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MC Fireside Chats – January 15th, 2025

Episode Summary

The January 15, 2025, episode of MC Fireside Chats delivered an insightful discussion on the intersection of business operations, innovation, and the future of outdoor hospitality. Hosted by Brian Searl, the session brought together industry experts, including Jeff Hoffman, Brent Parker, Mia Johnson, and Mike Sorensen, each contributing their perspectives on challenges and opportunities within the campground and RV park sectors. Brian began with an acknowledgment of the show’s new format and lightheartedly commented on the chaos of setting up his studio, mentioning his attempts to improve with new additions like a fiddle-leaf fig plant. After briefly introducing the guests, Brian set the tone by highlighting the focus on business operations and management strategies. Jeff Hoffman, a recurring guest and managing member of Camp Strategy, outlined his consultancy’s role in helping campgrounds achieve profitability. Jeff emphasized that 2025 would be critical for the industry, predicting shifts in revenue streams, camper demand, and operational challenges. He highlighted trends in RV sales, noting a rise in used sales, which he attributed to tighter budgets among consumers. Jeff called for the panel’s input on how demand and revenue might evolve, especially concerning long-term and transient site utilization. Mia Johnson, a seasoned campground broker and attorney, drew from her extensive experience, explaining that in regions like the Northeast, demand for seasonal sites remains robust due to stringent regulations limiting new campground development. She elaborated on her legal and brokerage background, sharing insights into helping campground owners grow revenue and value. Mia noted a growing trend of investors entering the industry, which she believes will reshape ownership and operations in the next decade. She also stressed the importance of long-term strategic planning and leveraging software tools to optimize business decisions. Brent Parker, owner of Open Campground, shared his unique perspective as a provider of cloud-based property management software. Brent explained his observations of campgrounds transitioning from short-term to long-term stays, driven by the desire for stable income and reduced operational complexity. He described how his software allows parks to recoup costs efficiently, emphasizing flexibility in pricing models to accommodate different campground setups. His insights on the benefits of passing certain costs directly to guests resonated with the discussion. Mike Sorensen, CEO of Wild Energy, addressed the critical issue of utility metering, particularly electricity. He explained how metering benefits both campground owners and guests, providing accurate billing and reducing overall consumption. Mike shared a case study highlighting the financial advantages of implementing utility meters and the importance of regulatory compliance in billing practices. He also hinted at future developments, such as water metering, to help campgrounds manage expenses and conserve resources. The discussion delved into evolving trends in campground operations, particularly the growing divide between transient and long-term stays. Mia emphasized that conversion between these models requires thoughtful planning, considering factors like existing reservations and market demand. Jeff and Brent discussed how operational costs and revenue potential influence these decisions, highlighting the complexities of balancing profitability with guest satisfaction. Brian skillfully facilitated the conversation, adding humor and insights while steering the discussion toward critical industry topics like leveraging technology for efficiency and meeting changing consumer expectations. As the session wound down, the panelists reflected on opportunities for innovation, such as utilizing AI, modernizing Wi-Fi infrastructure, and enhancing guest experiences through smarter operational strategies. The episode concluded with a lighthearted exchange among the panelists, underscoring the camaraderie and shared passion for improving the industry. Contact details for each expert were shared, ensuring listeners could follow up for further insights. The discussion set a high bar for future episodes, promising valuable takeaways for campground owners, operators, and industry professionals alike.

Recurring Guests

Jeff Hoffman
Board Member
OHI

Special Guests

Brent Parker
President
Open Campground
Mia Johnson
Principal Business Broker
Principal Business Broker
Mike Sorensen
President & CEO
Wild Energy

Episode Transcript

00:00:09.840 – 00:00:30.440

This is MC Fireside Chats, a weekly show featuring conversations with thought leaders, entrepreneurs and outdoor hospitality experts who share their insights to help your business succeed.Hosted by Brian Searl, the founder and CEO of Insider Perks. Empowered by insights from Modern Campground, the most innovative news source in the industry.

 

Brian Searl

00:00:58.150 – 00:01:44.340

Welcome everybody to another chaotic and crazy behind the scenes episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks. All these wonderful people in here are watching me scramble around trying to shut up my studio for the second week in a row. You see, I’ve got 10,000ft of headroom here that we’ll try to fix in the show as well. And my camera’s flickering, so still in the process of getting the studio built, but the plant’s new from last week, so we’ve made progress. Does that count? I don’t know. And it’s a real plant too, Mike. It’s a fiddle. Fig leaf. We actually researched it with Chat GPT with my AI to figure out what the best plant was for that. So you can kind of see me like I’m looking over here in a monitor at you guys and then back here the camera. So we’ll fix that too. But anyway, how’s everybody doing? How’s your Christmas New Year? Stuff like  that? 

 

Mia Johnson

00:01:45.120 – 00:01:47.260

Good? Excellent.

 

Brian Searl

00:01:47.760 – 00:02:51.176

Good to hear. Good to hear. So today we have kind of our new episode format. We’re going to talk about business. Operations and management is the overall topic of this. So I know Jeff is a recurring guest on here. We’ve got Mike and Mia as kind of our special guests. And then we have, you know, a couple people who can make it today that are going to be regular guests too, hopefully. But yeah, that’s going to be the overall focus of just, you know, talking about things that relate to operations, to management, to, you know, subtopics that relate to. To all those things. So I just want to go around briefly, I think and introduce our two recurring guests or just. Actually it’s just Jeff, isn’t it? Jeff, you’re the only recurring guest on the show. I guess on the show it’s supposed to be. So that’s interesting. We’re supposed to have Chris Chube here, who’s the glamping guy. And then we’re supposed to have Ali Rasmussen from Spacious Guys and Mike Harrison from crr, all of whom apparently could not make it this week for our first week episode. So we’ll figure that out as we go. But go ahead. Yeah, Jeff, you want to introduce yourself briefly and then we’ll Just go around the room and Mike and Mia can introduce themselves as well. And Brent as well.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:02:51.328 – 00:03:22.640

Sure. My name is Jeff Hoffman and I’m the managing member of Camp Strategy which is a consulting firm to help either starting startup campgrounds from the construction phase on. Our specialty though is in helping existing campgrounds get over the hump and become profitable cash flowing entities that will make so that they can survive.

 

Brian Searl

00:03:23.940 – 00:03:54.046

Yeah. Thank you for being here, Jeff. I’m really looking forward to having multiple conversations with you over the course of the year. You know, we’ve worked together for a long time, known each other for quite some time. I have a lot of respect for what you’re doing at Camp Strategy with Greg, so definitely looking forward to diving into some of those insights, especially as it pertains to, you know, what’s going on currently in the industry as well as, you know, our special guest of the week. So excited to have you here. Thanks for being here. Mia, you want to introduce yourself next, I’m just going to pop in and out. Don’t pay attention to me, like I’m trying to fix my lights and all that kind of fun stuff. So go ahead. Mia, 

 

Mia Johnson

00:03:54.158 – 00:05:30.080

thanks so much for inviting me. My name is Mia Johnson. I’m with Northeast Campground Brokers. We’re a full service brokerage firm. I also provide consulting services to owners. My background, I have been practicing law as a real estate and corporate attorney for 28 years and kind of fell into brokerage a couple decades ago. Became a campground broker 15 years ago now and to date I’ve sold 95 campgrounds and soon to be just over a hundred. I have also given numerous seminars over the years to different owners at different trade shows, et cetera across the country on how to grow your revenue. Growing your revenue means growing your value, so that’s, that’s key. And on how to grow your revenue and operational discussions as well on how to become more efficient. So I think I come at this from a little bit different perspective with my, my legal background as well as my brokerage background. But for me it’s always about how to grow the numbers in a business because if you’re growing your numbers in a business, you’re putting more in your pocket in the short term and also in the long run with your value. So that’s, I’m located in the Northeast in Rhode island, but I service basically 10 states in the Northeast. But I do go outside and do national on occasion deals as well.

 

Brian Searl

00:05:30.540 – 00:06:14.310

Yeah, I’m excited to like we’ve crossed paths before. I’m just probably a little inconsequential guy who has definitely not sold 100 campgrounds. But we’ve crossed paths before the NCA show with Cindy and. And all that stuff. We’ll be there again this year. We’re gonna give a session on AI, so hopefully we’ll cross paths again with each other. But, yeah, like, a lot of respect for all the things that you’ve done in the industry over the decades and looking forward to many, many good things to come. But excited to have you here to talk about, you know, all those things that you’re talking about really, I think, add up to a really good discussion, especially now with the way that I think you would agree the market has kind of changed. We’ll just leave it at that for now and let you expand on that recently and may even change further going forward. So excited to have you here, Mike.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:06:15.050 – 00:06:40.124

Hey, Brian, thanks for having me on. I didn’t get a chance to catch up with you at the recent trade show, so this is the most time we’ve spent together in a little while. Mike Sorensen, founder and CEO of Wild Energy. We’re utility sub metering company based in Sarasota, Florida. And, you know, we’ve grown quite a bit this year and have hundreds of parks across the United States, so it’s pretty cool to be in this industry. And thanks for having me on the show.

 

Brian Searl

00:06:40.292 – 00:06:45.388

Yeah, I’m excited. I mean, it’s only been, what, like, 15 days and you’ve already grown quite a bit this year. That’s pretty impressive.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:06:45.484 – 00:06:46.332

This year, right?

 

Brian Searl

00:06:46.436 – 00:06:53.772

Oh, okay. All right. You met last year. All right. But still, it’s very impressive. Yeah. Like, obviously, how many years have you been in the industry now? It’s only been.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:06:53.876 – 00:07:00.424

We’ve been commercial for about 4. You know, we were in development, product development for about a year before that, and then we started selling the product.

 

Brian Searl

00:07:00.612 – 00:07:36.194

But, like, from where. Like, I remember you coming in, right, like, from where you came in to where you are now is very, very impressive. I mean, again, I don’t. I can’t say that I follow utilities religiously, but, you know, like, the only company like that I had ever heard of that was doing any kind of metering before you was Utility Supply Group. Right. Which obviously have a lot of respect for them, too, and all the years of work that the Wade and his team have put in. But, yeah, you’ve come quite a long way and lots of people have good things to say about you. So excited to hear about, you know, the different ways that obviously electricity and Meet smart metering and paying attention to your usage and things like that.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:07:36.282 – 00:07:36.626

Right.

 

Brian Searl

00:07:36.698 – 00:07:49.826

Can help from an operational cost. So Jeff, you know you’re my only recurring guest here. Where do you think we should start? First up, business operations strategy. Oh, 

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:07:49.898 – 00:07:51.750

I think we should introduce Brent.

 

Brian Searl

00:07:52.570 – 00:08:02.016

I’m sorry, Brent. Like I’m looking the screen. So I was looking at the camera, I’m like, hey, there’s nobody else in my little camera lens. And then I realized I had to look over here. Brent.

 

Brent Parker

00:08:02.128 – 00:08:02.800

Cool.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:08:02.960 – 00:08:04.180

Great background.

 

Brent Parker

00:08:04.760 – 00:08:06.768

Oh, that’s, that’s a fake one by the way.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:08:06.904 – 00:08:08.460

Yeah, same one I got.

 

Brian Searl

00:08:09.400 – 00:08:12.220

Is it really? I’m old.

 

Brent Parker

00:08:14.360 – 00:09:49.438

Yeah. My name is Brent Parker. I am the, the owner of Open Campground which is a cloud based property management software, reservation software for campgrounds and RV parks. A little bit, little background of myself. So I started more so on the property management side. That was a general manager for a company called Rent Payment. It was a division of MRI software, which is a big company for commercial property management, residential management. So I was able to run that division for them and then I decided to kind of go to entrepreneur route. So I started a business called Marina Payments where we process payments for marinas. Marinas and boatyards and individual boat owners. And then I finally realized that I said, hey, I think I need a software to partner with this Marina Payments product that I have. So I acquired this business last summer from a previous owner who ran in about 14, 15 years. And so now I’m just trying to, you know, add my little flavor into, you know, the short term space. Trying to add some long term functionality, you know, for, especially for RV parks and mobile homes who need, I think, a different product than short term, you know, software. So, so yeah, that’s, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last year or so. And I’m excited to be on this call. So thank you for extending the offer.

 

Brian Searl

00:09:49.574 – 00:09:53.810

You’re like, well, you’re less excited since I almost forgot to introduce you, but now you’re more excited.

 

Brent Parker

00:09:54.230 – 00:09:55.370

It’s all good.

 

Brian Searl

00:09:56.630 – 00:10:30.178

I’ll live that down in shame another time. But yeah, I appreciate you being here. Honestly, like I don’t know much about your software system. I will admit that. You know, from my perspective, just being in the industry for so long, you tend to go toward like the people you heard repeatedly from a camp spot, new book, Res Nexus, other people perspective. Right. But who you see and who come up in conversations so more, so much more often than the smaller players. Not that they’re necessarily better in all facets but that you just hear their names more and so you get more familiar with them. And so I’m excited to hear what you have to offer. Especially. You said long term, right?

 

Brent Parker

00:10:30.314 – 00:10:30.866

Yes.

 

Brian Searl

00:10:30.978 – 00:10:44.050

Lisa is going to turn up my speaker over here. I was trying to motion with her to, like, turn up the little dial on the keyboard so I can hear you better. But yeah, long term is a need for sure. So I’m excited to get into that. So, Jeff, where do you think we should start?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:10:44.510 – 00:12:27.260

Well, actually, because we do have someone from PMS on, someone that tries to implement value and Mike that tries to save us all money, I think the best way to start is discuss the. What everyone thinks 2025 is going to be as far as revenue and camper nights, rate fluctuations. Are we peaking in demand, RV sales, are they going to continue to, although they dropped a little bit, are they going to continue to grow? Because obviously most of these people now, if they’re buying a new one or trading in an old one, that still stays in the inventory. So I track both new sales and used sales to see what’s selling, and right now used sales seem to be beating new sales that tells me that money’s tight in the purchasing area of the office. But I was just at the Cleveland RV show and it was packed, which is a good sign. But I’d like to just kind of pull the members that are here and find out. Where do you see demand for existing campgrounds? Where do you see demand for new campgrounds? Up, down. What about revenue basis? Are you thinking that there’s still room to go in rates or are we plateauing in rates?

 

Brian Searl

00:12:27.840 – 00:12:37.656

Wow, you just went for the really, like, good question first off, didn’t you? Like, we want people to tune until the end. You know, Jeff, you’re supposed to say the good questions to the end. Oh, by the way, I love your look.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:12:37.808 – 00:12:43.512

Oh, yeah, my. It’s very weird, the hat, but it.

 

Brian Searl

00:12:43.536 – 00:12:47.784

Looks like if you wouldn’t have pulled that off. Like, it looks like a. It looks really sophisticated. Like.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:12:47.872 – 00:12:54.610

Yeah. While it covers one. One thing, it’s cold as hell in my office because we’re like minus 11 outside.

 

Brian Searl

00:12:55.070 – 00:12:57.318

Well, it doesn’t look like it. Your pool’s uncovered.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:12:57.414 – 00:13:19.218

Yeah, but my son got me this hat when he went to Scotland, and I have never worn hats, but I have one picture of my grandfather because I never met him. And he has on the same hat. So we’re in tribute to him now.

 

Brian Searl

00:13:19.354 – 00:13:27.33 

That’s awesome. That’s a great story. Okay, well, who do you want to start because you don’t want me to start because I’m kind of negative. I’m, I have positive solutions.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:13:27.410 – 00:13:29.650

You’ll just bring AI up and let him talk.

 

Brian Searl

00:13:29.690 – 00:13:36.546

So no, I have clients about this. So you’ll probably want to, like, maybe people will want to hear what I have to say. But, but other people are more important.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:13:36.698 – 00:13:40.670

Okay, whoever wants to start, go ahead.

 

Brent Parker

00:13:40.980 – 00:14:26.122

I’ll start this from the property management side. So. Okay, I may not have all the answers as far as new sales, as far as like RV new sales, but what I’m seeing is that a lot of our customers are wanting to get rid of short term and start moving more into taking their sites into a long term vision. Right. So let’s just say they have 100 sites and let’s say they had a 50, 50 split at one point or maybe 60, 40. I’m starting to see more people trend towards, hey, I want to get this to maybe 80, 20, where it’s long term. And some are even saying, hey, I’m just gonna almost get rid of all. Of them and go strictly all 

 

Brian Searl

00:14:26.146 – 00:14:26.986

of the transients.

 

Brent Parker

00:14:27.098 – 00:15:28.890

All the, all the transients, right. Because I, I think they’re looking at it financially and saying, listen, if we could, if we’re seeing new sales of RVs and you know, sprinter vans, those types of things, then why not meet the demand and say, you know what, let’s put those guests in our site six months, three months, nine months. And I get way more revenue from those customers, existing customers versus the person that’s transient that’s only there for three days. Right. And then I have to remarket to that person to get them back into the campground, which is, you know, a bit of a challenge. Right. Because the average campers camping about two to three times a year, give or take. So if, if you have to extend a lot of resources and marketing efforts just to get somebody to come back to your campground two to three times a year versus somebody that’s there for six months. You’re gonna probably take the six months, right?

 

Brian Searl

00:15:29.190 – 00:15:32.158

It’s an easier path. For sure. I agree with that. The easier path.

 

Brent Parker

00:15:32.254 – 00:15:45.822

It’s an easier path. And then, you know, so that’s, that’s, I’ll say that’s what I’m seeing from a revenue perspective and also just from a changing of strategy on the property management side.

 

Brian Searl

00:15:45.926 – 00:16:08.628

I’m curious, you know, my initial thought with this is not, is partially based on what you said and partially based on other conversations I’ve, I’ve had with this about our client, with our clients. And for clarity for if you don’t know, like I run a four or five hundred person, like we are marketing company that services four or five hundred campgrounds. Four or five hundred people would be a lot to manage, Jeff. But you would help me if I got that big right?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:16:08.764 – 00:16:13.044

Oh, absolutely. We’d put in the EOS system and you’d be great.

 

Brian Searl

00:16:13.212 – 00:16:49.110

Good. That’s what I’m counting on you for. But I’ve had these conversations and so I’m curious if there’s data on this and maybe like I wish I had Scott Barr on the call to, to maybe help with this. How many people do we like? Let’s assume, let’s assume 25% of the existing inventory of parks that are mostly transient right now were to switch to even 8020 long term, 80 short term, 20. Is there actually enough people who are staying long term at camps campgrounds to fill up just 25% of that?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:16:50.930 – 00:18:44.270

Good question. I, One of the trends that people are going to the more long term is it’s a more stable income and if they’re buying these for investments, they don’t want to manage them. And it’s way easier to manage a seasonal park than it is to manage a transient park. But you are limited in your revenue to what the market will bear for a seasonal campground. If you’re a transient campground, you’re, you’re usually looking that if you would rent that site for the full 30 days for the month, you’re going to triple your income versus what you get for, for a monthly. So it comes down to how hard they want to work at their campground and what type of investment they’re looking for. Taking it to a more seasonal type situation or year round people. Quasi mobile home park basically is the easier solution. You don’t have as much management, you don’t have as much cost and you know, it works out good for Brent because right now most of the PMS systems that are out there are based on reservation revenue. You’ve got a good niche market with your product depending on what your cost is because nobody’s servicing that industry because that’s, that’s not how they make them their money. They make their money on the reservations. So if you can be a low cost operator in that sector, you’re going to do great.

