#442 Deer Week – McMillan Outfitting

One whole week of talking about nothing else but deer and hunting? That’s exactly what Tom McMillan did when he decided to team up with Michael Waddell to co-host Deer Week. Tom doesn’t have much free time on his hands being a husband, father, rancher, and outfitter. Despite this, he makes time to host McMillan on Sportsman Channel where he shares honest stories about his family, his high-profile clients, and their hunts. In this episode, he shares the challenges he faced with Deer Week, including learning to work a camera and climbing into a treestand.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:

Deer Week – McMillan Outfitting – Tom McMillan

We’re going to enjoy an October trick or treat with Tom McMillan. Tom McMillan and Michael Waddell have teamed up to create something called Deer Week. Tom’s on the Sportsman Channel and Michael Waddell is on the Outdoor Channel. They’re going to have a whole week of nothing but whitetail, the good, the bad, and the ugly, if you will. You’re going to have to watch the show. Tom promised me that there’s going to be plenty of laughs. Tom is a guy that never left West Central Kansas. A lot of people graduated from high school and went ahead to the big city, Wichita, Kansas City, or Ember. He stayed home because he liked the lifestyle. He liked ranching, riding horses and growing wheat. He loved hunting the whitetail deer in his county, so that’s what he did. He’s carved out quite a lifestyle for himself. He’s a personality on the Sportsman Channel, he has McMillan Outfitting. He has a family. He grows crops and runs cattle. He’s a busy guy, but he sure loves what he’s doing. You’re going to find out, as I did, he’s got a big sense of humor.

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I’m visiting with Tom McMillan. He runs McMillan Outfitting in Kansas, someplace south of interstate 70. Having said that, Tom, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It’s good to be here.

There’s something called Deer Week. He and Michael Waddell are the co-hosts. Tom, let’s start right off. Let’s promote what you’ve already done, what the show’s all about called Deer Week.

Deer Week, I consider it a celebration of this tradition and the sport that we all know and love well, deer hunting. It’s not necessarily just whitetail hunting, mule deer hunting and everything. This is a celebration of deer hunting, all the history and heritage behind it. With that goes deer hunting stories, stories about deer hunting camp. We decided to get together, it wasn’t my idea. It was Outdoor Sportsman’s group, they asked me and Michael. Michael and I have been buddies for a long time and he’s hunted deer with me several years. They asked him to be the host on the Outdoor Channel since that’s where his shows are featured. They asked me to be the host on Sportsman Channel where my show, McMillan is featured. Obviously, neither one of us, Michael and I, had to think about it too long. Does it celebrate deer hunting? Of course, we’ll do it and that’s what it’s about.

Everybody gets to send in their favorite episode, might not necessarily be the episodes from this television season, it might be one from the past. They get a lot of correspondence with the people that watch the networks through social media, ask them questions about what their favorite deer hunt was or maybe what their favorite recipe for venison is, talking about gear, tips and tactics and things to do or not to do. It’s a group effort by a lot of people in the spotlight, this awesome sport, and this great tradition of deer hunting. It’s going to be running simultaneously on both networks and Michael and I have already pre-tape some promos for it and commercials. It’s all about deer hunting.

What are the channels again, please?

Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel. Even on Dish Network, if you don’t normally subscribe to Sportsman, they’ve got a free preview going on. Even if you don’t get it, if you see this, if you hear about it, you’re still going to be able to see it. Both networks are doing it at the same time. Michael doesn’t have any show on Sportsman, I don’t have a show on Outdoor Channel but the promos are going to cross-promote and be seen on both.

I put out some posts on social media. We’ll go up to promote it. We’re doing what we can to help these guys because Michael Waddell and Tom McMillan, they’re pretty much known in the industry for who they are, how they hunt and how they relate to everybody, it’s a cool thing.

I can speak for Michael. We hope that we can relate to the common everyday hunter. A lot of people would consider Michael a professional hunter, that’s what he’s built his career. I do not consider myself a professional hunter in any way. I consider myself a guy that grew up working every day and doing a lot of different things to make ends meet and my life took me towards where I’m sitting here today with you. Part of my livelihood is made in the hunting industry, it started years ago when I decided to start McMillan Outfitting and start guiding hunts and that evolved into other things like buying and selling hunting real estate.

