MC Fireside Chats – April 16th, 2025

Brian Searl: Welcome everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name’s Brian Searl with Insider Perks Super excited to be here with you. I don’t even know what week it is. I’m on so many meetings and so many calls. It’s like week two, three of April. I don’t, it’s gotta be two, right? Week two, yeah, week three.

Anyway, something like that. Super excited to be back here for whatever episode we’re doing at my show. But excited to welcome back some of our recurring guests here that we always have on the show. Mr. Jeff Hoffman who is nursing some bronchitis and I have no idea why he showed up. I think we should require doctor’s notes in the future.

Make a note of that Sharah. So they can come to the podcast. Mike Harrison’s here. He’s a little, like fuzzy and fading in and out, but we’re just assuming he’s as handsome as he always is. And then we have Sandy Ellingson here with us as well. And then two special or three special guests, sorry, Kurtis Wilkins from Rjourney runs a great company, man multiple companies. Sorry Kurtis, I didn’t mean to slight you. Multiple companies. We’re gonna talk to him about that thing and some of the interesting stuff he has going on. We’ve got Jennifer here from Crystal River KOA And we’ve got, is it, do you wanna be Yolanda or, I don’t know how to pronounce the shortened version of your name ’cause I’m not smart enough. So do you wanna be called Yolanda? Or how should I pronounce your first name? I can’t hear you. So maybe that’s, we’ll just assume that it’s Yolanda for now, and sorry if I’m doing it wrong. But that’s what’s in my notes and I know you have commented on our podcast before as Yolanda.

Anyway, welcome. I want to first toss it to our recurring guests here Jeff, Mike, or Sandy. Is there anything that’s come across your desk in the last, month or so since we’ve last had this kind of group gathering with all of us together that you really feel is important to talk about or share?

Sandy Ellingson: I’ve been going through the KOA report for this year. I still don’t think I’ve fully consumed it, but I’m loving all the data that I’m getting there, and I think that’ll be a great conversation at some point. 

Brian Searl: Yeah, like I, we should talk about that briefly. I don’t have it pulled up in front of me.

We’re gonna digest that later on Outwired too. But go ahead. Somebody else was gonna talk. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah, I was gonna say, what’s new? We’ve had a lot of big news recently with CRR and Insider Perks. Last week it was announced that Rigsby, our AI voice chat bot rolled out the reservations via Rigsby on chat, which is huge news, first of its kind in the industry.

And then another month or so we’re gonna roll out Rigsby voice reservations, which will change the industry forever. You’ll no longer get a busy signal, we’ll no longer get a no answer. You can call and make a reservation at 1:00 AM. So we’re very excited for this new technology with Insider Perks.

We’ve all been the industry for the modern world and, moving it forward, we expect that it will be broken a few times in the first month and won’t work perfectly. But that’s what innovation and testing and working through this is all about. But we’re super excited for this technology and to look at the guests and drive revenue.

Brian Searl: Your check is in the mail. Mike, thank you.

Mike Harrison: I hope my check is in the mail. It better be, 

Brian Searl: The, it wasn’t planned to be clear. I don’t, I do need to sponsor the show. I should commit myself as.

Mike Harrison: I don’t mean to check from you. I want more money. More money.

Brian Searl: Oh, okay. All right. As long as it’s not for me, you can have as much money as you want. So anything else, anything from you, Jeff?

Jeff Hoffman: Just that I got quite a few data reports today. One from OHI, one from KOA, and the, I’m trying to think where the other one came in. One of the reports said that a great majority of the people that started camping during Covid have stayed in the industry so that we haven’t lost as many as we shared we might.

So that was encouraging. 

Brian Searl: Okay. Good news. And Sandy, do you happen to have a copy of the KOA report that you could pull up? Not this second, but in a few minutes if I gave you a few minutes?

Sandy Ellingson: Oh yeah, I can. And I also wanna add two more things. Brian, even though you did it, I’m gonna take credit for it. Okay.

Brian Searl: That’s fine.

Sandy Ellingson: I love getting the Modern Campground weekly, or daily actually, email. And there were two things in there this last week that I thought really hit home for me ’cause it’s something I’ve been so excited about is one, all the different things I’ve been seeing about campground.

Now embracing and doing events because I do believe that is key to the new campers creating these experiences. And the other thing I saw, which really excited me, was how campgrounds are now partnering with some dealerships to actually do training at their campgrounds for new campers. And so to see that kind of come out this week and I really appreciate what you’re doing with Modern Campground to get that out and encourage all of us.

Brian Searl: This is how it goes, Kurtis. They just talk about all my companies for an hour and then we just close the show. So thank you all for coming. I appreciate you watching. We’re done.

Thank you. I appreciate the kind words like I have very little to do with Modern Campground is the honest truth.

It’s Akari, my Editor in Chief. Sharah actually here, my podcast coordinator has a lot with Modern Campground. So kudos to the team behind that, but I’m glad you’re finding it useful. I glad

Sandy Ellingson: I can take credit for it ’cause I’ve been the thorn in your side on a weekly basis talking about how we need these things.

Brian Searl: Yeah, for sure. You’re one of the people as many people are in the industry, but you’re, not many people I would say. Few people probably less than 50, who really try to push this industry forward. And so yeah, you’ve definitely had your impact. And I’m happy to know you and have you on the show as are some of the other people here too.

Do we wanna spend a couple minutes talking on data, because I know we’re focusing mostly on operations here. I want to give for a second, I wanna give Kurtis a chance to introduce himself, Jennifer and Yolanda. And then obviously we can go around to Sandy and Jeff and Mike and introduce yourselves as well.

And then maybe decide if we wanna talk about five minutes and spend that on data, because that obviously impacts operations. 

Kurtis Wilkins: I’ll go first. Thank you Brian for having me on the show. It’s my first time. Also, so I’m the Senior Vice President of Acquisitions at Rjourney, and I am also the Head of our Data Science Department.

And what we’re seeing right now is this the first quarter. There was two major road bumps in terms of consumers and how they were consuming our product and RVs. And I thought it happened right after about January 23rd. We saw a big drop in terms of like activity and it, not just Rjourney activity, we’re talking nationwide activity in terms of like conversion events and consumption.

It took a little bit into February and then it slowly recovered and then we just saw another round of that here in April. And so this consumer changed its consumption habits. I don’t know what everybody else is seeing, but I know that our lead times are are definitely getting tighter in comparison to what they’ve been historically, so we haven’t seen a drop in bookings.

We’ve seen a change in the way they’re consuming our product.

Brian Searl: Great. Thanks for being here. I want to dive into all the things you’re doing with Rjourney and Advanced Outdoor Management and all that kind of stuff. Somebody’s squeaking in the background. I don’t know whose it is, but if your mic, if you feel like your mic might be squeaking, feel free to mute it intermittently.

Jennifer from Crystal River KOA. How are you? 

