MC Fireside Chats – June 25th, 2025

Brian Searl: What is up everybody? Welcome to MC Fireside Chats. Another episode, our first week that we are ever going to have where the show is no longer focused on the RV industry, and we love the RV industry, God bless them, but we felt like there was a little bit more impactful things we could talk about in week four.

So we’re shuffling things around a little bit. Phil from RVDA of America and Eleanor from RVD of Canada are gonna be joining us on our week one show going forward, which is focused on data, trends, analytics, things like that. Greg, we just felt really sorry for him, and so we just kept him here. I don’t know what his purpose is, but.

Greg Emmert: Join the club buddy.

Brian Searl: Just roll with it, man. And then we have a new recurring guest here, Kurtis Wilkins from Rjourney. I’ll let you introduce yourself in a minute. Is it Kurt or Kurtis or I don’t know.

Kurtis Wilkins: I go by Kurtis, professionally. 

Brian Searl: Okay. All right. I just wanna make sure, like some people are the fancy versions of their name and some people were like, eh, I’m just casual. I’m cool. You’re the fancy. I got it.

Kurtis Wilkins: I do it because there’s another Kurtis in his office, so he goes by Kurt. I go by Kurtis.

Brian Searl: Oh, okay. All right. So Kurtis Wilkins, I appreciate you joining us and being here. We’re looking forward to having some good conversations about marketing and tech going forward. And then, Sam, am I pronouncing it right? Dagenhard?

Sam Degenhard: You got it.

Brian Searl: Perfect. Sam, welcome. You’re the founder and CEO of Campfire Ranch. So why don’t you go ahead and just introduce yourself briefly, Sam, as a recurring guest or a regular. 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah, totally. No, nice to meet you all. Stoked to be here. Yeah. My name is Sam Dagenhard, I’m founder and CEO of Campfire Ranch.

We are an outdoor hospitality company based out of Gunnison, Colorado. So southwestern part of the state. We focus on building a collection of outdoor hospitality properties that range from Camping all the way to backcountry experiences, and all the fun, weird stuff in between. We focus on the subscale category, so everything about 30 rooms and less where we can have a kind of high touch, intimate experience, no guests by name and we do that around the best places to play outside.

Brian Searl: Cool. Thanks for being here, Sam. I’m excited to dive into more about Campfire Ranch. Kurt, Kurtis. Yeah, I’m gonna mess that up, man. Can I just call you Kurt?

Kurtis Wilkins: You can call me Kurt.

Brian Searl: It sounds so much cooler if you’re a Kurt.

Kurtis Wilkins: Yep. Kurt,

Brian Searl: Alright, Kurtis, go ahead. Sorry.

Kurtis Wilkins: So my name’s Kurtis Wilkins. I’m with Rjourney RV Resorts and Advanced Outdoor Management.

We have 41 locations branded and about another 1314 in the pipeline. They’re coming on board. We. And we run just over 12,000 pads in the RV industry. And I focus mostly, most of my role is focused around our front end sales pipeline. And then a little bit on the monetization side of camping.

Brian Searl: Awesome. Excited to have you here, Kurtis, as a recurring guest and looking forward to talking to you and diving into some things. And last but not least, Greg Emmer. You forgot a “T” on your name Greg.

Greg Emmert: Yeah. None of them.

Brian Searl: Greg Emer from, IHO.

Greg Emmert: I can’t even spell my damn name.

Brian Searl: Yeah. Welcome, from Verio.

Greg Emmert: There we go.

Brian Searl: There we go. Now you flipped it around.

Greg Emmert: Did I flip it?

Brian Searl: Now we got it.

Greg Emmert: Did I flip it? All right. As far as the name goes, we’re gonna leave it there ’cause all right. Homeland Security might be looking for Greg Emmert. This way I can stay under the radar a little bit. It helps, so.

Brian Searl: It does. Tell us about yourself, Greg.

Greg Emmert: Oh, boy. Like anybody here needs to know, they see me enough here and on Outwired. But yeah, I’m the founder at Verio Outdoor Hospitality Consulting. And I do all the things that help you build your operations strategically and with soul. There, how’s that? good intro? Does it sound like I’ve been.

Brian Searl: We got a Campground owner, I needed you to babysit kids.

Greg Emmert: Yeah. No, not that’s not happening. No, that’s, that is definitely not on the list of services. There is no amount of money that would cover that.

Brian Searl: Okay. Alright. So I wanna ask you guys what’s come across your desk recently in the last few weeks. Especially just like a recurring guest mostly. I know you’re new Kurtis, but that’s typically what we’ll start the show with. But before I do that, I just want to talk to the audience here who’s watching us for maybe the first time especially in this format, and just say what I envision are type of goal for this show in the fourth week of every month will be that we’ll function the same as the other Modern Campground, MC Fireside Chats episodes. Like we’ll have special guests like Sam who come on share their stories, their experiences, but a lot of it will be about what I’ve seen in the last week or so, or month or so since we’ve last chatted about, SEO or marketing or technology or AI or anything that comes across my desk.