It eventually evolved into a television show, it’s on the Sportsman Channel, and I get to do things like host Deer Week and be on this podcast. I’m not a professional hunter, I’ve spent my life doing it but I’ve got a lot of other items in the fire too. We farm, we ranch, and we run a cowherd and deal with a lot of horses. Hunting is a huge part of my life for sure, but a professional hunter, I’m not. I try to do it right, I try to do everything I can to do it right but I’m lucky enough to know some professional guys and be in their circle sometimes.

Let’s switch it up. A lot of people think Iowa has the biggest buck. I’ve got one friend that hunts Kansas and he kills big bucks, 180-plus deer. Every year for the last few years, he’s been hunting deer. Has he got them? No, but I’ve got the trail camp pictures of the deer. He was there. They didn’t show up. Let’s talk about what makes Kansas whitetail healthy. People think of Iowa. They’re going to go to Iowa, Wisconsin doesn’t do badly, and I hunt Buffalo County up there. There’s something that I like about Kansas because it’s not your typical “agricultural land” like we have in Wisconsin and maybe Iowa or maybe the Illinois area. Let’s talk about that for a little bit.

One thing that sets Kansas apart, first and foremost, is the perfect blend of genetics, habitat and cover, and food source. If you have one of those three ingredients missing, you’re only going to be able to get so high up on the ladder of what your deer herd can be. You’ve got to have good genetics to start with. You’ve got to have enough cover and low hunting pressure to let the bucks get over and you’ve got to be able to feed them good. Kansas has a good mix of all those things naturally. That’s one reason over the last several decades, Kansas has increased in its ability to produce big bucks and produce trophy quality bucks at a younger point in their life. One thing that I’ve seen in my life when they implemented the CRP program, the Conservation Reserve Grass program with the government, was to take some agriculture acres out of production. They weren’t making as many bushels of grain and then driving the price of the grain down, that was one the reason for that.

The other thing was to stop soil erosion on some of the sandy soil we’ve got. The byproduct of the CRP program that they had no clue, I don’t think what was going to happen with it was it allowed many big bucks to get older. Not because it’s a food source, they don’t eat the grass but they bed in it and it’s their home. Any 100-acre to 200-acre to 300-acre field of this CRP grass that gets six feet tall, about every single one of those tracts of land will produce and hold a mature whitetail in this part of the country. He beds there, he lives there, and he can stand up and be half a mile from probably 2 or 3 different food sources. If he can survive a few years, you’ve got a trophy class animal. That’s not to take away at all from other Midwestern States that I know, that everybody knows have phenomenal deer hunting, Iowa, I can say, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, the list goes on and on.

They all have those things in common. They have good genetics to begin with. They can feed their deer and the deer are allowed to get old, get some age on them. One other thing that sets Kansas apart and maybe not better but more user-friendly is it’s open enough terrain in a lot of Kansas. I’ve always thought that the deer here are more hunt-able. If you’re hunting a tract of land, let’s say it’s 1,000 acres of woods with no funnels and no pinch points, those deer are going to be harder to hunt. That terrain exists in Iowa, Ohio, Missouri, to where it’s acres of solid woods. They’re dropping acorns and the deer feeding on grasses. It’s like, “How do we hunt? They’re here but we can’t get them where we need them to get them killed.” In Kansas, the deer has enough wide-open diverse terrain that they have to expose themselves a lot, especially in the winter months when it gets cold, they have to feed earlier in the day, they’ve got to stay out later in the morning, they’re exposing themselves a lot of the times. I have always considered Kansas a state that is more hunt-able, if that makes sense.

