Article by: Beau Martonik

A new season means new goals, personally, professionally, wellness, and of course - hunting. Many hunters set too many goals or try too many new things to do well at any of them. I was listening to a business podcast the other day - The Game with Alex Hormozi, and he discussed an approach to scaling a business from start to finish. As he talked about these things, I couldn’t help but continually relate it to becoming a better hunter and crushing goals. To keep this focused, I will relate it to hunting a new area, species, etc., but I believe it can easily be applied to many situations.

SCALE

Scaling a business is growing a company while keeping costs low and maintaining quality. It involves planning, implementing new systems, and increasing revenue without increasing expenses. Alex Hormozi broke it down into this acronym.

S = Start

You first have to start to be good at anything or accomplish a goal. Seems obvious, right? It is, but many people  (myself included) can overthink and overcomplicate things to the point of never starting. If you aim to be consistently successful in hunting whitetails on public land every year but keep thinking about the hunting pressure, the drive to the spot, or that you’ve been successful on your back 40, you may never actually start. Are those all potential hurdles? 100%. You can’t let that stop you, though.

When you break down the steps to becoming a successful public land whitetail hunter, you can’t get good at killing deer there if you don’t know where they live. Scouting is a big part of the process. E-scouting, boots-on-the-ground scouting, trail cameras, and other research methods can all be beneficial in getting started in the process. It can be less of a process when you focus on a time of year or season rather than just being good at deer hunting in general. Setting the goal of being a consistently successful rut hunter in the big woods with a bow is an example of having a focused goal. The way you’ll hunt during the other times of the year is different, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hunt those other seasons, but focusing most of your effort on a particular time of year will undoubtedly help you get better faster. The key is just to get started!

C - Compound

Compounding simply means doing more. How do you get good at shooting your bow? You shoot, and you shoot more. Regarding deer hunting, the more you scout and hunt, the better you will get. If you spend an hour looking at Spartan Forge (use code eastmeetswest to save 20% on the Spartan Forge app) or another map of an area and don’t feel like you have it figured out, that’s not out of the ordinary. Come back to it. Look at the map every day for 10 minutes a day for two weeks, and tell me that you aren’t further ahead. I can promise you that it will help you much more than doing it once. Everyone has different levels of time to commit to something, but we usually have more time than we think. Even if you don’t have a lot of time, you can still accomplish your goal, but you may need to adjust the timeframe in which you plan to complete the goal.

I look at hunting areas in a 3-year strategy because I’ve found that it takes me 3 years to know the ins and outs of an area. That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in year 1, but the odds of it consistently are much lower. Every time I scout or hunt these areas, I learn something new by doing more.

In this stage, you should be concerned about doing more and not worrying as much about the results. The more you do something, the more you will learn what you need to improve on and do better. 

It is essential to document your experiences to improve. I use the Spartan Forge journaling feature because it automatically pulls weather data for the date and time you create the journal entry. I document my findings in a simple Excel spreadsheet when analyzing trail camera data. This takes a lot of time but has proven worthwhile for me. If you are using cell cameras, some of the manufacturers, like Tactacam, have easy to use apps that use AI to help analyze the data for you!

A - Augment

Augment or do better is the stage when you start refining your approach. As you start doing more, you learn what works and what doesn’t. Now, you can start doing more of what works. For example, through your scouting, you’ve found big community scrapes on tops of the ridges in saddles to be great places to get inventory on your trail cameras, but they are also places where seemingly all of the other hunters like to hunt, too. But, you find that working backward on the trails that lead into the saddles is where you get some pictures of mature bucks in daylight. In the future, you may travel through those saddles and drop a trail camera to see what’s in the area, but you spend your time hunting the higher opportunity areas where you’ve found bucks to spend some time in daylight. You can likely replicate that approach to nearby spots and ridges with similar results. This is when you become more proficient and methodical in your approach.

Another example I have found many times is concerning elevation lines. Going into a new area, I may walk up and down the mountain looking for sign and then find some rubs, scrapes, and bedding on a specific elevation line. Typically, you can replicate that on the surrounding ridges, spend less time covering everything, and focus on areas that are likely to produce results!

The data you are compounding from documenting your progress will help you in the “do better” stage.

L - Leverage

Next, you want to look for consistencies or reliabilities in a system. This is where the off-season preparation, analyzing data, and the 3-year plan all come into play. Reviewing your notes on previous hunts and scouting missions should lend similarities and trends. Understand that abnormal weather, food sources, and hunting pressure may be outliers throwing off some of your data. Three years' worth of data will help you see better consistencies. 