 

Brian Searl

00:18:44.890 – 00:19:43.434

This is fascinating to me what you just said Jeff, and I don’t want to get you off topic, but that’s actually very fast. I was watching a long video last night about the future of work and I know you told me I was going to bring up AI, right. But like the agents that are going to do the work and they were talking about what you just talked about. They were talking about how software is currently priced from like a Zendesk HubSpot perspective, all that kind of stuff. Right. And how they’re all priced based on seat. And so what happens when the seats aren’t filled with humans anymore? Like Zendesk is a $2 billion a year revenue company. What happens when they’re not charging per human anymore? They’ve got to rethink all of these models and how all this stuff works. And so I think there’s for sure a place for software that focuses on long term. I think everybody’s got to rethink how they’re doing things depending on how the market shifts. Right. Not always short term reactive, changing your pricing every year. But I think we’re seeing perhaps a clear shift in the way things are going to go for the next little while at least. Would you agree or no?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:19:43.602 – 00:20:33.868

Yeah. And some of that comes from, you know, you know that I work with a couple other PMS systems as, as a consultant for them. And that’s one of the directions that we’re, we’re looking at is how do we, how do we reach that market in a profitable way while still offering, you know, high quality back backdrop service for the program? Because there’s going to be a limit to what a seasonal park is going to pay for a PMS system. I think probably one of your biggest competitors is rent manager that can do that. But they, they are not cheap. I used to use them.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:34.004 – 00:20:35.480

So how much are they?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:36.580 – 00:20:39.900

I have, I sold all my parks. I don’t know anymore.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:40.060 – 00:20:43.040

How much worth, how much were they that made you think they were expensive?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:44.030 – 00:20:47.542

Between 475 to 650 per month?

 

Brian Searl

00:20:47.726 – 00:20:48.690

Hundred?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:48.990 – 00:20:49.606

Yes.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:49.718 – 00:20:50.518

Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:50.694 – 00:20:58.850

But they handled the whole park from billing, water bills, everything. So it’s a very good system.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:59.230 – 00:21:10.556

But for, but for long term I can see now I’m like, I’m thinking out of my head like that’s, that’s like a fifth of what I pay for like my mid tier shop. But like I’m not thinking it from a long term cap on. Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:21:10.668 – 00:21:44.058

Yeah. And a lot of these seasonal parks that Brent was talking about are probably 50 to 100 spaces. That would be a, you know, that nut would be a killer. So there’s a market for that. But I, I, you know, and I have people that would be in the market for that system because I do consult to Quite a few seasonal parks also. And they’re always looking for ways to get good data but keep the cost down. So.

 

Brian Searl

00:21:44.114 – 00:21:47.082

So I want to. Sorry, finish your thought. I thought you were done.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:21:47.186 – 00:21:47.738

That was it.

 

Brian Searl

00:21:47.794 – 00:23:05.790

No, I was just going to say I want to make sure we answer it. Like not my question because it’s not necessarily the most important. But I am curious, like did we ever talk, like we ever finalize that, like how many people do we actually think are on the road staying long term? Because there’s that piece of it. Right. We talked about. I think you talked about how easy. Which is an important discussion to have to be is how easy it is. And I think that was, you know, the point. But how many of these people are actually out there? Can they actually fill these properties if you convert to long term? Because it might be easier on you up until the point where you’re like. Because we’ve had calls with these clients. Right. Middle. Middle of the Texas is a good example of where it’s now overbuilt and a lot of people are switching to seasonal because they thought they could attract or maybe they started that way. But then they have the same amenities as everybody else. I have a pool, I have a miniature golf course, I have a great store, I have nice bathrooms. But so does the 15 other parks that within a five mile radius of me that were just built in the last four years. So what is the. Assuming there’s enough people to even begin to make those businesses profitable, all they’re close together, right? At what point? Like what is the difference maker that’s causing them to change? Choose your property over the other. Because it’s not that you also have something, it’s that you have. And we’ll talk about experience later, but you have something different.

 

Mia Johnson

00:23:07.210 – 00:25:10.484

I, I think that it definitely just your region will distinguish whether or not you’re going to have much more demand. You brought up Texas, that’s a great example where you can build a new thousand site campground in the Northeast. You cannot build a campground from scratch. Can’t do it. I can count on one hand how many people have built a campground from scratch in all of the Northeast in the last decade. And it took them years and years and years and it just wasn’t cost effective. So you, you get a region here where even adding new sites to an existing campground can take years if you ever get the approvals. So we have a different model up in the Northeast than you would have in a place like Texas where they’re popping up left and right. So In a region like that, which is also similar to some of the other regions out there, there are some states that are, you know, much more highly regulated and won’t be able to build as, as easily as Texas. The demand in the last several years since COVID for seasonal sites has been astronomical. Before COVID almost nobody had wait lists, right. For seasonals except the premier parks. Since COVID almost everybody has a wait list and they still have a waitlist. Now, I saw last year a little bit of a shift that the seasonal rates went up so much. They basically offset the reduction that we saw in the transient traffic. A lot of parks were a little bit down on transients last year for various reasons. It could be weather, could be market related, depending on the park, depending on the region. We still have the majority of the parks having wait lists, at least in the north northeast for seasonals. So it’s that market factor of where, when do we stop, how much do we switch over to the seasonal. And you know my attitude when I’m, when I’m talking to these owners, I always say, look, same thing with your rates. You go up until you no longer have a waitlist, right?

 

Brian Searl

00:25:10.572 – 00:25:11.320

Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:25:11.660 – 00:26:28.724

And if you have a wait list, then add more sites if you can. Otherwise consider converting. But conversion from transient to seasonal takes a long time because you’re already taking reservations for next year at most of these parks. So if you’ve already taken a reservation for next year for that site, what are you going to do? Call the person up and cancel it because you want to? You could, but not necessarily the best approach in terms of customer service. But that’s what some of these campgrounds are thinking in terms of the newer owners, the newer operators out there. I see since, since COVID 100 of my sales have been to investors. And that’s for another discussion for another day. I’m sure Brian’s had these discussions as well. But the market is going to completely change in the next 10 years because we’re losing most of those owner operators and we’re switching over to an investor model. Now there’s two kinds of investors out there. There’s the multi park investor that has owned campgrounds for years and they run them themselves. And then there’s the majority of the investors out there who are new to the industry or newer and are looking for property management companies. And there’s not a lot of options out there for, you know, a property management company.

 

Brian Searl

00:26:28.812 – 00:26:30.100

Good quality one. Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:26:30.180 – 00:29:34.644

Do the entire portfolio for this group. You know, they’ll, they’ll have a hotel Management company coming in and running a campground. Well, it’s different. It might be hospitality but it’s still different. And that’s where we’re having some reduction in some of these. Especially the like the private equity buyers, the private equity investor out there, they’re kind of backing off. They bought a few and then they fell flat on their face because they didn’t know how to run them and they didn’t have a good option to run them. So there is a huge need for property management companies nationwide to offer these services in campgrounds. Not all hospitality, but specifically campgrounds. And that need is only going to continue to grow for the next decade as most of these owner operator parks are going to be switching over to investors. Kind of similar to what happened in motels years ago where most of those motels were smaller owner operators and now they were bought up by, you know, the Hiltons and the Holiday Inns of the world and they’re, you know, multi park owners. So we’re seeing that switch. But back to what Brent said earlier about the cost to run these sites. Absolutely, absolutely. It is cheaper to run an all seasonal and or all annual park. Long term state park. It is probably about a 40% expense ratio is what I generally see on a long term park versus anywhere from a 55 to a 75 expense ratio. 55% to 75% expense ratio on a transient park. Right. The higher the expense, it’s usually the, you know, the Koas, the jelly stones, they have higher fees but you know, generally it depends on the size. But that’s a decent range. But certainly it is much, much cheaper to run those and much easier to run those long term parks. And I see a lot of those new investor buyers leaning towards that model. Unfortunately you don’t make as much money. Right. So it all comes down to cash flow. Right. That’s how they value these parks. That’s what they want. They want their return on their investment. It’s all about, you know, it’s their investors. It’s no emotion here. It’s, it’s not a hobby for them. They want to make that return and they’re going to do that. They’re going to run it whatever model they can to make the most out of it. And in an area that has know incredible demand for transients because you’re in a tourist area, well chances are they are going to buy up that park and they’re going to kick everybody out and go transient even though it costs more to run it because the demand is there for it. But then there’s a lot of other regions where they become the destination location. They’re not going to fill that park with transients unless they become the amusement. Right. And that’s very expensive to put, you know, three million dollar water park in or whatever, you know.

 

Brian Searl

00:29:34.732 – 00:29:39.204

Yeah. The most famous one I know is Howard Port here on Koa. You know him, Jeff?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:29:39.252 – 00:29:39.876

Oh, yeah.

 

Brian Searl

00:29:39.988 – 00:29:43.720

Very, very well. Created something out of nothing up there, but. Go ahead, Mia.

 

Mia Johnson

00:29:44.380 – 00:31:33.238

Yeah. So I mean, and when I, when I talk to owners about this, in particular about thinking about what your business model needs to be, it can’t be, let’s change it next month. Right. Because this is a long term again, it goes back to if you want to convert a seasonal to a transient or a transient to a seasonal. Right. More. That’s probably more what’s happening right now. If you have a reservation, you’ve got to think about the long term play. Same thing as you’re thinking about gas prices. All right. Gas prices are up. People want to stay in one location. Right. Gas prices go down. It’s not rocket science. Right. They’re more willing to drive further if gas prices are lower. So I always talk to owners about thinking long term. Actually do a business model. Use your software. Right. Everybody has, almost everybody has software. And these software programs can do tremendous things. They just don’t know how to use them. Right. Brent, I’m sure you could talk about that all day long, that there’s so many features that you can utilize and reports that you can run that they’re just not utilizing to help them guide their business model in three months, six months, 12 months from now. That’s what they need to be doing this year. They’re already done. They’ve already got reservations. There’s nothing they. Some stuff. But you know, in terms of the bigger picture, there’s nothing much they can do for this year, but they can still grow revenue in other ways. But in terms of conversion, seasonal versus transients, I think that it’s. We’re going to see a consistent shift. It’s going to go up, it’s going to go down. Right now there’s more demand for seasonals than parks need to address.

 

Brian Searl

00:31:33.294 – 00:31:34.646

Even in the Northeast.

 

Mia Johnson

00:31:34.838 – 00:31:39.210

Even in the Northeast, we, most campgrounds have seasonal wait lists.

 

Brian Searl

00:31:40.040 – 00:33:15.770

So. So the reason I ask here is twofold. You know, a lot of a ton of what you said I could follow up on. Right. And I’m old and probably remembered 22% of it. But the couple things that stuck out in my and in my head when you were talking is we went through something similar in Canada with an over. I don’t know if it was an overcorrection but in Ontario specifically where they have so many seasonal properties in Ontario that none of the transient people can find anywhere to stay. And so I think it’s important for us to consider where this market is going. And I know there’s a lot of we don’t know. Right. A lot of intangibles, a lot of data that we have never seen before. But to understand, you know, I don’t think that anybody here is saying like you should do this at your property right now because every property is unique as Jeff knows, consulting for many different people. But I think there’s a general rule here that we can kind of establish that says, you know, I think we just said it Mia right. There’s plenty of people out there who are going for seasonal. Do you convert to transient? I think it depends on where you are and how much you’re willing to invest in marketing and all that. But to your point to me about property management companies, there are some that are very good like CRR Hospitality is one. Mike who’s nor. I shouldn’t even give him a shout out because he missed the show. But Sierra Hospitality is one that specializes in RV parking, campground management, Blue Waters right there in the northeast. Right. They. They have a very good. I know they do hotels too but they have a lot of experience in campgrounds. So there are a couple out there and there are more, right Scott?

 

Mia Johnson

00:33:15.850 – 00:33:18.666

There’s certainly a couple but they’re a lot of these.

 

Brian Searl

00:33:18.818 – 00:33:22.138

They’re not a lot don’t have capacity. Yes.

 

Mia Johnson

00:33:22.234 – 00:33:28.632

And they also for. For a company like Blue Water, I’m not quite. I don’t think they’ll do a lot.

 

Brian Searl

00:33:28.656 – 00:33:49.780

Of the smaller part and that’s what my secondary point was is when you get to the long term or the seasonal just like we talked about how it doesn’t make sense for a camp spot or a new book and I’m putting words in their mouth to be clear. They may think differently about this to, to change their pricing model around and figure out how to make money from long term the same thing as the third party management.

 

Mia Johnson

00:33:50.600 – 00:34:28.104

Well, I actually just had. I won’t say the specific software unless you want me to. I just had a meeting because I am actually in the process of buying a campground myself and it’s mostly congratulations. So my partner and I had a meeting with the software company Monday and I have another company that I’m meeting with on Friday specifically About the cost. So I’m chuckling when this brought up earlier about the cost of long term and the way this particular company works is they charge $2 a month per seasonal site. So that’s pretty, that’s $2 a month, actually. I thought that was pretty good.

 

Brian Searl

00:34:28.192 – 00:34:28.552

Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:34:28.616 – 00:35:01.940

And they have a lot of other features that, you know, I can work in reimbursement for electric Mike. Mike’s point, if I needed to. And when I, when they get on there and they have to do some sort of reimbursement, I can just pass that cost off to them. Similar to what, you know, the, the per, per reservation fee. Right. If there’s a $350 reservation fee for every reservation. These companies are making a lot of money because you might have a transient park making thousands of reservations every year.

 

Brian Searl

00:35:01.980 – 00:35:02.324

Right.

 

Mia Johnson

00:35:02.412 – 00:35:07.540

But if you have 150 seasonals, I got 150 reservations. That’s it.

 

Brian Searl

00:35:07.660 – 00:35:08.132

Right.

 

Mia Johnson

00:35:08.236 – 00:36:25.242

So now I’m getting charged or very, you know, we only have probably 10 or 20 transient sites, very small amount. Right. So now I’m thinking, okay, well how do I pass that cost off if I’m only getting charged $2 a month? Then I think there’s easy ways for me to build that into my cost, either in their rate or when they log on to do something like pay their tab. Because I’m going to run a tab for them in the, in the store or pay their electric reimbursement, I’m just gonna add a processing fee of $3 Right. Because I’m also getting charged 3%, just under 3% credit card processing on top of that. So let’s say instead of $2 a month, I’m charging them three or four dollars a month. Right. There’s ways to build that in so it’s palatable to my customer. Right. So there’s lots of ways to do that. And I think that some of the software companies now certainly need to start focusing on a better business model for them to offer long term pricing. Right. Because a lot of these parks do have that. And often what happens is they don’t even put those sites in the system. Right. They might have 100 sites that are seasonal and. 100.

 

Brian Searl

00:36:25.346 – 00:36:29.638

Yeah. Because you don’t need online reservations because you’re calling and asking a bunch of questions. Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:36:29.734 – 00:36:58.852

But now you’re passing up all the other opportunities, things that you can link your store, your pos, your electric, your, you know, gas, whatever it is that you. Even the gate, gate chart, you know, the gate, linking the gate codes and stuff. You’re passing up all of those other opportunities. So I think it’s worth it, paying a little bit more to have, have all those seasonals in one spot right along with your transients. But that’s just me.

 

Brian Searl

00:36:58.956 – 00:37:01.220

Swear to God we’re going to get to electricity, Mike.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:37:01.300 – 00:37:07.800

Right. Well, some of the points that she brought up, Brian, lead up to Mike.

 

Brian Searl

00:37:08.300 – 00:38:08.506

Because they do so sorry, they do. But one second real quick because I want to just, I want to think about pricing here for a second because the same thing applies and I don’t think we’re going to solve this on this call, but the same thing applies to the reservation system. I, in my head I’m thinking of them and again I’m putting words in all of their mouths. Right. But in my head I’m thinking like, well, you want me to hire how many developers to work on a feature for something I may or may not make money from. That’s going to take me a couple years to build out a feature set for. And then will there be that many seasonals in three years as there is now? And will it even be worth my time? And then how do I then like, how do I differentiate that? Like Scott Barr and I were talking about this, about how campground owners view long term stays as seasonal, but campers view long term stays as a couple weeks. And so how do you actually define that process to make sure that you’re charging versus, you know, the correct rate to the campground who maybe has a mix of 80, 20 or 50. 50. So it’s interesting.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:38:08.618 – 00:38:38.340

Yeah, I was going to say the, as you know, being in the market a long time, people buy RVs and their first year they’re going to travel everywhere and then they found out, find out kind of what a pain in the butt it is to travel everywhere. So they end up becoming a seasonal someplace and then if they want to travel, they’ll unhook and go. But how many.

 

Brian Searl

00:38:38.380 – 00:38:54.160

Okay, I’m sorry, I know I’m interrupting you, but I’m going back to the, the same. We don’t have an answer for this. Right. How many of these people are actually out there that are full time RVers in 2025 that don’t own a house? I think it’s a lot less than it was a few years ago.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:38:55.180 – 00:39:14.078

Yeah, it’s, it’s heading back to where it was. But one thing that you’ve got now that you, you didn’t have before is mobile work, WI Fi and the ability to stay on the road. So we have a lot more people that can go out on the road for months at a time.

 

Brian Searl

00:39:14.214 – 00:39:14.606

Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:39:14.638 – 00:41:22.140

They may still have a permanent residence, but they can go out on the road for a long time because you can get a mail server that basically will send you by email all of your mail and it’s still a good market. But yeah, to answer your point, where, where’s the market driving? I, you know, we do see a big demand in seasonal, especially in the Northeast. One of the reasons is because of what Mia brought up was it’s very difficult to get a park built in the north Northeast. So you don’t have a lot of new transient. If you do, they’re full. You know, a few of my friends own campgrounds out there and they’re full the year out. You know, after they close for the season, they’re fully reserved for next year, both transit and seasonal. It’s a, a different market than say North Dakota where you’re scrapping for every tenant you can get whether they’re seasonal or, you know, a transient. And also the east coast pricing makes, yeah, it makes the seasonal park attractive because if I was getting 8, 8, $500 a site, I have a lot more seasonals, but we’re not getting that in the Midwest. But to her point about how you can charge back the seasonal cost, I see a trend not only with electric, but charging back the water and sewer eventually. Because even the parts that have septic and well that tell me they have no cost in two years when they have to replace that well or re drill it or change the septic system, they’ll find out that they’ve had a very big cost all those years that they’ve been ignoring.

 

Brian Searl

00:41:22.560 – 00:41:23.256

Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:41:23.368 – 00:41:39.944

So somehow they’ve, they’ve got to work that into their formulas to, to get paid for that. I won’t go down the financial hole that I, you know, I go down financial holes.

 

Brian Searl

00:41:39.992 – 00:41:50.638

So I would like to hear when you’re done. I want to hear from Brent on the. Because I think he was going to talk. Sorry. And then I also. Then I want to pivot to Mike.

 

Brent Parker

00:41:50.814 – 00:43:12.590

Yeah, I was, I was going to touch on what Mia mentioned about pricing. And this is not the two open chem crowns horn by any stretch, but just kind of give you an idea of how we were thinking. So we were again thinking long term of saying, okay, if more people are going towards long term stakes and the average software is really reservation based or they charge, you know, $2.50 per transaction or per seat or per site. What I’ve seen as well, we didn’t Want to copy that model? So what we did was said, okay, how about we just let the customer keep the per reservation fee that they want to charge. So hypothetically, if they want to charge $3 per reservation, they can keep that. We’re not going to take any of that money. Right. So our system is geared that way to where you can charge whatever you want. And we kind of tell the customers like, listen, if you don’t want to use the term booking fee, use service fee, use maintenance fee, use, you know, property fee, whatever it is, it’s up to your, you know, that’s your choice. Only thing that we do is we say, okay, we’re just going to charge the guests 2.95, whether it’s Visa, MasterCard, MX for the guest day.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:43:12.970 – 00:43:14.450

That’s it. Right.