And those are things that we’re talking to clients about or they’ve asked us questions about or just new things that we think would be helpful to you from a Campground operations standpoint in working with your agency or your website developer or your, like even bootstrapping it yourself, right? If you’re designing your own website.

And so we’re just gonna try to provide a lot of value here. And sometimes people like Greg will have to tell me to shut up ’cause I tend to roll and keep talking about things that are items that I’m talking, see it goes and hopefully will be valuable to all you guys. So kick it off. Is there anything that, that you guys I know we wanna talk about, SEO and your website designs and things like that.

I think we’ll get to that in the back half because we wanna focus on Sam’s company and Kurtis’s company bit. But before we do that, is there anything that’s come across any of you guys’ desk that you feel is really important? We should, I think probably related to like our topic?

Kurtis Wilkins: Something that’s come across our desk is, and I’m sure everybody’s very aware of it, it’s not new news, but that transition from regular search engine optimization, right? To AI search engine optimization.

Kurtis Wilkins: Our team, I don’t think we’re coining the term, but we’re calling it AEO for AI Engine Optimization.

And so that’s

Kurtis Wilkins: a thing that’s been talked about recently in a lot of the different spaces is 13% of search traffic was diverted out of Google. And that’s a big bite. You don’t take that bite without some notice being taken, especially by all the marketing departments.

And then we’ve also seen that same transition on the social media side as well. 

Brian Searl: Are we okay to dive into this first, since you brought it up, or if you okay, Sam

Kurtis Wilkins: I just let you know that’s what’s coming across my desk, things we’re talking about. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. No, that’s what’s coming across my desk too. Like I told you guys before we had that conversation. All right, let’s dive into this for a second then and make this kind of our, and then we’ll get to in the consequence of talking about this, we’ll obviously talk about Campfire Ranch, but I wanna leave time in the second half of the show, just talk specifically about all the things, Campfire Ranch, and all the things, Rjourney too.

Okay, so just tell me at point like, Hey, like we’ve done enough talking about SEO, you can stop now. 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: It’s my turn. Okay so let’s start here with Sam, you were telling us before the show started that you had a new agency you were working with and you were working on website redesigns and you’ve just gotten SEO reports and things like that.

So what does that look like from your world as, because I guess the preface for my thing and why I wanted to talk about this and I told you guys a little bit about this before we started the show, SEO specifically is, this is a mess out there, right? Like the only reason SEO exists is really to trick Google. And I’m of the belief that as you move further into an era of AI, where AI has a deeper understanding of what you’re about, as long as you are providing that information in a correct way, and as long as you are providing enough content to allow AI to understand all the different facets of your business, that there is not going to be a way to trick Google or AI systems anymore in the future.

So I’m of the mindset that SEO’s dead. I don’t even think you need a new moniker for it. I think you just need to do really what Google’s been saying all along, provide value to people and then make sure that the systems both traditional and new in AI SEO Land can understand everything that you’re about and everything you want to communicate to them.

So I’ll go into what I think about all that stuff after you two gentlemen, go. And Greg, you can talk about your journey too. I know you’re having a new website redesign too, but that’s that’s by us, right? So that’s, but talk about your, what.

Greg Emmert: Only the positives. I understand. Yeah. I’m getting the wink in the nod.

Brian Searl: It’s all negative, right? Yeah. Like we sent the checks in the mail. I’m sorry you didn’t get it today. So Sam, you wanna go first?

Sam Degenhard: Yeah, totally. No, I think it’s totally valid topic. We’re still a pretty young company. This going into summer 2025 marks our sixth season in business.

Jumping back to the start of Campfire Ranch I build our website on Squarespace as a prototype. And ultimately just started updating blocks as we got closer to opening our first location, which was a 17 site Campground. And

Sam Degenhard: SEO kind of happened as an accident, and then we brought in some support to revamp SEO and this was really in keyword days.

And so a lot of it was just inserting keywords into paragraphs, rewriting paragraphs, like it got pretty wonky. I didn’t like it, it didn’t feel right. Went in and rewrote it all. From my customer’s perspective, again, stopped working with those folks. Now we’re embarking, as you mentioned, Brian, just a new website project.

We’re getting to a place where we’re outsizing our Squarespace site and we’re ready to actually have some real infrastructure behind the scenes as we scale our business. As we’ve been going through this process, it’s been interesting because we’re getting a little bit of an audit on our current site, like what’s working and what’s as well as a bit of a, okay, this is what you’re gonna have when things are done in September.

So it’s been a good learning process for us, I think when we think of SEO and AI. Two things come to mind, so far in this process. The first is going through a bit of a brand discovery story with our agency right now. They actually got checked a lot of their assumptions of the business through AI and in that brand story audit.

So a lot of it was interesting to see like, how much is AI actually picking up about our business in search just right now, and how close is that to where we want to be or where we think we are. So that was a really good indicator. It was actually fairly decent. And I can talk about why I think that’s the case, but the second piece of it is, okay, then what role does a OA, excuse me, AI and SEO play in this new web design.