It does. There are 1,000 acres of farm that I’ve been hunting for years, maybe it’s 500 tillable but all of the rest are woodlots. You said something about pinch points and funnels. The last buck I shot there, he was coming down. There’s an escape route and he comes off the ridge. He dives down for 200 yards. He falls into this tight coulee draw, if you will. We’ve shot a lot of bucks there because that’s the funnel on the north side. On the south side of the road, there aren’t funnels and pinch points. You’ve got to figure out where the heck they’re coming. They don’t have to come that way where you get your stand unless they want to. There’s no terrain, geographic formation that going to push them to pinch points and funnels. Thanks for that, because I’ll be heading there soon. I’m going to say, “Let’s think about this.”

Deer will travel fence lines. They will travel on the lower ground rather than crossing over the top of hilltops. Share on X

It’s not just me, anybody can easily learn it, you think, “How do you funnel a deer in the wide-open spaces of Kansas?” There are a few tricks or things that you can figure out and pay attention to. Deer will travel fence lines. Especially the older bucks, they will travel lower ground, rather than crossing over the top of hilltops a lot of times where crops come together. Deer are browsers they like a lot of different kinds of food, you can find where an irrigated circle of alfalfa meets another food source like wheat or whatever. They’re going to travel as little as they can to get as many different varieties of food as they can every night. Sometimes you can funnel the deer to you. Sometimes you’re better off watching where they funnel themselves naturally and hunt them that way.

Let’s talk about long-distance scouting. Your guides, yourself will go out, take your spot scope and hook it to the window and sit there for a while, because you know the movement and you’re looking for Mr. Wonderful like the buck you got on the wall there. Do you use that technique a lot or not so much? Talk to me about that.

I’ve countless hours and countless miles driving. We’re driving these sandy dirt roads in the evenings looking at our spots and seeing what the deer are feeding on now. Their food patterns do change throughout the year. Scouting for me starts in about the middle of the summer towards the end of July, I don’t put out any trail cameras until about the end of August. Why take pictures of them if you don’t even know what they are yet, if they’re not done growing horns? A lot of times in the middle of the summer, the deer are hidden.

The green soybean fields, that seems to be their number one choice of food. The green or the beans, more likely that field is going to fill up with deer in the evenings. We do a lot of our scout in front of the vehicle. You use the public roads, the dirt roads and you watch the soybean fields and see what comes up in the evenings. As those soybeans mature, like we are doing in this time of the year and they get brown and die and get ready to be harvested, the deer move on to something greener and lusher and now people are planting wheat. Where there aren’t deer feeding today, there will be deer feeding in the next month when that green winter wheat is coming up and with milo, the milo changes.

I see deer feed on milo two different times, when the milo heads are becoming mature and they’re turning from the summertime green to the harvestable hard grain milo of red, right there in that doughy stage. The deer go to that food source at that time and then they’ll come back standing around on cut milo if it gets cold in the wintertime because they need those carbohydrates. To get back to your question, we do a lot of our scouting from the truck, watching, glassing and not disturbing any areas. As the year progresses and hunting season goes on and the food sources change, we’re doing the same type of scouting from the truck in different areas where those food sources are.

I have been living out in Colorado as they do. I find where I want to go and I can look a mile away if I have the right glass with me or more. Many people want to drop down into the basin and try to figure it out rather than sitting there. If you got a five day, eight-day hunt, it doesn’t matter. You spent three days doing nothing but scouting, absolutely nothing but scouting. You leave your bow in the truck, unless somebody commits suicide, you might want to have your bow with you. Having said that, I try to tell a lot of people, “You sit there and you watch.” That’s all you do. If you don’t see anything in the morning, noon, it’s because elk and mule deer do move a lot. They do bed but you can see them because they get up and scratch off their bed and lay down again. When you think about that, once you pinpoint and say, “How am I going to hunt him?” You can figure all that out, you haven’t even touched the ground, you get your map, figure it all out and then next morning you go in and get into them.

Are you going to get them? I have no idea but at least, you know exactly where they are. You haven’t walked ten miles, twenty miles or whatever. Why I mentioned that is I’m trying to share the knowledge in Wisconsin because there are many ridges. In the farm we hunt, I sit on one ridge in the morning or afternoon or evening, I can tell you exactly what’s coming out. The food sources, that change all the time and if nothing’s there I say, “They’re not on the alfalfa fields, they’re not going to come to it, for whatever reasons.” The next morning you go out and you take another parking spot, you sit there and watch and all of a sudden you see something come out, you get your glass and go, “That’s interesting,” and you put a mark on the map or in your book, your journal.