 

Brent Parker

00:43:14.490 – 00:44:02.980

So we don’t charge any monthly subscriptions. We just say you can pass that on to the guests, but if you’re generous then, you know, we’ll give you a better rate if you want to absorb the fee yourself. Right. So that’s how we’ve taken it because we’re gonna, we’re recognizing that if you’re gonna have long term guests, most likely those guests are going to pay, you know, hopefully with a credit card and, and that way you can, you know, they just pick up the charge and you don’t have to worry about it. Right. So we’re, we’re trying to be configurable with our pricing. We’re not trying to be kind of one way. We’re trying to say, listen, you know, your, your, if your park is configurable, if it’s 50, 50 split or 80, 20 split, then we will accommodate that need.

 

Brian Searl

00:44:04.080 – 00:44:10.300

Can we go to Mike or Mia? Do you want to, do you have questions for Brent about your park? I’m messing with you. I’m just kidding.

 

Mia Johnson

00:44:11.840 – 00:44:14.020

I’m going to be talking to Brent after this.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:44:14.320 – 00:44:19.226

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not the expert here, but let me catch up on it.

 

Brian Searl

00:44:19.298 – 00:44:23.306

When you talk about electric, didn’t you tell me some, at some point you’re going to go into water too?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:44:23.458 – 00:46:00.688

Yes, absolutely. So we’ll touch on that as well. I’m not an expert on rates or site types, but what I can just listen to the conversation. I think the one mistake is that we’re lumping everything into long term. Right. And there’s different types of long term there. You know, we’ve got parks that are an hour and a half from major metropolitan pounds and those are, you know, they, they do a site lease but It’s a weekend thing. People are going there to stay the weekend and they just happen to leave their equipment there all week versus somebody, to Jeff’s point, that’s on the road, you know, full time RVing. That’s a very different clientele than, you know, a park that’s catering to weekenders. That’s their second home. Right. That’s where you go for the weekend to go fishing and hang out with friends. So that’s, that’s a very different clientele. The one thing we have seen is oversaturated markets. So we can tell where development has slowed, like in the Houston area and then markets that are still expanding and booming. I would say Florida. You know, I’m working with a lot of new development projects in Florida specifically. They are still building, they are big parks. They’re, you know, 500 plus site properties still coming out of the dirt. So, you know, different markets are seeing different types of things happening for sure. And then I can’t go into it, but we’ve got an interesting client in Florida that is building a unique property with lots of amenity types on property, you know, and that will attract and fill up a thousand spaces that they’re working on just because there’s so many things that you’ll be able to do with their property. So you do have to consider all the different types of properties out there.

 

Brian Searl

00:46:00.824 – 00:46:17.460

Will those people. I don’t want to derail you. Sorry. Yeah, no, like again, you talk about Florida still being built, right. Will that new thousand site park with all its amenities attract a thousand new people to Florida though, or will it pull a thousand people from other existing parks, in your unscientific opinion?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:46:17.800 – 00:46:53.286

Yeah, unscientifically, it looks, it appears to be still new, new growth. You know, it’s new equipment still hitting the park parks. It’s not people pulling a rig that’s five years old, six years old from another park. It is still new rigs coming in there because they’re, you know, they’re nicer, high end parks, the ones that are being built. So they are attracting the higher rates and yeah, new people. And they’re doing it in phases. Right. So when I say a thousand site park, they’re not opening day one with a thousand sites. You know, they’re bringing on 350 and then another 200 and then, you know, just phase after phase after phase. Phase coming up online.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:46:53.438 – 00:47:03.370

Right. Hey Mike, quick question on that. On your new builds, how many of them are building and then selling the lots outright?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:05.230 – 00:47:16.822

Yeah, very few. Very few. Are doing that anymore. I, you know, I saw that more four years ago than I do today. So. Yeah, they’re not. They’ll do an annual lease, you know, that type of thing.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:47:16.926 – 00:47:29.316

Okay. Because I’ve, I’ve, a few of the parks that I visited for comparisons down in Florida were member, you know, not member parks, but you actually had deed to your lot.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:29.468 – 00:47:30.228

Absolutely.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:47:30.324 – 00:47:51.518

And you know, some of them had surprisingly quick uptake where they sold out, and then others were kind of slow to develop. For a developer, it takes the operation of it out and then you have the HOA where you make your money from.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:51.574 – 00:47:52.814

Right? Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:47:52.862 – 00:47:56.690

And in Florida, I don’t want an HOA because their laws are tough.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:57.670 – 00:48:54.290

They are tough. You’re absolutely right. Water is an interesting topic. We are being asked more and more and more for water. It’s kind of surprising, but, you know, even the water rates, you’ve got some parks that are in directly in major metropolitan areas like Tampa, and they’re on commercial water. And, and that’s one of the big expenses. Right. Right next to electrical is they’ve got a water bill that’s huge. Quarter million bucks. So you got to recover that somehow. And it’s funny, I have so many videos and pictures of water spraying out of RVs and spigot. You know, if people don’t care and you’re not measuring it, you know, it’s that that’s an uncontrolled expense. Same with electric. Electric, if you’re not charging for it, it’s an uncontrolled expense that you were. You got to eat no matter what the end result is. If the power company raised your rate, you’re eating that because you booked, you booked the reservation and the rate last year. So you didn’t build that 20 rate increase in.

 

Brian Searl

00:48:54.670 – 00:49:23.940

Is it easier to teach a consumer about electricity versus water, though? Because like, I think they’re. Because people at their houses get a separate electric bill and can see the cost. I mean, I know it’s hard regardless, saying, hey, we’re going to charge you for something we haven’t before. But from a water perspective, like, I mean, I know it’s like up here it’s bundled with my trash and it’s the same. Like, I don’t see it as often. And so is there a perception that it’s just like, inconsequential and that’s why they’re. I think they’re more wasteful with water than they are electricity.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:49:24.360 – 00:50:14.580

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Especially because, you know, everybody pays an electric bill. There’s very few people generating their own water. But you know, a lot of people in the country have well water. They’re not paying a water bill. And so that is a new concept to start paying for water and sewer. The hardest thing is to teach a park owner about billing their guests for electric. It’s funny, the consumers get that and the park owners don’t. We had one new park in Alabama come out of the ground, started charging electric, you know, on day one, you know, you stay there one day, you’re getting an electric bill. And they’ve had zero consumer pushback. And it’s, you know, they’ve been running now for almost a year, no complaints. So the consumers get that billing for electric model. It’s the park owners that are hesitant to change the paradigm.

 

Brian Searl

00:50:15.000 – 00:50:24.666

Yeah, I mean, I think that some of that is. A lot of these park owners have been going to the same conference for 20 years, talking to the same people who go to the Same conferences for 20 years who all have never charged for electric.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:50:24.778 – 00:50:25.210

Yeah.

 

Brian Searl

00:50:25.290 – 00:50:53.922

So it’s a completely foreign concept to them to think about doing something differently. And that’s not a slight on any of them. Right. That’s just like if you, I mean, the common example I give to people when they ask me about like, do you believe in certain things is Santa Claus. Right. Like if you, if you grew up believing in Santa Claus and then from like whatever age 6 or 7 when you started having doubts, from that point on until you were an adult, you only ever talk to people who still believed in Santa Claus. You would believe in Santa Claus. Like you would.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:50:54.106 – 00:50:54.498

Right.

 

Brian Searl

00:50:54.554 – 00:50:58.430

And so it’s the same thing. It’s, it’s just who you’re, who you’re surrounding yourself with.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:50:59.530 – 00:51:01.154

Yep, that’s absolutely true.

 

Brian Searl

00:51:01.282 – 00:51:08.390

But tell us more about like electric. I want to hear more about. Because this plays right into what we’re talking about. Right. Optimization operations.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:51:09.210 – 00:51:45.830

Yeah. I mean the cool thing and the reason, the whole, the whole reason Wild Energy got started was to make it possible to charge for electric on short stay utilities. I was a camper, I was on the consumer side and I couldn’t understand why I paid the same to camp as somebody who had a bigger rig or a smaller rig, because I, you know, I just knew that I was using a different amount of that utility. And again, being a consumer, you’re used to paying for it at your house. So that’s where the whole idea came from. And every time you explain that to a consumer, it’s like, well, do you pay for your neighbor’s electric. Do you want to pay for that guy who’s got a Tesla plugged in at his pad or.

 

Brian Searl

00:51:46.210 – 00:51:48.810

I’m thinking about buying, just to be clear.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:51:48.930 – 00:51:59.962

So, yeah. And, you know, same thing. You know, Brian, you got campgrounds that don’t want evs in their park. No EVS you can’t charge. And that’s true. If you don’t have the, the infrastructure to do it.

 

Brent Parker

00:51:59.986 – 00:52:00.170

You.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:52:00.210 – 00:52:17.300

You absolutely should not allow people to do that. But if you do, if you do bill them for it. That’s, that’s a great guest service. Let them charge their ev. You know, you’re giving them an amenity that they wouldn’t have at another park. And if you’re able to capture that cost and fill them back, go. Great.

 

Brian Searl

00:52:19.920 – 00:52:21.740

That’s all you got about electricity?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:52:22.320 – 00:52:27.288

No, no. ask questions.

 

Brian Searl

00:52:27.384 – 00:52:36.626

We have a couple minutes left in the technical end of the show, but we plan to kind of just have conversations. So if anybody else needs to drop off, please feel free. But if we’re having a conversation, probably.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:52:36.658 – 00:53:26.980

The big thing I would talk about is the regulatory side of it. I do a lot of education on what you can and can’t do around electrical billing and what kind of equipment you can and can’t use to bill people. And I think we need more education in the industry on what is allowed and how you should be doing it, because there are people that are getting public utility notices that of non compliance. And, you know, you’re putting your campground at risk. You know, you’re opening yourself up for class action lawsuits. That’s not, that’s not something that anybody wants. You know, we’re working with one very large property management company that is going to audit every single property they manage to make sure they’re doing it compliantly. And I think that kudos to them for trying to do it the right way and make sure they’re doing the right thing for, for the customers that they’re managing for.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:53:27.920 – 00:53:35.048

Hey, Mike, we need to hear that voice at OHI so that we can make it a national program, right?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:53:35.184 – 00:54:06.694

Yeah, OHI is actually. I’m working with OHI to change some of the regulations. Specifically in California and in Mississippi, there are some tough utility regulations that don’t allow for recovery. And again, that goes back to it’s not fair. Fair for the business owners. I’ve talked to the public utility commissions. They’re open to changing the rules. Nobody’s ever asked. So. And, and then you just have to walk through the red tape of, well, how do you get that right changed and, you know, publish it. And it’s got to be open for public comment and push through and you.

 

Brian Searl

00:54:06.702 – 00:54:13.574

Know, like utilities, right? Like, this is only like, what if you have private solar? Are you still governed by the same rules?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:13.702 – 00:54:15.862

Nobody’s got enough solar to run their camp.

 

Brian Searl

00:54:15.966 – 00:54:18.178

I’m just making something up. Right. I’m just.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:18.334 – 00:54:22.762

But so you have to abide by the, the public utility regulations.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:54:22.906 – 00:54:31.914

Right. And every state is different, even depending on the city. Some cities have their own ordinances about.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:32.002 – 00:54:32.730

That’s right.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:54:32.850 – 00:54:42.794

You know, New York, of course, there’s no campgrounds in New York City, but they have very weird rules on electric chargebacks.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:42.922 – 00:54:55.420

Yeah, San Diego is a great example of that. You know, they went hard after a couple of campgrounds that were charging inappropriately for electric and fined them significantly until they got their stuff under control.

 

Brian Searl

00:54:55.540 – 00:55:06.860

So what are the common ways that you see campgrounds usually making mistakes with the way they charge electricity? Because I think that’s maybe a good place to like. We’re not going to be able to talk about this for the next two hours, although maybe we’d like to.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:55:06.900 – 00:55:44.690

But number one, building the electric into your rate is a huge mistake. And it’s funny, we just did a property for a very large group, you know, a couple hundred parks, and we put meters in and started measuring things and gave them the data. And they’re like, oh, my God, the number that we baked into our rate was way off. You know, we didn’t know it, that we were not recovering enough. And so, you know, they have an opportunity now to improve the cost recovery and improve their bottom line. And just that data is very, very helpful to make informed decisions instead of just taking averages.

 

Brian Searl

00:55:45.670 – 00:56:00.222

So besides, so besides that, which is obviously a very important point, and you’re in your, like, with wild energy, they would be measuring this exactly. And they would be then recouping the exact dollar amount. Like they can’t go over right. In. In depending on jurisdiction.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:56:00.366 – 00:56:51.940

Yeah, that’s. That’s exactly right. It also brings the, you know, when you start metering somebody, it brings the consumption down. You know, the number that’s hanging out over my shoulder is carbon reduction. So the minute you take a campground and you start metering and shift it to the consumer, they use less. And so that’s better for the. The overall infrastructure of the park. You’re not going to be doing capital improvements as often. You’re not doing breaker changes as often because, you know, they’re not jamming your power so your maintenance costs go down. And you know, we provide an on screen view so that the, the end camper can look at what they’re using so they’re informed. That cuts down calls to the front desk that, you know, hey, I don’t trust my meter because they can look at it themselves. So there’s, there’s a ton of intangible benefits that you get by shifting that to the consumer side.

 

Brian Searl

00:56:54.090 – 00:56:58.430

Makes sense. Jeff, any good questions for anyone on the.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:56:59.290 – 00:57:05.870

Well, Mike, you know I love your product and when you figure out the water 1.

 

Brian Searl

00:57:06.490 – 00:57:12.034

Did you write Jeff a check for the show? Because I didn’t get it to check. Yeah, you’re spreading some love around.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:57:12.202 – 00:59:29.900

Well, we’re working with Mike’s product at other places. I’m actually installing it this year in, in my park because, and I hate to admit this, we have not been billing electric for the last two years because the program wasn’t working correctly. So this year we actually reduced our rate for seasonal and now we’ll be billing them back for electric. And in the end I believe that we’re going to gain about 200 hours a site over the season. We are one of the campgrounds that limits the amount of seasonals we take because we’re located next to big amusement park. So yeah, we do well with transient. But I have other parks where we took where they thought they were going to be transient. And when I worked with them I, I said, why are people going to be coming to this park on a visitation? You need to be a seasonal campground where people are coming to relax for the weekend. And we actually filled them up with seasonals and got rid of all the transient, cut all the costs, operating costs by about 20% and now it’s cash flowing very well. But it’s always, I mean it’s not a straight answer on a park or for operations whether it’s going to be a seasonal park, transit park, a hybrid park. It’s a function of cost, it’s a function of demand, it’s a function of rates. There’s so many variables that enter into it that you, you can’t have a standard answer. That’s one of the things we specialize in. And my. If you need due diligence, it’s one of the things we specialize in is doing performance on parks and looking at the parks to find all the things that might be wrong with it that would come up later for a new purchaser because most got most people buying a park, park don’t know what they’re looking for.

 

Brian Searl

00:59:30.680 – 00:59:39.904

Building a park usually and Please, please talk to Jeff or some similar company right before you build or before you buy, please.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:59:40.072 – 01:00:06.890

Even with design, there’s been. I. My hobby is I visit parks, of course, and I go to a lot of new parks that I look at them and go, oh my God, the sites are so narrow. The sites are too small, the roads are too, you know, hard to get in and out of. They built a 30 million dollar clubhouse. Who’s going to use it and how you’re gonna, how are you gonna spread that over the rates?

 

Brian Searl

01:00:07.230 – 01:00:21.360

So, yeah, that clubhouse thing fascinates me, Jeff. Like, I know people use clubhouses more than the use case. I’m gonna go, but I still to this day will go to any conference or any travel and I’ll stay in a hotel and just desperately wonder who sits in the chairs outside the elevator of the hotel.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:00:21.780 – 01:00:23.800

Well, I do. That’s how I met you.

 

Brian Searl

01:00:24.100 – 01:00:26.840

Is that really true? No, that’s not true, is it?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:00:27.780 – 01:00:29.308

No. You got those chairs.

 

Brian Searl

01:00:29.404 – 01:00:33.932

Get lots of stuff. It could be possible. How long have we known each other? It’s been like 15 years.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:00:34.036 – 01:00:40.880

Yeah, it’s getting there, right? I remember you when you were a baby and you were a U.S. citizen.

 

Brian Searl

01:00:41.220 – 01:00:44.012

Yeah, go ahead.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:00:44.036 – 01:01:00.550

Yeah. I mean, Jeff. Jeff brings up a good point. You know, we have investors that look for parks that are not metering because they know there’s an instant opportunity to start recovering that cost and improve the NOI instantly. So they will go and buy parks, you know, knowing that they can make money day one by putting metering in.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:01:00.670 – 01:01:41.370

Well, and, you know, going back to that, you know, operations, it’s the same thing. If they’re not charging a fee for credit card collections, we can boost the revenue 3% just by instituting that. And people are getting so used to that charge. When we first started it, you know, people would just back off in horror that we were going to have them start doing that. But people are starting to accept it. And the, you know, the cost for us to take credit cards is getting up there because they’re dinging us for a lot of little things.

 

Brian Searl

01:01:42.230 – 01:01:45.170

And what about crypto, Jeff? Just take crypto.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:01:47.430 – 01:01:49.250

Different. Different episode.

 

Mia Johnson

01:01:50.550 – 01:02:16.162

How do you, Mike, how do you pass off? How does Walk me through how you charge a transient who’s coming for the weekend? What are they doing? Are they just billing it when they check out? How quickly is that coming through? Seasonal. We all get. We know they do it once a month or even monthlies. That’s easy. But the transient. Walk me through how it works with your company.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:02:16.346 – 01:02:38.954

Yeah, so the great news is we’re integrated with about almost a dozen property management systems now that do that, automate that whole process. Right. So on check in that PMS will go grab the meter reading and then on checkout, you know, whether it’s a day, a week or two weeks, they grab the meter reading at the end, do the calculation and fill it right on the guest folio.

 

Mia Johnson

01:02:39.002 – 01:02:46.270

So automatic, it’s all computerized. You don’t have to have somebody go to the site and check the meter and correct.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:02:46.850 – 01:03:19.494

Okay, yeah, yeah, Mike, don’t. Most of the places they have a, basically actually a charge built in for say, and just a number one kilowatt is built into the price. What you do is if you use over that, then you’re billed for the excess. And what it does is try to get to the people that have two air conditioners, electric heaters, things like that.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:03:19.662 – 01:04:18.270

Yeah. So, you know, I’ve worked with the PMS’s and those features are, in some of them, it’s called power allocation. It’s, it’s an okay strategy. It’s not a great one. It does help ease people into being billed for electricity. But I, you know, I had a good in depth conversation with Rafa at Bluewater about that. I said, okay, Rafo, you go over by 1 kilowatt and you get a bill for 39 cents on your, you know, you get a charge 30 cents. How does that make you feel? And he says, yeah, I don’t like that. So I think it’s better to, to just, if you’re gonna bill, decide, you know, what duration you’re gonna start building utilities. And I would go down to five days plus, you know, if you want to start somewhere that is not daily, you know, that is long term or, you know, short stay or whatever you want to call it, but start it with five days plus and start grabbing that expense recapture right to the bottom line. And then, you know, once that is kind of the norm, move it down to daily.

 

Mia Johnson

01:04:18.770 – 01:04:22.430

Well, put a meter on each of these sites.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:04:23.410 – 01:04:49.638

The cost roughly in the $150 ballpark to put a new meter in there. You know, I tell people that is a better capital investment than a fire ring, a picnic table, because it’s actually recovering your cost and it’s going to be there 20 plus years versus, you know, you’re going to replace that, that $800 picnic table in six, seven, eight years. You know, it’s going to have to get replaced over and over.

 

Brent Parker

01:04:49.774 – 01:04:54.518

Mike, is that per, I’m sorry, is that Is that first per site per.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:04:54.574 – 01:04:57.286

Okay, yeah. And then there’s some, you know, there’s some.

