MC Fireside Chats – April 19, 2023

Brian: Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks. We are missing our co-host Cara today. She had a friend who went [00:01:00] into labor coincidentally, 15 minutes before the show. It feels like it’s planned, but maybe not. Anyway, we’re missing Cara today. Super excited to welcome her back next week as our regular co-host.

And then this week is our regular kind of Campground owner focused episode. So we’ve got one recurring guest out of our normal recurring guests, Nate Thompson from KCN Campgrounds welcoming him to his, actually his first show of being a recurring guest. So excited to learn about KCN campgrounds, what they do in the industry some of the things that they have their hands into.

And then now we’ve got Travis John here from, I’m sorry, Travis, I forgot your company. Web three Blockchain is. 

Travis: CampersDAO

Brian: CampersDAO okay. And so he’s gonna talk to us a little bit about Web three blockchain, some of the different things that he’s playing with. We’ll try to decipher that into maybe an English language so we can all understand that.

And then of course we have Ali and Eric Rasmussen from Spacious Skies Campgrounds 15 Parks now, and we’ll talk to a little bit about about their history, how they got started, things like that. And we’re excited, to do that. So do we want to just briefly go around and let, since we have basically three new, [00:02:00] four new people, Ali and Eric.

I’m just counting you as one view on my camera lens. Do we wanna start just introducing everybody and a little bit about yourselves and then we can deep dive. So whoever wants to start first. 

Ali: We’re happy to start. My name is Ali and this is Eric. We are the co-founders of Spacious Skies campgrounds.

We have 15 campgrounds, RV campgrounds. We have cabins, yards, all that from Maine down to now Georgia and out to Tennessee. All of our team members are Spacious Skies Campgrounds employees. So we are a collection that operates altogether. 

Brian: So I’m very curious and I definitely want to go around.

I’m sorry, Eric, I didn’t interrupt you. I was gonna ask you a question, but go ahead, if you were gonna say something. 

Eric: Nope. 

Brian: Okay. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say, I want to go around the room and have everybody introduce themselves, but tell me what’s the dynamic, like husband and wife team working together and who takes on what responsibility and what roles?

Just [00:03:00] briefly. 

Ali: Eric, why don’t you say what you do since it is, it’s like chicken or the egg, right? I think that for sure Eric’s role is the chicken here. 

Eric: Sure. Yeah. So I focus generally on acquisitions, capital markets and asset management. So out searching for new campgrounds to acquire lining up financing, debt and equity.

And then just general, again, asset management, oversight of portfolio operations. 

Ali: And then I am on the side of operations of actually running the campgrounds of the brand development, marketing all of that stuff. And then Eric also he also runs the like property improvements to capital improvements side of things.

Brian: Awesome. I’m really excited to dive more into this cuz I think it’s a fascinating and Nate, obviously you can weigh in on this from KCN Campgrounds too, just how you, from starting point, right? My first park I bought, but then how do I grow an operations team and a marketing team [00:04:00] and all the people that are necessary to run every facet of a Campground?

I think that’s a really interesting story that you guys could play off each other for, but go ahead, Nate. Tell us about KCN. 

Nate: I’m Nate Thompson. I’m one of the founders of KCN Campgrounds. We have a portfolio of currently of seven parks and unlike Ali and Eric that kind of run vertically up and down the east coast, we were run more horizontally with parks in Utah all the way out to Tennessee.

We’re building a portfolio currently. We, our last park we purchased was in December, and we’ve got additional parks in the pipeline. Our goal is and model is we are looking for parks that are maybe underutilized under amenitized, if you will, and up-leveling those with new amenities, accommodations and whatnot that are more in tune with what people are looking for these days in parks that have been maybe they were built in the sixties or the seventies and not really optimized for RVs of the current size and status.

The amenity set accommodation set of the current needs and demands of our guests. 

Brian: Awesome. 

Thank you, Nate. Definitely look forward [00:05:00] to diving more into what Kcn has to offer. And then Travis the one outlier here who doesn’t own a multitude of parks. Really cool technology.

Web three, blockchain. Can you briefly try to introduce your company, what you wanna accomplish? And then of course, we’ll definitely dive deeper into what you’re offering. 

Travis: Yeah, definitely thanks for having me and I’ll be learning quite a bit from our panel of experts here as well.

Yeah we’re launching something completely new for this industry. The concept itself is not new. We’re crowdfunding with passionate RVers to buy an RV park. Start first, start with one as all of us here on the call. Do and move forward from there.

And similar to Nate, our focus is really on, on the upper end of amenity rich type of focus of potentially buying existing campgrounds, but even the possibility of creating our own. But really our focus is around the modern camper. A lot of the push toward more amenities. Of course, that’s not for everyone, but there’s enough demand, where we’re seeing that.

Currently definitely a destination type of Campground. And in our case, we have [00:06:00] 10,000. We’re focusing on crowdfunding with 10,000 fellow RVers to buy our first Campground. And we are also, we also have a private accredited investor model that we’re bolting onto this. So from a growth standpoint, our advisory board, if you will, is gonna be our 10,000 members that are gonna be crowdfunding our first Campground.

So where we feel this is a unique step in is really where the kind of, the techy language comes in. But it’s really just using blockchain technology, which has been around for decades to use to, to democratize the ability to vote and the ability to make decisions. Which campgrounds to buy, how to operate them.

We’re looking to also vertically integrate operations. You wanna out not outsourcing that. So quite a few of our members will also be team members ultimately and be part of the strategy. So we’re really looking to, first, obviously it’s, crawl before you walk and then before you run.

But this is a, first time we’re doing this, I’m involved in a project that’s in the golf industry just as a member that, that they’ve been [00:07:00] able to make this work with the same kind of technology. And, we’re excited to do this in the camping business. 