I’m trying to share that I do ask people all the time about long-distance scouting. Nine Finger Chronicles, Dan Johnson, he sets up observation stands. He’ll set up an observation stand because he wants to get away from the road or whatever, but he’ll set that up and he’ll be looking as far as he can see, a quarter-mile, half a mile and he’ll watch. He doesn’t move on a buck until he sees them a couple of times, he patterns them and then he does a run and gun technique. He goes in the night before the buck comes through, he goes up, puts the stand and get the heck out of there, goes back in the morning and then he says, “I’ll either take them in the morning, at noontime between 10:00 and 2:00, or I’ll take them in the evening or I’m out of there.” He’s hunting mature bucks, that’s it. He’ll take his stand down and he’ll do it all over again until he gets on the right buck and the buck makes a mistake and he’ll harvest it.

I agree that scouting should be more observing than disturbing and I learned that the hard way. I remember back when I was 10, 12, 13 years old, you thought you were doing some good by getting in the bedding areas, looking around and you could see where the trails were and the scrapes, rubs, beds and you thought you were in their nest, in their home which you were. It was a huge mistake. You can almost picture where the deer were and how they were acting when nobody is watching them but I learned the hard way that that is the last thing you want to do. If they’ve got a sanctuary or bedding area that you know that they’re going to, by all means, stay out of it. I’ve got leases that I’ve never stepped foot in the bedding area unless we have to go in after a deer that someone has shot or that I shot. It’s fun to be able to see that stuff and go, “This is what it looks like in here and yeah, there are a lot of signs.” I try to preach, hunt the perimeter. If you can stay out away from where the deer live, the perimeter of their nest, watch their habits and watch where they’re going so you know where to be, then you’re going to disturb less and most likely have more success with it.

How many yards away do you like to set up from a bedding area?

If we’re scouting or if we’re watching, close enough to see and be able to tell what I’m looking at. It doesn’t do you a lot of good if you’re far away that you’re looking at a buck and you can’t tell if he’s 2-years-old or 6-years-old. As long as you can not disturb, it doesn’t matter if you’re a couple of hundred yards away. In certain situations, either it’d be a high point on a riverbank, to where are you can be within a close shot of a deer and see everything. If they’re not smelling you, if you’re not disturbing them, it doesn’t matter how close or far away you are.

The absolute most important thing that I ever consider to think about when it comes to whether scouting or hunting, putting up the stand or whatever, is wind. It’s the wind direction, what it’s doing, what it’s going to be doing. If the wind is wrong, don’t risk it because I guarantee you cannot beat a mature whitetail’s nose 100% of the time. I feel that man today cannot make a product that will eliminate your scent, because you’re making scent all the time, your breath or your sweat or what you had for lunch yesterday, whatever. There are products out there that do help. We all know that. I’m going to be the first guy to stand up and say, “Wait a minute, you said your product 100% of the time eliminates human odor. I’m going to have to call on that because it’s impossible.” The only way we can fight that is to play the wind and to make sure that the wind is in our favor, all the time.

Let’s switch it up a little bit. Tom and I were talking about guest etiquette. It’s simple. You go to a place. You book with Tom, you show up. I’ll use myself and I go, “Tom, I’ve sat in the stand twice and I saw the buck coming across the ridge, why don’t we move the stand?” You look at me cross-eyed and we’ll have a little chit-chat. Let’s unpack that a little bit because that’s important. To all of the readers, they dream about going to Kansas or Iowa and hiring somebody not DIY but say, “I made a couple of bucks and for once I want to shoot a 180 or 150 buck. ,” Let’s leave it on a mature buck. They come in and it goes crosswise a little bit, let’s share from an outfitter’s point of view your thoughts.