 

Mia Johnson

01:04:57.438 – 01:04:58.966

Is there a monthly charge?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:04:59.158 – 01:05:54.200

There is a monthly charge. Yeah. And that’s in volume. So it starts at about six, six dollars and drops down. So again that, that gets passed through usually on the rate because people don’t want to have all these extra charges. We do have some campgrounds that do administrative, they call it an administrative fee and they’ll make it six and a half, seven dollars. I’ve got one property that does 25. And you know, his thought process there was, you know, I’m charging them for the seasonal site. 25 bucks a month isn’t going to kill them and I’m going to pay for all my equipment. So it’s just the mindset and you know, again, what your clientele will bear. Yeah. I always say on an average daily rate, you know, you got to add 20 cents and you got, you’ve got that covered. So if you can increase your rate 20 cents a day or you can increase your monthly by six bucks, you know, you’re covering that. You want to increase it by 10. Now you’re paying for your equipment.

 

Brian Searl

01:05:55.190 – 01:05:59.730

So you’re saying we could just increase the rate by those guidelines and then not buy wild energy meters.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:06:00.070 – 01:06:03.010

No, you’re paying for them. Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:06:04.070 – 01:06:49.980

Mike, do you, do you see the daily billing or even, you know, going from three days out billing? I picture that as being from being drawn down from the mega parks down to the mom and pops. Not. I don’t see the mom and pop hops starting that phase because they don’t, they don’t have the demand and most of the places to be innovative on that. But the mega parks do like Margaritavilles and some of the bigger jelly stones where they’re the destination park. I think they’re the ones that can start that trend. But just like the credit card fees, it got started, but now it’s being accepted across the industry.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:06:50.520 – 01:07:11.968

Yes. It’s funny you say that. The, the smaller parks are starting first. They are the quickest to adopt new technology and make changes. The big park owners, multi park owners, are very hesitant to change. You know what they’ve been doing? I’ve been doing it this way. I don’t want to change it. So they’re more hesitant to make, to make that change than the individual park owners.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:12.064 – 01:07:24.314

You know what’s fascinating though? I bet you, and you tell me if I’m wrong. I bet you when the big part of people come and talk to you at the Trade shows. They’re like, we’re going to do this tomorrow. And then they. Then that flips into what you said when they go back home.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:24.482 – 01:07:27.322

Yeah. I mean, if you. It depends if they’re financing them.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:27.346 – 01:07:28.698

I’m not picking on them. Right. But just.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:28.754 – 01:07:41.156

Yeah, no, if they’re. If they’re financially oriented and they can run numbers in their head and they know how to. Then they get it right away. It’s the people that don’t understand their financials that struggle with it.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:41.308 – 01:07:49.044

Yeah. Well, my point is, is I think the big park owners get it right away, and I think they want to do it right away, but then they run into the machine that is there.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:49.212 – 01:07:49.700

Yes.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:49.780 – 01:07:52.212

Big. Huge. Yeah. So that’s what. That’s what my point was.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:52.236 – 01:07:58.116

Overall. one, one executive’s like, I don’t. You know. Yeah. It’s decision by committee instead, that.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:07:58.188 – 01:08:05.120

That’s why they need my NI. To talk to them and say, you’re throwing money away.

 

Brian Searl

01:08:05.510 – 01:08:30.807

We should just put together, like, Mike, you and I should just put. And maybe we can sneak Jeff into this package. And Mia, we should just put together some kind of like, epic, like, package where we take one meeting a month so there’s like crazy demand and we look like we’re backlogged and we have a wait list for people who can just come in and purchase a park and put in wild energy and use AI and like, just cut their expenses by 80% there.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:08:30.893 – 01:08:33.039

Have a. Have a good case study. For sure.

 

Mia Johnson

01:08:34.459 – 01:08:37.599

Yeah, case study if you want.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:37.979 – 01:08:39.043

Which one?

 

Mia Johnson

01:08:39.211 – 01:08:41.603

I said you can use my new park as a case study.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:41.691 – 01:08:44.959

Oh. Oh, you’re a realtor and you bought a park?

 

Brian Searl

01:08:45.419 – 01:08:48.163

Were you not paying attention? She just said that earlier. Jeff.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:48.291 – 01:08:49.159

But it’s insane.

 

Brian Searl

01:08:49.979 – 01:08:51.159

Come on, Jeff. 

 

Mia Johnson

01:08:52.059 – 01:08:56.281

You know, I gotta. Jeff, I gotta put my money where my mouth is. Right.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:56.435 – 01:09:13.290

Well, I’m not allowed to buy any more parks. Or. Or I will be. I’ll be single because I got rid of all of mine. Now I can. I have a technicality that I can invest in a park, but I don’t own it.

 

Brian Searl

01:09:14.150 – 01:09:15.650

I mean, that’s fine.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:09:18.070 – 01:09:25.107

Yeah. Because if my wife asked me, I say no. I have not bought a park. Absolutely not.

 

Brian Searl

01:09:25.243 – 01:09:32.599

Seems like a very dangerous fine line that you should navigate offline away from. I don’t want to take sides.

 

Mia Johnson

01:09:33.659 – 01:09:36.599

So it’s like you were a lawyer in a prior life, Jeff.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:09:37.899 – 01:09:41.119

Well, but accountants can read the law.

 

Brian Searl

01:09:41.499 – 01:10:54.282

But there is, for as much as we joke about it, right. There is a market for that. For not like just being that exclusive and putting together, but Just what you said, Mike. For people who can come in and reduce that operating expense of a park and know for sure they can do it when they’re looking at a cap rate or whatever the NOI is or. And so that’s like, that’s what we tell people too with AI when you come in, like especially with labor. And so I think there’s something that could be put together between multiple providers in this, in this space to market that in a better way to these investors who are trying to come in and be more cost efficient but also still provide a better guest experience because this is going to be. You know, going back to your very first question, Jeff, what do we think 2025 is going to look like? I think 2025 is going to be down or flat for a lot of people. Unless you’re just started marketing off. Right. And you’ve never done any marketing before, then maybe you have a chance to be up a little bit. But so I think you’re going to have to pay more attention to many things. But one of those things is going to be your margins. What are your costs for things? And there are ways that through metering or through credit card processing or requesting cooping fees or using AI or whatever that you can do this very easily in 2025. And so I think maybe it’s a conversation we’re not gonna have in the show, but.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:10:54.386 – 01:11:21.366

Right. Because yeah, one of the, if you have an older park, one of the new fixes to save some revenue would be to put the investment into your WI Fi and get rid of your old kids cable systems and your cost of fixed cable. Let people stream and the WI FI is going to work. Everybody streams anymore anyway.

 

Brian Searl

01:11:21.558 – 01:11:25.542

Just buy a bunch of Starlink dishes and rent them out to people per night.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:11:25.726 – 01:11:26.886

Well, there you go.

 

Brian Searl

01:11:27.038 – 01:11:44.908

You can have them installed on poles outside, but just flip them on when they want Internet rent them out. Wouldn’t that make more money than maintaining and revamping a WI FI system system X number of years and trying to figure out all the signals and hassles and trees and I mean maybe that to trees you start to figure it out with Starlink, but you only figure.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:11:44.924 – 01:11:50.428

Out once people want trees. Until they want WI Fi.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:11:50.604 – 01:11:53.212

Yeah, until they want their Starlink dish to work. Right.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:11:53.316 – 01:11:55.164

Yeah, but if you, but if you.

 

Brian Searl

01:11:55.172 – 01:12:05.310

Were renting the dish and it was on a pole and it was in the same exact location, you would know where it was that it got coverage. It’d be screwed in and locked down. You just flip that dish on if they pay for it.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:05.430 – 01:12:17.970

Yeah, we. I don’t know. My. My profile is we want to. Internet is one of your biggest amenities anymore in a campground.

 

Brian Searl

01:12:18.470 – 01:12:35.912

Yeah, but everybody has cell phones. Everybody has 5G. Everybody has hotspots. So, like, I don’t know that there’s a. Like, there was even five years ago. I don’t know that there’s a need with a capital, all capital letters for people to absolutely have that. Like, there was years ago. So I think maybe there you can get away with it.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:35.936 – 01:12:39.540

I’ll have you come to my front desk when the WI fi goes down.

 

Brian Searl

01:12:40.000 – 01:12:48.216

Okay. Because, like, I’ll just pull out their phone and be like, did you know there’s this button here that you can toggle on that’s a hot spot?

 

Oh, your WI fi’s back.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:48.368 – 01:12:50.168

Yeah. No, they don’t know that.

 

Brian Searl

01:12:50.304 – 01:12:53.336

I know that could be part of the education process.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:53.488 – 01:13:02.658

Right. Well. And you know that I carry. Along with my phone, I carry two other hotspots just so that I’ve always got my own signal no matter where I am. So.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:02.714 – 01:13:06.590

I don’t know that I actually did know that, but. Good. That’s awesome. Yeah, I used to do that.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:07.290 – 01:13:20.150

Yeah. But there. There’s so many avenues that we can go down. We haven’t even touched operating systems for your campground management systems procedures.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:20.490 – 01:13:36.770

Well, that’s why we have this call, though. That’s why we restructured the show, because every time, like, again, I don’t, you know, Mike and Mia and Brent aren’t going to be here, but you and I will be. And. And so the. The idea is, is let’s dive into those operational things week by week so that people are interested that can tune into the show.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:37.070 – 01:13:42.246

Okay. So that’s pretty much going to be the standard of this.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:42.318 – 01:13:42.982

Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:43.126 – 01:13:50.134

Time when I’m. When we come on, is going. Going over building systems, operations, cost savings, financials.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:50.182 – 01:13:53.848

Why do you think you’re here? That’s why we picked you for this episode, man.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:53.984 – 01:13:55.940

Hell, I never know why I’m here.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:57.120 – 01:14:04.712

I mean, I don’t know why I’m here either, too, but just to mess up my mic and screw around with the studio and curse at things before the show starts.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:04.776 – 01:14:12.984

So I’m gonna have to get all fancy then like you and get my, you know, my Rush Limbaugh microphone, golden microphone.

 

Brian Searl

01:14:13.032 – 01:14:25.510

And, yeah, we need to create a real plan. Yeah, we need to create better plans for people who. Who are on the show, not just for the current guests, but for, like, Mike. I mean, Mike was asked, like, trade show Questions. So should we require guests to have their booth set up behind them? I think so.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:26.210 – 01:14:29.550

You mean you want me to have my banner instead of my backdrop?

 

Brian Searl

01:14:29.890 – 01:14:30.554

Yeah.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:30.682 – 01:14:33.754

Mike, were you at OHI last summer?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:33.882 – 01:14:34.762

Yes, sir.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:34.906 – 01:14:41.738

Okay. I don’t know if I ran across you or not, but we. We had a booth there in Orlando. The one in Orlando, right.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:41.794 – 01:14:42.122

Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

01:14:42.186 – 01:14:42.426

Yeah.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:42.458 – 01:14:42.762

Okay.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:42.826 – 01:14:44.630

Down there. Done that. Yep.

 

Brian Searl

01:14:45.530 – 01:14:47.058

Last year. Last year.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:47.114 – 01:14:48.130

Wasn’t that two years ago?

 

Brian Searl

01:14:48.170 – 01:14:48.882

Two years ago.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:48.986 – 01:14:49.950

Two years ago.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:50.890 – 01:14:52.146

Oklahoma.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:52.338 – 01:14:53.426

Okay. I think we’re talking.

 

Brian Searl

01:14:53.458 – 01:14:55.282

Oh, Orlando is three years ago in OHI.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:55.306 – 01:14:57.110

Oh, yeah, yeah.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:58.730 – 01:14:59.330

Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:59.410 – 01:15:06.146

Yeah. Kansas. Kansas City. Oklahoma City. And beautiful Louisville.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:06.258 – 01:15:11.026

Where did your hat go? Put your hat back on. Honor your grandfather.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:15:11.218 – 01:15:12.750

It got warm in there.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:14.410 – 01:15:19.154

Well, you guys are asking me. Yeah. Right now I’m asking questions.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:19.282 – 01:15:25.710

When I was alive, I didn’t have air conditioning. Suck it up, Jeff. Leave the hat on.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:26.490 – 01:15:32.498

Yeah. Come on, Brian. I admit I’m old. You don’t have to remind me.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:32.554 – 01:15:33.762

I admit I’m old.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:33.866 – 01:15:34.322

Yeah.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:34.386 – 01:15:34.990

So.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:35.530 – 01:15:38.470

And. And you’ve completely ruined my partner.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:39.220 – 01:15:41.628

I’ve completely. Why have I ruined your partner?

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:41.724 – 01:15:51.720

Greg is so far down the AI hole that every time I talk to him, he can’t talk to me direct. He types it in and has AI answer me.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:52.420 – 01:16:06.966

You watch, Jeff, you watch. In less than two years, and I’m telling you this, in less than two years, you will turn to Greg and you’ll be like, I am so glad you started learning AI two years ago, because we would be fucked without you. Can I just say fucked. I don’t know if I can say.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:16:07.118 – 01:16:08.342

It’s your show.

 

Brian Searl

01:16:08.526 – 01:16:15.686

That’s true. But, like, I don’t know if people get offended by that. But it’s. It is. It is what it is. Right? Like, I, I think you’re gonna do that in less than two years.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:16:15.758 – 01:16:36.890

I do admit I use it, but I still. When I’m building strategic plans and doing other things, it’s still. I want to use my experience to. Well, of course, you know. And he keeps telling me, well, it is, you know, if you run your thoughts through AI, it’s still your thoughts. And it’s like.

 

Brian Searl

01:16:36.930 – 01:16:37.786

It’s true.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:16:37.978 – 01:16:52.506

It is, but that’s not the way I talk. If I’m talking to you across a table, I want the same thought process to come out of my mouth as I would put down on paper.

 

Brian Searl

01:16:52.618 – 01:17:28.926

Of course. But how. How much can you scale a table? And I don’t want to divert into the AI thing, but how much can you scale the Jeff across the table? Like, I mean, I do, but Like, I don’t in this conversation. Right. So like. Yeah. How much can you scale the Jeff across the table is my point. You can’t. You can scale Jeff on the phone more, you can scale Jeff on email more, but you can’t scale Jeff across the. So there has to be a difference in that in order to scale. Anyway, let’s go back to Brent. I want to talk more. And by the way, like, anybody’s welcome to leave if you guys want. Like, we’re just having a good conversation. I know everybody has things to do except for me apparently, but.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:17:29.078 – 01:17:33.966

So I have to go shovel my driveway. Brian.

 

Brian Searl

01:17:34.078 – 01:18:15.810

What? You don’t have a robot for that? You know, I, I bought. I bought my girlfriend’s parents. They’re my. I guess I don’t know, my in laws. We’re not married yet. Right. But I bought them those snow melting. There’s a company called Heat Track that I’ve been using for like 20 years. I bought them from my dad like so long ago. But they’re wonderful. You just stick them on your mat and you like plug them in and like your doorstep and they sell. And they sell driveway path ones and they sell ones for your roof and they sell. So you don’t have to shovel anymore. Like if you just figure out you’re looking for an investment and you had capital sitting there, invest in your back.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:18:17.080 – 01:18:26.352

So Brian, you need to solve the freezing water line to an RV problem because that, you know, that keeps. You can keep a campground open and keep the water flowing.

 

Brian Searl

01:18:26.416 – 01:19:20.992

Well, you can monitor it. Monitoring it or solving it. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t want to. That’s your department. You got. You’re building all kinds of wizard hardware things over there, right? There’s got to be something though that I bet you there’s some kind of. Because like. And I’ll tell you, and this is just the weird things that I may or may not know. Years ago, I remember backing this project on Kickstarter where it was like a. It was a butter knife, but it like vibrated in such a way if you held it that it would like slightly heat up to slice through the butter easier. So I bet you like 15 years later there’s probably some kind of similar technology that would at least vibrate it enough to where it would keep it above freezing depend like not, not in Canada, but like in, in North America. Not that it would vibrate or anything. Right. But I’m sure there’s some kind of technology right there that would. We just have to figure it out.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:19:21.016 – 01:19:24.928

Mike, it’s all heat tape using electric. I like it.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:19:25.064 – 01:19:49.870

Right. Well, we invented a heat tape. Oh, God. Well, company that I had a piece of, we invented a heat tape called Frostex, which is, is a great little one that you can put because it’ll even work on a water hose and not melt it, unlike some of the other heat tips. But it doesn’t solve the problem for me as an operator.

 

Brian Searl

01:19:50.370 – 01:19:51.110

Why?

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:19:52.210 – 01:20:11.580

Because we get 36 inches of frost. So. And unless I had put in heated terminals at the very beginning of my construction, I can’t, I can’t keep them warm enough. My water. We were built as a summer park.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:20:11.700 – 01:20:12.044

Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:20:12.092 – 01:20:17.680

We’ll never be. You know, I’ve got some main water lines that are maybe 12 inches deep.

 

Brian Searl

01:20:18.340 – 01:21:05.302

So here’s, here’s what I want you to build, Mike. I want you to build a self contained water meter system for each site that will apparently make my camera go off. Lisa, I think you’re rolling on the cord, but try to move your chair now, Lisa. But anyway, so I don’t know what happened to my camera anyway. Better looking without it. But build a, a self contained, you know, water meter system that can recycle people’s water in real time. And then you can keep like. You don’t have to build water pipes. You can just have like a water tank on each individual person’s site that can clean the water and purify it and so quickly that they will never need to have water pipes.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:21:05.366 – 01:21:12.854

Yeah, I think NASA did that for the space station. So I think mass produce that and put it in every rv. We’re good to go.

 

Brian Searl

01:21:12.942 – 01:21:27.240

You’d be. Yeah, you’d be even richer than you are now, which is probably pretty red with all the people who need electricity. It’s coming soon anyway, so. Is that crazy? Is that too crazy of an idea? Like in 20 years, though? I don’t know.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:21:27.700 – 01:21:36.188

Hey, nothing’s. Nothing’s crazy if you can figure out how to do it. That’s the. It’s the crazy people that made all the innovations, so.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:21:36.324 – 01:21:37.240

That’s right.

 

Brian Searl

01:21:38.100 – 01:21:39.840

But yeah, it’s. It’s interesting.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:21:40.740 – 01:22:12.690

I’m gonna have to. To go. I got a 3:30 coming up. It was very, very good meeting you, Mia and Brent. I probably have seen you at a show or two, but haven’t stopped and talked to you if you want. All my information should be on Brian’s page someplace. But I’m willing to talk to you anytime off the air because this is what I love doing is talking. Campground.

 

Brent Parker

01:22:13.390 – 01:22:16.534

Definitely. Nice to meet You, Jeff, appreciate it. Appreciate all your insight.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:16.662 – 01:22:19.590

Yeah, we should probably wrap up at some point anyway. Now especially.

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:19.710 – 01:22:20.246

Yeah.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:20.358 – 01:22:28.662

Don’t have a camera, so. But yeah, like Mia, tell us about your prop. What’s the name? Are you able to say that? Did you close already or.

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:28.686 – 01:22:29.606

No, not yet.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:29.678 – 01:22:43.616

Okay, so don’t say it. Yeah, but we want to hear about it. Like we’ll try to have you back on the show. Maybe tell us about your experience as a campground owner, but I wish we had more time to dive more into the brokerage aspect. I’m sorry, we didn’t. We had. We think we had a good conversation though.

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:43.688 – 01:22:45.808

Invite me back. We’ll chat for sure.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:45.864 – 01:22:50.660

Absolutely. So. But where can they find out more information about your brokerage if they’re interested in selling the property?

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:51.160 – 01:23:12.620

On my website is anycampgroundbrokers.com and yeah, give me a call. We’ll chat if anybody has any questions. Like I said, I also do a little bit of consulting, usually trying to assist in people thinking about succession planning and, you know, growing. Growing value.

 

Brian Searl

01:23:14.840 – 01:23:21.312

Awesome. Thank you for being here, Brent. Where can they find out more about your reservation system for long term guests?