We’re right at the beginning of the copywriting stage for this new site. So it’s like today and this week is the time to actually be talking about this. So awesome topic. Because our team’s gonna do the copywriting. We’re not gonna have the agency do that. And this kind of circles back in. The biggest reason I believe that is the right move for us as a team is because at the end of the day, it all comes down to understanding your customer.

And we have a really high touch hospitality experience on the ground at our properties. We have two locations, and last year we had 3000 hours in front of guests, one-on-one. And if you can really understand those customer segments, I think you can have a lot of confidence in what you’re saying and communicating digitally to a consumer.

And that will win in AI as we see in our little mini audit. But also, when you go and you go through, I got my SEO report on the left screen here. When you go through that keyword search. Forcing those topics in or building groupings of topics like doesn’t feel weird and you’re really just talking to your customer the way you should be talking.

We try to pull that from onsite, put it into the digital space, and then have our actual team all the way down to front of house write the copy of the website. And that’s really our intention with this project is to kind don’t abandon that customer with, new trends and things.

And just remember we know our customer, we know ’em well. We talk to ’em all the time. Let’s speak to them digitally the same way we would at the Campground. 

Brian Searl: So I think there’s two things I would love to take this immediately into because , I know at SEO and these topics very well into how you think the best way to do that is some of my

Brian Searl: thoughts on what you said, but I think we should dial it back just for a second.

For the people who are watching who maybe don’t have that agency or don’t have that big team behind them who are already researching and have already been through the, I’ve dismissed keep, there’s so many owners who I talk to. Being in the industry for 15 plus years that have no idea that they should even monitor keywords or that there’s data available for how much the keywords are searched, or that speed matters on their website or that security matters or that what core web vitals are, or Right.

There’s so many different things. So I think I’d love to have you walk through the journey of what you thought SEO was, and maybe we’ll just take that one question, ask the same thing to Kurt and ask the same thing to Greg, but what you thought SEO was when you first got into it. 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah, good question. At the beginning it was have the right keywords in your copy. That was it. And it was, talk about those things you think people might search. Later on, it was a lot more of what you mentioned, Brian, security speed, back links broken links, 404 pages, all of that stuff I really never even realized played a factor in search results. And something we learned with one of our early agencies, and that was the landscape we were pretty much operating in, was it’s all about keywords to, there’s all this other stuff we don’t actually technically understand at all. We need help. And that was really our environment for a long time.

Brian Searl: Kurtis, how about you? 

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah, and Sam, I think everybody starts there. My experience 10 years ago, same experience. You’re just like, oh yeah, it’s just a couple words that we’re putting on the website. We’re trying to rank for these things. And then, you slowly start to peel back like the layers.

And good SEO leaned into Google, leaned into being, you just said, Hey, whatever you want. That’s what I’m going to provide. And I’m gonna make sure that there’s a lot of it and there’s a lot of different ways to look at it. And I think that it’s it comes down to structured data, well structured.

When you talk about that localized experience, making sure that you’re using for backlinking, right? In terms of getting like backlinks from other websites is localizing your product well enough to do interact with the community around you, right? Making sure that you’re a part of your, each individual group.

I’ll give you the Boy Scouts for example, right? Making sure that you work with that group because they’re in the community and there’s a lot of members there, and that builds relevance, right? And as long as they’re talking about you and you’re talking about them and there’s some links back and forth it works well.

And so I guess from where I started to where I am, that’s a long journey. Brian that’s a big question. We could talk about it for days, but I think right now, like our big focus is like on structure, right? Structured. Targeted pieces of information. And when we say localization, localizing it to the community that you’re in, right?

For the relevant information out, but also for that user coming in and making sure that, if you’re in Texas and you’re in Louisiana that user wants to see specific language to them. But if they’re searching for a Texas park from Wisconsin, swapping out words to make sure that it’s localized to the individual that’s searching, that’s a big important piece as well.

And that’s I don’t know how much of you do that, Brian, but I’d actually like to throw that back too, if possible, or circle it around next. 

Brian Searl: Okay. Let me let Greg answer first and then, yeah. 

Greg Emmert: Oh, my answer’s way short. Are you kidding me? My first website, I don’t know how old you guys are, but my first website for our Campground that we owned in Homer, Ohio.

Went live when people were still using Yahoo and the web crawler for search results. I don’t know if

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah.

Brian Searl: Web crawler was cool.

Greg Emmert: Yeah, it was cool.

Brian Searl: Logo wasn’t it? 

Greg Emmert: Yes, it was. Yeah, it was an erected for sure. Yeah. Our SEO what we did, we called up the person who hosted it. Shout out to Roxi Baxley. Sorry, Brian. But Roxi’s great.

Brian Searl: No, Roxie is great. I know her.

Greg Emmert: Roxi’s great. We’d call her up and be like, what are you doing to get us on these here Google things? We didn’t know we’re too busy plunging toilets and fixing roadways and water leaks. Fast forward to now.

So I’ve learned nothing. Nothing. I go to Chat GPT for everything, right? So I’ve got.

