Guide Life: Josh Teff
Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
FowlCo Outfitters has quickly become one of the nation’s top hunting lodges and destinations for waterfowlers. With the top guides in the business, it’s little wonder that they’ve grown so successful so quickly. Putting birds on the ground day after day is proving to be a common thread for the FowlCo crew. One such guide that helps make those piles happen is Arkansas native, Josh Teff.
Teff was born in Fayetteville, AR, but grew up in Springdale. Just the next town East. Having been all over the place, he still hasn’t ever left his roots in Arkansas, except for when his guiding career pulls him away to Oklahoma. His love for duck hunting started when he was in his late teens. “Before that, I had been a deer hunter. I had started hunting deer when I was 13 and then went on my first duck hunt a little later on, and that’s when I fell in love with it,” says Teff. “That’s when I started to learn how to blow a call, and how to scout and how to read birds, work birds, use a dog, and then in 2005 I really caught a break; I was working at JB Hunt and got an offer to go work for Texas Trophy Hunters Association”, and so started Josh’s first step into the outdoor business. It was a short stint, only lasting two years, which was followed by another 8 years in the trucking business.
After a much-needed escape, Teff was able to land a job at a private fly-fishing club in Northwest Arkansas. “A year into that I ended up becoming the operations manager and ran that business for the better part of 8 years, and then left in 2017 for FowlCo”, Josh says. Having guided everything from upland birds to deer, Teff is no stranger to the game of guiding. Entering his 12th year of waterfowl guiding, he makes it clear that waterfowl is his “main squeeze”.
Then, Josh was approached by Aaron Seifritz and John David Blagg about starting a waterfowl outfitting company. “It had always been a pipe dream, but I’d never really got serious about trying to do it on my own. Just because of the monetary necessity and all of that. It just seemed like too daunting of a task to pull off.” However, they were able to get the funding needed through some investors and were able to make headway with FowlCo outfitters. Soon Teff would begin his journey as a guide at one of the most premier hunting lodges in the nation.
Leading up to the creation of FowlCo, Teff talks about the process by saying, “I thought about the whole thing from the foundation and the very start of the process. What’s it going to be like when I get to FowlCo. From the moment I get off the plane, to the moment I get back on. And I’m going through that track in my brain, from beginning to end, and everything that we’re going to expose them to, from the time they get picked up, to the time they pay their final bill”. That type of thinking helped shape FowlCo into the industry leader that it is today. “I sat and wrote down every minute detail of every place they could be and everything we could do throughout that trip, and that’s how we ended up with the operation we’ve got.” However, it isn’t the attention to detail that has led to FowlCo’s almost-instant success. In Teff’s eyes, it’s the people. “We have irreplaceable people. We have people that are so good at what they do, and so good with other people, and they’re just naturally relationship-driven”. Josh says that when you come to FowlCo, you’re not just going to feel like another guy at the lodge, they’re going to take the time to get to know you and take interest in you. “It’s going to be me, Aaron, John David, and a number of our other guides sitting down, getting to know you and developing a relationship. We’re trying to build that same feeling like you’re at your duck club,” says Teff. Killing birds is a great ability to have as a guide, but being able to be social, and make connections with clients and landowners, that is just as much a part of being a successful guide. A talent that Josh has mastered over the years of guiding.
Getting things started with landowners for FowlCo, Josh believes was almost divine intervention. Having the ability to get access to some great ground, and meet other great contacts as the process continued, and make friends along the way. “Our pitch was pretty much, ‘Hey just give us a chance. We’ll pay you on time, take care of the land’ and once we proved that we were going to respect them and the land, then we had landowners calling and asking us to lease their ground”.
With all three major partners coming from guiding backgrounds, Josh took all their cell phone and email contacts of past clients he had and plugged it into a spreadsheet and some marketing software which allowed him to contact these people, and within the next two weeks, half their calendar was booked. Such is a testament to the enjoyment clients have when they hunt with these guides. “Going into year one we were 90% booked. Going into year two, we were nearly 98% booked, and coming out of last year and going into this season, we were booked solid. When COVID hit we lost about 20%, but built that back in no time with our waiting list”. FowlCo doesn’t advertise their hunts a lot, because they don’t need to. Between their massive waiting list and their extensive list of repeat customers, they aren’t hurting for business.
When asked about how hunts are divided up at FowlCo, Teff explained, “we have relationships with our clients, and we know who takes which groups out. So it’s like ‘hey that’s Aaron’s group’ or ‘hey that’s Josh’s group’ and that’s just kind of how it works itself out. Nearly every day John David and Aaron take a group and I take a group nearly every day, and we have five guides that work with us in the guide house, and of those five, two or three will be guiding, and the rest will be scouting. Then after the hunt, the clients can hunt upland, shoot five stand, or just relax at the lodge. “We try not to hunt waterfowl in the afternoon. We will on occasion, but we try to take care of the resource and not burn it up,” Teff says.