Jennifer Grissom: I’m Jennifer from the Crystal River KOA. I’m the Owner I also was the developer and engineer for the project. We opened in July of last year. So this is all new for me and thank you, Brian, for having me on. So engineering is my background.

I partnered with another KOA owner, franchise owner. And yeah, it’s, honestly it’s been a great year for us. We’re obviously in Florida a different market. We had a great January well over projections yeah I’m so happy to be part of the KOA franchise.

I don’t know where we would’ve started marketing and getting customers without that base. But we’ve had a 

Brian Searl: Go ahead, please. I thought you’re done. I’m sorry. No, I was just gonna say thank you for being here. I appreciate it. I wanna dive into your KOA, learned a little bit more about that. Some of the trends maybe you’ve seen in Florida would be interesting, and then some of the operational aspects of KOA too.

And don’t be nervous while you’re on the podcast. I’m still don’t know what I’m doing. This is new to me. Like I’m a very slow learner and I’m confident you’re a fast learner. So you’ll pick it up quick. Yolanda, from Alaska.

We still, can we hear Yolanda? Still can’t hear. Yolanda, I’m sorry. Yolanda, I don’t know if maybe you could try joining from your phone. That might help, but we can’t hear you for whatever reason. But just yell anytime if you think you’ve got your mic fixed and we’ll try to get back to you. Mike, Sandy and Jeff, do you wanna briefly introduce yourselves?

Jeff Hoffman: Sandy? 

Brian Searl: Now we can’t hear Sandy either. We’re like losing everyone’s audio. 

Sandy Ellingson: No, I was a good girl and I muted when you told us to. And then I forgot. So I’m Sandy Ellingson, I had a technology consulting firm and sold it and then decided to hit the road full-time as an RVer and fell into a second career.

So I serve as a liaison between the industry campgrounds, making sure there’s proactive communication, and I absolutely love it. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here. Mike.

Mike Harrison: Hi there. Mike Harrison. I work with CRR Hospitality. We both own and operate luxury RV resorts. We also do third party management and consulting and love participating in the industry in many different associations. And panels and different venues and opportunities like Modern Campground. So happy to be here. Thank you. 

Brian Searl: Thanks for being here. Mike and Jeff, last but not least. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah, I’m Jeff Hoffman. I just enjoy the campground industry. I have been in it for a long time and sold everything off and thought I was going to retire and decided not to. So I started a business called Camp Strategy, which we go out and try to help campground owners make their parks better.

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here, Jeff. I know you’ve only been in the industry for 10 years, but if you can say that a long time, that’s fine. We can tell this joke. 

Jeff Hoffman: I’ve 

Brian Searl: got stocks older 

Jeff Hoffman: than that. 

Brian Searl: So yeah this show is mostly about operations and improving operations. I think it behooves us though, to spend just a few minutes and talk about data because there’s quite a bit that is changing in the industry.

And I think it would help our audience to understand how other owners are either not being impacted or being impacted by some of the changes. And just clean some data. And I think just because we have that KOA North American Campground report, we don’t wanna dive too much into it, but if Sandy has a couple things that she wants to call out from there that she found interesting, we can maybe talk about those things.

And then I’d love to get I think at least and any of you’re willing to jump in, but I’d love to hear Jennifer’s opinion on, we don’t know what she’s seen. She just said she had a great year, but we just saw the report in Woodall’s who we talked to, I think Mike has talked to Toby O’Rourke and a few other people about some cancellations and things that they had seen at KOA properties in Florida. So I’m just curious specifically about that, but where do you wanna start, Sandy? Like just no pressure, but like the most important and most impactful thing in the entire report go. 

Sandy Ellingson: I just thought it was super encouraging because we’ve been doing some kind of companion research along with some of the other things and seeing how those two balance each other out.

We are seeing significant increases in the number of people camping, the types of camping that they’re doing. I think somebody else has already mentioned our retention of those covid campers that have come in. And so we’re showing like a 98% retention rate year over year from if you go average everything from 2014 forward.

And just the number of new households. Something else that was really encouraging to me that I saw that I loved was that there’s 9.6 million tent usage up 56%. And I’m very burdened by the fact that because we had such increases during covid we’ve lost some of our onboarding capability for younger campers.

We’ve priced them out in some ways and a lot of parks stopped allowing tent camping now, not KOA, but a lot of parks are no longer allowing tent camping, which means, that we don’t, we’re losing our onboarding process for the younger camper. And you can only do that for so long before you start dying.

And so this was super encouraging to me. And so operationally, how to tie this back, one of the things I’m talking to my campgrounds about is looking at things as onboarding tools. And that includes not only tent camping, but car camping, which is not a homeless person parking on your site, but somebody coming in who’s probably,

I mean 

Brian Searl: it could be, to be fair. Probably isn’t, but it could be. 

Sandy Ellingson: Yeah, it could be. You’re right. The biggest fear when somebody hears car camping from a campground is this is a homeless person coming in. And that’s not the case because a lot of times they are coming in with a lot of expensive equipment and the reason they’re not tent camping is safety.

They are concerned about tent camping, so they wanna be in their car where they can close the doors. And so there’s just a lot of really nuanced kind of things that I think we are gonna be able to flip the script this year and have people view what they thought was a negative as a positive to be able to grow our occupancy even more.

Brian Searl: So I think I’d like to talk about, and I don’t wanna spend the majority of the show on this, but I think I’d like to talk about a couple points, like just, and maybe you already said them, but directly from the North American Camping Report, if you have it in front of you. ’cause I know you collect your own data, and I know I’m not questioning the validity of any of your data, but I just wanna make sure it, our audience knows like where it’s coming from when they hear it.

Sandy Ellingson: Yeah, so I’m just looking at the first page of the KOA report, which says that camping households, those who identify as campers increased by 16.5 million or 23% 

Brian Searl: year over year? 

Sandy Ellingson: This says camping households, those who identify as campers have increased by 16.5 million Additional households, 23% increased.

It didn’t tell me a timeframe. All types of accommodations have seen an increase in use. And again, this is exciting to me. So 9.6 million in 10 usage up 56%, 6.4 million in RV uses usage up 96%, 7 million in cabin or glamping usage up 101%. So those are the things that are really exciting to me to see that.

We are growing, we are we’re continuing, I think in some of the growth that we got in Covid and retaining those people, I think that really proves this. So that’s what the first page of the report actually, 

Brian Searl: Mike, have you had time to read this? I assume you’re usually a voracious reader.

Mike Harrison: Yes, I am. I’m not seeing those same numbers that Sandy’s seeing, and I don’t, I’m not let me be clear. I’m excited about the camping industry, but I’m not seeing that growth. The numbers are skewed if you’re looking at it from five years ago.

Brian Searl: And that’s why I asked her the question because a lot of those numbers I was looking at in the KOA report were 2024.

Not that they’re wrong.