Brian: So I think one of my first questions, and I have a limited knowledge of blockchain, right?

So I’m enough to be dangerous. But my, one of my initial questions here is is I’m hearing you talk and before you go into the technology and how that helps and things like that, I can probably just go into the heads of myself, Ali, Eric, Nate. We have investors. In some cases we own partial businesses of the, parts of our companies.

Nobody probably here can imagine having 10,000 partners. So how does that work? How do you keep everybody happy in your model, right? With 10,000 people voting up? So that’s my opening question. 

Travis: And that’s really where blockchain makes it a lot easier because it is fully democratized, everything is literally on the blockchain.

And it does, it’s not overly techy with the tools that are available now. It’s very similar to logging into to your Gmail using a, a web three wallet these days. So of course we provide training, people that, maybe aren’t quite up to this. A lot of our focus is around the millennial [00:08:00] camper, so to speak.

Cuz so really, like the crypto blockchain stuff isn’t actually that that difficult to comprehend in the sense that a lot of times it’s already part of what their day-to-day might be, but it’s something where you’re able to see all the votes, everyone. There’s no lack of accountability in that case.

And it’s also not cumbersome because we’re not. Voting on should we replace the toilet paper, in the bathroom. I think, it’s just not little things. We’re focusing on strategic goals, so it’s where do we want a Campground to be voting on specific campgrounds criteria that we want at those campgrounds, and then sourcing them, so that’s, good old fashioned sourcing as you guys are doing on this call.

Nate: So Travis, I’m super curious. So for instance, you talked about like the location. Is that something that would come up as a member based vote? So for instance, you had parks that were a potential to buy and three different locations, and a blast would go out to all the members and say, pick your, one of the three that you would prefer, and then that kind of tallies up [00:09:00] and informs the direction of the business.

Is that how it works? 

Travis: That’s correct, yeah. So there’s a, we’ve used a tool, like one of the tools is called Snapshot. It’ll, it for, it’s free for so you don’t have to pay like gas fees, what they call, in the blockchain world, like to connect your wallet and do those transactions.

You’re able to vote on a, what we call a proposal. So we’ll have a proposal, 1.10, for location, southeast locations. We have these three southeast locations. We give them, all the details. And then our 10,000 members are able to and of course they’ve already given us criteria to say, Hey, we wanna find one in the southeast.

We wouldn’t even be looking in the southeast if that’s not, already not a hot button. So from there, yes, they would vote on those and it would be, from that point, once we find a consensus, we would move forward with the next step. 

Nate: That’s super interesting. 

Brian: So I think one of the most important things we should just set the precedent for briefly with you, Travis, is just to, to explain the blockchain for people who don’t understand, right?

We’ve heard this kind of buzzword tossed around and what does it mean? Is it crypto? Is it not crypto? [00:10:00] Obviously crypto is on the blockchain. I know that cuz I’m way too much of a geek. But let’s take this to, and I wanna see if you agree with this, Travis. I have not read this. I literally just did this way you were typing.

You can see here, I think you can see. Give a second. Lemme turn this on. So this is ChatGPT. So I just took this in here and said, explain blockchain for a fifth grader and use an analogy just cuz that’s really easy. It says, all right, imagine a digital notebook that everyone in your class has a copy of.

This notebook keeps a record of every time someone in your class trades stickers with each other. Each time a trade happens, the details are written down in a page of the notebook. Once the page is full, it’s sealed with a special tape that can’t be opened and a new page begins. This special tape also has a secret code that connects it to the previous page, making them link together.

Now, this digital notebook is called a blockchain. The pages are called blocks, and the special tape with the secret code is called the chain. Just like the notebook, a blockchain records all the transactions or contracts or [00:11:00] votes in this case, right? Like sticker trades in a secure and organized way.

Since every student has a copy of the notebook, it’s really hard for anyone to cheat or change the sticker trades because everyone would have to agree to change their own copy too. This makes the blockchain trustworthy and safe in the real world. Blockchain is used for things like digital money called cryptocurrencies and other types of data.

So give us your take and spin on that from perspective.

Travis: You know that I love ChatGPT, so I’m glad you asked it. And that was certainly, I couldn’t have strung that together any, any better. But I would explain it as a distributed ledger. But the notebook analogy and the stickers in the classroom, at a fifth grade level is a great way to put it.

Cuz ultimately that is, that’s really where the foundation of this is this is for the first time you’re truly able to have transparency among voting. Cuz we’ve all had social networks and we have, ability to vote. But as investors know on this call, if you had 10,000 [00:12:00] partners that’d be a nightmare.

Yeah. As you point out, Brian. So ultimately in this case, we will have limited partners, that are putting in money to, to scale our Campground portfolio, but ultimately our advisors who. Really our industry experts are, everyday RVers, sometimes full-time RVers. They’re the ones that are truly voting on the direction of the project.

And, it is immutable. You cannot change this ledger, you can’t change the notebook from your analogy you mentioned. So that’s what we find is exciting. And I really the fact that we put it in the hands of, the everyday RV to guide the direction.

I, I realize it’s more work, but it’s just with technology it does streamline a lot of the presented headaches that seem to, seem to be on the surface. Yeah, we’re excited about it. And for, to the point of blockchain, there’s so many ways to aggregate your community. Backend buddy press plugins as Brian as, as well as things like discord.

So organizing the community through communication is also very important. We’re also working, very hard on that so that all those [00:13:00] members have a voice, not just in their voting, but just in the communication. Everybody can collaborate. We have in-person events, it’s not just all about this, virtual avatar kind of world.

Brian: So I think we could probably talk about this forever when we bored death, everybody who is watching it. But cuz I’m a big geek too, like I would love to talk about blockchain and NFTs and youth cases of how those things will come up in the future. But we do have a bunch of other amazing guests here, so I wanna get into Spacious Skies and KCN Campgrounds but before I do, I have to talk about our sponsor, Firefly reservations. So we’re gonna play a quick video. We’ll be right. 