Honestly, it can be a tricky subject because a lot of people in the world put in their homework and they do their time and they pay attention and they learn and they’re great hunters and they do the research. It’s hard sometimes for people that have hunted their entire life, consider themselves knowledgeable, which they are, to go and relinquish all of that and put it into somebody else’s hands and say, “Get me on a deer.” That’s hard to do sometimes because they might know in the back of their mind, it’s not the way they do it at home, which is fine and dandy. My point is, if those discussions ever come up between myself and the client, I need to be open to suggestions too.

Let’s talk about it. Let me explain why the stand needs to be where it’s at. That might be because it’s the easiest to access, that might be because the majority of the time the wind is right for why that stand is there. It might be because for the last twenty years we’ve had success out of that tree and we’ve killed a lot of deer or it might be, it was the best tree or whatever. I don’t have the time or the extra energy to slap up stands and put them someplace that may or may not produce a good hunting opportunity, that’s wasting everybody’s time including my own. When I go about it, I set up every stand thinking, “What is our highest success rate?” Where’s that stand going to be needed to be put to have our highest success right throughout the year? That comes from decades of watching these deer here and making a lot of mistakes, hopefully learning from some of those mistakes, knowing the history of what has worked in the past.

When people come and they say, “I don’t feel it, it’s not working out for me. I don’t like that setup,” or, “I don’t like this setup. That stand is too high or too short, we want to move it.” Rather than moving that, let’s get you in a place that you feel better about. I had to learn from some of my clientele over the years, approaching me that way, I had to learn how to be a good client myself in other places. I go on several hunts a year with other outfitters for elk, or antelope or whatever else, out of the state of Kansas. A lot of times they’ll say, “What do you feel about tonight?”

Scouting should be more observing than disturbing. If they've got a sanctuary that you know that they're going through, stay out of it. Share on X

I say, “I’ve chosen to trust in you as my outfitter and guide. I’ve paid for you. I made the trip, why would I start second-guessing you now? I trust you enough to write you a check and to come here to hunt with you, so I’m going to continue. You know the land. You know the area.” That’s all an outfitter is going to ask is, “We’re not throwing up tree stands and putting out blinds for our exercise.” A good outfitter won’t because our business depends on clients having success. If you’re a songwriter or a singer, it doesn’t matter how many good songs you’ve got stuck away on a recording track somewhere. If you’re not having success now, nobody’s going to hear that stuff.

My point is if our clients don’t have success every year, nobody’s going to want to come next year. Our job depends on our client’s success. Good outfitters are going to put a lot of time and effort and thought process into where those stands are going to go. Whenever this discussion comes up for somebody like yourself, I think of a guide, I won’t say his name because he might be watching this. He was a hunter that I had years ago. He showed up in the driveway. It was the first day of his hunt, got out of his rental car. I’ve never met the man before, I talked to him through the phone, through emails and he introduced himself and he said, “Tom, I’m probably the best bowhunter you’ve ever met.”

He was dead serious, maybe he was but I said, “Really?” I said, “I finally got to meet the best bowhunter in the world.” I said, “Perfect, another expert.” I said, “Come on into the lodge, we’ve got a whole lodge full of you guys.” I was jabbing him and I was kidding but my point was that’s the wrong way to start off. To be honest, him having locked in on that attitude, he was telling other hunters in camp what they were doing wrong. If somebody else shot a deer, he was saying it was too young of a deer or they made a marginal shot and got lucky. By about day three, I had other clients coming to me saying, “Tom, as the outfitter and the head of this operation, you need to do something about this guy or we’re going to hang him from the rafters of the lodge by tomorrow morning.” We had to have a sit-down and have a little heart-to-heart and I said, “You chose me as your outfitter, you paid me. You made the trip from five states away and then you get here and you tell everybody including myself what we’re doing wrong and that we don’t know how to hunt.”