Mike Harrison: Yeah.

Brian Searl: But they were 2024 over 2019. 

Sandy Ellingson: Yeah, and I’m pulling this specifically from page three, by the way. And the report is available at koapressroom.com. So any, they make it publicly available to anybody, even if you’re not a KOA 

Brian Searl: For sure. To be clear, we’re not questioning the data, right?

Sandy Ellingson: Yeah.

Brian Searl: Because we love Scott Bahr. We put it together or help put it together, right? We’re just questioning the methodology of there’s a difference between 2024 over 2023 and 2024 over 2019. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Mind if I chime in here? Have you guys looked at the Google Trends reports for the keyword searches? In those, in these sectors for our keywords?

There are some tailwind. There’s some headwinds in front of us.

Mike Harrison: So for sure. Yeah, and I guess that’s my point is comparing to 2019, it’s like saying let’s look at the AC industry and the filter industry from 2024 to 2019 and exploded after covid. So the numbers, comparing in that timeframe just I don’t think are very prevalent.

While it’s an amazing growth, you really gotta look at the last year and the last two years and see it. If you ask me what really stuck out in the report more than anything is just, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the KOA report or I know Scott released one, American Glamping Association released one, Sage Outdoor.

They’re all saying the same thing, and it’s the evolution of the modern traveler. And I think that’s what’s really encouraging is that there are new voices to echo what Sandy said, that are coming into our industry that we have to be prepared for. And I think there’s some interesting things that you should pull from that.

Which is, we look at all of our data and demographics and interestingly enough and not every property is gonna be the same of course, but for five of our resorts, our demographics are almost mixed, very equally, right? Baby boomers, like the same percentage as Gen X is the same percent as millennials, the same percentage as a Gen Z.

So what that tells us is if you lump, the Gen Z and the millennials together, which is when you have to, they’re never gonna look on Facebook, right? Versus our, baby boomers and Gen Xers who are never gonna look on TikTok. You can’t market the same way to every person, and you have to understand who your target market is and evolve how you’re gonna get these new campers and make sure what you’re doing to get them.

And then part two to that is we’re talking about operations. We’ve been focusing heavily on experiential hospitality, is how do you then evolve your offering, especially campgrounds been in business for 40 years that have been doing the same thing. How are they evolving their experience to make sure that it is becoming more of a lifestyle experience, whether you have glamping or it’s just an RV site, or if it’s a tent site, how is that becoming more interesting?

How are you evolving and integrating technology into your campground? It doesn’t have to be a robot like Brian wants, it can be, simple enhancements. But, how are you evolving to basically cater to the modern travel, which is now going to as the baby boomers expire or retire or whatever word you want to use.

And I’m not saying Jeff when I say baby boomer or expiring but how are you evolving that? That’s what I pull from it more than anything.

Kurtis Wilkins: And to go right off of that, Mike, I couldn’t agree more, but the we talk about the changing consumer, right? And those demographics are changing rapidly.

I’m sure we’re all aware here of our Canadian travelers, right? And where do you redeploy those marketing assets and how fast are you reacting? ’cause you don’t wanna be sending money after conversions that aren’t gonna come. Just because it worked last year doesn’t mean it’s gonna work again. So you need to be really tracking these conversion ratios.

You need to be tracking everything and it’s, you gotta be doing it almost daily at scale. To get any kind of effectiveness out of what you’re doing. ‘Cause we are we do have young demographics coming in and they require different things. And so how do we fill that void? How do we make sure that the value proposition we’re offering is there for that customer?

Brian Searl: I think that’s the easy low hanging fruit key, right? Is how do we make sure the value prop is there first for your guest of your park, which is different across your portfolio. Chris, across your portfolio, Mike across all the people you consult for, Jeff, across all of KOA, Jennifer all of your clients, Sandy maybe they’re all the same in Alaska.

I dunno I can’t hear from Yolanda yet, but we’ll assume that they’re different people in different parts of, can I hear you? Is that you? 

Yolanda D’Oyen: Yeah, I think that’s me now. 

Brian Searl: Oh, hi Yolanda. I can’t, you’re not moving, but I can hear you. Which is the important part. For your wisdom, would you like to introduce yourself real quick?

Yolanda D’Oyen: Woo, after all of this, I just want to, hold on. Let me give my elevator pitch. Hi Brian. I am Yo’El, a Chinese Jamaican creative serial entrepreneur and real estate professional, a radical woman of God and the owner builder of the Ark Denali RV Campground Resort in Alaska. The Ark boasts the best view of Mount Denali in the state as quoted continually.

And it is set to become a top tier destination for outdoor enthusiasts. So put Alaska on your places to visit list and come and have fun and adventure with me because we, Jamaicans are everywhere doing big things and so there’s just a little additional little pitch. So hold on. So if you want to discuss further, contact me.

I have very lucrative investment opportunities still available. I’m sorry. I still have on my capital raise hat. It’s been quite an adventure here in Alaska, building this brand new RV park. 

Brian Searl: That’s fine. You can wear we all wear many hats here, but I really like your intro. I think I’m just gonna seed the podcast to you, if you don’t mind just starting it off for me.

In future weeks too. ’cause that was pretty passionate and inspirational. So thank you for sharing. And Alaska is definitely on my list. I was actually gonna go there in May and ended up having to, not cancel. Yeah, I had to cancel a flight ’cause my girlfriend couldn’t get off enough time for work for her birthday.

But definitely on our list we’ll be back there or we’ll come there. It’s one of the states. I haven’t been there, yet. 

Jeff Hoffman: Isn’t Alaska your next door neighbor? 

Brian Searl: It’s not really, like Jeff do you know how big Canada is? Have you measured Canada? It’s not like the same on a map where like you can fit two fingers instead of province and it just, then you go to the next one.

It’s big. Jeff, I’m not anywhere near I’m about 19 hours away from the Alaska border I think, or something like that. Maybe it’s further. Anyway so let’s talk about thank you for being here, Yolanda, and we wanna talk about your park in a little bit. I just wanna finish up the data discussion briefly.

I think this is the important thing, right? There’s so much data to look at. There’s so much that we’re gathering from Google Analytics or call centers like Kurt and Mike do to, dozens and dozens of things, right? What do you look at? What do you pay attention to?

Obviously, we could have that conversation for hours and it would, I think, be different. There would be a set of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 things that you would say every park owner should look at, but not all of them have the tech savvy ability to do that, or the team behind them to do that. And so I think the foundational aspect of it is let’s start with who our guest is and understanding them so that we can tell our story and we can set ourselves apart from an experiential standpoint, but also in a, whatever headwinds we’re facing.

Like Kurt said, I think there’s gonna be a ton of ’em this year. But why am I different? Why? And we’ve talked about this on the show before, right? It’s not enough to have, I also have a miniature golf course. I also have a swing pool. It’s, I have better customer service, or I have this that you don’t have.