Brian Searl: Then you’ve learned something

Greg Emmert: Brian said and so I’ve learned a lot. It was a really long exercise building. I started out with a book and a process and figured out, okay, what’s my brand, right?

And what, and I wanted it to be very personal because I was an owner operator and that’s who I’m speaking to when I’m trying to get a consulting client, right? So I’m speaking to owner operators. Boy, I know those conversations ’cause I’ve been wearing all the hats and doing everything they’ve done. So I need my sight’s gotta reflect me, not necessarily what I’m shooting, I don’t wanna look fancy, I wanna look like me.

I want it to look and sound like me ’cause I’m the brand. So in going through this exercise, the interesting thing that I learned was as things shift towards the AEO as you, I like that by the way, it’s totally stolen now. You should, that was, that’s really good. But towards the LLM searches is that, it tends to look for, obviously it looks for different things, but it likes narrative. It likes things that read almost like they’re being spoken. So a lot of my website reads like that. My business profile reads like that was totally new to me.

And the only reason I know it’s important is ’cause I do a podcast with Brian. Otherwise I would be woefully inept and just meeting people and, trying to let my work speak for itself, which it does, but obviously I need this website, otherwise people think I’m just a crazy guy with a dot card on my phone who will take their money if they’ll sign a contract with me, right?

But that’s, so I have honestly as Brian, as his team builds my website, I’ve pretty much thrown SEO out the window. I’m tailoring the entire thing towards LLM because I don’t see what the point is in trying to do something that’s on its way out. I know some people will find me that way, but the website is typically not how I get business anyway.

It’s just a way for people to verify that I’m not a maniac. I’ve put some thought into this, and it actually aligns with what I do and what I say. But yeah it’s wild because just a couple years ago I formed another consulting company with Jeff Hoffman. He’s a great guy and he’s still got that company.

He and I recently split because we had different visions, but we still work together on projects. We’re dating now we’re not married. But when we built that website, it was totally different. That was like two years ago, and we were still planning for SEO and we structured the website very differently.

So the speed at which all of this is happening is crazy to, at least to me, because I don’t play in this space as much as Brian or by the sounds of it, you two gentlemen. But yeah the most interesting part to me was the way that it grabs text that is more like conversational and descriptive and whereas with SEO, that wasn’t necessarily a big deal.

Brian Searl: Yeah. I think, you’ve touched on a lot of good things. All three of you have, right? And we could probably spend hours discussing this, or maybe days like Kurtis said, probably days in my case. But I think there’s a couple things that I would hit on, right? Number one is for the people who are listening who likely don’t know anything, or in their first beginning steps of SEO or just probably as most people who come, at least to our agency, think about it as it’s just put the keywords on the page, right?

I just need to rank for the keywords. Just put them 5, 10, 15, 25 times on the page. Whatever you gotta do, just make me number one. And then, like the goal of our agency specifically is we wanna educate people, but now it’s, we almost don’t have to because if you’re using a tool like Chat GPT, it’s very easy to go to Chat GPT and say is my agency full of shit?

And it will tell you, right? And so I think the number one thing that I would recommend to people who, whether you’re dealing with me or any other agency out there that exists, or like an individual like Roxi, who’s a great lady who does SEO and has been doing it for, websites for a long time in our industry, is you need to know things, but you don’t need to know everything.

You should know 5% of everything that you’re talking to everybody about, whether that’s marketing or tech or anything else. And that used to be a heavier lift than it is today with a tool like Chat GPT. But now it’s not because you could just go to Chat GPT and say, I need to know 5% of website design so that I know that I’m not being like, played for all my money and my website developer is not full of shit.

And then it will tell you what you need to know, and then you can say, all right, gimme questions that I need to ask them and what should they answer? And then, you have, obviously you have to be careful when you’re talking to your web dev team that they’re not just using Chat GPT to answer your questions, but that’s a whole nother can of worms that will crack open on some other show some other time.

But yeah, the big thing is I think you need to know that enough to be dangerous. You need to know enough to ask the right questions to the people because you don’t know what you don’t know. And then going forward into some of the more deeper stuff, the keyword stuffing is what I’ll call it, like where you just put the keyword on the page.

For people who have been deeply involved in SEO or obsessed with, I have been unhealthily perhaps for the last 15 years, like that kind of died in like 2012 or 2013, I don’t know, like a long time ago, right? Like keywords are still important, but we evolved so quickly beyond just keywords to things that we won’t have time to talk about on this episode, but like entities and latent semantic indexing and NLP and all the different things that, like Google has an idea when they come to your website, I guess is the easiest way to say this, of what it expects to see when you tell it what you’re about.

Now this is 101 from I don’t know, 1992 or whenever websites first came out. H one tags. So many websites don’t even know what their header tag actually is and are wasting it. But assuming you can get the topic of your page right, and you tell Google what it’s about, a Campground near San Antonio or Ohio, we’ll talk about Ohio Campground in, where was it? Homer Bill, Ohio?

Greg Emmert: Homer Bill, Ohio.