He was from West Virginia, I said, “How can a guy from West Virginia, that’s never been in Kansas, know what the whitetails are going to be doing in my county? How could you possibly know what’s going on here?” It was an eye-opening experience for him. I will never forget the conversations I had with that guy. It was seen by all. I don’t think I was being too much of a hardass on him because my other clients were going, “We’ve got to do something, stick a sock in his mouth or something, or we’re going to strangle him.” My whole point is to keep an open mind. If you’re an outfitter too, nobody knows everything, you can learn from clients. If everybody keeps an open mind and communicates about it, and trust in your outfitter, he wants you to tag out. If he wants a job in the future, if he wants to continue to do what he’s doing for a living, he wants you and he needs you to have success. I’m not saying that every single person out in the world sees it that way but I sure do, 100%.

The only thing I’ll add to that, I learned this long ago from a ranch here in Colorado when I first met him and hunted in his ranch where he said, “Bruce, you can come here for ten years if you’re a good hand. If you’re not a good hand, I’ll fire your ass.” He was a straight-up cowboy, he looked me in the face and said, “You make the decision, it’s here but you got to be a good hand.” What does that mean? I have no idea. Tom knows and I’ll let people know because I’m not a rancher, never was a rancher but I’ve spent enough time with them and I’ll never forget that.

What he was getting at is you’ve got to be a steward of the land. You’ve got to be willing to help him out. Jump out, get the gate, and make sure if he let you go on your own, you open the gate, you shut the gate behind you so his cattle don’t get out and run down the road or go over to the neighbors. You don’t drive out across his ranch and leave muddy ruts and you don’t leave your trash out, common sense stuff. If you can get out there and take care of yourself and take care of the land and his livelihood, that means you’re being a good hand and a good guy to have around. If you’re talking about ranchers and farmers, you are interrupting their livelihood. They’re providing hunting for you, whether you pay him or it’s a favor or whatever. Deer hunting, believe it or not, that’s a resource. If it’s not the land owner’s resource, it’s a resource from Mother Nature, for all of us to enjoy. You got to be mindful and you’ve got to be respectful and take care of what’s taking care of you.

Let’s talk about McMillan Outfitting, where you are. If a person wants to come and visit muzzleloader, rifle or bow, what does it take and what should they expect?

I started this operation in the year 2000, right here in the county where I was born and raised. When I grew up, I’ve always been absolutely fascinated with Mother Nature and being outside and hunting and fishing in the outdoors, everything. All of my friends were smart, we grew up hunting together but the second we graduated high school and even college, they couldn’t wait to leave and go get jobs in the big city and I was the exact opposite. I couldn’t wait to get back home so I could go hunting. Some of them leave the city and come back and hunt with me.

My point is that I can never pull myself away from the hunting that we have here. My operation, McMillan Outfitting is four miles up the road from where I was born and raised. My family, my father and mother still have cattle operation and still farm right down the road and all around us right here. I remember in the year 2000, there was no outfitting around here. It was unheard of. I had heard that word, we had to look it up we’re like, “What is outfitting? What is an outfitter? Why they’d called that?” If you’re out hunting with somebody, why call them an outfitter? It was my wife that said, “If you’re going hunting every day and as soon as you tag out, you’re taking a friend, or a friend of a friend with you and trying to help them.”

She said, “There’s a thing called guiding. Why don’t you take whoever you can take and charge him for it?” I said, “That is an awesome idea. I’m glad you thought of that.” A roundabout way is that what got me into guiding. Our priority is whitetail. When we started out, I tried to grow the business as much as I could and I had three full-time guides for about 3 or 4 years. We did everything from upland bird hunts to waterfowl hunts to turkey hunts in the spring, predator hunts in the offseason, whatever we can do to expose the name and the brand and get people in. Things evolved and I realized that I could be more efficient with controlling things more, keeping a hold of the lease acres that were premium, calling down my client lists. We don’t take many deer hunters a year. I want because of McMillan Outfitting the deer hunting to be as good or better than it ever was.

We have to control the amount of access that we allow hunters to go on our properties. It evolved into one thing after another and it evolved into a television show. When the idea about the out television came up, I thought, “It’ll be easy because the cameras are just going to follow us around and film what we’re already doing.” That proves right there how ignorant I was to media, television and everything about it. I had to learn the hard way about how much production and everything that goes into it, managing people and schedules with filming and editing and all this stuff. It still does go hand in hand with the hunting operation with McMillan Outfitting.