And you’ve gotta be able to tell that story at an individual property level. And by doing that and telling that story in a way that resonates with the type of guest you’re trying to reach, I think you’ll be ahead of 85% of parks in this country, in both our countries, 

Jeff Hoffman: Brian, and what I’ve found out by having multiple parks in multiple states, and I think Mike can attest to this, although we like to systematize the operations, every part that has a different feel to it, they all have their own personality.

They all have their own individual little markets. So if you try to run them as all the same, you’re not gonna do well. Each market almost has to be done individually, and you have to praise what you’ve got in that market and capture. The people you’re trying to get or what your, who your customer really is.

And a lot of that you can pull out of this data to try to figure it out who you need to go after and that’s who you need to market to. 

Brian Searl: How do you compensate for the fact that everybody’s been consulted on by Camp Strategy with your brain and then thus they’re all similar, Jeff? 

Mike Harrison: It won’t be.

Brian Searl: Go ahead Kurt. 

Kurtis Wilkins: I was gonna say, Jeff, I think you’re spot on. I think each park has its own demographic. I think there’s I think a lot of parks rhyme, right? Like they are different. But they rhyme and they come with a lot of similar points of action because your messaging in Colorado should be different than your messaging in Texas, and it should be different than your messaging in Pennsylvania, right?

Those, there’s dialects there, right? Freebie here is like the difference between campground and RV park, right? Different parts of this country use different words to search for the campground. And if you are, and it’s not a one size fits all, but if your model supports a multifaceted business like that and you’re mining your own demographics, I think you’re spot on.

You can get in there and you can micro targett your customer bases in terms of acquiring a new customer. The things like, Brian, I don’t know if you want me to go through my top things, but like the.

Brian Searl: Go ahead. Yeah.

Kurtis Wilkins: The bread and butter, I think of this industry is you’re gonna, you need to be looking at your pace reports, right?

You need to know what you’re, how you’re performing, and what your park is performing at in terms of what’s coming up into your future and are you filling up as fast as last year? Do you need to fill up faster? And you need to be tracking your leads, right? And you need to be tracking those at a microscopic level.

Are you converting at the same rate? Are those campers that you had last year converting at the same rate? Are there different demographics that are converting better? And should you be refocusing your efforts into those demographics? Because with the changes that are happening on the political level, right?

There are demographic changes right now and we need to be pivoting our strategies towards those. And you can’t wait. You gotta do it quick. 

Jennifer Grissom: I think Kurtis, one of the things that we’re struggling with right now is our people are reserving. Our reservation window is so narrow right now, whereas, in previously campers were reserving three, six months out, the booking window is so narrow, it’s making, projecting so difficult, the pickup report and stuff that I really, we’re relying, it’s very difficult to rely on those things now because, you are picking up reservations in three weeks, but it’s really hard to forecast way out. And then, I also wanted to speak to what Sandy said about the tent campaign.

We were blown away with the number of tent campers that we received. And at first we had them, I would say, priced too low. And it was a very negative experience for our manager. And so we raised the price plan on those. I would say we do get a lot of homeless people, but not the homeless people that at the lower price points what we’re getting are a lot of elderly who are living outta their cars, parking in Walmart at night.

They come because they wanna use their facilities once a week. And these are clean, great people. I’ll see the same lady there every week. Just something that I did not anticipate as an owner that somebody would be paying $65-$70 a night for a tent site when, there’s an RV site that’s just priced over that.

I’ll say I do have my partner’s campground in South Florida and she has one in North Florida, and it’s been interesting to see how their numbers and everything compare to ours just based on the areas and demographics. And, we started thinking we’d approach it like those two, but like you said, we couldn’t.

It’s a totally different area, a different beast. And you really have to get, with your local what do they call it, like Chamber of Commerce? 

Brian Searl: Yep. Destination market organization. 

Jennifer Grissom: And they’ve done a lot of the work that you’re talking about so they can help you and identify that. And they’ve been a huge help for us.

Brian Searl: But to your point, like you’re right to be clear, I’m not like destination market organizations are a wonderful partner depending on the area you’re in, in most areas, right? But some are just don’t have the funding, necessary sometimes. But DMO and people you can partner with to get that data.

But to your point, like I think this is a, an interesting discussion to have of the booking window gap because boy, that can make forecasting scary. Can it? And I’m not an owner, I’m just imagining it from a marketing perspective of how I would talk to 500 of our clients of if they, and they’re not asking me to forecast every day to be clear.

But but talk a little bit about that briefly. Who wants to take that? ’cause that’s interesting to me. 

Mike Harrison: Well, I think it’s a bigger discussion than that. You had asked earlier about kind of data and I was on a panel last week and I was asked to with Paul Bambi and Chris from KOA, and we were asked to speak about, what does the next five years look like in the outdoor hospitality industry?

And, one of the things, as we all know, there’s some headwinds, that are facing us still very exciting industry. But, forecasting to be falls into the bucket of, let’s call it operational excellence. And, there are many campgrounds that have existed forever that have never had to compete.

And, locationally, they’ve just been great and they’ve been around for 50 years and maybe the owner still has an AOL email address and maybe their website picture hasn’t been updated for 20 years. And it’s pixelated, the pics on their website. And, with the evolution of Covid and the hospitality industry, there’s been certainly the last two years and overabundance of supply.

That’s also, the Canadian traveler isn’t the only reason, the only answer why the market’s down. There’s also all the new supply that’s opened in the last two years from the covid boom, let’s call it. And so the markets now need to absorb the new supply. What that means is all of these campgrounds that have never had to compete or don’t know how to compete, or have never marketed or haven’t evolved, or still are handing out the brochure at the truck stop, and that’s all they’re doing.

The operational excellence is really needs to be applied, right? And those that are forecasting, and forecasting effectively, those who understand that there’s a change in their booking window, those that are leveraging, the better enhanced marketing techniques, those that are utilizing experiential hospitality and evolving their product, that’s who’s gonna survive or thrive, I guess is a better word.

And so yes, while the forecasting can be scary. To me it’s really more about, do you know that your forecasting needs to be scary? Have you looked at that, your booking. 

Brian Searl: Any of your forecasting at all? Very good point. Yeah. 

Mike Harrison: And so that’s to me is the bigger issue at play is that there’s a segment of the industry that, that may end up getting left behind if they do not hop on board of, making changes and becoming more operational experts on their own properties.

So that’s, to me is the bigger context. 

Jennifer Grissom: Mike, the two things that you said. So we started developing our property in 2017. Covid hit. Couldn’t find a contractor. Anyway, by the time we got it all said and done, they build a 400 sweet citrus acres, pops up at exaggerating a mile away, 400 sites. They’re expanding another 500.

I’m terrified, right? No, it, we have been so much more successful. I only know because the owner happens to be, of my ex-husband’s and he’s talked to me, they had to pay off their loan. 