 

Brent Parker

01:23:21.456 – 01:23:36.780

Yeah, sure. So the website is opencampground.com and there’s a section where we could basically give you a demo of the website or of the app and kind of just walk you through what we have to offer.

 

Brian Searl

01:23:37.480 – 01:23:41.820

Awesome. Thanks for being here, Brent and Mike. Where can they find out more about Wild Energy?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:23:42.440 – 01:24:09.350

Well, best thing is to ask your local campground. I mean, we’re all over the place now. I think there’s only a couple states we’re not in north and South Dakota, so you might not get a good reference there. But every other state we’ve got dozens of customers in, so, you know, asking your peers is probably the best thing. We can answer the specific technical questions and implementation questions. And we’re at www.wildenergyco.com.

 

Brian Searl

01:24:09.970 – 01:24:22.366

Awesome. Thanks for being here, Mike. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Fireside Chats. I swear I’m here and I’m not an AI somewhere in the background. But we’ll see you next week for another episode. And thanks here. Thanks. Take care, guys.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:24:22.398 – 01:24:23.130

See you.

 

Mia Johnson

01:24:23.430 – 01:24:24.894

Take care. Bye Bye.

 

Speaker A

01:24:25.022 – 01:24:47.270

Thanks for joining us for this episode of MC Fireside Chats with your host Brian Searl. Have a suggestion for a show idea? Want your campground or company in a future episode? Email [email protected] get your daily dose of news from ModernCampground.com and be sure to join us next week for more insights into the fascinating world of outdoor hospital hospitality.

 

00:00:09.840 – 00:00:30.440

This is MC Fireside Chats, a weekly show featuring conversations with thought leaders, entrepreneurs and outdoor hospitality experts who share their insights to help your business succeed.Hosted by Brian Searl, the founder and CEO of Insider Perks. Empowered by insights from Modern Campground, the most innovative news source in the industry.

 

Brian Searl

00:00:58.150 – 00:01:44.340

Welcome everybody to another chaotic and crazy behind the scenes episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks. All these wonderful people in here are watching me scramble around trying to shut up my studio for the second week in a row. You see, I’ve got 10,000ft of headroom here that we’ll try to fix in the show as well. And my camera’s flickering, so still in the process of getting the studio built, but the plant’s new from last week, so we’ve made progress. Does that count? I don’t know. And it’s a real plant too, Mike. It’s a fiddle. Fig leaf. We actually researched it with Chat GPT with my AI to figure out what the best plant was for that. So you can kind of see me like I’m looking over here in a monitor at you guys and then back here the camera. So we’ll fix that too. But anyway, how’s everybody doing? How’s your Christmas New Year? Stuff like  that? 

 

Mia Johnson

00:01:45.120 – 00:01:47.260

Good? Excellent.

 

Brian Searl

00:01:47.760 – 00:02:51.176

Good to hear. Good to hear. So today we have kind of our new episode format. We’re going to talk about business. Operations and management is the overall topic of this. So I know Jeff is a recurring guest on here. We’ve got Mike and Mia as kind of our special guests. And then we have, you know, a couple people who can make it today that are going to be regular guests too, hopefully. But yeah, that’s going to be the overall focus of just, you know, talking about things that relate to operations, to management, to, you know, subtopics that relate to. To all those things. So I just want to go around briefly, I think and introduce our two recurring guests or just. Actually it’s just Jeff, isn’t it? Jeff, you’re the only recurring guest on the show. I guess on the show it’s supposed to be. So that’s interesting. We’re supposed to have Chris Chube here, who’s the glamping guy. And then we’re supposed to have Ali Rasmussen from Spacious Guys and Mike Harrison from crr, all of whom apparently could not make it this week for our first week episode. So we’ll figure that out as we go. But go ahead. Yeah, Jeff, you want to introduce yourself briefly and then we’ll Just go around the room and Mike and Mia can introduce themselves as well. And Brent as well.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:02:51.328 – 00:03:22.640

Sure. My name is Jeff Hoffman and I’m the managing member of Camp Strategy which is a consulting firm to help either starting startup campgrounds from the construction phase on. Our specialty though is in helping existing campgrounds get over the hump and become profitable cash flowing entities that will make so that they can survive.

 

Brian Searl

00:03:23.940 – 00:03:54.046

Yeah. Thank you for being here, Jeff. I’m really looking forward to having multiple conversations with you over the course of the year. You know, we’ve worked together for a long time, known each other for quite some time. I have a lot of respect for what you’re doing at Camp Strategy with Greg, so definitely looking forward to diving into some of those insights, especially as it pertains to, you know, what’s going on currently in the industry as well as, you know, our special guest of the week. So excited to have you here. Thanks for being here. Mia, you want to introduce yourself next, I’m just going to pop in and out. Don’t pay attention to me, like I’m trying to fix my lights and all that kind of fun stuff. So go ahead. Mia, 

 

Mia Johnson

00:03:54.158 – 00:05:30.080

thanks so much for inviting me. My name is Mia Johnson. I’m with Northeast Campground Brokers. We’re a full service brokerage firm. I also provide consulting services to owners. My background, I have been practicing law as a real estate and corporate attorney for 28 years and kind of fell into brokerage a couple decades ago. Became a campground broker 15 years ago now and to date I’ve sold 95 campgrounds and soon to be just over a hundred. I have also given numerous seminars over the years to different owners at different trade shows, et cetera across the country on how to grow your revenue. Growing your revenue means growing your value, so that’s, that’s key. And on how to grow your revenue and operational discussions as well on how to become more efficient. So I think I come at this from a little bit different perspective with my, my legal background as well as my brokerage background. But for me it’s always about how to grow the numbers in a business because if you’re growing your numbers in a business, you’re putting more in your pocket in the short term and also in the long run with your value. So that’s, I’m located in the Northeast in Rhode island, but I service basically 10 states in the Northeast. But I do go outside and do national on occasion deals as well.

 

Brian Searl

00:05:30.540 – 00:06:14.310

Yeah, I’m excited to like we’ve crossed paths before. I’m just probably a little inconsequential guy who has definitely not sold 100 campgrounds. But we’ve crossed paths before the NCA show with Cindy and. And all that stuff. We’ll be there again this year. We’re gonna give a session on AI, so hopefully we’ll cross paths again with each other. But, yeah, like, a lot of respect for all the things that you’ve done in the industry over the decades and looking forward to many, many good things to come. But excited to have you here to talk about, you know, all those things that you’re talking about really, I think, add up to a really good discussion, especially now with the way that I think you would agree the market has kind of changed. We’ll just leave it at that for now and let you expand on that recently and may even change further going forward. So excited to have you here, Mike.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:06:15.050 – 00:06:40.124

Hey, Brian, thanks for having me on. I didn’t get a chance to catch up with you at the recent trade show, so this is the most time we’ve spent together in a little while. Mike Sorensen, founder and CEO of Wild Energy. We’re utility sub metering company based in Sarasota, Florida. And, you know, we’ve grown quite a bit this year and have hundreds of parks across the United States, so it’s pretty cool to be in this industry. And thanks for having me on the show.

 

Brian Searl

00:06:40.292 – 00:06:45.388

Yeah, I’m excited. I mean, it’s only been, what, like, 15 days and you’ve already grown quite a bit this year. That’s pretty impressive.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:06:45.484 – 00:06:46.332

This year, right?

 

Brian Searl

00:06:46.436 – 00:06:53.772

Oh, okay. All right. You met last year. All right. But still, it’s very impressive. Yeah. Like, obviously, how many years have you been in the industry now? It’s only been.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:06:53.876 – 00:07:00.424

We’ve been commercial for about 4. You know, we were in development, product development for about a year before that, and then we started selling the product.

 

Brian Searl

00:07:00.612 – 00:07:36.194

But, like, from where. Like, I remember you coming in, right, like, from where you came in to where you are now is very, very impressive. I mean, again, I don’t. I can’t say that I follow utilities religiously, but, you know, like, the only company like that I had ever heard of that was doing any kind of metering before you was Utility Supply Group. Right. Which obviously have a lot of respect for them, too, and all the years of work that the Wade and his team have put in. But, yeah, you’ve come quite a long way and lots of people have good things to say about you. So excited to hear about, you know, the different ways that obviously electricity and Meet smart metering and paying attention to your usage and things like that.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:07:36.282 – 00:07:36.626

Right.

 

Brian Searl

00:07:36.698 – 00:07:49.826

Can help from an operational cost. So Jeff, you know you’re my only recurring guest here. Where do you think we should start? First up, business operations strategy. Oh, 

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:07:49.898 – 00:07:51.750

I think we should introduce Brent.

 

Brian Searl

00:07:52.570 – 00:08:02.016

I’m sorry, Brent. Like I’m looking the screen. So I was looking at the camera, I’m like, hey, there’s nobody else in my little camera lens. And then I realized I had to look over here. Brent.

 

Brent Parker

00:08:02.128 – 00:08:02.800

Cool.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:08:02.960 – 00:08:04.180

Great background.

 

Brent Parker

00:08:04.760 – 00:08:06.768

Oh, that’s, that’s a fake one by the way.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:08:06.904 – 00:08:08.460

Yeah, same one I got.

 

Brian Searl

00:08:09.400 – 00:08:12.220

Is it really? I’m old.

 

Brent Parker

00:08:14.360 – 00:09:49.438

Yeah. My name is Brent Parker. I am the, the owner of Open Campground which is a cloud based property management software, reservation software for campgrounds and RV parks. A little bit, little background of myself. So I started more so on the property management side. That was a general manager for a company called Rent Payment. It was a division of MRI software, which is a big company for commercial property management, residential management. So I was able to run that division for them and then I decided to kind of go to entrepreneur route. So I started a business called Marina Payments where we process payments for marinas. Marinas and boatyards and individual boat owners. And then I finally realized that I said, hey, I think I need a software to partner with this Marina Payments product that I have. So I acquired this business last summer from a previous owner who ran in about 14, 15 years. And so now I’m just trying to, you know, add my little flavor into, you know, the short term space. Trying to add some long term functionality, you know, for, especially for RV parks and mobile homes who need, I think, a different product than short term, you know, software. So, so yeah, that’s, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last year or so. And I’m excited to be on this call. So thank you for extending the offer.

 

Brian Searl

00:09:49.574 – 00:09:53.810

You’re like, well, you’re less excited since I almost forgot to introduce you, but now you’re more excited.

 

Brent Parker

00:09:54.230 – 00:09:55.370

It’s all good.

 

Brian Searl

00:09:56.630 – 00:10:30.178

I’ll live that down in shame another time. But yeah, I appreciate you being here. Honestly, like I don’t know much about your software system. I will admit that. You know, from my perspective, just being in the industry for so long, you tend to go toward like the people you heard repeatedly from a camp spot, new book, Res Nexus, other people perspective. Right. But who you see and who come up in conversations so more, so much more often than the smaller players. Not that they’re necessarily better in all facets but that you just hear their names more and so you get more familiar with them. And so I’m excited to hear what you have to offer. Especially. You said long term, right?

 

Brent Parker

00:10:30.314 – 00:10:30.866

Yes.

 

Brian Searl

00:10:30.978 – 00:10:44.050

Lisa is going to turn up my speaker over here. I was trying to motion with her to, like, turn up the little dial on the keyboard so I can hear you better. But yeah, long term is a need for sure. So I’m excited to get into that. So, Jeff, where do you think we should start?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:10:44.510 – 00:12:27.260

Well, actually, because we do have someone from PMS on, someone that tries to implement value and Mike that tries to save us all money, I think the best way to start is discuss the. What everyone thinks 2025 is going to be as far as revenue and camper nights, rate fluctuations. Are we peaking in demand, RV sales, are they going to continue to, although they dropped a little bit, are they going to continue to grow? Because obviously most of these people now, if they’re buying a new one or trading in an old one, that still stays in the inventory. So I track both new sales and used sales to see what’s selling, and right now used sales seem to be beating new sales that tells me that money’s tight in the purchasing area of the office. But I was just at the Cleveland RV show and it was packed, which is a good sign. But I’d like to just kind of pull the members that are here and find out. Where do you see demand for existing campgrounds? Where do you see demand for new campgrounds? Up, down. What about revenue basis? Are you thinking that there’s still room to go in rates or are we plateauing in rates?

 

Brian Searl

00:12:27.840 – 00:12:37.656

Wow, you just went for the really, like, good question first off, didn’t you? Like, we want people to tune until the end. You know, Jeff, you’re supposed to say the good questions to the end. Oh, by the way, I love your look.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:12:37.808 – 00:12:43.512

Oh, yeah, my. It’s very weird, the hat, but it.

 

Brian Searl

00:12:43.536 – 00:12:47.784

Looks like if you wouldn’t have pulled that off. Like, it looks like a. It looks really sophisticated. Like.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:12:47.872 – 00:12:54.610

Yeah. While it covers one. One thing, it’s cold as hell in my office because we’re like minus 11 outside.

 

Brian Searl

00:12:55.070 – 00:12:57.318

Well, it doesn’t look like it. Your pool’s uncovered.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:12:57.414 – 00:13:19.218

Yeah, but my son got me this hat when he went to Scotland, and I have never worn hats, but I have one picture of my grandfather because I never met him. And he has on the same hat. So we’re in tribute to him now.

 

Brian Searl

00:13:19.354 – 00:13:27.33 

That’s awesome. That’s a great story. Okay, well, who do you want to start because you don’t want me to start because I’m kind of negative. I’m, I have positive solutions.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:13:27.410 – 00:13:29.650

You’ll just bring AI up and let him talk.

 

Brian Searl

00:13:29.690 – 00:13:36.546

So no, I have clients about this. So you’ll probably want to, like, maybe people will want to hear what I have to say. But, but other people are more important.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:13:36.698 – 00:13:40.670

Okay, whoever wants to start, go ahead.

 

Brent Parker

00:13:40.980 – 00:14:26.122

I’ll start this from the property management side. So. Okay, I may not have all the answers as far as new sales, as far as like RV new sales, but what I’m seeing is that a lot of our customers are wanting to get rid of short term and start moving more into taking their sites into a long term vision. Right. So let’s just say they have 100 sites and let’s say they had a 50, 50 split at one point or maybe 60, 40. I’m starting to see more people trend towards, hey, I want to get this to maybe 80, 20, where it’s long term. And some are even saying, hey, I’m just gonna almost get rid of all. Of them and go strictly all 

 

Brian Searl

00:14:26.146 – 00:14:26.986

of the transients.

 

Brent Parker

00:14:27.098 – 00:15:28.890

All the, all the transients, right. Because I, I think they’re looking at it financially and saying, listen, if we could, if we’re seeing new sales of RVs and you know, sprinter vans, those types of things, then why not meet the demand and say, you know what, let’s put those guests in our site six months, three months, nine months. And I get way more revenue from those customers, existing customers versus the person that’s transient that’s only there for three days. Right. And then I have to remarket to that person to get them back into the campground, which is, you know, a bit of a challenge. Right. Because the average campers camping about two to three times a year, give or take. So if, if you have to extend a lot of resources and marketing efforts just to get somebody to come back to your campground two to three times a year versus somebody that’s there for six months. You’re gonna probably take the six months, right?

 

Brian Searl

00:15:29.190 – 00:15:32.158

It’s an easier path. For sure. I agree with that. The easier path.

 

Brent Parker

00:15:32.254 – 00:15:45.822

It’s an easier path. And then, you know, so that’s, that’s, I’ll say that’s what I’m seeing from a revenue perspective and also just from a changing of strategy on the property management side.

 

Brian Searl

00:15:45.926 – 00:16:08.628

I’m curious, you know, my initial thought with this is not, is partially based on what you said and partially based on other conversations I’ve, I’ve had with this about our client, with our clients. And for clarity for if you don’t know, like I run a four or five hundred person, like we are marketing company that services four or five hundred campgrounds. Four or five hundred people would be a lot to manage, Jeff. But you would help me if I got that big right?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:16:08.764 – 00:16:13.044

Oh, absolutely. We’d put in the EOS system and you’d be great.

 

Brian Searl

00:16:13.212 – 00:16:49.110

Good. That’s what I’m counting on you for. But I’ve had these conversations and so I’m curious if there’s data on this and maybe like I wish I had Scott Barr on the call to, to maybe help with this. How many people do we like? Let’s assume, let’s assume 25% of the existing inventory of parks that are mostly transient right now were to switch to even 8020 long term, 80 short term, 20. Is there actually enough people who are staying long term at camps campgrounds to fill up just 25% of that?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:16:50.930 – 00:18:44.270

Good question. I, One of the trends that people are going to the more long term is it’s a more stable income and if they’re buying these for investments, they don’t want to manage them. And it’s way easier to manage a seasonal park than it is to manage a transient park. But you are limited in your revenue to what the market will bear for a seasonal campground. If you’re a transient campground, you’re, you’re usually looking that if you would rent that site for the full 30 days for the month, you’re going to triple your income versus what you get for, for a monthly. So it comes down to how hard they want to work at their campground and what type of investment they’re looking for. Taking it to a more seasonal type situation or year round people. Quasi mobile home park basically is the easier solution. You don’t have as much management, you don’t have as much cost and you know, it works out good for Brent because right now most of the PMS systems that are out there are based on reservation revenue. You’ve got a good niche market with your product depending on what your cost is because nobody’s servicing that industry because that’s, that’s not how they make them their money. They make their money on the reservations. So if you can be a low cost operator in that sector, you’re going to do great.

 

Brian Searl

00:18:44.890 – 00:19:43.434

This is fascinating to me what you just said Jeff, and I don’t want to get you off topic, but that’s actually very fast. I was watching a long video last night about the future of work and I know you told me I was going to bring up AI, right. But like the agents that are going to do the work and they were talking about what you just talked about. They were talking about how software is currently priced from like a Zendesk HubSpot perspective, all that kind of stuff. Right. And how they’re all priced based on seat. And so what happens when the seats aren’t filled with humans anymore? Like Zendesk is a $2 billion a year revenue company. What happens when they’re not charging per human anymore? They’ve got to rethink all of these models and how all this stuff works. And so I think there’s for sure a place for software that focuses on long term. I think everybody’s got to rethink how they’re doing things depending on how the market shifts. Right. Not always short term reactive, changing your pricing every year. But I think we’re seeing perhaps a clear shift in the way things are going to go for the next little while at least. Would you agree or no?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:19:43.602 – 00:20:33.868

Yeah. And some of that comes from, you know, you know that I work with a couple other PMS systems as, as a consultant for them. And that’s one of the directions that we’re, we’re looking at is how do we, how do we reach that market in a profitable way while still offering, you know, high quality back backdrop service for the program? Because there’s going to be a limit to what a seasonal park is going to pay for a PMS system. I think probably one of your biggest competitors is rent manager that can do that. But they, they are not cheap. I used to use them.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:34.004 – 00:20:35.480

So how much are they?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:36.580 – 00:20:39.900

I have, I sold all my parks. I don’t know anymore.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:40.060 – 00:20:43.040

How much worth, how much were they that made you think they were expensive?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:44.030 – 00:20:47.542

Between 475 to 650 per month?

 

Brian Searl

00:20:47.726 – 00:20:48.690

Hundred?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:48.990 – 00:20:49.606

Yes.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:49.718 – 00:20:50.518

Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:20:50.694 – 00:20:58.850

But they handled the whole park from billing, water bills, everything. So it’s a very good system.

 

Brian Searl

00:20:59.230 – 00:21:10.556

But for, but for long term I can see now I’m like, I’m thinking out of my head like that’s, that’s like a fifth of what I pay for like my mid tier shop. But like I’m not thinking it from a long term cap on. Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:21:10.668 – 00:21:44.058

Yeah. And a lot of these seasonal parks that Brent was talking about are probably 50 to 100 spaces. That would be a, you know, that nut would be a killer. So there’s a market for that. But I, I, you know, and I have people that would be in the market for that system because I do consult to Quite a few seasonal parks also. And they’re always looking for ways to get good data but keep the cost down. So.