Announcer: Did you know most campers prefer to reserve online? Are you missing reservations? Firefly makes it easy to run your Campground and accept reservations online. Anytime with Firefly, you can quickly message campers.

Simply handle ongoing reservations and automate emails and payment processing, giving you back time to run your Campground. You can start your free trial today, no credit card needed. Visit firefly [00:14:00] reservations.com to learn more. 

Brian: Super appreciative of Firefighter Reservations for being a regular sponsored, our Campground owner’s show, so they’re easy.

Just easy Campground reservation software for RV, parks and Campground. So if you are in need of that, please give them a shout, do a demo and see if they might be a good fit for you. So let’s dive in here. Who wants to start KCN, Spacious Skies, should we do a coin toss? Do you wanna alternate and just talk One, park One. Park one. Park one. 

Ali: We went first last time. Nate, you go ahead. 

Nate: So Brian, what specifically would you like me to cover? Where what directionally where are we headed here? 

Brian: So I think it’s interesting to me, let’s play out this starting point, right? And that starting point, I think we talked about that both you and Spacious Skies share and can interplay between each other on is how you, cuz that story of how you got started and how you started staffing and how you decide what to acquire, when to acquire whether to acquire leads us to tell the story of both of your organizations pretty well, I think. I hope so. 

Nate: Sure. Okay. So Kcn is a partnership. I’ve got two [00:15:00] other partners and they’ve been in, I have a benefit of having two partners that have been in the in the Campground space for a little bit longer than I have.

As I mentioned before, the show to Travis, I’m. Recovering technology professional myself although I’ve been in real estate and real estate projects and stuff most of my adult life. So my partners, Kevin and Cam have been in the the Campground space, owning a couple of parks themselves. I know them through my kids and we’re staying at one of the parks, a couple of summers.

And we started talking about the Campground industry and the Campground space, and looking around the park in Green River, Utah, where we were staying seeing all the campers and whatnot. My brain started working. And so in talking with Kevin and Cam we decided that there was an opportunity to go at a bigger scale.

With some of the things in my background that I’ve done in the past to help maybe put some more gasoline in the tank to take this to a bigger level. And so the first part we talked about that we started getting an actual management company in place, all the scaffolding necessary to really scale and run the parts[00:16:00] that we intended to buy.

And then we bought our first part last spring and bought four parts last year as we started to ramp up the acquisition side of the business. There’s kinda two pieces, right? There’s, and I’m sure Ali and Eric, I’m excited to hear how you got that divided as well. We’ve got kinda the acquisition and the growth aspect to the business.

And then, as kinda one with own entity. And then separate related, we’ve got a management company that actually operates the parks. So within that all kinda the shared function, finance, marketing, park operations, hr, recruiting, those kinds of things, the management. As we get that stood up and kinda formalized, which is well down the path, we can add additional parks to it, and we’ve got best practices that we can apply across all of them.

Ali: I have did you say that you you founded or you started building the management company before you acquired your first park, is that right? 

Nate: We did. [00:17:00] We have, it’s a little bit of a blurry timeline in a sense because already had a couple of parks and so there was there were teams in place at those parks, but no real centralized management other than the two of them.

And so in order for us to scale, we really needed to put together a standalone entity that all of the teams at the parks, roll into that has functions like I said earlier, but yeah building the airplane while it’s in the air to a certain degree. That’s the goal really, is all of those functions are centralized in one org.

Ali: Yeah. Yeah. I think that we did it backwards we got into this with the intention of being a little bit more passive on the investor side of things. Our original plan was to we, we thought that our portfolio would max out at four or five campgrounds, all third party managed.

And we, so we closed on our first Campground with that plan in mind, may of 20, 21 and day one [00:18:00] that, that business plan was definitely not gonna come to fruition. So I ended up. Sticking around getting a two week crash course in Campground management because I was doing it. While Eric was home with our three kids in New Jersey, I was up in Maine. And that is where the the realization that we should build our own property management company and operate ourselves with. So I was able to leave the property after a few weeks after the after we got a manager in place.

But Yeah. That from then on we started to hire up and game plan what the management company should and does look like now. So I think that it’s felt like we’ve, and but we, acquisitions did not slow down while we were simultaneously building the management company.

I think that we definitely felt like we were playing. [00:19:00] A little bit more until probably right about now, just based on the timing of of things. We did not go into this game planning our own management company, but it was ob it was so obviously the right thing to do when we realized it was the right thing to do.

And we have been lucky enough to from like the leadership side of things, we were able to recruit folks that Eric worked with in, in his past life in real estate development and and really build up from there. 

Nate: Yeah, it totally makes sense. Cause you, and what we realized I think similarly is with that kind of vertical integration, you control everything from the guest experience to the back office, all of the CapEx projects.

That’s a big focus for us is we wanna buy parks that have the capacity for expansion and improvements and maybe optimization of the layouts and the site types and whatnot. That’s a big focus for us as well. And it’s hard to do that arms length, I think, as opposed to having an integrated team where you’re talking to your managers on a weekly basis and [00:20:00] you’ve got budgets and you’ve got, guest feedback and you’ve got team feedback and it builds a an engine that, that I think can really drive a lot faster and provide a better experience ultimately to the guests.

Ali: That’s right, that’s right. We also and we’re closer to the road where we’re seated at this camp, so apologies if you guys all hear road noise. Yeah. The other thing that we did off, like from the get go was decide that we were going to build a brand and develop a unique brand, a new brand in the space.

We look up to KOA and Jellystone and sun and all of the brands that are the big time players. And so we That’s, that was the goal from the start. And we do find and I think realized quickly as well, that building that brand would have been almost impossible with third party management.

