’ve incorporated this for many years. That has become part of what Adventure Bug does as well on a different level with our BASECAMP portion of who we are. Those are skil sets that I’m constantly working on.

What’s ahead for you over the next few years?

What’s ahead is more downsizing and picking and choosing what is the cream of what we do. As I go into the middle of this decade towards 60, I ask myself, “What is my true skillset? Where would I be of my best version of myself with our client base and our participants on trips and expeditions? How can I create more time to be in the Rif Community Foundation as well and get back to those roots?”

I encourage people as much as possible to seek out adventure travel that has a charitable component to it where you are contributing a part of your trip funds, in other words, or resources that you bring and it goes towards a tour product in the developing world. I’d love to spend a decade leading trips for nonprofits that would benefit others.

I’m sure that certainly lines up well against the things that you’re very passionate about. Last question, when you think back on your own career journey, what final advice would you offer our audience on how to think about theirs?

First of all, this is getting quite cliche, but it is to follow what you are passionate about. If we can be examples of what we really get excited by and passionate by, then if we can create a livelihood around that and have that parallel livelihood and lifestyle flow where I have to lean towards the livelihood more at times to keep it buoyant or take time out and go back to lifestyle, it’s a lovely marriage the two to have. That begins with what your passion is.

I always say, “Combine your passion with putting it towards what is your natural skillset.” Those two passions and skillsets going together, how could that be of service? How could you put that to service, whether it’s for profit or whether it’s to maintain a livelihood? The entrepreneurial spirit, sense of adventure, and risk tolerance are really important as well. How much can you and are you willing to give towards something you truly are passionate about?

A lot of people struggle with that aspect of risk, like how much risk they’re willing to take to go out and try something and what their safety net is like that allows them to have some period of time where they can experiment from a professional standpoint. A lot of people don’t get that luxury. They have to make do every day. Even people in the developed world who are living more month to month, if you want to think about it in that sense from a paycheck perspective, don’t get that luxury. To the extent that you have the opportunity to do something that’s a bit out there, entrepreneurial or otherwise, is a luxury.

For young entrepreneurs coming up or young kids coming out of college as well, my feeling is that they really need to pay attention to where AI is going to venture us towards. Is AI going to be impacting perhaps the career that you are training towards? If so, how can you align yourself with it, or how can you benefit perhaps from this technology that’s coming in?

I know with the travel industry and the fact that we’re providers of a service, which is an experience, there’s a growing appetite on this planet where people are going, “I get it. I work hard. I’m in front of a machine most of the time and I’m lacking experiences.” You don’t have to go all that far to have an experience that breaks your routine or takes you out of your knowing that you do all the time. I’m always encouraging them, including my kids as they are school leavers going towards college and things like that, how they could be of service to others that provide experiences in the future.

The Value Of Experiences

Certainly, for me, experiences matter more than things at this point. That’s certainly something that is harder for AI to completely take away. With augmented reality and things like that, there will be a growing industry around creating augmented reality experiences but there’s no substitute for physically going to a place. Artificial Intelligence can’t completely do that for you. You can watch a video but it’s not the same.

There is something about being outdoors, being around other cultures, and being around those who have less than us. It gets us in that space of, “How can we help these communities to grow and benefit or at least have education and have tools and resources so that they can come up to the next level? It’s not up to us to decide what is the next level for them. That’s an imperialistic way of thinking as a charity co-founder. It’s about what tools these folks can use that will vastly improve their way of living, such as a well, putting up a support wall around a school, or building a classroom with a teacher’s dormitory behind it so teachers show up to work in the poorer countries. It could be small things like that.

Matt Butler: It’s about identifying tools that can vastly improve the quality of life for these communities, such as building a well, constructing a support wall around a school, or creating a classroom with a teacher’s dormitory to ensure teachers show up to work in impoverished areas.

That’s why you do what you do, and that’s why I love to travel to different parts of the world. Thank you for doing this with me.

Thank you for giving us an opportunity to share our passion as well.

I appreciate that. Thank you. Have a good rest of the day.

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I’d like to thank Matt for joining me to discuss his upbringing in Northern Canada, his move to Europe, his entry into the adventure travel business, his experiences as an entrepreneur, and his fantastic charitable work. Matt is terrific evidence that every career journey is unique. If you are ready to take control of your career and map out your unique journey, you can join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on our website for the PathWise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Thanks. Have a great day.

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About Matt Butler

Matt Butler is the Founder & CEO at BASECAMP 2XL and Adventurebug Worldwide Travel, which he co-founded with his wife, Julie. Matt and the Adventurebug team plan and lead trips all over the world, and I was recently with him on a fantastic trip to Jordan.

Matt was born 7th of 8 children in rural, northern Canada. He thrived in nature from an early age and honed his survival skills in the wilderness. Dog sledding and ice hockey were replaced by nordic ski racing where he competed at the international level. While attending university, he worked 9 seasons with Canada´s Provincial & National Park Services in various roles, including mountain rescue and guiding at the Colombia Icefield region in Jasper. He also lived in Australia and worked as a qualified teacher in Malawi, China, Great Britain and Spain before retiring from the profession and returning to his passion – designing and leading adventures.

Matt and Julie have travelled the world extensively, leading years of expeditions and tours to incredible destinations and empowering others to pursue their passions and purpose. Matt is a specialist in rock climbing, alpine summits, ski & snowboarding, cycling, surfing, nature hikes, cultural guiding and more.

He is also co-founder of The Rif Community Foundation (www.rifcom.org), a non-profit charity that delivers community support in rural Morocco, and he is a Trustee of The Kindred Project (https://www.sis.ac/community/the-kindred-project/), a student-initiated global NGO Charity. Matt resides at base camp in Andalucia, Spain with his wife Julie and their 3 children.