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National Pro Staff Director and currently oversee a staff of 15 members across the country

Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host Bruce Hutcheon and were heading to Missouri today. We’re going to talk to Mike McIntyre. Now Mike is the CS Outdoors National Pro Staff. That’s a mouthful, Mike. Kind of tell us just a little, and then we’ll talk about it. National Pro Staff Director and currently oversee a staff of 15 members across the country

Mike: Bruce, thank you very much for having me on. It’s definitely my pleasure to be here. I’m really looking forward to talking to you today and talking some whitetails with you. [Inaudible 00:00:27]

Bruce: Let’s do it. Sorry about that. I just talked over you. I’m excited on having you on the show. What is CS Outdoors, and then tell us about your position as National Pro Staff Director?

Mike: Absolutely, Bruce. CS Outdoors basically is a land and habitat management company who started here locally. We’re just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. It’s actually started by a gentleman by the name of Cory Smith. Cory and I went to high school together and got to talking whitetails after high school. [Inaudible 00:01:04], we just jumped in and started this company, putting a grand up, and basically, it’s a land and habitat management company where we basically will go into a landowner’s property and kind of help them out basically to achieve their goals.

We really put the landowner’s needs first. We focus on the landowner. If they’re looking to maximize income on the property, we have some different ways that they can do that, whether it be through timber stand improvement with a logging operation or even going through and doing a lease on their property, if they’re not into hunting themselves and they’re looking to make some income off of leasing, we can do that for them as well. So really, it’s focused on the landowner first and trying to maximize what they really want to get out of their property first and foremost. That’s kind of what CS Outdoors is in a nutshell. We can definitely go into it more later.

my role there as the National Pro Staff Director is it’s kind of the evolved over the years

Basically, my role there as the National Pro Staff Director is it’s kind of the evolved over the years, basically, whenever I started doing it. We wanted to get some select individuals to pretty much just help promote the company. Everybody knows “Pro Staff” does not mean Professional, it means Promotional. So we basically handle it, the company is in its infancy, we wanted to get some guys on board with us that could really help us promote the company through various outlets like social media or word-of-mouth [inaudible 00:02:31]. That’s really kind of what I do is I started bringing some people on board that I thought could really help benefit the company and [inaudible 00:02:40]. Right now we have a staff of 15 individuals across the country in various states that are all on our staff to help us get where we want to be and promote the company as best as possible.

Bruce: Presently, you’ve got about 15 staff members, just let’s take 90 seconds, how does somebody become a Promotional Staffer or Pro Staffer for CS Outdoors?

Mike: Absolutely. At the start of the every year, I open up an application process. I post on our social media channels, be it Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Basically, we just look for anything outdoor resume. If people are already involved in the hunting industry, what they’ve been doing, and if not, someone where they think that they can fit to be able to help us out to promote the company. Maybe they’re an outfitter or something like that, that can get word-of-mouth out to help us out. Really, the sky’s the limit. We open the application process up and just go through that. Gosh, I think last year there was 50 or 60 different applicants that put in, and we ended up bringing on 8 or 9 people last year.

Bruce: Thanks for that. And listeners, there’s a lot of opportunities out there, but hear this word, promotional versus professional. You’re going out there to promote whoever you align yourself with. They expect you to promote their products. So there’s some benefits to that, obviously. But think about, before you send an application to anybody, how you’re going to promote that specific company.

So let’s jump in and talk about some whitetails. In our warm-up, Mike, you were talking about internet scouting. Let’s talk about that for a few minutes.

Mike: Absolutely, Bruce. It’s something that in this day and age, with all the modern conveniences we have, we are able to do so much. Whenever we first start looking at a piece of property, maybe even an adjacent property that we might be familiar with, it’s really the [inaudible 00:05:01] tool that we use a lot, which is Google Earth. It’s a free resource and you’re able to go in and look at a piece of property from a satellite view of it. I’m sure a lot of the listeners …

Just keep going about internet scouting.

Bruce: You sound great now, so just keep going. Just keep going about internet scouting.

Mike: Do you want me to start back over from the start of that Google Earth thing?

Bruce: Yeah, why don’t you. It will make it easier for me to edit.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Bruce, definitely, I think we have so many modern conveniences at our disposal right now, in this day and age, that it really takes so much of the physical effort out of scouting a new piece of property. One of the things that we’ve really evolved, started doing is using Google Earth. It’s a great resource. It’s a free resource. Whenever we start looking at a new piece of property, either be it for a consultation or if it’s a piece of property we picked up to start a lease on, that’s one of the very first things we do is get on Google earth and really start scouting the property from the satellite image.

It’s such a great tool to use. You can actually see some of the terrain features. You can actually zoom in and out and tilt it to an angle where you can actually see hills that are rolling. You can kind of see where some draws are, where in a two-dimensional world, before you could never really do that just by looking at a map on a piece of paper. So Google Earth has really just turned it into an invaluable resource for us.

A prime example is a friend of mine that is on the CS Outdoors Pro Staff as well. His name is Jeff Wolf. He’s started me from Google Earth for the same reason, kind of started doing this. We went to hunt a friend’s farm down in the Arkansas border, and it’s about a thousand-acre piece of ground. A thousand acres, if you have never hunted it before, is really a tough thing to try and undertake. For Jeff to dive into that and never set foot on it before and try to establish a game plan of where we’re going to hunt, it’s tough.

Jeff was able to pinpoint some funnels and some transition areas

But through use of Google Earth, Jeff was able to pinpoint some funnels and some transition areas that he could identify just from looking at Google Earth to use. He was able to go in the very first night, the very first tree he sat in, he was able to shoot a doe out of, just because he knew enough and was able to learn enough about that property and the way that the terrain was through Google Earth to be able to have a successful hunt on the first night of ever setting foot on a thousand-acre piece of ground. It’s a tool like that, that can really afford you a lot of success.