Brian Searl: I don’t see Akron or Canton just as a bigger, Cleveland is a bigger example, right? But if you want to attract a market from Cleveland, you’re a Campground or an RV park, or an RV resort, or a glamping resort near Cleveland, you need to tell Google what the topic of your website is.

And that doesn’t mean stuff, the H one with your keyword, but it means put it there and then once Google has a basic understanding of what the structure of your page is supposed to be about, it knows that if you’re trying to say, I’m a Campground near Cleveland, these are the things that I want to see on the page to verify that you’re not foolish yet.

This is Google’s bot, right? Which is a dumb bot, by the way, not a smart bot. They’re not sending AI to crawl your website. At least not by default. And so it will want to say I’m from Cleveland. I don’t know if you guys know anything about the city of Cleveland. But it will want to know does it mention the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Does it mention Lake Erie? Does it mention, all the things that I wanna see that are related to what I expect someone who’s talking about Camping and the city of Cleveland to be on the page four. And those are entities and things like that, right? And those all play a role in SEO and those have been in place since 2016, 20- Again, I have no idea what Google’s algorithm was or what the dates are. I’m just like on my radar since, at least back then. And so what you were talking about, Sam, when you had your original first company, like kind of start to not only put keywords in, but start to put longer fragmented sentences in.

And maybe those were entities, maybe they weren’t, I don’t know. I don’t know what the agency was. It doesn’t matter at this point. But like we worked our way through that problem too, right? Like years and years ago we worked our way through let’s just write more copy on the pages to make sure that we have the right sentences.

And then it just got disjointed and ugly and long and like it really wasn’t written for the user. And that was the real problem. And I think as much as we like to pick on Google and say Google fucks with us and doesn’t rank us number one, or wait, can I say, fuck, it’s on the Outwired show later.

Greg Emmert: It’s your show. Jesus, man.

Messes with us. This is the family friendly show. As much as we like to complain about Google, Google has told us what we should be doing all along. Google has told us that you should just write for your user. And if you write for your user and like you’re not a horrible writer, and you’re providing the information that people need to know, then you’ll be fine.

And there are times where you need to deploy extra strategies. Like I had a client emailing me about why does the speed report on my website give me a B instead of an A? Because it doesn’t matter. Like Google only cares about speed because Google cares about usability of your website.

Google wants people to be able to browse it, to load it quickly, to be able to not have a bad experience. And so it released a set of metrics that help you understand how to make that better. It’s not a test that you have to pass at a hundred percent, right? 

But so there’s a tendency from SEOs to get distracted and go down rabbit holes and not focus on what truly matters, which is the user. And Google’s doing the best it can, but I know I’m going a little bit of rant here, but let’s.

Kurtis Wilkins: And Brian, I’d like to elaborate a little bit on that.

Brian Searl: Yeah, please.

Kurtis Wilkins: Like that point. That’s a great point in like what is Google’s function, right? What is it doing for its users? ’cause at the end of the day, remember we’re not really the product.

We are the product, but we’re not the thing that Google is really trying to extract, right? That’s the user themselves. That’s what Google’s product is. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. Google doesn’t care about you or Rjourney, or Campfire Ranch or Verio. It doesn’t give two hoots about you. It cares about its users. 

Kurtis Wilkins: It cares about its users. And so I always try to frame this in a way, it’s imagine you were making a recommendation for a hire or a place to go to a restaurant. What are the things that you would need to know to recommend that to somebody very close to you? And that’s what Google needs from you. And they want to know that it’s a good experience.

They wanna know all of those pieces. And that’s SEO in a nutshell, right? It’s like Google’s making a recommendation and they wanna make the best recommendation because at the end of the day, they want their user to go, that was a great recommendation. I was satisfied. And they come back to Google to make another recommendation.

Brian Searl: Correct. 

Kurtis Wilkins: And I view that same behavior and that same user behavior. Wrapping this back to AEO, AI Engine Optimization, it’s the same concept. They want to have accurate information. They wanna have that be able to make that recommendation. And so that’s that kind of going into what you’re saying, right?

Just right back into it is like that’s what Google is, that’s all SEO is. But how does it work? There’s a lot of like technical pieces to it. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. I mean. Go ahead. Someone was gonna say something? 

Kurtis Wilkins: I was gonna make it more of a topic. I wanted to bring up another issue, but let’s finish this one out.

Brian Searl: Yeah, I just want to go through a little bit of this, right? So I think you’re right. I think there’s different types of SEO from my standpoint. And I don’t, I’ll play devil’s advocate and say I don’t know that we need a new acronym. ’cause I think acronyms will just distract people.

But you’re not the only one who’s come up with

Brian Searl: AEO and I’ve heard like GEO and all kinds of other things, right? But I think it’s still the same thing. It’s still the same game. It’s providing the information to bots and to humans. So to make them understand your content and to allow it to that information, to both do good.

On page SEO, which is like on page to me is like the words of the content that are written on the page for both now bots not just like AI and Chat GPT, but like the bots that are gonna be browsing your website instead of humans in a couple years. Forget about humans, come to your website, it’s not gonna happen.