I think for just like many of the same reasons that, you just described, but especially when we’re trying to develop like the continuity of something that is 

[00:21:00] forward-facing like that. 

Nate: Yeah. No, that totally makes sense. I think there’s a huge value in that brand development. We have a little bit of a different approach in the sense we’re more of a, like an intel inside an approach.

All of our parks are KOA parks, and so the KCN brand is more focused on our investor community. And our, as opposed to the end customer or the end guests that are at our parks. And honestly just a quick plug for koa they, that, that model, I think we get such a great value from being part of that organization, that family, that franchise model with respect to marketing and operations and technology and the leadership there we’re close with and very proud of being part of that and see the leadership that, that Toby and others have at that organization.

It’s it’s great to be part of that. And that I think has helped us accelerate not having to build some of those things from scratch, but rather being able to, draft behind the existing activities, technologies, programs that are in place there have helped us scale, I think, quite a bit faster than if we had done it [00:22:00] from scratch.

Like it sounds like you have, which is, that’s a lot of work. 

Ali: For the faint part. Our favorite acquisitions definitely are KOAs. It’s a great foundation to, to work with. 

Nate: Yeah. Yeah. Plug and play, it’s just, okay. All of these things are already ready to go. 

Ali: It’s really true. It’s really true.

Brian: I think what you guys are talking about too is, it’s very interesting from a branding perspective, right? Because this is more of my area and it’s interesting to me how you, how different branding can be, and this all goes back for me from a knowledge perspective all the way back to Nike, right?

Nobody would ever imagine a swoosh was a shoe company, but they made it that you’d never imagine a fruit would be a technology company like Apple, but they made it that. And so I think very much is useful that today, given all of our tools and all of our technology and all of the things that we can use, like I don’t think you could build a brand like Spacious Skies or KCN the same way in the same compressed time period in 1970, as you could today.

And Warren Buffet famously said it takes 20 years to build a [00:23:00] brand in five or to build a reputation in five minutes to ruin it. I think that’s not necessarily true anymore. I think you can go with that. Maybe not five minutes, certainly still five minutes, but.. 

Can I show off some of your guys’ websites while you talk?

Am I allowed to do that, Nate? I know where it’s maybe. 

Nate: Sure. Yeah. We’re closing in on kind of the final launch candidate for our new KCN website. We’re very excited. It’s a labor of love and anytime you work on something like that reflects your team and your organization and your mission and whatnot, it’s a painful process right.

To, to birth, something like that. With all those caveats Brian, if you’d like to share it Sure. That’s absolutely fine. 

Brian: Yeah, we’ll share it Spacious Skies too. And yeah, it’s a work in progress. So this is really interesting to me and. Shameless plug. I guess we helped you design this website.

Yeah. But it’s very interesting to me the kinda the direction that we took from it, right? This is not unlike I have never seen anything like this in the industry, but this art that you’re looking at is entirely AI generated. So we’ve taken basically this theme of drawing throughout the entire [00:24:00] website of hand black pencil, sketch, and obviously added a little bit of color here in the water.

But as you scroll down, it’s just nice and clean and just generated different, like everything is completely from scratch. Just using an ai. And but then we carry that over to, we’ll look at like your team, so your team page of everybody. We’ve carried that kind of theme over into the drawings and into the editors and all those kinds of things that just make that quirky not even quirky, but unique KCN and brand.

Stand out that we’re looking forward to building. So I’m really, yeah, I’m really proud of how that turned out. And I love it. I love the fact that you are willing to let play around with the AI art too. 

Nate: Oh, I think it’s great. I think that the the taking advantage of technology and where things are and where things are headed is a passion of mine personally, and being able to plug that in particularly in an industry that I don’t think has there’s a lot of open fuel learning from a technology perspective in the Camp Camping and Campground space, I believe.

Now this is [00:25:00] kind yeah we’re super happy with how it’s turned out and the fact that this is all. Yeah, AI generated artwork is something of a proud pride point for us as we launched this new site.

Travis: Oh yeah. It’s gorgeous. Yeah. Well done. 

Ali: That’s really nice. 

Brian: And then the flip side is spacious skies.

So this is obviously a completely different look, but still we’ve heard, obviously you’ve done a great job getting the brand out there already. You’ve had a little bit of lead time from where Nate’s starting at, right? But I, I constantly get hear compliments for your website about the trails that you’re drawing and the graphics.

Yeah. And just the branding and the loyalty programs and just this website’s beautiful. It’s amazing. I had nothing to do with this website.

But it’s beautiful. 

Ali: And this is I worked, I, we work with a local shop in our hometown. We can walk to their studio from our house.

And for sure it is we, labor of love is a really great way to put it. Earlier this year [00:26:00] we launched This integrated website we started, things with individual, URLs. We had a main HQ website, but booking and all of that was on individual URLs for each Campground.

And now we’ve integrated everything into this massive website. At the same time we integrated our booking software. We use Camp Spot, and so we, we took advantage of the API integration. And it is, there we go. It’s my internet. 

Brian: It’s just my internet okay. 

Ali: And then also the third thing that we launched in February was our spacious Skies loyalty program.

So that was. That was also an early intention that we finally got out there. We call our loyalty program members cosmic campers. And cosmic kiddos and cosmic canines, we put that up there too. Super important. And so we it’s, it’s a familiar model. We have an [00:27:00] annual fee, small annual fee for a discount on our reservations and a couple little Perks here and there as we develop them.

We just started with the basics. We don’t have like a tiered program or points or anything just yet. But it’s it’s been really great. I think today our count was 325 members since our February 15th launch. Our initial completely made up goal was 50 members a month for the first year.

And so we’re, we need a new goal now. 

Nate: Funny thing about goals, when you blow past them, you gotta reset quickly. 

Ali: That’s right. That’s right. Now we have to challenge ourselves. That’s right. 