Brian Searl: Such a fascinating story. This show’s gonna go two hours. We gotta dive into this. Sorry. 

Jennifer Grissom: They had to pay off their loan, which must be nice, right?

’cause I can only imagine what that loan was. And these are all concrete sites, a clubhouse because they couldn’t make their loan payments where we’re in a much better situation. We were profitable I think within two months of opening, which is pretty unique, I think. And I would say operationally that’s key.

Our management and keeping our staff happy, that is our number one priority. When you ask what do I focus on? And that’s morale of my staff. So right now we are running without a maintenance person because we, my partner and I, Paige and I go up there, my manager does it. We weren’t able to find one that really fit in, so we just run it as an all girl crew, which Yolanda we might appreciate. But we’re women owned and operated. And even our maintenance person was a woman before we decided to do it without her. Yeah. Is the most important. 

Brian Searl: I think you touch on a lot of important things here too, but like both you and Mike are right. The data’s important.

The forecasting is important as we talked about, but you like, you’ve gotta get to the point where you’re set up to forecast and you, again, going back to understanding your audience and who they are and how you appeal to them and all that, you have to do the operational, not even excellence. You have to do the operational like half-assed first and then get to the good and then get to the great, and then get to the excellent.

But you have to get those fundamentals taken care of first, right? And then you’re set yourself up for a situation where maybe you can forecast well or great one year, maybe you can’t another year, but because you have your operational excellence down because you know your team is in a good place and your, amenities are in a good place and your resort looks good and you’re treating your guests good, that like you have less to worry about probably than most other people who are or are not forecasting in your area.

Is that fair? 

Jeff Hoffman: Brian, I think, and Mike, you can correct me if you think I’m off base here, but. If we go back years into the hotel business before franchising really took over the hotel business, it was where we were before investors started coming into our business.

Nobody was really modeling anything. Nobody was really putting in systems tracking data, and now campgrounds are starting to get a little bit more sophisticated in their marketing, in their pricing and everything else. So it’s, right now it’s a dynamic industry because of the changes that are happening.

What I foresee in the future is probably between KOA Jellystone and maybe a couple hotel franchises coming over into our market space. We’ll grow more into that franchise type model on campgrounds from now on. 

Brian Searl: I think they’re all gonna be Rjourneys and CRR Hospitalities. 

Kurtis Wilkins: I was like, I don’t know about Mike, but I know that we definitely talk to a lot of institutional clients and that there is a demand there and this institutionalization of this market space it’s happening and they want they wanna see these forecasts, they wanna see these projections, they want to know where their marketing dollars are and is it being effective. And those, we went out and we had to build our own tools to provide that to provide that dynamic system that moves very rapidly to get there.

And so I, Jeff, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think that this is, we are in the early stages of institutional investors coming in, and I think that’s good for everybody. I think that raises property value. 

Mike Harrison: Absolutely. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Love it.

Mike Harrison: Yeah, I was one that Brian’s very first guest on Modern Campground several years ago, and if you go back and if you rewind the tape I said way back when, don’t be surprised that one of the hotels, are gonna get into the space.

And then fast forward to a year ago, and then, Hyatt was the first to get in with Auto Camp, and then Hilton was under Canvas and then Marriott with Postcard cabins and it is only the beginning, right? What this market does or what this industry doesn’t have is distribution, right?

There’s no marriott.com, there’s no expedia.com, and once that becomes normalized and simplified, the access which has started to touch everybody with glamping, et cetera, et cetera, and the entire dynamic of the industry is gonna change. The RV park isn’t going to die, but it’s certainly going to be more RV park with glamping, blended as we go forward, the 30 site RV park isn’t going to die, but there are going to be few and far between. And it’s exactly what I said last week at that panel was, how many more Joe and Bob Motels are there on the side of the road? That are 30 rooms, it just don’t exist, right? The smallest hotels that are being built in the last 20 years are basically a hundred room town, place suites, a hundred room Fairfields, and the super eights and motel sixes, eh, not a lot of those new builds.

And we’re, and we’re several years away from that, but that’s what’s, and unfortunately, same thing happened to Home Depots, versus eight little neighborhood hardware stores. And so it doesn’t mean that the small campground’s going to die but it certainly is, there’s going to be aggregation, there’s going to be accretion and, hop on board, I guess is the best way to say it.

The ones who will not, are going to struggle. And to Kurt’s point, we have done the same thing. That’s how we’ve cut our teeth is through sophisticated analytics and data and reporting and marketing and all those things, which is attractive to the institutional type, buyers.

And so I don’t say this for you. I see, Yolanda’s in the call. I don’t wanna run your call Brian and I see, Jennifer’s on the call and they’re small property owners, so I don’t say any of this to scare away a small property owner say you don’t exist. That is not what I’m saying whatsoever.

But the complexion will change.

Brian Searl: And I think you have to look at and just, sorry, one second. Kurt. Can I call you Kurt or is it Kurtis? So I have to be official? Yes. Okay. I just wanna make sure you can call me Bri if you want. That’s fine. We can be friends.

So I think there’s a couple things here that you mentioned. Mike, and then I wanna let Kurtis talk. I think you’re a hundred percent right with the people evolving. Like nobody, I don’t think I’m gonna speak for you Mike, and you can tell me if I’m wrong. I don’t think anybody’s saying you have to embrace institutional investing and sell your park to an institution or love the fact that it’s coming in our industry.

But you have to understand that it is, and you have to adapt to it because there’s going to be new and different expectations placed on you as a result of consumers being able to choose from not just independence, but independence and institutions. Is that fair? 

Mike Harrison: It’s if everybody’s using a car and you’re still using a horse, that’s basically what we’re saying.

Brian Searl: But there, it’s still a place, like for some of you, just not all of you. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah. There’s still horses, there’s still ranches in this world and Yep. 

Brian Searl: There are lots of motel sixes that are just not properly charging the meth labs to set up in their rooms. And if you did, you would probably be fine not to pick on Motel six.

Like I actually did this. I actually were on vacation.

Mike Harrison: Height in. That’s a better.

Jeff Hoffman: Hey.

Brian Searl: We, I speak that way out of joking, of course, but I still remember we went to a La Quinta one time or we were staying next to a La Quinta and there was a bunch of police that pulled up and like the whole wall blew out of the side of the building and we were told it was a meth lab that was there.

Like we were at dinner and came back and it was so interesting times. But in all seriousness, like there is a place for you, but you have to figure out your niche. You have to figure out your guests, you have to figure out the type of customer you wanna serve, and you’ve gotta be different than the institutions if you want to be different than the institutions.

Jeff Hoffman: Well, I think where we’re also heading that’s gonna help the small campground owner is our VMS systems are developing so much quicker than they did over the years. There’s, right now there’s so many people in the industry, there’s people that are looking at the industry to come in and, I just think that the mom and pops for them to stay competitive are gonna have to change a little bit and get new systems in and learn how to read the data.

