Why we are doing the Outrider thing.
After years of telling solo guys, "Sorry, full property only," Skyfall just officially changed how it books. All trips, groups, and individuals are now run through FE Outrider.
Here is the story. Stick with me.
Two slightly retarded Italians from the Bronx walk into a hunting lodge. That is the abridged version of how Tony and I met, and it is funnier than the long version. The long version we will save for another post. The point of THIS one is the partnership we just locked in, and why it matters for anybody who ever wanted to come to Skyfall but did not have a full crew to bring with them.
I will say one thing about Tony before I get into the business of what we're doing. He is one of the top humans I know. I do not throw that around. I know a lot of people. Most of them are fine. Some of them are good. A small number are great. Tony lives in a different category. The category of guys you'd hand your last hundred bucks and your truck keys to and not ask any questions because you already know the answer.
He also builds experiences for a living, and he does it better than anyone I have ever seen. What Tony has built at Outrider is something I have not seen anyone else pull off. He takes eight strangers and turns them into a crew by 9pm on the first night. Doesn't matter where in the world. Doesn't matter what they came in for. That is not a skill you can teach. That is a gift.
We have been working together for a couple years now. The thing we're announcing today, the new Skyfall + Outrider booking partnership, made too much sense not to do.
Here is why it matters. Strap in. Backstory time.
Why Skyfall has always been "book the whole damn thing."
Since day one, Skyfall has been a private-buyout property. You and your crew. The whole weekend. Eight guys max. No exceptions. No "we'll just slot you in with a group from Houston." No "trust me, you'll love these dudes." None of that bullshit.
I did this on purpose. And I would do it the exact same way again.
Here is the reason.
I have been on a hundred hunts in my life. Some of the best three days of my life happened on hunting trips. Some of the worst three days of my life also happened on hunting trips, and the difference was almost never the deer or the duck or the country. The difference was the other guys in camp.
You ever been on a trip where one guy is just a fucking nightmare? I have. Probably you have too. At this point I have a Hall of Fame, and the inductees include:
The guy who cannot shut up at 5am when everyone else is trying to wake up easy.
The guy who has been "in the industry forever" and will not stop telling you about the 178-class he shot in 2009 like it's a war story.
The guy who is drunk by 11am on Saturday and shooting at things he probably should not be shooting at.
The guy who does not tip the guides.
The guy who treats the lodge staff like garbage.
The guy whose energy is just OFF and you cannot quite name what is wrong, but by hour six the whole camp can feel it, and by Sunday morning everybody is texting each other separately, "yo, this dude, holy shit," and the trip is permanently colored by it forever.
That guy ruins the trip. Not just for himself. For everyone.
I built Skyfall specifically to keep that guy out. The whole "book the full property" model exists because I sat in a duck blind one too many mornings with a stranger I wished I had never met, and decided at some point I was not going to inflict that experience on my guests. Period. If you are paying what you pay to come to Skyfall, the last thing I want is for some random other guy's shitty vibe to be the thing you remember about your trip.
So we curated. Hard. Same group goes in, same group goes out. Whatever your crew's vibe is, that is the vibe of the property for the weekend. You bring nine of your best friends, you get a weekend with nine of your best friends. We make sure your experience at Skyfall is unrivaled. Outrider makes sure you do it with the right people.
The downside of that model? You could not come if you did not already have a crew. One or two guys looking to book a Skyfall trip got told, "sorry, full property only, find six more friends and try again." Which sucked. Because the guys reaching out solo were almost always exactly the right kind of guys. They just did not have a fully formed crew of eight ready to wire deposits in February.
That bothered me. It bothered me for a long time. I left a lot of good hunts on the table over the years because of it.
Then Tony called.
About two years ago Tony hit me up. He wanted to bring an Outrider group to Skyfall. Said he had vetted everybody himself, said the energy would be right, said trust him.
I will be honest. I was nervous as shit. The whole thesis of Skyfall was "no mixed groups, no how, no way." Now we were going to mix a group? With strangers Tony picked? On the exact property I had built specifically to NOT do that?
But it is Tony. So I said yes. We ran it as a single-trip test. One weekend, one Outrider group. See what happens, no commitments after.
It fucking SLAPPED. (blame Jeff @ Outrider for that one!)
I am gonna let that sit there for a second.
"It fucking slapped. Dinner lasted three hours because we were laughing so hard. Strangers on Friday. Brothers by Sunday. That is a Tony move."
The guides were saying afterward that it was one of the best groups they had run all year. By Saturday afternoon, a couple of the guys were already on the phone with their wives, explaining that they had just made seven new friends and were absolutely doing this again next year.
So we did another trip. Slapped again…….. Did another trip. Slapped again.
At a certain point, you have to admit you might have had something a little bit wrong.
What Tony actually does.
Here is what most people do not see about how Outrider works. Tony is not just slapping a bunch of guys into a calendar slot and hoping they do not kill each other. He spends real time on the front end of every trip understanding who you are, what you do, what kind of trip you're trying to have, what energy you bring, and what energy you would not survive being around. The matching is the whole product. The hunt is just where the matching plays out.
That is why it works. The Outrider crews that come to Skyfall are not random. They are curated. Same way I curate the property, the staff, the food, the stand placement, the food plots, the everything. Different guy, same instinct.
Once I figured that out, the partnership made itself. Tony's curation of guests, plus Skyfall's curation of property and program, equals the experience I have always wanted to be able to offer to one or two solo guys at a time, without compromising anything that makes Skyfall what it is.
What this actually means for you.
After two years of running this together, we are making it official. Skyfall now books everything through Outrider. Groups and individuals. Full-property weekends and one-or-two-guy curated drops. All of it. One door, one booking, one team running the matching on the front end.
A few things to know.
If you have a crew, you can still take the whole 500 acres. Bring six, bring eight, lock down the property for the weekend, do your thing. That option is not going anywhere. The only difference is the booking now runs through Tony and Outrider instead of through me directly. Which is honestly a better experience for the guest, because Tony does the front-end work the right way and I get to spend my time making sure the property is dialed when you arrive.
If you do not have a crew, you can finally come to Skyfall without one. This is the part that did not exist before, and the part I am most excited about. Tony will match you with a curated 6-8 person group. The kind of group that is going to make Sunday morning feel like the end of a trip you do not want to end. Solo guys, pairs, three buddies who want in but do not have a full crew, this is the door.
The bar at Skyfall does not change. The food does not change. The country does not change. The guides do not change. The only thing that changes is the front end is run by a guy whose entire profession is making sure the right humans end up at the right table.
That is the whole point of this. The trip just got better for the guys who already knew how to book it. And the trip just got reachable for a lot of guys who never could before. Both of those things matter to me, and both of them got handled in the same partnership.
Now go book it.