Travis: Yeah. I remember commenting, Ali, now that we were looking at it cuz about your new website launch a few months ago.

So yeah, it’s, yeah. Amazing. 

Nate: It looks great and it’s interesting too that kind of the juxtaposition of R two. Yeah. Yours is very consumer focused. It focuses on the parks and booking and amenities and whatnot. Which totally makes sense. That’s the audience. And I’m curious from a management [00:28:00] perspective, when you consolidate those all into one versus having, 12 different websites.

How has that worked? How is that? Is it now one 12 the effort to manage your website? 

Ali: Not one 12, I would say like one. A quarter easier maybe. It’s we’re definitely like tweaking it all the time. Every week there’s a new way to streamline it.

Like we just made the realization that we were copying, pasting and updating the same line 14 times over because we had our rules set up on each campground’s sub page. And it was like, why are we doing this? We’re gonna consolidate all of that and make everything in a common area.

And yes, the intention is to keep on streamlining and make it less ever. But I’m not sure about your, your man me managers or how your like. The guest communication or your even your [00:29:00] social engagement. Like who is handling all of that so far? Everything that we do.

Yeah, we have we have not allowed our or not trained our managers on handling any of that engagement, like at the social perspective. We, so we manage all that in house with our marketing team. And similarly, like the man, no, no one’s touching the websites, no one’s touching, like the social pages except for our little team of three.

Nate: Yeah. Inhouse I should caveat or qualify that a little bit. So I’m our marketing person. Sure. But we have participation from a manager level on social, so our Campground managers are posting to Facebook and whatnot. We also do that on a corporate level onsite. We’ve got a program or a platform called Zing, which is a text messaging platform Yeah.

That integrates with the reservation management system that K2 has called, or that KOA has called k2. And so there’s both automated. Kind of text messaging that happens as guests both are close and then they arrive and then they’re onsite and then they depart. And then there are a library of different [00:30:00] single messages that can be done, kind of one off that the park managers and their teams control and manage as well.

And then my job is to really put the heads and beds, if you will, from a marketing and a overarching, demand gen perspective with marketing programs to help, generate guests being onsite of the parks. 

Ali: I just saw when I logged into CampsSpot today on the admin side I just saw that they have launched a new like an improved text feature that I can’t wait to dive into because really, it’s necessary.

Nate: Yeah we’ve seen a lot of really good response to that. And it’s just a quick very unintrusive way to communicate different things to guests as they’re approaching or if there’s a late check-in then there’s a, the ability to link to a whole late check-in page for the park and whatnot of here’s where to go, here’s what to do, here’s how to do it.

And then there’s also ability to drive kind of interaction and retail engagement while they’re on site at the parks as well. Yeah, that’s been a really good tool for us so far. 

Ali: Yeah. I’m excited to dig into our new function. 

Brian: Yeah, [00:31:00] it’s really interesting. Obviously you wanna provide the g the best guest service possible, and I’ve talked to, both of you at different points, right?

For different things. And just offered my unsolicited opinions, right? Sometimes, but moving forward with the tech, with the text messaging that people prefer to do over emails because maybe they get too much email spam and there’s not enough value there or whatever it is. It’s easy for them to look on their device.

That just enhances the guest experience coming, going, like you were talking about receiving the post departure emails from Camp Spot, but also I’m really excited where this is gonna go in the future. And both of you know that I’m alright, I’m really obsessed with the ai, but but one of the things like personalization of guest emails that we’ve talked about before, where like you can plug in data just like the hotel collects your preferences and then give somebody a personalized guide that no one else has to the local area or to your Campground or to what you might or might not enjoy, or where you might wanna stay or book or not.

I’m interested in continuing to explore those things and see where that kind of goes. 

Nate: And I think that there’s a there’s so much open field running in that capacity as you overlay AI onto some of this stuff. Cuz there’s, with [00:32:00] Campo or Camp Spot Rather, or k2, there’s a pretty rich data set about your guest and where they, and what they’ve done particularly across parks and whatnot, things that they’ve engaged with or interacted with. And using something like a text messaging platform with some AI overlay, the ability to send very specific targeted messages based on that data set to a guest with text, which is a very contextually point in time touchpoint.

I think that there’s a lot of upside, a lot of headroom for that experience to really continue to grow and mature and ultimately be very valuable to the guests to suggest things that they may not otherwise think of across the park or the location or region that they’re in. 

Travis: I think that’s where..

Brian: So I’m curious.

Sorry. No, go ahead Travis, please. I’m sorry. Go ahead. 

Travis: Even with like your chat by Brian Searl and some of those things be different stages of that journey. Cuz it could even be on your website, Ali, Eric, from a brand perspective where someone’s chatting, maybe they’re considering booking, but they don’t know, as you mentioned, they like, they aren’t fully aware [00:33:00] and we know.

It’s just the amount of research you have to do for a trip you’re going on and where you know where to stay, what kind of restaurants are there. If you’re able to personalize that very quickly, that could be a huge conversion optimizer for that stay, so I think that’s it’s interesting to see where all these, it, it can be obviously an enhancement at the end to thank them for their visit when, or changing the reservation last minute through text message, when they’re arriving late, late arrival procedures, et cetera.

But yeah, it’s, I think you’re right Brian. It’s just there’s so much that we. Can do as brands and as investors to really make the guest experience better. And I think that’s why you guys chose to vertically integrate as well, is that, I think that’s many brand many that are focused on, just that third party of side of things may have a tough road in the next three, four years, in my opinion.

Nate: Yeah. Yeah. And even like Travis, you’re saying think think about the onsite experience where AI baby steps. Where a guest gets to a park and say, Hey, if you’d like, if you’d like some, curated or some [00:34:00] custom recommendations, tell us five things or eight things, or 10 things about you, your family, things you like to do.