It’s neat for people that might be from Louisiana or Florida or Missouri or anywhere in between that watch hunting shows and they get to see other people go to other places and hunt and have their story told. Now, people can come here to McMillan Outfitting, we film their hunts and they look forward to going back home in a few months or a year later and watch it with her family and having their kids watch them on TV and the deer they got or didn’t get or whatever. I always called it the revolving door of McMillan Outfitting, all the people that come in and out and hunt with me.

It’s a way to expose their stories and show what they do for a living, how they hunt and their experiences here. It does still go hand in hand, although when you’re throwing a full camera crew of 2 or 3 guys, my day is getting a little bit longer by the time I get up about 4:00 in the morning and some night I get to bed at midnight. By the time the end of rifle season rolls around, I’m ready to hibernate for a while. That’s not a complaint at all because I’m lucky to get to do what I do, I’ve made a job out of deer hunting, to be completely honest, how could anybody ever complain about that?

I was thinking, do you set up double sets for the film crews?

Every single one of my sets, I honestly don’t even know how many three stand setups I’ve got. I use the Family Tradition Ladder stands. They last forever and they’re safe. Every one of my sets in a treestand set up is the same. We put up a ladder stand first, and then I’ll put a walk on cameraman stand above it so that way we’re not limited. Whichever way the wind’s blowing or if we see a buck in the morning go into this scrape line, I’m already going to have a set up in there and stick a guy in there, put a cameraman with him and that way we can hopefully get it on film. Every single set up of mine is a double.

Good for you because that goes into planning. All of a sudden, they go, “I got a lot of stand up, but we can’t get the cameraman in, we have to go in early.” That blows up.

You cannot beat a mature whitetail’s nose 100% of the time. Man cannot make a product that will completely eliminate your stamp. Share on X

You have a choice to make. We still do treat people’s hunts as the priority. It takes precedence over the filming. If we get it on film, great, that’s going to be cool to be able for them to watch and see for the rest of their lives and show people. Still, they’ve paid for a hunt, we’re not going to botch a hunt as to get it on camera. I always tell them, “We’ll film the next one.” Especially on a mature buck, you’ve got to take him when you have the opportunity because they don’t come around every day.

If you want to share or if you don’t, what’s your average rate rifle, muzzleloader or archery for five days?

My hunts are $6,500 for a five-day hunt, no matter if it’s a bow, rifle, crossbow, muzzleloader or whatever it is. That’s with meals and lodging included. This is my hunting lodge right here. Our normal routine is we’ll get everybody gathered up about 5:00 AM. Myself and the people that would help me, we’d get them out to where they’re going to go. They grab a coffee, a granola snack or whatever they can find in the morning when we leave in the dark. I gather everybody up about 10:00 AM, bring them back to the lodge and the rut hut. The girls make unbelievable home-cooked breakfast for them and give people a chance to call home or get some work done on the computer, take a nap, watch the game. We’re back out about 2:00 in the afternoon, hunt until dark, and come back in again in the evenings. I learned a long time ago that a bad day of hunting could be made up for with some good cooking.

A beer, wine, or whiskey, too.

There might be some of that from time to time. That’s part of hunting camp, it’s a camaraderie, talking about it and celebrate hunt and the toast and the congratulations to when somebody does good. You’ve got to sit around that campfire. If you have a glass of wine or a beer with it, it helps people elaborate or lie a little bit more about the one that got away. Everybody gets the liar circle, that fire ring out by the lodge is the liar’s circle.

You should have a hidden microphone and camera and see what happens. That would be a great show, in my opinion.

There’s no network we could put it on. Maybe we need to make that network. All the BS that goes along, behind the scenes that everybody can show anywhere else.

Unscripted or whatever.