When asked if being a guide was a lifelong desire or something that came by happenstance, Josh responded, “You know, my brother got into waterfowling about the same time I did, and he wanted to go by himself or go with a maximum of 2 or 3 people. I’m the opposite. He and I are very different in that way, I’m a socialite. I love to be around people and see people smile. When I would go hunting I would try to get everyone I could to go with me. I don’t care if we had 8 or 9 or 10 guys. We’d figure out a way to hide and have a good time. And that’s one of the main things I loved about waterfowl hunting, was the social aspect of things” he says. Teff also talks about going through stages, and getting better, and getting to more advanced stages of waterfowl hunting. “I don’t want to get too poetic about it, I mean we are trying to kill a limit of birds, don’t get me wrong, but very rarely will you see us post a pile of birds we killed. Even though we kill just as much or more than most, that’s not what we’re trying to focus on. I feel like what keeps people coming back to hunting is something much deeper than that, and deeper than focusing on what you kill”. Josh mentions that it serves as a spiritual element, and an ability to get in touch with the Creator, and everything else that is out there. Teff continues by saying, “I’m not putting down anybody or bagging on the guys who are still in that ‘I gotta kill everything’ stage, but we’re just past that”.
However, don’t let the past history of guiding for ducks or deer fool you, Josh admits that if he had a free Saturday to hunt anything of his choosing, it would be wild turkeys. “I think one of the reasons we don’t guide for wild turkeys is because we’re all so obsessed with it,” Teff says. “I love it because it’s just a chess match and there’s so much interaction. My boys enjoy it too, my middle one especially. It’s something for us to do and it doesn’t feel like work”. Teff does admit that being a waterfowl guide is the hardest and most emotionally taxing job he’s ever had. “The Central Flyway has a 74 day duck season, and we hunt two weeks of goose on top of that. So you’re talking 88 days minus the holidays. So roughly 82-83 days we’re guiding a season, and there are no breaks. I know it sounds like I’m whining and complaining- I’m not- it’s just a lot of work”. As any guide can agree, there’s a reason they call it the “grind”. Teff does say, “I wouldn’t trade any of it, I wouldn’t trade a day of it, but it’s a lot of work”. But when the guide grind is over, and there are no turkeys to chase, Josh says he also loves to fly-fish as well.
“The number one thing is scouting,” Teff says in regards to the success they have at FowlCo, “If you don’t scout the birds out, and get a pattern on what they are doing, you will have zero success trying to hunt them. We typically like to let a goose feed sit for a couple of days before we hunt it. Not always, but most of the time we let them sit and get comfortable on a field, then we go in and hunt it. As far as ducks go, there’s not a ton of big open water, but there’s tons of water. There are tons of small cattle ponds and backwater sloughs, and it’s just a matter of finding them, and when we find them, they’re spread out enough that we don’t put pressure on the masses,” he says. “Number two is the hide” he goes on, “if you have a bad hide you just can’t kill birds. It’s a waterfowling cliche if there ever was one, ‘be on the X and hide good, but it’s true. You have to be where the birds want to be, and hide well” Josh says. He says that some days a good caller can help, but nothing like having the right spot and hiding well.
Lucky enough for the boys at FowlCo, they’re able to get good pushes of birds all throughout the year, and birds will hang around year-round, giving clients good odds on birds from beginning of the season to end. Josh also says that one of the benefits of Northern Oklahoma is the ability to target anything from big mallards to cacklers. “There are times when the duck numbers are low, but the goose numbers are high, and times when the goose numbers are low and the duck numbers are high. It’s nice because we’re aren’t restricted to one specific species” says Josh. “You have a bunch of different options of stuff to shoot at”.
Josh also keeps records of the last dozen seasons with bird counts and tallies to keep a mark on how well the seasons are going. This year has started off like wildfire for Josh and the FowlCo team. “I’ve kept track of the hide, the wind, the weather, the area, the number of guns, the species we killed, so I’ve got a massive spreadsheet that shows all that stuff, and I can go back and break all those variables down and see what happened on a certain day with those certain variables in this blind and it’ll tell me ‘today has been your #1 most successful hunt in this scenario’”, an extremely helpful tool to have when you’re trying to run the best guide service in the business. It’s also given them the information to know that this season, they’re on pace to have their best year yet at FowlCo.
Josh also made it clear that God and faith was a driving force behind FowlCo. And that none of this would have been a reality if it wasn’t for the divine hand of the Savior. “As much as this is a business, it’s also a mission. You know we’re not going to become a 501 (c-3), but the underlying theme in all we do is that we’re in God’s creation, and all we’re doing is by the hand of God. And we want to put that on display for people to realize,” Teff says.
After 12 years of guiding waterfowl, it’s clear to see that Josh has much to offer those that he hunts with and guides for at FowlCo. Both in the field and at the lodge. There’s a reason his talents landed him a job with such a premier hunting outfit. Whether he be out chasing central flyway cacklers, or fat Northern mallards, you can rest assured he’ll get them into the decoys.
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