And an AI can basically weave that into a very specific customized package for that guest. And Brian just did on ChatGPT, right? Like in seconds. The the ability for us to do that from a human time perspective it doesn’t scale right? But if you can build some of these little like modules or components that can start to weave, that I think could be a pretty interesting differentiator for parks that have something like that as an onsite, tool or feature or option for.

And it really, millions of things. 

Brian: It’s only limited by your imagination. And we’ve only started to imagine, as a toddler taking its first couple steps of what this is possible. And I really need my lawyer here, Christine Taylor, to, to make sure I don’t say anything silly during the show, but imagine from a guest safety standpoint, right?

Like you could set up AI to tie a proximity sensor for when a bearer comes near their cabin and they just get a text message that says Five bear safety tips,[00:35:00] 

Travis: 50% off bear spray, you know.

Nate: One time to take off the bacon suit. Yeah, exactly. 

Brian: But I’m curious Eric, you’ve been a little bit quiet, so I want to gently ease you into the conversation here. I’m just curious, let’s continue the story right with how we build. So we’ve got our fundamentals that we’ve laid down. We’re up to the branding standpoint.

We’ve got really nice websites, regardless of how many parks we have or don’t have at this point. How does that interplay work? And Nate, you can speak to this too, I’m sure. Between, I wanna go out and I wanna look for more campgrounds, but I wanna make sure that I’m not overwhelming the team who’s operating the campgrounds.

Eric: Yeah, we’re that, that, that’s a constant balance. I think we’re continually working through and we capitalize we built the property management platform. We staffed up on that ahead of our kind of mass acquisition run. So we were a little bit ahead of the game, but it’s a constant constant churn of growth and then figuring out new systems and how do we handle this new scale?

And as we bring [00:36:00] on more parks it’s a different element of the business and the operations that is getting tweaked next to a, to accommodate that scale and future growth. So we we, it’s a it’s a constant balance that I think we’ll probably be dealing with. In perpetuity as we continue to grow.

But when we did have a, a headstart on the staffing piece to, to handle the acquisitions as we 

planned..

Ali: Once we realized that we were, what our fate was that weed up. 

Eric: Yeah. Right up. That first acquisition. We knew we weren’t going third party anymore. That’s what we staffed up immediately a month or two ahead of our kind of next wave of acquisitions.

Ali: Yeah. 

That’s right. And I think that as a, for our company culture that, goes along with the consumer side of the brand we are trying to build the steam culture that one of like our characteristics that we. Trying to make sure everybody like embodies is this the idea of being able to like, be nimble and be flexible and like not too tied down 21 silos. So as we grow [00:37:00] and we’re continuing to like work and develop our team and like who is responsible for what, who leads what every few months or so we can take a look at what all has to be done and what all like what needs attention.

And everyone’s just like flexible and open to, to re distributing or responsibilities if necessary or just tweaking how everybody’s day to day looks. And I think that also allows us to move at whatever pace we intend to move. 

Eric: Yeah. We, it also ebbs and flows a little bit throughout our evolution and we, also what external factors are.

Are playing into it as well. Right now we’re finding ourselves in a really good position. 2023. We’re uber focused on operations and getting everything perpe, everything perfected as opposed to, listen, there there’s a lot of acquisition opportunities out there, but it is it’s a lot harder right now.

It’s a lot more work. We’re closing on the on the really good opportunities but, using this external, kinda the external circumstances to hone this piece of our business.[00:38:00] Cause it’s what makes the most sense for our future, future growth. 

Nate: Yeah, that totally. I’m curious, as you’ve gone through that obviously 1, 2, 3 parks is different than the scale of number that you’ve got now from a technology perspective, what have been maybe some of the components or the pieces of that overall platform that you’ve built that have been great until they weren’t great?

Or have been. Things that you’ve decided you need to add as you hit a certain scale? What does that kind of look like? Yeah, great. Great question. I think the one that, that, that comes to mind immediately is our accounting kind of processes and the technology there. Like when we started just doing it as we did it right?

And it always was always a secondary thought to acquisitions and other kind of value driving activities. Whereas now that we have a lot of scale and we’re finding. Scale makes some things a lot easier and it makes other things a lot harder. And those are the things we gotta design processes around.

And that’s a big one is accounting and driving a lot of technological [00:39:00] efficiencies with that, to handle the scale and what we’re on the tail end of rebuilding our entire infrastructure. And that’s set up for 15 parks. It’ll be set up for a hundred parks.

So that’s got a good example like kinda getting over that, that, that initial kind of gap and getting the processes in place. And we believe that’ll carry us through our next several phases of growth. 

Ali: Yeah one thing that we just transitioned from, or like we’re at the tail end with the accounting processes because we have so many team members in so many different locations managing, like purchasing and approvals and all that stuff.

We were doing it with Excel spreadsheet packages and very, it was a very manual process with Bank of America credit cards and everybody’s hands that we need to, cancel and reissue every time there’s a problem. Like I’m looking at my, my, my browser bookmarks right now we’ve just graduated to using ramp cards instead of like the Bank America cards that everybody [00:40:00] had in hand.

And like processing things through bill.com instead of, just a our accounting manager’s email address things like that, that it may have seemed obvious. To someone else who’s growing and or building, growing a company, like those are things that we had to catch up on because we were focused on the other elements of building.

And that’s like definitely one thing. And I, the IT side of things, we have so many devices across many states and accounts and all that stuff. We’re probably seeking a, a third party IT solution versus the head of it, which is me right now, me and the Argo Daddy account.

Nate: Yeah, that’s everybody’s favorite job. 

Ali: What’s that? 

Nate: That’s everybody’s favorite job being the head of it, right? I can’t print. 

Ali: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I’d be curious to know what, how you’re scaling all of that. 