And now until that point to get the humans and eventually their personal AIs to understand that you’re speaking their language. And so we talked about, Sam, you talked about this a little bit with having your team write it instead of the agencies. If I was playing devil’s advocate, I would say.

I agree with you except for like your agency should be good enough to do that. And I would also say that I would trust AI to write it way better than my front desk team or like my internal team at all. And maybe they are using AI. I’m not saying they aren’t. But we do this for our clients, like this is a big focus of us in the last year or two, is I wanna understand what my ideal customer profile is for a client.

I wanna understand what types of buyer personas are going to come to that client and are likely to stay. I wanna understand what language and words resonate with those different types of buyer personas to put them on my website. I wanna understand and build an audience style guide based on all that for what they wanna see and not see, and words to use and not to use.

And then I wanna use all that to write the copy of my website. And AI will do that way better than almost any writer that I know could. Certainly writers could use, like somebody has to use the AI, right? Because sometimes you’re not gonna agree with that. Sometimes you’re gonna wanna say, I want the people in Cleveland and I wanna write it toward the people in Cleveland.

But the people in Cleveland, despite you really wanting them to come to your website, are not the ones that are gonna come Camping with you. And so that’s why it’s great to have an objective viewpoint, like a Chat GPT or something, run that stuff for you. But that stuff helps in two ways. One is it helps the AI understand what you’re about because you’ve got a body of content that is not extensive long stuff with keywords, whatever, but has the things that AI looks for when it’s scraping, crawling or when Google’s scraping and crawling.

It’s easy to understand, right? And it speaks to the buyer personas that you have, and it helps them while you have a few years here where you still have humans coming to your websites before their databases. It helps people to understand, hey, this is a page that’s written toward me because I’m a single mom with no kids and I travel in my car.

Or I am an adventurer and I like to go hiking, or I’m a retiree and I like, and you have to blend those personas together or create pages specifically geared toward them. So like it’s a lot. It’s a lot, but it’s all the same. It all goes back to value in providing what the consumer wants to see. Is that where you thinking was going Sam? 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah, no, I think that’s spot on. We even look for different indicators in the way that our customers speak to us via email, community management, on social media platforms. Like how do people engage talk to their friends, share, repost things, and if we can pull in their behaviors that they’re doing with one another, then it’s an indicator of how they might interact with us and trying to just meet them at that level.

As you mentioned before Greg, it was like, your Campground was your brand, it was you. It was very much me in the early days. Now there’s 10 employees at Campfire. It’s not just me. And so we have to spend more time thinking intentionally about how do we speak to customers.

And that could be through copy, that can be through tools like AI and helping us, learn more. We often get caught thinking that, I think probably every Campground owner probably feels this way, but you get often thinking about how,

Sam Degenhard: your customer knows everything that’s offered, every amenity on your property you’re like, of course they know that we do this in the shower hours.

And like you just take it for granted because you see it, you deal with it every single day. But even just communicating the basics in a way, like AI has taught us a lot of that is just what do people want when they’re coming to Gunn and Crested view to camp?

We think we know, but a lot of that stuff we just never thought was important. We don’t talk about it. So we’ve used it to pull a lot of indicators out that otherwise we’ve just glanced over and try and get too detailed. And sometimes the basics. It’s a good reality check. I’m using AI to try and understand how people are behaving.

Brian Searl: Yeah. If you use GPT-4.0, like I know there’s different models. We won’t get into that stuff. But I think it’s the one that’s default on the free tier now. But in the top left you can switch this, but that and 0.3, which is available. I think if you have a paid plan, we’ll go out and search the internet.

And you can say to it, just go look at my current website and tell me what I’m f***ing up, messing up. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Get the censorship eventually. But and then it will tell you and like the input equals the output, right? So what am I messing up? It could do anything, but what am I messing up specifically about SEO if I wanna target these buyer personas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And write a big paragraph and then it’ll, especially O three, it’ll think through all that stuff. And it’ll give you a really good answer. Greg knows, Greg plays with O three quite a bit for all his consulting work and things like that. But did Greg just disappear?

You just disappeared, man, went black and then you came back again. I’m surprised I haven’t done that yet. Like the last couple weeks. Yeah, I just chinked it. Jessica told me like, I disconnect two times during podcasts now randomly. I don’t know. Anyway.

Greg Emmert: The plate in my head, I’m sorry.

Brian Searl: But I, sorry, I got distracted now. I lost my train of thought. But

Brian Searl: I think it’s just I’ll give you an example of something you were talking about. I think Sam briefly is like the information on your website. We take over so many websites from clients that have a paragraph of information on the homepage and maybe two paragraphs elsewhere on the contact page and sentences of here’s our photos on the gallery page.

It’s not enough. Like you don’t need to stuff you might, in the future of 40 pages of content, like we’re talking about, I’m trying to not give away like some of the stuff that we’re telling clients proprietary level wise. But you you need a little bit of information to help AI and to help users understand what you’re about.