 

Brian Searl

00:21:44.114 – 00:21:47.082

So I want to. Sorry, finish your thought. I thought you were done.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:21:47.186 – 00:21:47.738

That was it.

 

Brian Searl

00:21:47.794 – 00:23:05.790

No, I was just going to say I want to make sure we answer it. Like not my question because it’s not necessarily the most important. But I am curious, like did we ever talk, like we ever finalize that, like how many people do we actually think are on the road staying long term? Because there’s that piece of it. Right. We talked about. I think you talked about how easy. Which is an important discussion to have to be is how easy it is. And I think that was, you know, the point. But how many of these people are actually out there? Can they actually fill these properties if you convert to long term? Because it might be easier on you up until the point where you’re like. Because we’ve had calls with these clients. Right. Middle. Middle of the Texas is a good example of where it’s now overbuilt and a lot of people are switching to seasonal because they thought they could attract or maybe they started that way. But then they have the same amenities as everybody else. I have a pool, I have a miniature golf course, I have a great store, I have nice bathrooms. But so does the 15 other parks that within a five mile radius of me that were just built in the last four years. So what is the. Assuming there’s enough people to even begin to make those businesses profitable, all they’re close together, right? At what point? Like what is the difference maker that’s causing them to change? Choose your property over the other. Because it’s not that you also have something, it’s that you have. And we’ll talk about experience later, but you have something different.

 

Mia Johnson

00:23:07.210 – 00:25:10.484

I, I think that it definitely just your region will distinguish whether or not you’re going to have much more demand. You brought up Texas, that’s a great example where you can build a new thousand site campground in the Northeast. You cannot build a campground from scratch. Can’t do it. I can count on one hand how many people have built a campground from scratch in all of the Northeast in the last decade. And it took them years and years and years and it just wasn’t cost effective. So you, you get a region here where even adding new sites to an existing campground can take years if you ever get the approvals. So we have a different model up in the Northeast than you would have in a place like Texas where they’re popping up left and right. So In a region like that, which is also similar to some of the other regions out there, there are some states that are, you know, much more highly regulated and won’t be able to build as, as easily as Texas. The demand in the last several years since COVID for seasonal sites has been astronomical. Before COVID almost nobody had wait lists, right. For seasonals except the premier parks. Since COVID almost everybody has a wait list and they still have a waitlist. Now, I saw last year a little bit of a shift that the seasonal rates went up so much. They basically offset the reduction that we saw in the transient traffic. A lot of parks were a little bit down on transients last year for various reasons. It could be weather, could be market related, depending on the park, depending on the region. We still have the majority of the parks having wait lists, at least in the north northeast for seasonals. So it’s that market factor of where, when do we stop, how much do we switch over to the seasonal. And you know my attitude when I’m, when I’m talking to these owners, I always say, look, same thing with your rates. You go up until you no longer have a waitlist, right?

 

Brian Searl

00:25:10.572 – 00:25:11.320

Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:25:11.660 – 00:26:28.724

And if you have a wait list, then add more sites if you can. Otherwise consider converting. But conversion from transient to seasonal takes a long time because you’re already taking reservations for next year at most of these parks. So if you’ve already taken a reservation for next year for that site, what are you going to do? Call the person up and cancel it because you want to? You could, but not necessarily the best approach in terms of customer service. But that’s what some of these campgrounds are thinking in terms of the newer owners, the newer operators out there. I see since, since COVID 100 of my sales have been to investors. And that’s for another discussion for another day. I’m sure Brian’s had these discussions as well. But the market is going to completely change in the next 10 years because we’re losing most of those owner operators and we’re switching over to an investor model. Now there’s two kinds of investors out there. There’s the multi park investor that has owned campgrounds for years and they run them themselves. And then there’s the majority of the investors out there who are new to the industry or newer and are looking for property management companies. And there’s not a lot of options out there for, you know, a property management company.

 

Brian Searl

00:26:28.812 – 00:26:30.100

Good quality one. Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:26:30.180 – 00:29:34.644

Do the entire portfolio for this group. You know, they’ll, they’ll have a hotel Management company coming in and running a campground. Well, it’s different. It might be hospitality but it’s still different. And that’s where we’re having some reduction in some of these. Especially the like the private equity buyers, the private equity investor out there, they’re kind of backing off. They bought a few and then they fell flat on their face because they didn’t know how to run them and they didn’t have a good option to run them. So there is a huge need for property management companies nationwide to offer these services in campgrounds. Not all hospitality, but specifically campgrounds. And that need is only going to continue to grow for the next decade as most of these owner operator parks are going to be switching over to investors. Kind of similar to what happened in motels years ago where most of those motels were smaller owner operators and now they were bought up by, you know, the Hiltons and the Holiday Inns of the world and they’re, you know, multi park owners. So we’re seeing that switch. But back to what Brent said earlier about the cost to run these sites. Absolutely, absolutely. It is cheaper to run an all seasonal and or all annual park. Long term state park. It is probably about a 40% expense ratio is what I generally see on a long term park versus anywhere from a 55 to a 75 expense ratio. 55% to 75% expense ratio on a transient park. Right. The higher the expense, it’s usually the, you know, the Koas, the jelly stones, they have higher fees but you know, generally it depends on the size. But that’s a decent range. But certainly it is much, much cheaper to run those and much easier to run those long term parks. And I see a lot of those new investor buyers leaning towards that model. Unfortunately you don’t make as much money. Right. So it all comes down to cash flow. Right. That’s how they value these parks. That’s what they want. They want their return on their investment. It’s all about, you know, it’s their investors. It’s no emotion here. It’s, it’s not a hobby for them. They want to make that return and they’re going to do that. They’re going to run it whatever model they can to make the most out of it. And in an area that has know incredible demand for transients because you’re in a tourist area, well chances are they are going to buy up that park and they’re going to kick everybody out and go transient even though it costs more to run it because the demand is there for it. But then there’s a lot of other regions where they become the destination location. They’re not going to fill that park with transients unless they become the amusement. Right. And that’s very expensive to put, you know, three million dollar water park in or whatever, you know.

 

Brian Searl

00:29:34.732 – 00:29:39.204

Yeah. The most famous one I know is Howard Port here on Koa. You know him, Jeff?

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:29:39.252 – 00:29:39.876

Oh, yeah.

 

Brian Searl

00:29:39.988 – 00:29:43.720

Very, very well. Created something out of nothing up there, but. Go ahead, Mia.

 

Mia Johnson

00:29:44.380 – 00:31:33.238

Yeah. So I mean, and when I, when I talk to owners about this, in particular about thinking about what your business model needs to be, it can’t be, let’s change it next month. Right. Because this is a long term again, it goes back to if you want to convert a seasonal to a transient or a transient to a seasonal. Right. More. That’s probably more what’s happening right now. If you have a reservation, you’ve got to think about the long term play. Same thing as you’re thinking about gas prices. All right. Gas prices are up. People want to stay in one location. Right. Gas prices go down. It’s not rocket science. Right. They’re more willing to drive further if gas prices are lower. So I always talk to owners about thinking long term. Actually do a business model. Use your software. Right. Everybody has, almost everybody has software. And these software programs can do tremendous things. They just don’t know how to use them. Right. Brent, I’m sure you could talk about that all day long, that there’s so many features that you can utilize and reports that you can run that they’re just not utilizing to help them guide their business model in three months, six months, 12 months from now. That’s what they need to be doing this year. They’re already done. They’ve already got reservations. There’s nothing they. Some stuff. But you know, in terms of the bigger picture, there’s nothing much they can do for this year, but they can still grow revenue in other ways. But in terms of conversion, seasonal versus transients, I think that it’s. We’re going to see a consistent shift. It’s going to go up, it’s going to go down. Right now there’s more demand for seasonals than parks need to address.

 

Brian Searl

00:31:33.294 – 00:31:34.646

Even in the Northeast.

 

Mia Johnson

00:31:34.838 – 00:31:39.210

Even in the Northeast, we, most campgrounds have seasonal wait lists.

 

Brian Searl

00:31:40.040 – 00:33:15.770

So. So the reason I ask here is twofold. You know, a lot of a ton of what you said I could follow up on. Right. And I’m old and probably remembered 22% of it. But the couple things that stuck out in my and in my head when you were talking is we went through something similar in Canada with an over. I don’t know if it was an overcorrection but in Ontario specifically where they have so many seasonal properties in Ontario that none of the transient people can find anywhere to stay. And so I think it’s important for us to consider where this market is going. And I know there’s a lot of we don’t know. Right. A lot of intangibles, a lot of data that we have never seen before. But to understand, you know, I don’t think that anybody here is saying like you should do this at your property right now because every property is unique as Jeff knows, consulting for many different people. But I think there’s a general rule here that we can kind of establish that says, you know, I think we just said it Mia right. There’s plenty of people out there who are going for seasonal. Do you convert to transient? I think it depends on where you are and how much you’re willing to invest in marketing and all that. But to your point to me about property management companies, there are some that are very good like CRR Hospitality is one. Mike who’s nor. I shouldn’t even give him a shout out because he missed the show. But Sierra Hospitality is one that specializes in RV parking, campground management, Blue Waters right there in the northeast. Right. They. They have a very good. I know they do hotels too but they have a lot of experience in campgrounds. So there are a couple out there and there are more, right Scott?

 

Mia Johnson

00:33:15.850 – 00:33:18.666

There’s certainly a couple but they’re a lot of these.

 

Brian Searl

00:33:18.818 – 00:33:22.138

They’re not a lot don’t have capacity. Yes.

 

Mia Johnson

00:33:22.234 – 00:33:28.632

And they also for. For a company like Blue Water, I’m not quite. I don’t think they’ll do a lot.

 

Brian Searl

00:33:28.656 – 00:33:49.780

Of the smaller part and that’s what my secondary point was is when you get to the long term or the seasonal just like we talked about how it doesn’t make sense for a camp spot or a new book and I’m putting words in their mouth to be clear. They may think differently about this to, to change their pricing model around and figure out how to make money from long term the same thing as the third party management.

 

Mia Johnson

00:33:50.600 – 00:34:28.104

Well, I actually just had. I won’t say the specific software unless you want me to. I just had a meeting because I am actually in the process of buying a campground myself and it’s mostly congratulations. So my partner and I had a meeting with the software company Monday and I have another company that I’m meeting with on Friday specifically About the cost. So I’m chuckling when this brought up earlier about the cost of long term and the way this particular company works is they charge $2 a month per seasonal site. So that’s pretty, that’s $2 a month, actually. I thought that was pretty good.

 

Brian Searl

00:34:28.192 – 00:34:28.552

Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:34:28.616 – 00:35:01.940

And they have a lot of other features that, you know, I can work in reimbursement for electric Mike. Mike’s point, if I needed to. And when I, when they get on there and they have to do some sort of reimbursement, I can just pass that cost off to them. Similar to what, you know, the, the per, per reservation fee. Right. If there’s a $350 reservation fee for every reservation. These companies are making a lot of money because you might have a transient park making thousands of reservations every year.

 

Brian Searl

00:35:01.980 – 00:35:02.324

Right.

 

Mia Johnson

00:35:02.412 – 00:35:07.540

But if you have 150 seasonals, I got 150 reservations. That’s it.

 

Brian Searl

00:35:07.660 – 00:35:08.132

Right.

 

Mia Johnson

00:35:08.236 – 00:36:25.242

So now I’m getting charged or very, you know, we only have probably 10 or 20 transient sites, very small amount. Right. So now I’m thinking, okay, well how do I pass that cost off if I’m only getting charged $2 a month? Then I think there’s easy ways for me to build that into my cost, either in their rate or when they log on to do something like pay their tab. Because I’m going to run a tab for them in the, in the store or pay their electric reimbursement, I’m just gonna add a processing fee of $3 Right. Because I’m also getting charged 3%, just under 3% credit card processing on top of that. So let’s say instead of $2 a month, I’m charging them three or four dollars a month. Right. There’s ways to build that in so it’s palatable to my customer. Right. So there’s lots of ways to do that. And I think that some of the software companies now certainly need to start focusing on a better business model for them to offer long term pricing. Right. Because a lot of these parks do have that. And often what happens is they don’t even put those sites in the system. Right. They might have 100 sites that are seasonal and. 100.

 

Brian Searl

00:36:25.346 – 00:36:29.638

Yeah. Because you don’t need online reservations because you’re calling and asking a bunch of questions. Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

00:36:29.734 – 00:36:58.852

But now you’re passing up all the other opportunities, things that you can link your store, your pos, your electric, your, you know, gas, whatever it is that you. Even the gate, gate chart, you know, the gate, linking the gate codes and stuff. You’re passing up all of those other opportunities. So I think it’s worth it, paying a little bit more to have, have all those seasonals in one spot right along with your transients. But that’s just me.

 

Brian Searl

00:36:58.956 – 00:37:01.220

Swear to God we’re going to get to electricity, Mike.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:37:01.300 – 00:37:07.800

Right. Well, some of the points that she brought up, Brian, lead up to Mike.

 

Brian Searl

00:37:08.300 – 00:38:08.506

Because they do so sorry, they do. But one second real quick because I want to just, I want to think about pricing here for a second because the same thing applies and I don’t think we’re going to solve this on this call, but the same thing applies to the reservation system. I, in my head I’m thinking of them and again I’m putting words in all of their mouths. Right. But in my head I’m thinking like, well, you want me to hire how many developers to work on a feature for something I may or may not make money from. That’s going to take me a couple years to build out a feature set for. And then will there be that many seasonals in three years as there is now? And will it even be worth my time? And then how do I then like, how do I differentiate that? Like Scott Barr and I were talking about this, about how campground owners view long term stays as seasonal, but campers view long term stays as a couple weeks. And so how do you actually define that process to make sure that you’re charging versus, you know, the correct rate to the campground who maybe has a mix of 80, 20 or 50. 50. So it’s interesting.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:38:08.618 – 00:38:38.340

Yeah, I was going to say the, as you know, being in the market a long time, people buy RVs and their first year they’re going to travel everywhere and then they found out, find out kind of what a pain in the butt it is to travel everywhere. So they end up becoming a seasonal someplace and then if they want to travel, they’ll unhook and go. But how many.

 

Brian Searl

00:38:38.380 – 00:38:54.160

Okay, I’m sorry, I know I’m interrupting you, but I’m going back to the, the same. We don’t have an answer for this. Right. How many of these people are actually out there that are full time RVers in 2025 that don’t own a house? I think it’s a lot less than it was a few years ago.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:38:55.180 – 00:39:14.078

Yeah, it’s, it’s heading back to where it was. But one thing that you’ve got now that you, you didn’t have before is mobile work, WI Fi and the ability to stay on the road. So we have a lot more people that can go out on the road for months at a time.

 

Brian Searl

00:39:14.214 – 00:39:14.606

Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:39:14.638 – 00:41:22.140

They may still have a permanent residence, but they can go out on the road for a long time because you can get a mail server that basically will send you by email all of your mail and it’s still a good market. But yeah, to answer your point, where, where’s the market driving? I, you know, we do see a big demand in seasonal, especially in the Northeast. One of the reasons is because of what Mia brought up was it’s very difficult to get a park built in the north Northeast. So you don’t have a lot of new transient. If you do, they’re full. You know, a few of my friends own campgrounds out there and they’re full the year out. You know, after they close for the season, they’re fully reserved for next year, both transit and seasonal. It’s a, a different market than say North Dakota where you’re scrapping for every tenant you can get whether they’re seasonal or, you know, a transient. And also the east coast pricing makes, yeah, it makes the seasonal park attractive because if I was getting 8, 8, $500 a site, I have a lot more seasonals, but we’re not getting that in the Midwest. But to her point about how you can charge back the seasonal cost, I see a trend not only with electric, but charging back the water and sewer eventually. Because even the parts that have septic and well that tell me they have no cost in two years when they have to replace that well or re drill it or change the septic system, they’ll find out that they’ve had a very big cost all those years that they’ve been ignoring.

 

Brian Searl

00:41:22.560 – 00:41:23.256

Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:41:23.368 – 00:41:39.944

So somehow they’ve, they’ve got to work that into their formulas to, to get paid for that. I won’t go down the financial hole that I, you know, I go down financial holes.

 

Brian Searl

00:41:39.992 – 00:41:50.638

So I would like to hear when you’re done. I want to hear from Brent on the. Because I think he was going to talk. Sorry. And then I also. Then I want to pivot to Mike.

 

Brent Parker

00:41:50.814 – 00:43:12.590

Yeah, I was, I was going to touch on what Mia mentioned about pricing. And this is not the two open chem crowns horn by any stretch, but just kind of give you an idea of how we were thinking. So we were again thinking long term of saying, okay, if more people are going towards long term stakes and the average software is really reservation based or they charge, you know, $2.50 per transaction or per seat or per site. What I’ve seen as well, we didn’t Want to copy that model? So what we did was said, okay, how about we just let the customer keep the per reservation fee that they want to charge. So hypothetically, if they want to charge $3 per reservation, they can keep that. We’re not going to take any of that money. Right. So our system is geared that way to where you can charge whatever you want. And we kind of tell the customers like, listen, if you don’t want to use the term booking fee, use service fee, use maintenance fee, use, you know, property fee, whatever it is, it’s up to your, you know, that’s your choice. Only thing that we do is we say, okay, we’re just going to charge the guests 2.95, whether it’s Visa, MasterCard, MX for the guest day.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:43:12.970 – 00:43:14.450

That’s it. Right.

 

Brent Parker

00:43:14.490 – 00:44:02.980

So we don’t charge any monthly subscriptions. We just say you can pass that on to the guests, but if you’re generous then, you know, we’ll give you a better rate if you want to absorb the fee yourself. Right. So that’s how we’ve taken it because we’re gonna, we’re recognizing that if you’re gonna have long term guests, most likely those guests are going to pay, you know, hopefully with a credit card and, and that way you can, you know, they just pick up the charge and you don’t have to worry about it. Right. So we’re, we’re trying to be configurable with our pricing. We’re not trying to be kind of one way. We’re trying to say, listen, you know, your, your, if your park is configurable, if it’s 50, 50 split or 80, 20 split, then we will accommodate that need.

 

Brian Searl

00:44:04.080 – 00:44:10.300

Can we go to Mike or Mia? Do you want to, do you have questions for Brent about your park? I’m messing with you. I’m just kidding.

 

Mia Johnson

00:44:11.840 – 00:44:14.020

I’m going to be talking to Brent after this.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:44:14.320 – 00:44:19.226

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not the expert here, but let me catch up on it.

 

Brian Searl

00:44:19.298 – 00:44:23.306

When you talk about electric, didn’t you tell me some, at some point you’re going to go into water too?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:44:23.458 – 00:46:00.688

Yes, absolutely. So we’ll touch on that as well. I’m not an expert on rates or site types, but what I can just listen to the conversation. I think the one mistake is that we’re lumping everything into long term. Right. And there’s different types of long term there. You know, we’ve got parks that are an hour and a half from major metropolitan pounds and those are, you know, they, they do a site lease but It’s a weekend thing. People are going there to stay the weekend and they just happen to leave their equipment there all week versus somebody, to Jeff’s point, that’s on the road, you know, full time RVing. That’s a very different clientele than, you know, a park that’s catering to weekenders. That’s their second home. Right. That’s where you go for the weekend to go fishing and hang out with friends. So that’s, that’s a very different clientele. The one thing we have seen is oversaturated markets. So we can tell where development has slowed, like in the Houston area and then markets that are still expanding and booming. I would say Florida. You know, I’m working with a lot of new development projects in Florida specifically. They are still building, they are big parks. They’re, you know, 500 plus site properties still coming out of the dirt. So, you know, different markets are seeing different types of things happening for sure. And then I can’t go into it, but we’ve got an interesting client in Florida that is building a unique property with lots of amenity types on property, you know, and that will attract and fill up a thousand spaces that they’re working on just because there’s so many things that you’ll be able to do with their property. So you do have to consider all the different types of properties out there.