Nate: It’s funny, so we’re on ramp also. And I brought a controller onto the team that I’ve worked with in the past and gave her some time and thought space to put [00:41:00] together what would be a good, scalable platform for our accounting and bookkeeping and whatnot.

And so we’ve got RAMP for all the expense management, which is a fantastic platform. Awesome. And all of our managers have ramp cards, virtual cards and whatnot. Yep. That’s integrated directly into QuickBooks Online. As is now we did a kind of a custom integration with k2.

So all of our reservation data comes out of K2 and goes directly into QBO as well as ramp. And that’s also integrated with Amazon business. So those all kind of feed in the QuickBooks online, which is the main, brain if you will. And once it’s in there, that’s used for all of. All of the necessary accounting and taxes and investor reporting and the like.

But getting that all woven together was a bit of an effort. To your point, I think you can drop, more parks onto that platform and you’re not gonna have some of the, the wheels getting a little bit shaky that we might have had earlier in the life cycle, right?

Brian: So this is interesting to me. It’s an, obviously I don’t have experience owning the parks and working with accounting software and ramps cards and things like that, but I do own four [00:42:00] businesses that are totally different and not nearly as scary as running campgrounds. But it is interesting to me that I would’ve told you, I’ve owned started working from efforts Campground probably in 2011, 2012, and I would’ve told you probably at numerous points throughout those years that I was good.

I was happy, like I was a geek. I’m, I’ve done my automation, I’ve done my scaling, I’ve got my IT, and then something new comes out and I realize I can save two more hours or six more hours or eight more hours. And so one of the things we’re obsessed with right now, Is Zapier and the automations that we can do two hundreds of those different things in some in combination with ai, but some not.

And it’s fascinating to me the amount of things that you can do just through that platform. And I’ve probably saved my team like 130 hours a week starting, and I’ve only done I don’t know, six of what I wanna do. So it’s really interesting of, when I think I’m, this is it, and then I find I was just getting started.

Nate: No, it’s, yeah it’s once you’re on the rollercoaster, there’s no stopping point. Even listening to Ali talk about bill.com, I’ve used that in previous instances. We [00:43:00] don’t use it now. And my brain immediately said, okay, I need to look and see if that’s a piece that we need to plug in for all of our AP kind of workflow.

Ali: Yeah. Yep. 

Brian: There’s another one. I think Avid Pay is a competitor to them too, but I, yeah, some of our clients use bill.com to pay us yeah. It’s a very user-friendly dashboard, easy platform. 

Nate: Well and Allie and Eric, you may have run into this, we’re at the, we’re at the point right now where we get, hundreds of bills in some, in the peak of the season, like a week.

And so these stacks of bills are coming in. We’re looking at a solution right now that will open scan and distribute those and then we can workflow that into something like a bill.com. Whereas right now, it’s a, that, that particular part of our operations workflow is pretty manual, cumbersome, time consuming, and we’re looking at ways to really stream it at that.

Well, as soon as you find that solution would you share it with us because Yeah, totally. I know a few people who are tired of opening envelopes. 

Brian: I bet you could do a lot of that through. I see, I bet you could do a lot of through zappier, like the scanning part would [00:44:00] be the hardest part, right?

Like who whoever manually, like if you could manually input the data into crm, like a monday.com or something, I could take that data and feed it and automate it and do slack messages and emails and data entry points and connect it to QuickBooks and do it’s just getting it in there. So the scan is the hard part.

That’s the only thing I don’t, yeah. Yeah. 

But for sure, yeah it’s.. 

Nate: So many fun little things to tweak and improve..

Brian: And the hard, like the hardest thing for us, and I don’t know if you guys were like, the hardest thing for us, it might, like I’ve known the Zapier is a really powerful tool, but it’s finding the time to build it out even though you know that I can build this stuff out and it will save me an ungodly amount of hours after I do the initial 16 hours to sit down and do everything is just too much to car..

Ali: Yep. We, yep. We know that plight for sure. Yeah. Hopefully 2023 is our year for for stuff like that. That’s our plan. We’re sitting here at, the most recent acquisition, but we are for sure expecting that this little [00:45:00] pause right now for honing of operations should include things like that.

Nate: Yeah, absolutely. There it’s mind numbing and exciting at the same time. 

Ali: It’s very true. 

Brian: And that’s like what I discovered honestly and it, AI was the trigger for me, for the Zapier and to start building that out, even though it doesn’t all have to do with ai. But the trigger for me was like, I realized that I don’t have to build the 16 hour innovation or Zapier things, to get a tangible benefit. So I’ll give you one example for the social posting we do for some clients, we will actually write the social post. Our writers will write it, and then we’ll send it to chat g p t through their api. And we’ll tell it you’re a professional grammar and spell checker and I want you to come back and give me three ways that the sentence structure could be improved, the grammar could be improved, the spelling could be improved.

And so most of the time it’s fine, but that saves somebody else from QCing, that social post on top of that writer. So that ends up that saved one person 30 hours a week, who was just my qc, and now she can write better content or [00:46:00] coordinate with clients and get better images or local posts or whatever else.

That was the brainstormer for me, that flipped my switch that I’m going all in on this. 

Ali: Yeah. Yeah. We’re on the, we’re like on the cusp of being smart about using ChatGPT we’re all in exploratory mode right now in disbelief. I’m still in disbelief as good, isn’t it? 

Nate: Yeah it’s, Brian was showing me some of the stuff with ChatGPT 4, which he has access to as the next generation of what we’re exposed to publicly now.

And it’s amazing what is, we are early stage baby steps with what’s coming without a doubt. 

Travis: Yeah. As you guys know, you have to know how to write, ask the right questions. And, in the sense of ai it’s called prompts, which is just really the, the easy way of saying is just how to ask the right question, yeah. And AI will and the same thing is asking for the end result, Xavier and Zapier. That certainly is the same concept, is what I really want to achieve here. [00:47:00] What I need, what Zaps do I need to lay on top of each other to make this work yes. 

