Will Bamber
Pro Racing Driver & Co-Owner, Family Hunting Safari (New Zealand)
Fifth-generation New Zealand safari host and professional Lamborghini racer who grew up hunting from horseback and now gets his kick watching guests take the red stag.
- Hunting Safari Operations
- Professional Motorsport
- Small-Team Software Systems
- Data-Driven Trade Shows
About Will Bamber
What Will built
Lives a deliberately multifaceted life. Will is a professional racing driver — currently in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo championship plus a GT championship in North America — after growing up racing go-karts in New Zealand and spending five years racing professionally in Asia before moving to the United States around COVID. He's also the fifth generation behind his family's New Zealand hunting safari, a former sheep station the family has held for well over a century and turned into a red-stag operation in the early 1980s. On top of both, he builds the company's software himself — a cloud ERP/CRM and the automations that let a roughly six-person core team run like a much larger one.
Will in the field
Grew up hunting from bikes and horseback on the family's remote ranch from the age of two or three, in a New Zealand town of about 40,000 people. These days he barely pulls the trigger himself — he says he gets more of a kick out of seeing animals in the wild and watching guests take the trophy. Knows the land's numbers cold (red stag is 71% of the business), grew up shooting 50 to 100 possums a night and plucking them for their wool, and counts the possum and wallaby — not the 700-inch red stag — as the biggest draws on the trade-show booth.
Why this conversation matters
Will is the rare hunting-lodge owner who's also a serious operator. He talks openly about building a cloud ERP for a tiny team, using AI to strip the admin drag out of invoicing and client research, and why data — not gut — now drives which trade shows the family works and which trophies they manage for. Underneath all the systems is a culture his father Paul built: people first, fundamentals first, and relationships that outlast any single hunt. The throughline he keeps returning to is that a multifaceted life actually lowers the pressure and raises his performance — on the track and on the land.
“From our land, it's genuinely very pleasurable to see the animals and watch guests appreciate them. I get more of a kick out of that than personally pulling the trigger anymore.”
Will Bamber on The Hunt for Success
Sam McGough's full conversation with Will, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Key takeaways from Will Bamber
The ideas Will left on the table in episode 06.
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People first, systems second — do the fundamentals well.
Will is blunt about it: take away all the software and automations, and if you just do the fundamentals well, you'll be in a really good place. The systems amplify a great team; they don't replace one. The best feedback the safari gets is almost always about the people.
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Build the system so a six-person team runs like a big one.
Will built a cloud ERP that turns a custom, fully branded proposal around in five to ten seconds instead of an afternoon of PDFs, sends post-hunt invoices on a button-press, and lets the accountant track everything instantly — all without adding overhead or convoluted departments to a lean team.
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If you don't track the data, you don't really have a business.
With real data, Will can tell you red stag is 71% of revenue, which trophies are taken most and when, and — crucially — which trade shows generated the best long-term clients versus one-offs. That visibility is where the marketing and operations decisions actually get made.
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Use AI where it removes the admin drag.
The biggest AI win isn't in the field — it's the back office. Vendor invoices get their details extracted and tagged to the right project automatically; client research and even personality cues help the team communicate better. For an outfit with heavy single-transaction receivables and an aging founder doing the books, that's real time back.