 

Brian Searl

00:46:00.824 – 00:46:17.460

Will those people. I don’t want to derail you. Sorry. Yeah, no, like again, you talk about Florida still being built, right. Will that new thousand site park with all its amenities attract a thousand new people to Florida though, or will it pull a thousand people from other existing parks, in your unscientific opinion?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:46:17.800 – 00:46:53.286

Yeah, unscientifically, it looks, it appears to be still new, new growth. You know, it’s new equipment still hitting the park parks. It’s not people pulling a rig that’s five years old, six years old from another park. It is still new rigs coming in there because they’re, you know, they’re nicer, high end parks, the ones that are being built. So they are attracting the higher rates and yeah, new people. And they’re doing it in phases. Right. So when I say a thousand site park, they’re not opening day one with a thousand sites. You know, they’re bringing on 350 and then another 200 and then, you know, just phase after phase after phase. Phase coming up online.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:46:53.438 – 00:47:03.370

Right. Hey Mike, quick question on that. On your new builds, how many of them are building and then selling the lots outright?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:05.230 – 00:47:16.822

Yeah, very few. Very few. Are doing that anymore. I, you know, I saw that more four years ago than I do today. So. Yeah, they’re not. They’ll do an annual lease, you know, that type of thing.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:47:16.926 – 00:47:29.316

Okay. Because I’ve, I’ve, a few of the parks that I visited for comparisons down in Florida were member, you know, not member parks, but you actually had deed to your lot.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:29.468 – 00:47:30.228

Absolutely.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:47:30.324 – 00:47:51.518

And you know, some of them had surprisingly quick uptake where they sold out, and then others were kind of slow to develop. For a developer, it takes the operation of it out and then you have the HOA where you make your money from.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:51.574 – 00:47:52.814

Right? Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:47:52.862 – 00:47:56.690

And in Florida, I don’t want an HOA because their laws are tough.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:47:57.670 – 00:48:54.290

They are tough. You’re absolutely right. Water is an interesting topic. We are being asked more and more and more for water. It’s kind of surprising, but, you know, even the water rates, you’ve got some parks that are in directly in major metropolitan areas like Tampa, and they’re on commercial water. And, and that’s one of the big expenses. Right. Right next to electrical is they’ve got a water bill that’s huge. Quarter million bucks. So you got to recover that somehow. And it’s funny, I have so many videos and pictures of water spraying out of RVs and spigot. You know, if people don’t care and you’re not measuring it, you know, it’s that that’s an uncontrolled expense. Same with electric. Electric, if you’re not charging for it, it’s an uncontrolled expense that you were. You got to eat no matter what the end result is. If the power company raised your rate, you’re eating that because you booked, you booked the reservation and the rate last year. So you didn’t build that 20 rate increase in.

 

Brian Searl

00:48:54.670 – 00:49:23.940

Is it easier to teach a consumer about electricity versus water, though? Because like, I think they’re. Because people at their houses get a separate electric bill and can see the cost. I mean, I know it’s hard regardless, saying, hey, we’re going to charge you for something we haven’t before. But from a water perspective, like, I mean, I know it’s like up here it’s bundled with my trash and it’s the same. Like, I don’t see it as often. And so is there a perception that it’s just like, inconsequential and that’s why they’re. I think they’re more wasteful with water than they are electricity.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:49:24.360 – 00:50:14.580

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Especially because, you know, everybody pays an electric bill. There’s very few people generating their own water. But you know, a lot of people in the country have well water. They’re not paying a water bill. And so that is a new concept to start paying for water and sewer. The hardest thing is to teach a park owner about billing their guests for electric. It’s funny, the consumers get that and the park owners don’t. We had one new park in Alabama come out of the ground, started charging electric, you know, on day one, you know, you stay there one day, you’re getting an electric bill. And they’ve had zero consumer pushback. And it’s, you know, they’ve been running now for almost a year, no complaints. So the consumers get that billing for electric model. It’s the park owners that are hesitant to change the paradigm.

 

Brian Searl

00:50:15.000 – 00:50:24.666

Yeah, I mean, I think that some of that is. A lot of these park owners have been going to the same conference for 20 years, talking to the same people who go to the Same conferences for 20 years who all have never charged for electric.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:50:24.778 – 00:50:25.210

Yeah.

 

Brian Searl

00:50:25.290 – 00:50:53.922

So it’s a completely foreign concept to them to think about doing something differently. And that’s not a slight on any of them. Right. That’s just like if you, I mean, the common example I give to people when they ask me about like, do you believe in certain things is Santa Claus. Right. Like if you, if you grew up believing in Santa Claus and then from like whatever age 6 or 7 when you started having doubts, from that point on until you were an adult, you only ever talk to people who still believed in Santa Claus. You would believe in Santa Claus. Like you would.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:50:54.106 – 00:50:54.498

Right.

 

Brian Searl

00:50:54.554 – 00:50:58.430

And so it’s the same thing. It’s, it’s just who you’re, who you’re surrounding yourself with.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:50:59.530 – 00:51:01.154

Yep, that’s absolutely true.

 

Brian Searl

00:51:01.282 – 00:51:08.390

But tell us more about like electric. I want to hear more about. Because this plays right into what we’re talking about. Right. Optimization operations.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:51:09.210 – 00:51:45.830

Yeah. I mean the cool thing and the reason, the whole, the whole reason Wild Energy got started was to make it possible to charge for electric on short stay utilities. I was a camper, I was on the consumer side and I couldn’t understand why I paid the same to camp as somebody who had a bigger rig or a smaller rig, because I, you know, I just knew that I was using a different amount of that utility. And again, being a consumer, you’re used to paying for it at your house. So that’s where the whole idea came from. And every time you explain that to a consumer, it’s like, well, do you pay for your neighbor’s electric. Do you want to pay for that guy who’s got a Tesla plugged in at his pad or.

 

Brian Searl

00:51:46.210 – 00:51:48.810

I’m thinking about buying, just to be clear.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:51:48.930 – 00:51:59.962

So, yeah. And, you know, same thing. You know, Brian, you got campgrounds that don’t want evs in their park. No EVS you can’t charge. And that’s true. If you don’t have the, the infrastructure to do it.

 

Brent Parker

00:51:59.986 – 00:52:00.170

You.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:52:00.210 – 00:52:17.300

You absolutely should not allow people to do that. But if you do, if you do bill them for it. That’s, that’s a great guest service. Let them charge their ev. You know, you’re giving them an amenity that they wouldn’t have at another park. And if you’re able to capture that cost and fill them back, go. Great.

 

Brian Searl

00:52:19.920 – 00:52:21.740

That’s all you got about electricity?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:52:22.320 – 00:52:27.288

No, no. ask questions.

 

Brian Searl

00:52:27.384 – 00:52:36.626

We have a couple minutes left in the technical end of the show, but we plan to kind of just have conversations. So if anybody else needs to drop off, please feel free. But if we’re having a conversation, probably.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:52:36.658 – 00:53:26.980

The big thing I would talk about is the regulatory side of it. I do a lot of education on what you can and can’t do around electrical billing and what kind of equipment you can and can’t use to bill people. And I think we need more education in the industry on what is allowed and how you should be doing it, because there are people that are getting public utility notices that of non compliance. And, you know, you’re putting your campground at risk. You know, you’re opening yourself up for class action lawsuits. That’s not, that’s not something that anybody wants. You know, we’re working with one very large property management company that is going to audit every single property they manage to make sure they’re doing it compliantly. And I think that kudos to them for trying to do it the right way and make sure they’re doing the right thing for, for the customers that they’re managing for.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:53:27.920 – 00:53:35.048

Hey, Mike, we need to hear that voice at OHI so that we can make it a national program, right?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:53:35.184 – 00:54:06.694

Yeah, OHI is actually. I’m working with OHI to change some of the regulations. Specifically in California and in Mississippi, there are some tough utility regulations that don’t allow for recovery. And again, that goes back to it’s not fair. Fair for the business owners. I’ve talked to the public utility commissions. They’re open to changing the rules. Nobody’s ever asked. So. And, and then you just have to walk through the red tape of, well, how do you get that right changed and, you know, publish it. And it’s got to be open for public comment and push through and you.

 

Brian Searl

00:54:06.702 – 00:54:13.574

Know, like utilities, right? Like, this is only like, what if you have private solar? Are you still governed by the same rules?

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:13.702 – 00:54:15.862

Nobody’s got enough solar to run their camp.

 

Brian Searl

00:54:15.966 – 00:54:18.178

I’m just making something up. Right. I’m just.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:18.334 – 00:54:22.762

But so you have to abide by the, the public utility regulations.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:54:22.906 – 00:54:31.914

Right. And every state is different, even depending on the city. Some cities have their own ordinances about.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:32.002 – 00:54:32.730

That’s right.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:54:32.850 – 00:54:42.794

You know, New York, of course, there’s no campgrounds in New York City, but they have very weird rules on electric chargebacks.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:54:42.922 – 00:54:55.420

Yeah, San Diego is a great example of that. You know, they went hard after a couple of campgrounds that were charging inappropriately for electric and fined them significantly until they got their stuff under control.

 

Brian Searl

00:54:55.540 – 00:55:06.860

So what are the common ways that you see campgrounds usually making mistakes with the way they charge electricity? Because I think that’s maybe a good place to like. We’re not going to be able to talk about this for the next two hours, although maybe we’d like to.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:55:06.900 – 00:55:44.690

But number one, building the electric into your rate is a huge mistake. And it’s funny, we just did a property for a very large group, you know, a couple hundred parks, and we put meters in and started measuring things and gave them the data. And they’re like, oh, my God, the number that we baked into our rate was way off. You know, we didn’t know it, that we were not recovering enough. And so, you know, they have an opportunity now to improve the cost recovery and improve their bottom line. And just that data is very, very helpful to make informed decisions instead of just taking averages.

 

Brian Searl

00:55:45.670 – 00:56:00.222

So besides, so besides that, which is obviously a very important point, and you’re in your, like, with wild energy, they would be measuring this exactly. And they would be then recouping the exact dollar amount. Like they can’t go over right. In. In depending on jurisdiction.

 

Mike Sorensen

00:56:00.366 – 00:56:51.940

Yeah, that’s. That’s exactly right. It also brings the, you know, when you start metering somebody, it brings the consumption down. You know, the number that’s hanging out over my shoulder is carbon reduction. So the minute you take a campground and you start metering and shift it to the consumer, they use less. And so that’s better for the. The overall infrastructure of the park. You’re not going to be doing capital improvements as often. You’re not doing breaker changes as often because, you know, they’re not jamming your power so your maintenance costs go down. And you know, we provide an on screen view so that the, the end camper can look at what they’re using so they’re informed. That cuts down calls to the front desk that, you know, hey, I don’t trust my meter because they can look at it themselves. So there’s, there’s a ton of intangible benefits that you get by shifting that to the consumer side.

 

Brian Searl

00:56:54.090 – 00:56:58.430

Makes sense. Jeff, any good questions for anyone on the.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:56:59.290 – 00:57:05.870

Well, Mike, you know I love your product and when you figure out the water 1.

 

Brian Searl

00:57:06.490 – 00:57:12.034

Did you write Jeff a check for the show? Because I didn’t get it to check. Yeah, you’re spreading some love around.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:57:12.202 – 00:59:29.900

Well, we’re working with Mike’s product at other places. I’m actually installing it this year in, in my park because, and I hate to admit this, we have not been billing electric for the last two years because the program wasn’t working correctly. So this year we actually reduced our rate for seasonal and now we’ll be billing them back for electric. And in the end I believe that we’re going to gain about 200 hours a site over the season. We are one of the campgrounds that limits the amount of seasonals we take because we’re located next to big amusement park. So yeah, we do well with transient. But I have other parks where we took where they thought they were going to be transient. And when I worked with them I, I said, why are people going to be coming to this park on a visitation? You need to be a seasonal campground where people are coming to relax for the weekend. And we actually filled them up with seasonals and got rid of all the transient, cut all the costs, operating costs by about 20% and now it’s cash flowing very well. But it’s always, I mean it’s not a straight answer on a park or for operations whether it’s going to be a seasonal park, transit park, a hybrid park. It’s a function of cost, it’s a function of demand, it’s a function of rates. There’s so many variables that enter into it that you, you can’t have a standard answer. That’s one of the things we specialize in. And my. If you need due diligence, it’s one of the things we specialize in is doing performance on parks and looking at the parks to find all the things that might be wrong with it that would come up later for a new purchaser because most got most people buying a park, park don’t know what they’re looking for.

 

Brian Searl

00:59:30.680 – 00:59:39.904

Building a park usually and Please, please talk to Jeff or some similar company right before you build or before you buy, please.

 

Jeff Hoffman

00:59:40.072 – 01:00:06.890

Even with design, there’s been. I. My hobby is I visit parks, of course, and I go to a lot of new parks that I look at them and go, oh my God, the sites are so narrow. The sites are too small, the roads are too, you know, hard to get in and out of. They built a 30 million dollar clubhouse. Who’s going to use it and how you’re gonna, how are you gonna spread that over the rates?

 

Brian Searl

01:00:07.230 – 01:00:21.360

So, yeah, that clubhouse thing fascinates me, Jeff. Like, I know people use clubhouses more than the use case. I’m gonna go, but I still to this day will go to any conference or any travel and I’ll stay in a hotel and just desperately wonder who sits in the chairs outside the elevator of the hotel.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:00:21.780 – 01:00:23.800

Well, I do. That’s how I met you.

 

Brian Searl

01:00:24.100 – 01:00:26.840

Is that really true? No, that’s not true, is it?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:00:27.780 – 01:00:29.308

No. You got those chairs.

 

Brian Searl

01:00:29.404 – 01:00:33.932

Get lots of stuff. It could be possible. How long have we known each other? It’s been like 15 years.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:00:34.036 – 01:00:40.880

Yeah, it’s getting there, right? I remember you when you were a baby and you were a U.S. citizen.

 

Brian Searl

01:00:41.220 – 01:00:44.012

Yeah, go ahead.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:00:44.036 – 01:01:00.550

Yeah. I mean, Jeff. Jeff brings up a good point. You know, we have investors that look for parks that are not metering because they know there’s an instant opportunity to start recovering that cost and improve the NOI instantly. So they will go and buy parks, you know, knowing that they can make money day one by putting metering in.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:01:00.670 – 01:01:41.370

Well, and, you know, going back to that, you know, operations, it’s the same thing. If they’re not charging a fee for credit card collections, we can boost the revenue 3% just by instituting that. And people are getting so used to that charge. When we first started it, you know, people would just back off in horror that we were going to have them start doing that. But people are starting to accept it. And the, you know, the cost for us to take credit cards is getting up there because they’re dinging us for a lot of little things.

 

Brian Searl

01:01:42.230 – 01:01:45.170

And what about crypto, Jeff? Just take crypto.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:01:47.430 – 01:01:49.250

Different. Different episode.

 

Mia Johnson

01:01:50.550 – 01:02:16.162

How do you, Mike, how do you pass off? How does Walk me through how you charge a transient who’s coming for the weekend? What are they doing? Are they just billing it when they check out? How quickly is that coming through? Seasonal. We all get. We know they do it once a month or even monthlies. That’s easy. But the transient. Walk me through how it works with your company.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:02:16.346 – 01:02:38.954

Yeah, so the great news is we’re integrated with about almost a dozen property management systems now that do that, automate that whole process. Right. So on check in that PMS will go grab the meter reading and then on checkout, you know, whether it’s a day, a week or two weeks, they grab the meter reading at the end, do the calculation and fill it right on the guest folio.

 

Mia Johnson

01:02:39.002 – 01:02:46.270

So automatic, it’s all computerized. You don’t have to have somebody go to the site and check the meter and correct.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:02:46.850 – 01:03:19.494

Okay, yeah, yeah, Mike, don’t. Most of the places they have a, basically actually a charge built in for say, and just a number one kilowatt is built into the price. What you do is if you use over that, then you’re billed for the excess. And what it does is try to get to the people that have two air conditioners, electric heaters, things like that.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:03:19.662 – 01:04:18.270

Yeah. So, you know, I’ve worked with the PMS’s and those features are, in some of them, it’s called power allocation. It’s, it’s an okay strategy. It’s not a great one. It does help ease people into being billed for electricity. But I, you know, I had a good in depth conversation with Rafa at Bluewater about that. I said, okay, Rafo, you go over by 1 kilowatt and you get a bill for 39 cents on your, you know, you get a charge 30 cents. How does that make you feel? And he says, yeah, I don’t like that. So I think it’s better to, to just, if you’re gonna bill, decide, you know, what duration you’re gonna start building utilities. And I would go down to five days plus, you know, if you want to start somewhere that is not daily, you know, that is long term or, you know, short stay or whatever you want to call it, but start it with five days plus and start grabbing that expense recapture right to the bottom line. And then, you know, once that is kind of the norm, move it down to daily.

 

Mia Johnson

01:04:18.770 – 01:04:22.430

Well, put a meter on each of these sites.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:04:23.410 – 01:04:49.638

The cost roughly in the $150 ballpark to put a new meter in there. You know, I tell people that is a better capital investment than a fire ring, a picnic table, because it’s actually recovering your cost and it’s going to be there 20 plus years versus, you know, you’re going to replace that, that $800 picnic table in six, seven, eight years. You know, it’s going to have to get replaced over and over.

 

Brent Parker

01:04:49.774 – 01:04:54.518

Mike, is that per, I’m sorry, is that Is that first per site per.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:04:54.574 – 01:04:57.286

Okay, yeah. And then there’s some, you know, there’s some.

 

Mia Johnson

01:04:57.438 – 01:04:58.966

Is there a monthly charge?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:04:59.158 – 01:05:54.200

There is a monthly charge. Yeah. And that’s in volume. So it starts at about six, six dollars and drops down. So again that, that gets passed through usually on the rate because people don’t want to have all these extra charges. We do have some campgrounds that do administrative, they call it an administrative fee and they’ll make it six and a half, seven dollars. I’ve got one property that does 25. And you know, his thought process there was, you know, I’m charging them for the seasonal site. 25 bucks a month isn’t going to kill them and I’m going to pay for all my equipment. So it’s just the mindset and you know, again, what your clientele will bear. Yeah. I always say on an average daily rate, you know, you got to add 20 cents and you got, you’ve got that covered. So if you can increase your rate 20 cents a day or you can increase your monthly by six bucks, you know, you’re covering that. You want to increase it by 10. Now you’re paying for your equipment.

 

Brian Searl

01:05:55.190 – 01:05:59.730

So you’re saying we could just increase the rate by those guidelines and then not buy wild energy meters.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:06:00.070 – 01:06:03.010

No, you’re paying for them. Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:06:04.070 – 01:06:49.980

Mike, do you, do you see the daily billing or even, you know, going from three days out billing? I picture that as being from being drawn down from the mega parks down to the mom and pops. Not. I don’t see the mom and pop hops starting that phase because they don’t, they don’t have the demand and most of the places to be innovative on that. But the mega parks do like Margaritavilles and some of the bigger jelly stones where they’re the destination park. I think they’re the ones that can start that trend. But just like the credit card fees, it got started, but now it’s being accepted across the industry.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:06:50.520 – 01:07:11.968

Yes. It’s funny you say that. The, the smaller parks are starting first. They are the quickest to adopt new technology and make changes. The big park owners, multi park owners, are very hesitant to change. You know what they’ve been doing? I’ve been doing it this way. I don’t want to change it. So they’re more hesitant to make, to make that change than the individual park owners.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:12.064 – 01:07:24.314

You know what’s fascinating though? I bet you, and you tell me if I’m wrong. I bet you when the big part of people come and talk to you at the Trade shows. They’re like, we’re going to do this tomorrow. And then they. Then that flips into what you said when they go back home.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:24.482 – 01:07:27.322

Yeah. I mean, if you. It depends if they’re financing them.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:27.346 – 01:07:28.698

I’m not picking on them. Right. But just.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:28.754 – 01:07:41.156

Yeah, no, if they’re. If they’re financially oriented and they can run numbers in their head and they know how to. Then they get it right away. It’s the people that don’t understand their financials that struggle with it.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:41.308 – 01:07:49.044

Yeah. Well, my point is, is I think the big park owners get it right away, and I think they want to do it right away, but then they run into the machine that is there.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:49.212 – 01:07:49.700

Yes.