Brian: The hardest thing for us has been getting our employees to tell us, This is something that I think is tedious in my day because they don’t believe it can be automated.

And so they look at it and think, I just have to do that. That’s part of my job. It’s always been part of my job. And I, and so I’ve got everybody in my company giving me a list of their 20 things that take the most time by May 1st. And I said, I don’t care if you think it can be automated or not.

Like I’ll figure out a way to automate it. 

Ali: That’s, so what did we just ask our team to do? It’s roles, responsibilities and expectations similar to that, we’ve asked everyone to like outline what they think they’re supposed to be doing. So we can figure out, what we’re missing, what we’re the gaps.

Nate: The hardest part is out, what question to ask is the leader to get the right answer. 

Ali: Yes. That’s absolutely true. 

Nate: I’ll tell you one to Travis’s point about asking the right prompts that Yahoo has gotten really good at that. With respect to ChatGPT is [00:48:00] my two, or are my two teenage daughters.

And so looking at the role of that in education and whatnot, it’s a whole nother discussion topic for another podcast for sure. But yeah it’s just touching so many different parts of the economy and society at once in a very short period of time. Yeah seeing where it goes is gonna be super interesting.

Brian: I would love to set up, honestly, and we almost did this, and I have a brand called Camp Vantage that I was gonna do this with, but I would love to just start another podcast for a half hour where we talk not just about ai, but about Zapier and automations and efficiencies and ways to make parks better.

That’s a little bit geekier that solely focuses on that. You come to me with a problem and we’ll solve it live on the air, or we’ll figure out a way to do it. That would be fascinating to me. I think it would help a lot. That is really cool. I agree. But anyway, four minutes left. Closing thoughts?

I don’t think we got to as much as we wanted to, but. 

Travis: I’m curious by the way, if the what both Ali, Eric and Nate, what you guys see in deal flow in the [00:49:00] coming 12, 24 months. Obviously we’ve got some macro issues and different things going on, demand still seems strong of course, but I’m curious, 

Eric: Yeah, go ahead Nate. 

Nate: After you. 

Eric: I was gonna say, currently, deal flow has changed in the past several months. There’s the macro conditions have caused a bit of a bid ass spread between buyer and seller for sure. I think we’re starting to converge into where things will land long term.

We’re expecting a slow year on the acquisition front. We think who knows who knows what, depending on what your crystal ball says. We, there’s a lot of things that’ll loosen up here at the end of the year into early next year. I think we’ll start seeing a lot of, a lot more attractive buying opportunities.

But again who knows right now is not.

Nate: Yeah. That’s not the case. Yeah. Yeah. There, there’s a lag time between seller expectations and buyer realities that we’re in right now. And similar to all, and Eric we’re, somewhat fortunate in the sense that we’ve got a lot of internal baseball that we’ve gotta handle right now.

And so with getting a bunch of the parks open, which are seasonal and redoing a bunch of the legal structure for how we [00:50:00] fundraise and how we work with investors right now as well. There’s, we have lots of things that, that’s actually nice timing, that we’ve got a little bit of a bre a breather.

Fuel flow is, there’s still a lot of opportunities out there. It’s do they fit our criteria? Are they price reasonably? If you look at rates versus cap rates and those types of spreads it’s it’s not quite where we were. It’s nowhere near where we were a year ago, two years ago.

And so there needs to be a little bit of a settling out. So I expect we’ll probably do a couple of acquisitions this year if we find ones that fit those criteria and have the right types of attributes. But it’s also nice to have a little bit of a breather, like I said, to be really buttressing some things that we know, need some work that we can then when that does happen scale back up pretty aggressively.

Travis: Appreciate that. That’s great feedback. 

Ali: Oh yeah. Travis, I feel like I have a lot of questions for you and how you’re, who’s doing what for you guys? I have the 10,000 in my head, but who of those 10,000 are like, who is going to be interacting with the seller?

Like which [00:51:00] individual is it you? 

Travis: Yeah, I’ll be i’ll, I’m definitely part of the deal flow. I’m a real estate broker, that’s part of my background as well. Certainly bring that to the table. But what we’re forming as committees, which is similar so we have an acquisition committee, we have a, an operations committee.

So similar to what you guys are doing, and we talked about organizing our businesses. It would be a very similar capacity where people would raise their hands. People have skills in those certain areas. We align them with that committee. In some cases they’ll get paid. And, that, that’s, so yeah, we would definitely take advantage of their, of our community as much as possible.

And then internal team members will probably have to be, in some cases hired from the outside, of course. And certainly onsite staff, will most likely, the majority will be made up not of our 10,000 members, yeah. 

Brian: I’d love to continue this conversation for another hour, but we all have things to do I’m sure, and we’ll have to have you back on again.

Like I’d love to hear more about the Spacious Skies stories. You guys continue to grow KCN, lots of growth in your future. You guys obviously play well off each other. So probably Ali you and Eric back on with Nate, another [00:52:00] show in the future. And then Travis, of course, I would, I could unpack everything with you for that.

Eric: Would, that would be wonderful. This is our, our favorite topic. 

Ali: It is our favorite thing to talk about.

Brian: I hope so, right? 

It better not be car washes or anything else. But thank you guys. I really appreciate you joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Thank you once again to our sponsor, Firefly Reservations for sponsoring this episode.

Again, if you’re looking for RV Parker Campground management software, give them a try. See if their demo is a good fit for you. Other than that, we appreciate everyone for showing up and we will see you all next week on another episode of MC Fireside. Chats, I have to move my hand. I’m not used to being in this view all later.

Thanks. 

Travis: Take care. 

[00:53:00]