And I think that is gonna help them stay in the market. KOA is helping a lot with their franchises by trying to give them, the best systems that are out there. They’re always trying to upgrade. And everybody else I know in the industry, whether it’s Camp Life, CampSpot, New Book, they’re making changes every week trying to stay up on top of demand and I think I make calls to different people every week saying, why can’t we do this? Or why can’t we do this? Why can’t I look at this number? For me it sounds simple for them. It’s a lot of programming. 

Jennifer Grissom: Jeff,

Brian Searl: I, Kurt, oh, hold on. I’m gonna let Kurt talk ’cause he’s been waiting. I’m gonna let Kurt talk and then Jennifer, if it’s somebody to say, and then I wanna talk to Yo’El about her park.

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah, I, Jeff couldn’t agree more. Our, I mean our engineering teams, ’cause we have our own proprietary property management system. And it’s integrated top to bottom right website all the way through the call center to our rate management teams. And that definitely has given us a competitive edge because we aren’t waiting on production timelines for someone to come out with a feature that’s gonna make us, an extra million dollars a year.

We can prioritize that. We can set that out and we’re, I. We always say that the tagline here is operators that run the software, operators should also be prioritizing what comes out on that software. And so that’s, I couldn’t agree more. I think that the industry has a lot of work to do on that side of the business.

I know we still have a ton of new features that we want to add to our platform that keep yielding. 

Brian Searl: Jennifer, were did you have something? I’m sorry.

Jennifer Grissom: I was just gonna say, I could not imagine opening a park, not being a part of a franchise and not having the operating systems. Bless you, Sandy. I think that.

Just the value that’s provided, not just in the name recognition, which of course you do rely on a franchise to maintain that name recognition. But the value that I have as a owner in terms of marketing, name recognition, and just the software alone, I don’t know that I could develop that as a single campground.

Now Kurtis, with his multiple, it’s different, right? But as a 68, 6 site campground, it just wouldn’t make sense. That’s what I had. I don’t feel like a small campground because I am part of a huge franchise, if that makes sense. 

Brian Searl: Which is a different way you can take it, right? You get institution, you got by yourself, you got in the middle somewhere, which is where KOA is, where you have the benefits of both, right?

In some capacity. So I think there’s a good fit for everybody of and there’s so many other players that we’re not talking about, right? But that’s how Camps Spot and New Book help people the smaller parks that don’t have the resources to develop their own. So there are pros and cons to all the things.

It just depends on where you sit. So let’s talk to Yo’El real quick. I got corrected. It’s not, it says Yolanda, but she wants to be called Yo’El. I’m very confused, but I always am, Yo’El, so don’t feel like it’s your fault. Tell us about your property, like you did, give us the elevator pitch. What I’m interested in is first, how do you decide to develop in Alaska?

Yolanda D’Oyen: That’s such a loaded question, but I just wanted to let you know. I just wanted to thank you very much, Brian, for this platform, because I’m the newbie on the block. And what it is that I’m a primarily a designer and developer and visionary. I have marketing background. It’s truly a unicorn.

And this particular site, I tell the people, I said, Lord had to trip me to get me to Alaska because I wouldn’t have done it. And I even have a little testimony on my website because everybody asks, how did I get to Alaska? But I just wanted to let you know that this has been a five year, over five year of me planning, and we’re right, we’re shovel ready to start as soon as the snow melts that we can get started.

And the thing about it is that I’m it’s good to not have a preconceived notion of what the RV industry was supposed to be because I’m a visionary, because I’m a planner and I do master planning and marketing, and this was what was presented to me and I researched my property is. It’s like location.

It is a blessing to even be, to have this property and it’s in the Denali State Park and it’s at the very beginning stage and we, everything that everybody has been talking about, I have the benefit of implementing all that knowledge and all that information into my park. Even though my land, the property is 85 acres, I’m only developing 35 of it, and of that 35, I’m only putting 40 RV campsites.

My park is like a, is a resort on steroids. Because what I’m doing, and most places in most resorts in Alaska, they close for the winter. Alaska has anywhere from an average of six months of winter. Our summers have, are amazing because they’re 24 hour day of summer. It has very unique qualities, but what the driving force of me being in Alaska, of me doing this project and I will be open 20 all year.

I will be open 12 months for the year because the winter time I have discovered because honestly I didn’t even know how to get dressed during the winter. But now I love all aspects winter included of Alaska. Is that there is so much winter activity. Denali is gorgeous. During the winter, the night skies are fantastic with the Northern nights.

Mr. Jeff, you just coming back from your trip, right? We have Northern Lights. It’s fantastic. The but the main reason for me personally, it’s a personal thing. I found out that Alaska has the highest rate of suicide in the nation. And you know what if I, because everything closes down during the wintertime and that’s a darkness and all.

If I can save one person, that’s my goal. And I’m telling you, we’re going to be open. We have like about minimum nine tour buses that go up and down. The highway, and I’m not off the highway. I’m on the highway and you can see Denali, the view of Denali right there from the highway. So what I’ve done is diversified and I have the area for the park, the RV park, but I’m taking and capitalizing on my traffic, on all those guests.

When you think of one tour bus, one tour bus holds 90 people on average. So what do I do? I invite them in. I have a nice roundabout. I’m having a 2000 square foot heated viewing deck. So they come in for free, they come and they take snap, snap. I’m having a convenience store, a gallery of food. They can, you want to keep them there as long as possible.

Let them spend a little money and then they go on the way the next stop, is 80 miles north. The other stop below is 20 miles south. As a matter of fact, it just goes on and on. If you can think it and you diversify it, it has the most, I have a helipad. It’s just amazing. I have the only safe river access because we’re on the river, the large Chilena river.

I have the only safe, a river access in 50 miles north and south. That’s amazing. So we can have overnight camping day picnicking. We can, I’ll have riverfront cabins. The idea is not to overbuild, but to still have the good, excellent customer service. And you keep them there and they still drive up.

It’s an amazing opportunity. And you know what? I’m going to be there. That’s my home. So I’m an onsite, I’m an onsite builder. Why wouldn’t I want to live in the best view ever? So that’s, it’s very exciting. Very exciting. And I’ve been told that my part, especially because the RV is on only, we’re going to have 40 units and they’re going to be triple wide.

So if you feel, and everyone has the view of Denali, that’s the amazing thing. And so I really capitalize as a builder, a visionary on everything that is spoken about. So I’m like a product, the child of everybody’s vision of the future RV future industry is what Ark Denali is about. 

Brian Searl: And I think you’re touching on a good point, right?

We’ve talked about this throughout the whole show, this coming, this recurring theme of operational excellence, understanding your guests recognizing the location and the blessings that you have with your specific property that are unique from everybody else, and taking advantage of those, like the view deck of Denali and the river access and all the things you’re talking about, right?

Yolanda D’Oyen: Yes.