Trail cameras can play a pivotal role in the leverage phase concerning deer hunting because they are your 24/7 eyes in the woods. It seems that hunters either love or hate trail cameras, and although they aren’t necessary, they can help you find consistency if you utilize the data. At the end of the year, you catalog your trail camera data and look for consistencies from year to year. In this example, I look for consistencies in dates and weather patterns more than anything else. You can apply those consistencies in dates and weather patterns to specific bucks, doe groups, general bucks, or whatever interests you. I am guilty of overcomplicating this at times. I’ve found that looking at a few significant consistencies vs. worrying about any outliers will help you stay on track.

When you find these consistencies or patterns, LEVERAGE them! 

E - Expand

Many of us love to jump to the “expand” phase too early because it’s fun, new, and exciting. The problem with going to this too soon is you never get a chance to thoroughly learn all the skills required to succeed in the previous phases and jump to something new. 

If you are just out there only to have fun and aren’t worried about the end result, go ahead and try new things all the time whenever things start to get boring. That said, if you are here reading this, I imagine you are looking for consistent success built through time. I believe anyone can find success consistently, but they want to expand too quickly to new areas, new hunting styles, etc. Once you see consistent success in an area, now is the time to expand your horizons and push into new arenas. How quickly this happens depends on your time available to put towards it. If you have a job that allows you to have a significant amount of time off, you may be able to work towards multiple goals or different styles simultaneously, but for most of us, time is harder to come by.

My Personal Experience Using the SCALE Approach

In 2022, I decided to learn how to use a muzzleloader, having previously only hunted deer with a bow and rifle. There was a learning curve to using a muzzleloader, but I knew I needed to get started. I picked up an old, unreliable inline muzzleloader for $100 and got started. I didn’t find success that first year, but I learned (and documented) about the deer I was hunting in January in that particular area and quickly realized that upgrading my muzzleloader to have more confidence in my shooting was a necessity. If I had overthought my weapon choice and the hunt itself before just getting started, I wouldn’t have known the possibilities that hunting with a muzzleloader would open up for me in the future. 

That’s the S for Start.

The following year, I picked up a new CVA Accura muzzleloader (use code eastmeetswest10 for 10% off CVA products), practiced with it, and started e-scouting the areas more based on the January timeframe. I did that consistently and more often. I had an opportunity at a remarkable 8-pt buck that year, but my muzzleloader didn’t go off. I learned a few critical things about keeping the powder dry and limiting the variance in temperature and conditions with a loading muzzleloader that I planned to improve. 

That’s the C for Compound.

Through more practice, e-scouting, and reviewing my notes, I developed a game plan to ensure the muzzleloader fired every time. I identified consistencies in where we were finding bucks at this time of year in the areas we were hunting. The big bucks liked to bed on the very top of the hills with excellent visibility of any danger approaching from below them. No access roads were on top, and cover was limited, so visibility was critical to their survival. I noted in the previous few years that the black oaks and some red oaks at lower elevations still had acorns on the ground at that time of the year. Bucks need Food in the late season to rebuild their bodies after the rut and prepare for winter.  

That’s the A for Augment.

I found consistencies and reliabilities in the time of year, season, and buck behaviors at this time of year. In year 3 (this past January), it was time to leverage and act on those lessons. There was one caveat - snow. The weather was forecasted for an unseasonably amount of snow for the area. Could that throw a wrench in my data? Yes and no. Yes, it would likely change things, but not necessarily for the bad. Based on previous experience in other hunting, I knew that the snow would likely cause the deer to be even more focused on food to build up those fat reserves, and that’s where my focus needed to be, too. During the span of the 3-day hunt, I saw multiple bucks and ended up missing one on the last day. I still have more to work on, but I’m getting better and feel more confident than in year 1. Going into next season, I know what to improve and where to focus my efforts. 

That’s the L for Leverage.

I don’t think I will expand into other seasons in Ohio until I remove other obligations in October or November due to time constraints. In short, I am not yet ready to expand, but that’s okay. I have been paying attention to other muzzleloading opportunities in different states for future hunts.

Finally, that’s the E for Expand.

Hormozi stated in the business podcast that you can tell someone’s skills by the quality and quantity of the metrics they track around a given task. You can apply the same process in hunting to maximize your time and become more efficient. Hunting is much more than becoming “efficient,” but consistently being successful is almost always a lot more fun, too.

 

If you like this article and want more information on deer hunting mountain bucks, chasing bugles in the west, and everything in between, check out the East Meets West Hunt podcast.

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