 

Brian Searl

01:07:49.780 – 01:07:52.212

Big. Huge. Yeah. So that’s what. That’s what my point was.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:07:52.236 – 01:07:58.116

Overall. one, one executive’s like, I don’t. You know. Yeah. It’s decision by committee instead, that.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:07:58.188 – 01:08:05.120

That’s why they need my NI. To talk to them and say, you’re throwing money away.

 

Brian Searl

01:08:05.510 – 01:08:30.807

We should just put together, like, Mike, you and I should just put. And maybe we can sneak Jeff into this package. And Mia, we should just put together some kind of like, epic, like, package where we take one meeting a month so there’s like crazy demand and we look like we’re backlogged and we have a wait list for people who can just come in and purchase a park and put in wild energy and use AI and like, just cut their expenses by 80% there.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:08:30.893 – 01:08:33.039

Have a. Have a good case study. For sure.

 

Mia Johnson

01:08:34.459 – 01:08:37.599

Yeah, case study if you want.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:37.979 – 01:08:39.043

Which one?

 

Mia Johnson

01:08:39.211 – 01:08:41.603

I said you can use my new park as a case study.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:41.691 – 01:08:44.959

Oh. Oh, you’re a realtor and you bought a park?

 

Brian Searl

01:08:45.419 – 01:08:48.163

Were you not paying attention? She just said that earlier. Jeff.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:48.291 – 01:08:49.159

But it’s insane.

 

Brian Searl

01:08:49.979 – 01:08:51.159

Come on, Jeff. 

 

Mia Johnson

01:08:52.059 – 01:08:56.281

You know, I gotta. Jeff, I gotta put my money where my mouth is. Right.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:08:56.435 – 01:09:13.290

Well, I’m not allowed to buy any more parks. Or. Or I will be. I’ll be single because I got rid of all of mine. Now I can. I have a technicality that I can invest in a park, but I don’t own it.

 

Brian Searl

01:09:14.150 – 01:09:15.650

I mean, that’s fine.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:09:18.070 – 01:09:25.107

Yeah. Because if my wife asked me, I say no. I have not bought a park. Absolutely not.

 

Brian Searl

01:09:25.243 – 01:09:32.599

Seems like a very dangerous fine line that you should navigate offline away from. I don’t want to take sides.

 

Mia Johnson

01:09:33.659 – 01:09:36.599

So it’s like you were a lawyer in a prior life, Jeff.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:09:37.899 – 01:09:41.119

Well, but accountants can read the law.

 

Brian Searl

01:09:41.499 – 01:10:54.282

But there is, for as much as we joke about it, right. There is a market for that. For not like just being that exclusive and putting together, but Just what you said, Mike. For people who can come in and reduce that operating expense of a park and know for sure they can do it when they’re looking at a cap rate or whatever the NOI is or. And so that’s like, that’s what we tell people too with AI when you come in, like especially with labor. And so I think there’s something that could be put together between multiple providers in this, in this space to market that in a better way to these investors who are trying to come in and be more cost efficient but also still provide a better guest experience because this is going to be. You know, going back to your very first question, Jeff, what do we think 2025 is going to look like? I think 2025 is going to be down or flat for a lot of people. Unless you’re just started marketing off. Right. And you’ve never done any marketing before, then maybe you have a chance to be up a little bit. But so I think you’re going to have to pay more attention to many things. But one of those things is going to be your margins. What are your costs for things? And there are ways that through metering or through credit card processing or requesting cooping fees or using AI or whatever that you can do this very easily in 2025. And so I think maybe it’s a conversation we’re not gonna have in the show, but.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:10:54.386 – 01:11:21.366

Right. Because yeah, one of the, if you have an older park, one of the new fixes to save some revenue would be to put the investment into your WI Fi and get rid of your old kids cable systems and your cost of fixed cable. Let people stream and the WI FI is going to work. Everybody streams anymore anyway.

 

Brian Searl

01:11:21.558 – 01:11:25.542

Just buy a bunch of Starlink dishes and rent them out to people per night.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:11:25.726 – 01:11:26.886

Well, there you go.

 

Brian Searl

01:11:27.038 – 01:11:44.908

You can have them installed on poles outside, but just flip them on when they want Internet rent them out. Wouldn’t that make more money than maintaining and revamping a WI FI system system X number of years and trying to figure out all the signals and hassles and trees and I mean maybe that to trees you start to figure it out with Starlink, but you only figure.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:11:44.924 – 01:11:50.428

Out once people want trees. Until they want WI Fi.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:11:50.604 – 01:11:53.212

Yeah, until they want their Starlink dish to work. Right.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:11:53.316 – 01:11:55.164

Yeah, but if you, but if you.

 

Brian Searl

01:11:55.172 – 01:12:05.310

Were renting the dish and it was on a pole and it was in the same exact location, you would know where it was that it got coverage. It’d be screwed in and locked down. You just flip that dish on if they pay for it.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:05.430 – 01:12:17.970

Yeah, we. I don’t know. My. My profile is we want to. Internet is one of your biggest amenities anymore in a campground.

 

Brian Searl

01:12:18.470 – 01:12:35.912

Yeah, but everybody has cell phones. Everybody has 5G. Everybody has hotspots. So, like, I don’t know that there’s a. Like, there was even five years ago. I don’t know that there’s a need with a capital, all capital letters for people to absolutely have that. Like, there was years ago. So I think maybe there you can get away with it.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:35.936 – 01:12:39.540

I’ll have you come to my front desk when the WI fi goes down.

 

Brian Searl

01:12:40.000 – 01:12:48.216

Okay. Because, like, I’ll just pull out their phone and be like, did you know there’s this button here that you can toggle on that’s a hot spot?

 

Oh, your WI fi’s back.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:48.368 – 01:12:50.168

Yeah. No, they don’t know that.

 

Brian Searl

01:12:50.304 – 01:12:53.336

I know that could be part of the education process.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:12:53.488 – 01:13:02.658

Right. Well. And you know that I carry. Along with my phone, I carry two other hotspots just so that I’ve always got my own signal no matter where I am. So.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:02.714 – 01:13:06.590

I don’t know that I actually did know that, but. Good. That’s awesome. Yeah, I used to do that.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:07.290 – 01:13:20.150

Yeah. But there. There’s so many avenues that we can go down. We haven’t even touched operating systems for your campground management systems procedures.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:20.490 – 01:13:36.770

Well, that’s why we have this call, though. That’s why we restructured the show, because every time, like, again, I don’t, you know, Mike and Mia and Brent aren’t going to be here, but you and I will be. And. And so the. The idea is, is let’s dive into those operational things week by week so that people are interested that can tune into the show.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:37.070 – 01:13:42.246

Okay. So that’s pretty much going to be the standard of this.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:42.318 – 01:13:42.982

Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:43.126 – 01:13:50.134

Time when I’m. When we come on, is going. Going over building systems, operations, cost savings, financials.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:50.182 – 01:13:53.848

Why do you think you’re here? That’s why we picked you for this episode, man.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:13:53.984 – 01:13:55.940

Hell, I never know why I’m here.

 

Brian Searl

01:13:57.120 – 01:14:04.712

I mean, I don’t know why I’m here either, too, but just to mess up my mic and screw around with the studio and curse at things before the show starts.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:04.776 – 01:14:12.984

So I’m gonna have to get all fancy then like you and get my, you know, my Rush Limbaugh microphone, golden microphone.

 

Brian Searl

01:14:13.032 – 01:14:25.510

And, yeah, we need to create a real plan. Yeah, we need to create better plans for people who. Who are on the show, not just for the current guests, but for, like, Mike. I mean, Mike was asked, like, trade show Questions. So should we require guests to have their booth set up behind them? I think so.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:26.210 – 01:14:29.550

You mean you want me to have my banner instead of my backdrop?

 

Brian Searl

01:14:29.890 – 01:14:30.554

Yeah.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:30.682 – 01:14:33.754

Mike, were you at OHI last summer?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:33.882 – 01:14:34.762

Yes, sir.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:34.906 – 01:14:41.738

Okay. I don’t know if I ran across you or not, but we. We had a booth there in Orlando. The one in Orlando, right.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:41.794 – 01:14:42.122

Yeah.

 

Mia Johnson

01:14:42.186 – 01:14:42.426

Yeah.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:42.458 – 01:14:42.762

Okay.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:42.826 – 01:14:44.630

Down there. Done that. Yep.

 

Brian Searl

01:14:45.530 – 01:14:47.058

Last year. Last year.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:47.114 – 01:14:48.130

Wasn’t that two years ago?

 

Brian Searl

01:14:48.170 – 01:14:48.882

Two years ago.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:48.986 – 01:14:49.950

Two years ago.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:14:50.890 – 01:14:52.146

Oklahoma.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:52.338 – 01:14:53.426

Okay. I think we’re talking.

 

Brian Searl

01:14:53.458 – 01:14:55.282

Oh, Orlando is three years ago in OHI.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:55.306 – 01:14:57.110

Oh, yeah, yeah.

 

Brent Parker

01:14:58.730 – 01:14:59.330

Okay.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:14:59.410 – 01:15:06.146

Yeah. Kansas. Kansas City. Oklahoma City. And beautiful Louisville.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:06.258 – 01:15:11.026

Where did your hat go? Put your hat back on. Honor your grandfather.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:15:11.218 – 01:15:12.750

It got warm in there.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:14.410 – 01:15:19.154

Well, you guys are asking me. Yeah. Right now I’m asking questions.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:19.282 – 01:15:25.710

When I was alive, I didn’t have air conditioning. Suck it up, Jeff. Leave the hat on.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:26.490 – 01:15:32.498

Yeah. Come on, Brian. I admit I’m old. You don’t have to remind me.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:32.554 – 01:15:33.762

I admit I’m old.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:33.866 – 01:15:34.322

Yeah.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:34.386 – 01:15:34.990

So.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:35.530 – 01:15:38.470

And. And you’ve completely ruined my partner.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:39.220 – 01:15:41.628

I’ve completely. Why have I ruined your partner?

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:15:41.724 – 01:15:51.720

Greg is so far down the AI hole that every time I talk to him, he can’t talk to me direct. He types it in and has AI answer me.

 

Brian Searl

01:15:52.420 – 01:16:06.966

You watch, Jeff, you watch. In less than two years, and I’m telling you this, in less than two years, you will turn to Greg and you’ll be like, I am so glad you started learning AI two years ago, because we would be fucked without you. Can I just say fucked. I don’t know if I can say.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:16:07.118 – 01:16:08.342

It’s your show.

 

Brian Searl

01:16:08.526 – 01:16:15.686

That’s true. But, like, I don’t know if people get offended by that. But it’s. It is. It is what it is. Right? Like, I, I think you’re gonna do that in less than two years.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:16:15.758 – 01:16:36.890

I do admit I use it, but I still. When I’m building strategic plans and doing other things, it’s still. I want to use my experience to. Well, of course, you know. And he keeps telling me, well, it is, you know, if you run your thoughts through AI, it’s still your thoughts. And it’s like.

 

Brian Searl

01:16:36.930 – 01:16:37.786

It’s true.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:16:37.978 – 01:16:52.506

It is, but that’s not the way I talk. If I’m talking to you across a table, I want the same thought process to come out of my mouth as I would put down on paper.

 

Brian Searl

01:16:52.618 – 01:17:28.926

Of course. But how. How much can you scale a table? And I don’t want to divert into the AI thing, but how much can you scale the Jeff across the table? Like, I mean, I do, but Like, I don’t in this conversation. Right. So like. Yeah. How much can you scale the Jeff across the table is my point. You can’t. You can scale Jeff on the phone more, you can scale Jeff on email more, but you can’t scale Jeff across the. So there has to be a difference in that in order to scale. Anyway, let’s go back to Brent. I want to talk more. And by the way, like, anybody’s welcome to leave if you guys want. Like, we’re just having a good conversation. I know everybody has things to do except for me apparently, but.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:17:29.078 – 01:17:33.966

So I have to go shovel my driveway. Brian.

 

Brian Searl

01:17:34.078 – 01:18:15.810

What? You don’t have a robot for that? You know, I, I bought. I bought my girlfriend’s parents. They’re my. I guess I don’t know, my in laws. We’re not married yet. Right. But I bought them those snow melting. There’s a company called Heat Track that I’ve been using for like 20 years. I bought them from my dad like so long ago. But they’re wonderful. You just stick them on your mat and you like plug them in and like your doorstep and they sell. And they sell driveway path ones and they sell ones for your roof and they sell. So you don’t have to shovel anymore. Like if you just figure out you’re looking for an investment and you had capital sitting there, invest in your back.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:18:17.080 – 01:18:26.352

So Brian, you need to solve the freezing water line to an RV problem because that, you know, that keeps. You can keep a campground open and keep the water flowing.

 

Brian Searl

01:18:26.416 – 01:19:20.992

Well, you can monitor it. Monitoring it or solving it. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t want to. That’s your department. You got. You’re building all kinds of wizard hardware things over there, right? There’s got to be something though that I bet you there’s some kind of. Because like. And I’ll tell you, and this is just the weird things that I may or may not know. Years ago, I remember backing this project on Kickstarter where it was like a. It was a butter knife, but it like vibrated in such a way if you held it that it would like slightly heat up to slice through the butter easier. So I bet you like 15 years later there’s probably some kind of similar technology that would at least vibrate it enough to where it would keep it above freezing depend like not, not in Canada, but like in, in North America. Not that it would vibrate or anything. Right. But I’m sure there’s some kind of technology right there that would. We just have to figure it out.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:19:21.016 – 01:19:24.928

Mike, it’s all heat tape using electric. I like it.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:19:25.064 – 01:19:49.870

Right. Well, we invented a heat tape. Oh, God. Well, company that I had a piece of, we invented a heat tape called Frostex, which is, is a great little one that you can put because it’ll even work on a water hose and not melt it, unlike some of the other heat tips. But it doesn’t solve the problem for me as an operator.

 

Brian Searl

01:19:50.370 – 01:19:51.110

Why?

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:19:52.210 – 01:20:11.580

Because we get 36 inches of frost. So. And unless I had put in heated terminals at the very beginning of my construction, I can’t, I can’t keep them warm enough. My water. We were built as a summer park.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:20:11.700 – 01:20:12.044

Yeah.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:20:12.092 – 01:20:17.680

We’ll never be. You know, I’ve got some main water lines that are maybe 12 inches deep.

 

Brian Searl

01:20:18.340 – 01:21:05.302

So here’s, here’s what I want you to build, Mike. I want you to build a self contained water meter system for each site that will apparently make my camera go off. Lisa, I think you’re rolling on the cord, but try to move your chair now, Lisa. But anyway, so I don’t know what happened to my camera anyway. Better looking without it. But build a, a self contained, you know, water meter system that can recycle people’s water in real time. And then you can keep like. You don’t have to build water pipes. You can just have like a water tank on each individual person’s site that can clean the water and purify it and so quickly that they will never need to have water pipes.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:21:05.366 – 01:21:12.854

Yeah, I think NASA did that for the space station. So I think mass produce that and put it in every rv. We’re good to go.

 

Brian Searl

01:21:12.942 – 01:21:27.240

You’d be. Yeah, you’d be even richer than you are now, which is probably pretty red with all the people who need electricity. It’s coming soon anyway, so. Is that crazy? Is that too crazy of an idea? Like in 20 years, though? I don’t know.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:21:27.700 – 01:21:36.188

Hey, nothing’s. Nothing’s crazy if you can figure out how to do it. That’s the. It’s the crazy people that made all the innovations, so.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:21:36.324 – 01:21:37.240

That’s right.

 

Brian Searl

01:21:38.100 – 01:21:39.840

But yeah, it’s. It’s interesting.

 

Jeff Hoffman

01:21:40.740 – 01:22:12.690

I’m gonna have to. To go. I got a 3:30 coming up. It was very, very good meeting you, Mia and Brent. I probably have seen you at a show or two, but haven’t stopped and talked to you if you want. All my information should be on Brian’s page someplace. But I’m willing to talk to you anytime off the air because this is what I love doing is talking. Campground.

 

Brent Parker

01:22:13.390 – 01:22:16.534

Definitely. Nice to meet You, Jeff, appreciate it. Appreciate all your insight.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:16.662 – 01:22:19.590

Yeah, we should probably wrap up at some point anyway. Now especially.

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:19.710 – 01:22:20.246

Yeah.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:20.358 – 01:22:28.662

Don’t have a camera, so. But yeah, like Mia, tell us about your prop. What’s the name? Are you able to say that? Did you close already or.

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:28.686 – 01:22:29.606

No, not yet.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:29.678 – 01:22:43.616

Okay, so don’t say it. Yeah, but we want to hear about it. Like we’ll try to have you back on the show. Maybe tell us about your experience as a campground owner, but I wish we had more time to dive more into the brokerage aspect. I’m sorry, we didn’t. We had. We think we had a good conversation though.

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:43.688 – 01:22:45.808

Invite me back. We’ll chat for sure.

 

Brian Searl

01:22:45.864 – 01:22:50.660

Absolutely. So. But where can they find out more information about your brokerage if they’re interested in selling the property?

 

Mia Johnson

01:22:51.160 – 01:23:12.620

On my website is anycampgroundbrokers.com and yeah, give me a call. We’ll chat if anybody has any questions. Like I said, I also do a little bit of consulting, usually trying to assist in people thinking about succession planning and, you know, growing. Growing value.

 

Brian Searl

01:23:14.840 – 01:23:21.312

Awesome. Thank you for being here, Brent. Where can they find out more about your reservation system for long term guests?

 

Brent Parker

01:23:21.456 – 01:23:36.780

Yeah, sure. So the website is opencampground.com and there’s a section where we could basically give you a demo of the website or of the app and kind of just walk you through what we have to offer.

 

Brian Searl

01:23:37.480 – 01:23:41.820

Awesome. Thanks for being here, Brent and Mike. Where can they find out more about Wild Energy?

 

Mike Sorensen

01:23:42.440 – 01:24:09.350

Well, best thing is to ask your local campground. I mean, we’re all over the place now. I think there’s only a couple states we’re not in north and South Dakota, so you might not get a good reference there. But every other state we’ve got dozens of customers in, so, you know, asking your peers is probably the best thing. We can answer the specific technical questions and implementation questions. And we’re at www.wildenergyco.com.

 

Brian Searl

01:24:09.970 – 01:24:22.366

Awesome. Thanks for being here, Mike. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Fireside Chats. I swear I’m here and I’m not an AI somewhere in the background. But we’ll see you next week for another episode. And thanks here. Thanks. Take care, guys.

 

Mike Sorensen

01:24:22.398 – 01:24:23.130

See you.

 

Mia Johnson

01:24:23.430 – 01:24:24.894

Take care. Bye Bye.

 

Speaker A

01:24:25.022 – 01:24:47.270

Thanks for joining us for this episode of MC Fireside Chats with your host Brian Searl. Have a suggestion for a show idea? Want your campground or company in a future episode? Email [email protected] get your daily dose of news from ModernCampground.com and be sure to join us next week for more insights into the fascinating world of outdoor hospital hospitality.