Brian Searl: And I think none of us would probably complain maybe some of us who really are beach people, which I don’t understand, mountains are better. But most of us would really wanna wake up to a view like that. But there’s things that you can identify, whether they’re mountains or rivers or beaches or whatever or something smaller, even if it’s just down to a customer service or a warm cookie that you’re giving away at check-in, that really sets you apart and lead to that operational excellence.

You’ve just gotta not only take advantage of making your operations better, but understanding your guest and understanding your location as you clearly have a vision to do. Would you agree, Kurt?

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah, I would totally agree. 

Brian Searl: So talk, go ahead. Somebody else. Oh, I was gonna ask you another question, Kurt. I was just gonna, I was gonna ask, so talk, tell us a little bit and that we have a few minutes left and we can go over a couple minutes.

If somebody needs to drop off, they can. Unless it’s you, Kurt, and you’re in the middle of your question, then please finish your answer. But so talk to me a little bit about Rjourney, right? How many locations do you guys have now? 

Kurtis Wilkins: So right now on the platform, there are I think it’s 34, 35 on the Rjourney platform.

We manage an additional 20 on top of that. And then we have quite a few onboarding scheduled for the rest of the year. So it’s we’re definitely moving forward in the space and through growing. The I think you, did you want me to touch a little bit on what we just accomplished in the last week?

Brian Searl: I do, but first, my opening question for everybody who’s watching and is unfamiliar with Rjourney. I’m just super curious and I ask everybody this, who has a lot of properties, has been successful in the industry. The first time they’re in the show is, how did you get here, man? 

Kurtis Wilkins: Oh, this is a wild wild story.

So we are, we’re a family office. And where we started was we actually started in garbage. We were the one of the largest garbage companies in the country for trucking. And over the years we’ve invested and divested of different businesses, whether that be solid waste hydro facilities, solar farms, wind farms, apartment buildings, hotels we’ve done housing.

I can’t tell you how many thousands of homes we’ve built. But we’ve been quite a few real estate asset classes. We, the most recent one was self-storage. We saw an opportunity during a the covid market to, to make an exit in storage. And we’ve rolled into RV parks. We started with 27 and we’ve grown since.

And that’s how we got here. How I got here is I went to school, got a degree, and some crazy guy named David hired me, said, her you go kid.

Brian Searl: You have the best story board, right.

Kurtis Wilkins: Go try it out. 

Brian Searl: I think we all have our crazy guy in our history that, or girl that helped us get to where we are. Right? We could all tell those kinds of stories, probably multiple in my history.

But so tell us about the recent news briefly that you’ve been going through, and then I’d love to hear as a secondary answer, where do you see Rjourney five years from now? Let’s pretend you get everything you want. 

Kurtis Wilkins: In industry news, what we’ve, what we just accomplished was it’s groundbreaking for our industry.

So CMBS is not foreign to this market, but it is foreign in terms of a transient component on an RV park. Pure seasonals, right? Pure monthly, it’s available to get this kind of lending. But what we were able to do is we were able to blend in a monthly seasonal transient mix into a loan package.

It was the largest of its kind, and it paved a road for other RV park owners and other RV park investors to use that as a comp to go get that kind of financing for themselves. I don’t know how familiar this group is with CMBS, but that’s that’s institutional lending on on Wall Street.

And that’s gonna be some of the most aggressive lending that you can get in the space. And so that’s a big achievement for the industry, not just us because now people will be able to use our comp to go get the same. 

Brian Searl: So give me like, for the people who don’t understand that and aren’t in the financial Wall Street world every day, or even if they are, like, I think there’s a significant number of people who trade stocks who may still not understand that, give us the elevator pitch, like Yo’El perfected, but a little bit shorter ’cause we’re running outta time of how that might benefit the everyday campground owner.

Kurtis Wilkins: If normally what you’re working with in on your loan packages is that the regional banks, some parks are too big for regional banks and they run into constraints on family of debt limits on acquisitions. And if you are going in and you’re buying, say, a 15 to $16 million loan, there’s, there you start to narrow down your buyers and your pool of people that would consume that kind of loan.

And what this opens up is the ability to get more competition for your loan package. So if you are doing a refinance, you can, do equity extraction, you can get cheaper interest rates for lower LTVs. It’ll, it makes the banks compete harder for your business. And that’s what it is because it breaks up that loan into securities and then everybody can buy a little piece of the security.

Brian Searl: Interesting. So there’s new opportunities for Jeff to own 20 parks again. 

Kurtis Wilkins: There’s opportunities for Jeff to own 200 parks. Just come talk to Rjourney.

Brian Searl: Yeah.

Kurtis Wilkins: And I will plug, shamelessly plug our management company. We brand name Rjourney, but the Advanced Outdoor Management, that is the team behind the brand and they’re phenomenal to work with.

Brian Searl: Thank you, Jennifer. I know you have to drop here, but thanks for being here. I appreciate it. I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk a little bit more about your park. We gotta have you back on. We had so many people in, so many good conversations. But tell ’em where they can find more about Crystal River KOA before you have to drop. 

Jennifer Grissom: Come check it out, crystalriverkoa .com and yeah thanks for having me and I’d love to come back on and share more about our campground. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jennifer. I appreciate it. Thank you. Sandy’s been super quiet today too, but before we get to Sandy and ask if she has any final thoughts she’s never quiet, Kurtis this is very strange. Very it’s almost like creepy. I can’t understand it. Anyway so five years from now, if you have unlimited funds or unlimited, like everything goes your way, is what I mean. 

Kurtis Wilkins: So Rjourney’s intention is to, of course, grow in locations and size. Whether that’s through partnerships joint venture or just pure management place we’re actively looking for to get a larger footprint.

This, I would say like our five-year vision is somewhere between 102 hundred locations. Location count isn’t as important as people think it is. It’s more which locations?

Brian Searl: Yep.

Kurtis Wilkins: It’s more important. I think Jeff and Sandy could both attest to that. It doesn’t matter. It’s the adage of real estate, right? You can change a lot about a park, but you can’t change where it’s.

Brian Searl: Are you planning on being the first campground on Mars when Elon gets there? 

Kurtis Wilkins: I haven’t had any conversations with him about that, but I’m open to them if he watches the podcast. 

Brian Searl: It’s never too early. We actually we did a, and I don’t wanna take up too much of the show here.

We did a thing on Outwired our, my other podcast, which starts in an hour. It’s like a Joe Rogan style. We drink whiskey and have fun. So now that we’re not having fun here, to be clear, it’s just a different kind of fun over there. But we talked a couple months ago about the, like how you would take $5 as a startup investor in a campground and turn that into a trillion dollars just by owning RV parks.

And it went all the way to space travel and become becoming the sole exclusive provider of the first mover on Mars. And it’s pretty interesting. So I’m just saying there’s a future there. We use the $200 a month thinking AI model. It laid it all out. I’m not saying it’s easy, but you’re not looking for easy. Are you, Kurtis? 