And so an example I’ll give is we’re running, like we’ve recently set up some automations to run AI LLM reports. For all of our clients who we have website design and Camp Vantage through. And what it does is it basically goes out and it says, what are 50 questions that a user would typically go to a Chat GPT or a Gemini or a Claude or whatever else, and ask that would return a result that would typically include my Campground name.

And there’s a whole bunch of processes through that, but it’ll pick five and it’ll go out and ask the engines in a delivery report and basically how to destroy your competitors, all that kind of stuff. But the base core thing of it is an example I always cite is, Mike Harrison from Verde Ranch, RV Resort likes to let me use his property as a demo and break things all the time.

And so we were trying this, months ago for him on a first pass and one of the demo questions that asked was he’s in Camp Verde, Arizona. Are there any luxury RV resorts in Camp Verde, Arizona that offer bicycle rentals or something like that, and we’ve learned that by studying these LLMs, they all have different behaviors.

Chat GPT is willing to guess. So Chat GPT’s response was, there’s no luxury RV resorts that I can find in Camp Verde that offer bicycle rentals. However, Verde Ranch, RV Resort, and a couple of these other ones in the area are likely to have bicycle rentals because they’re resorts. So I would call them and ask, right?

And then the other two, Claude and Gemini that we’re currently testing now, refuse to guess, they just said there’s no luxury of your resorts period in Camp Verde to have bicycle rentals. And so if you determine that, and you can’t do everything, but if you determine that bicycle rentals is a core key driver motivation of why somebody might come to your area.

If you have lots of bike trails in the area or outside Scenic Mountains, or you’re near rivers with bike paths or whatever else, right? Then you take that and you look at that and say I really wanna be an answer to that question because I think a lot of people, because of where I am. Lots of bike trails, lots of mountains, lots of right.

We’ll be asking that question. Or in the future when you have the ai, like Google has announced and Chat GPT has announced, we’ll take your search query and just rewrite it in the backend and won’t even tell the user well that the AI will infer that’s what they really wanna know. Then at that point, the way I show up for that is to build a page or write a blog post, or put a section in the existing page about bicycle rentals so that then the AI knows here, either I offer bicycle rentals or here’s some resources of people who offer bicycle rentals in the local area.

And then that page shows up in traditional Google search, which is what AI is not using Google search, unless it’s Gemini, but in some form or fashion, is using a search index to see what content you have. And if you have a page bid on it that shows up for those queries in traditional search, then that will show up for the AI in their search index.

And it’s very easy to win the answer to that question. And so those are the things that, like you, you just have to pay attention to. And there’s so much more behind it, but like listing an amenities list of 20 bullet points, it says, I have bicycle rentals is not as powerful and won’t show up as a page about bicycle rentals.

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah. And that’s what I was going on there, Brian, with like structured data, and making sure that you have all of those structured components and everything that you do. Because RV parks I’m probably ostracized for saying this, but I look at RV parks, I look at like campgrounds as we run many businesses in one business in terms of how we interact with the internet.

Like we don’t have a bucket that we fit into. We fit into many buckets and you need to make sure, and that’s the same problem we’re seeing with the AI search, it’s the AI we fit too many things. And that’s why I actually Chat GPT guessing, because it, at least it’s giving us the answer, right?

Or it’s giving the consumer the answer that they’re looking for. But we have to optimize around all of our components, right? If you’re running like a stone, right? You might wanna mention the waterpark because it’s not implied usually through the website, right? You might wanna imply that you have a gift store.

You might wanna imply, and you should be building things along that side where, if you just end up on my website, you’ll see there are pages about dump stations. And that was before we even were optimizing for AI, right? We were just trying to fit into search.

And I think that’s a great point. And going along that too is like the social proof, where you’re talking about we’re talking about reviews and the listings, right? And where your consumers are interacting. That social proof is becoming it, I don’t know how it’s weighted. I don’t know, but I’m noticing that the more weight or the more reviews or references around a particular topic of your business, the more relevant you are.

In terms of specific types of search, like you said, great. They have to be good reviews, but if they just were searching for the thing overall and they just have any reviews, it’s proof to the engine itself that this exists. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. It’s the same thing as the bicycle rentals page, right?

Kurtis Wilkins: Exactly.

Brian Searl: What you’re talking about. There’s three different tenants here overall. On page SEO we talked about. What you’re talking about is brand more than anything, right?

Kurtis Wilkins: Yep.

Brian Searl: A good, strong brand. And I’ll talk about that in a second. And then three is the technical SEO, which is all the code and the optimizations and speed tweaks we won’t have time to get into today. But behind the scenes. But what you’re talking about is really important for AI SEO it’s not the number one thing. Content is the number one thing. 

And you’re not gonna trick it by lying. It’s way smarter than me already. It’s way smarter than you already. Forget it, give up. It’s gonna be a hundred thousand times smarter than you in five years. It’s over. Forget it. But like brand, so the conversation around your brand on social, not what you are saying, what people are saying about you. 