That’s what we do here and we’re lucky to do it. We try to make sure everybody has the experience, not just to deer hunt. We’ve guided people from 34 different states in all walks of life, some celebrities, some people that, this was their one vacation for the year and it doesn’t matter who you are and what you do, we try to treat everybody the same. My job is to get you close to a mature deer and my job starts a long time before you show up and isn’t over until you’re gone. It’s a fun thing to get to do. I never get tired of learning from these whitetails, they have always fascinated me and there’s still a lot to learn. The thing that keeps me going is, I never get tired of when does come together and we’d get that old mature buck outsmarted. All the hard work that’s gone into it gets paid off. That’s what keeps me going. That’s what makes the 4:00 AM alarm okay to deal with it.

Do you want to give some shout outs to your sponsors and supporters?

Some of my main sponsors are PEAK Antifreeze, BlueDEF diesel additive, Herculiner truck bed liners, Realtree. Ruger firearms, they’re a great sponsor, American-made. Elite Archery, I’ve been with Elite Archery for years. Yeti coolers, B&W Trailer Hitches, the list goes on and on. That’s some of my main sponsors. I’ll tell you what, the ones that probably don’t get the recognition are my family, my friends that help. They have to hear my complaints and put up with me when I’m tired and grumpy and make this outfit run like a well-oiled machine. Those are the ones that I need to thank, my clientele, people like yourself that give us a platform to talk about what we do and circle back around this conversation to Deer Week. Deer Week is about being able to express and enjoy and celebrate this beautiful thing that we call deer hunting.

How does somebody get ahold of you?

By the arm. That was a joke.

I’m laughing.

Now would be a good time to laugh. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, @TMKansas. To book a hunt or inquire about a hunt, you can email me through McMillan Outfitting at McMillanOutfitting.com and that’s the best way. I respond to every email. I can honestly say that sometimes it might take me a few days to get back to everybody, especially when hunting seasons going on. If you get an email from McMillan Outfitting, it’s me typing it up. I appreciate all the interest and the chance to talk about what we love to do.

Let’s wrap it up doing more promo for Deer Week from the Sportsman Channel. You’re on the Sportsman Channel.

Everybody needs to start tuning in on October 15th in the evening, every evening for that week, Deer Week, #DeerWeek. You can correspond with a lot of people in the networks, bagging your Tweets and your Facebook posts the #DeerWeek. If you’re not sure if you get the networks or not, you can go to both websites for the Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel, there’s a place you can type in your zip code and it will tell you how to get the channels. This is something that everybody needs to tune into. We’re going to have a lot of fun, share a lot of tips and tactics, a lot of hunting stories about hunting camp, the ones that got away, and the ones that didn’t get away. It’s going to be a real celebration and I’m looking forward to it.

Tom McMillan, on behalf of thousands of followers of Whitetail Rendezvous podcasts across North America, this has been a pure joy. Everybody told me, “Tom’s funny.” You got me by the arm.

I could have been writing some jokes down. I would have worn a clown nose or done this a little bit more. One thing I always try to preach is, hunt hard but have fun. I’m pretty much always a goofball, but what I do take pretty seriously is chasing deer. If you get me on the deer subject, some of that goofiness I hope goes away because I do get passionate about what goes into killing whitetails.

About Tom McMillan

When asked what the most important thing to him is – with regards to his hunting career, he will reply “To NEVER lose sight of the fact that hunting should be fun, even though it is now a business”. http://www.thesportsmanchannel.com/shows/mcmillan/

“To me, trophy is a relative term,” he continued to Frazee in that interview. “The score of the deer’s antlers isn’t what motivates me. It’s the challenge of hunting that specific animal that I have set my sights on.” http://mcmillanoutfitting.com/

Viewers of McMillan’s popular TV show can vouch for that, thanks to the reality nature of the production that provides an honest – and at times, humorous – look into the life of a family man, rancher, hunter, guide and TV show host.

As season five of MCMILLAN unfolds on Sportsman Channel, McMillan has some interesting episodes in the works including the challenge of learning to be a cameraman, traveling with Waddell for some out-of-state hunting, guiding clients, and oh yes, maybe even climbing into a treestand himself.

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#442 Deer Week – McMillan Outfitting – Tom McMillan

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