Kurtis Wilkins: No. Definitely not. Looking for easy. Give us a challenge. 

Brian Searl: Sandy. Tell us something.

Sandy Ellingson: First of all, it’s very easy to be quiet when you’ve got such great guests and that I enjoy listening to. So I had fun with you today, Kurt. It was good to see you again. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Good to see you too, Sandy. I was and it was a pleasure to see you again.

And Jeff, it was nice to make your acquaintance on this podcast. 

Brian Searl: I’m just gonna, I’m gonna point out, she said it was lovely to talk to all the guests, but not the host. 

Sandy Ellingson: I get to talk to you a lot more than I do them though. 

Brian Searl: Probably true. Okay, so final thoughts.

Sandy Ellingson: And, I do love what you’re doing, so I get to tell you that on the back channel.

But the other thing too that I thought was interesting as I listened to everybody and because I’m a little more seasoned than some. Not older, just seasoned. One of the things that struck me is that I’ve always loved that KOA kinda led the pack with doing these annual reports and then being willing to share them, not just with KOA, but with other campgrounds.

And I really believe that 2025 is gonna be a year where we’re gonna have to see some changes in that happening. And all of us are gonna have to follow the example that KOA set and be able to share agnostic data. Nothing where we’re, messing up people’s privacy. But there are so many more types of parts and so many more pieces of aggregated data that we need to be able to collectively gather.

If we wanna be able to compete with the hotels and the things that are coming in with this. And so I just thought today was a really good conversation leading to that. And again, I wanna just encourage parks that, technology is the underpinning platform of everything great. That everybody I’ve heard talking today.

And so you’ve got to have the right technology and if you don’t know what it is, ask one of us. 

Brian Searl: If you don’t know what technology is or the right technology? 

Sandy Ellingson: No the right technology for you because it’s,

Brian Searl: I think if you dunno what tech is period, you’re in trouble. But Go ahead. Sorry.

Sandy Ellingson: I was just gonna say it’s an individual question based on the kind of park, but there’s certainly a lot of people out there with a lot of great experience who can give advice.

Kurtis Wilkins: And Sandy, I actually have a great analogy that I use for technology. I’m like, technology is the car, data is your windows. And you want great technology ’cause you want a fast car, you wanna be able to go places, you wanna be able to stop, you wanna be able to steer. But if you’re not looking at your data, imagine driving a car without any windows.

Can’t see where you’re going. And that’s how I describe the two and how we works.

Sandy Ellingson: I’m stealing that. I’m totally doing that from my conference. 

Yolanda D’Oyen: I just wanted to say as far as a five year, it’s interesting, I’ve been doing this now for over five years in the planning stage. I know we’re, we are implementing, but I do have my, the first phase and we’re doing it by phase because all the underground, when you’re doing from a brand new situation, building brand new, all the infrastructure is really important.

And getting everything set up. My phase two is actually putting my riverfront cabins and my phase three is the hotel because not everyone is going to be having the RV in the interim. I just, it was like finding treasure, is that my phase three site that I had set aside for my hotel. I’m going to implement and put in workforce housing and hostel accommodations and I can actually get that up and running in 80 to 90 days while the rest of the project is being constructed.

And so there revenue can start right away. Just for the, exactly what we’re talking about for the institutional loans, that sort of thing. Another to come in and buy for the business. But not just that. Also, RV parks are prime for USD loans. They’re 85% loan guaranteed loans, and those are actually really good loans.

I know all these various different loan opportunities, funding opportunities it’s been amazing journey for me personally for growth. And as I am quiet listening to. All your podcasts. Now talking about the industry, I’m learning a lot. I connected with Mr. Jeff there and there’s so much knowledge, Brian, that you bring to this.

I’m personally humbled that I got invited here. I’m like, what do I bring to the table? But, as I said, I’m the newbie going out the child that is gathering all this information and putting it into action. And there is, and making a difference. And we can make a difference.

We are here. The RV industry is an opportunity., It is a hospitality. I see it as an a hospitality. Component for longevity of life. Seriously, because there is that work everybody in life going into that work life balance. And we offer that, we offer an opportunity for families to get together.

We are not just RV owners or we offer things more grassroots opportunities than most hotels do. We can do this. And so there is, I feel there is a responsibility, to for what it is that we do. There is a responsibility that we have. So I thank you for me being here.

I didn’t, let me get off my bandwagon, my, my 

Brian Searl: box. No, you’re fine. Thank you for being here, Yo’El. We actually have a lot of guests on the show, just so Jeff talks less. So in addition to your intelligence and all the good things that you’re doing, that’s a side benefit for you being here too. 

Yolanda D’Oyen: I’m very happy that I was able to connect with Mr. Jeff. I’m sorry. I’m Jamaican, so we, there is a certain amount of respect, for Mr. This and that. You can’t take that. 

Brian Searl: Absolutely. I’ve known Jeff for a long time. He knows. I’m just messing with him. 

Yolanda D’Oyen: Yes. Thank you so much again for the opportunity. 

Brian Searl: Final thoughts, Jeff and Kurt, and then we can wrap up.

Jeff Hoffman: I’m pretty much just gonna have to take off, Brian. I got another meeting. I enjoyed the show. This was a good one. I enjoyed the conversation and hopefully for the next one I’ll have all the KOA data read and, dribble down into something I can use. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Kurt. Final thoughts? 

Kurtis Wilkins: My final thoughts are thank you for having me on, Brian. Absolute pleasure to be here. Hope I get invited back and I’m excited also to dive into the KOA data and see the performance of 2024. It’s always good to look back.

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you guys for being here. I appreciate it. If you’re interested in the KOA data in and you haven’t heard enough of me talking already in fifty-, I don’t know, eight minutes or so we’re gonna do our Outwired show live with Scott Bahr, who actually did the KOA North American Camping Report.

And Greg Emmert, who is my co-host on Outwired, we’re gonna drink a little bit of whiskey. We’re gonna have some fun dissecting that data. We’re also gonna talk about what’s more important to consumers from a data standpoint, from like the physical of the gasoline to the mental of the safety.

And then we’re gonna even dive into flying cars and talk about that and how that’s gonna impact real estate and all kinds of things. ’cause China just approved their first one and they’re flying around over there right now, and they’re coming to America soon. So if you’re not tired of me, join us there.

Otherwise, we’ll see you next week on MC Fireside Chats. Thanks, Kurt and Yo’El for sticking out with me. The end Yo’El. Remember when you get your park developed, the three people here stuck it out to the end. We should come visit first. 

Yolanda D’Oyen: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, you’re, you are definitely welcome. And please and I’d love to come back again if you don’t mind.

Brian Searl: Absolutely. Thank you guys. Take care. Have a great have a good day. 

Yolanda D’Oyen: Alright, byebye.