To a certain extent, back links because they build trust and authority. Although that’s not even something we really spend time on anymore because I think you get natural enough back links from local listing citations and stuff like that.

And again, AI is not going out and saying how many backlinks does this website have before I put them in an answer that would, it’s not doing that. But it is important. We know we have data for that and like just the conversation around your brand period. You have to build your brand.

You can’t just be one of many campgrounds near wherever city you have. It’s the conversation around it. It’s think about sending out press releases like these are things that the AI references and knows that you, even if it’s just a press release on I’m not talking about Woodall’s or Modern Campground.

Those are good. Those do well, at least Modern Campground shows up in search. I’m pretty sure Woodall’s will, but I honestly haven’t seen it. I know they’re my competitor and I like, I’m sounding biased or whatever, but like we know those show up in search, but I’m talking about sending a press release on the wire, like something like a PR news wire or something.

Not only does that give you back links and yes, they’re all the same back links and yes, they’re duplicate content, but it doesn’t matter. They’re conversations in media. And so they nudge it a little bit, right? If you’re distributing it to the right places, if you’re getting a link on AP News, if you’re getting a link on Bloomberg, if you’re getting a link on, market wire or whatever else, or market watch, sorry.

But those things are like votes of confidence. They’re conversations around your brand. And so it looks at PR, it looks at local listings, it looks at social media conversations. It looks at not in real time while you’re searching. It form as they redo the LLM indexes and the training and things like that. That’s it’s a long tail game guys, but that brand conversation for sure, building a strong brand is tremendously important. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Do you mind if I switch, this is on subject, but I wanna talk about Chat GPT operator in terms of our website. Are you familiar with that? 

Brian Searl: Yes.

Kurtis Wilkins: Is that

Brian Searl: Sam?

Kurtis Wilkins: Oh, sorry.

Brian Searl: What I was gonna say is we have Sam on here, he’s a wonderful guest of Campfire Ranch. I’d love to have you spend a couple minutes just talking about Campfire Ranch, and then how about we delve into operator. Is that okay? 

Kurtis Wilkins: That sounds great. 

Sam Degenhard: Alright, ‘cuz I want to learn about it too.

Sam Degenhard: Yeah.

Brian Searl: Yeah, there’s a bunch of ’em that do that. Anyway, we’ll talk about that in a second. You’re really tempting me, but just we need to get to Sam. All right. so you briefly introduced Campfire Ranch. Tell us how Campfire Ranch got started. 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. So I’ve been an outdoorsman my whole life. I actually grew up RVing. First and foremost, my grandfather bought my parents an RV for their fifth wedding anniversary, and they had no idea what to do with it. And that created my lifestyle, adult life and childhood life. Been Camping my whole life. Long story short, went to school in Colorado, moved to LA for a career afterwards.

Very big change from a town of 5,000 people to a town of 11 million. Was still trying to get out and go Camping. Found myself squeezed into the box of state park campgrounds, national forest campgrounds. It wasn’t Colorado where you can just drive up a dirt road and disperse camp. And that was like every weekend for me when I was in school and started putting ideas on paper of just like, why isn’t there a Campground that’s designed for me and my friends?

Like, why doesn’t this exist? And I started organizing group Camping trips back in the day then. And most of those were to Joshua Tree and St. Bernardino National Forest. Pretty illegal actually. Just, no permits, but we’d bring 50 people out and do Camping trips and we build this like ideal Campground for ourselves for a couple nights.

And that’s when it started to stick with me that just, there might be an opportunity to design a facility that would be more purpose-built to my generation and kept doing my career. Got to the point, I just couldn’t ignore this idea and decided to take a stab at it. Left my career.

I was working for Red Bull in sports marketing at the time. So my background’s all in kind of content, and it was funny we brought that up in a few ways, but a lot of that space has inspired me to deliver hospitality, but in and create my own brand and the way that Red Bull was able to create theirs.

And yeah, it just took the leap in 2019, quit my job and decided to go find the first location to bring this idea to life. I knew it, it couldn’t work with one location. It would just be a fun seasonal job for what I had in mind. And yeah we’re multiple years later now, and we’ve gone just beyond just Camping, as I mentioned, we look at kind of different types of lodging assets from the backcountry experience to the Camping experience and all the fun weird stuff in between.

So we’re pretty opportunistic. Our goal is to go coast to coast, with Campfire Ranch as a brand and be in those top outdoor recreation markets where we can stand out and be one of one. 

Brian Searl: So what are some of the things when you we’re looking at that journey with your friends and you were going out to, I think you said Joshua Tree, and you were saying, I wanna create this ideal Camping experience, what were some of the things that you really felt were missing from the existing Camping experience that you felt you needed, did now, you have now?

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. Yeah. Things that we actually put in place. The biggest piece I think was gear and equipment. Even with expendable income, there’s a pretty big barrier to like, what to buy and what do you need to have and what is the right piece of equipment that you need to have.

There’s so many questions that go into building an outdoor Camping quiver, and I’m talking about tent campers here. But you know what tent. What brand, what size, what color, like, how long do you expect to have it? Like all those questions are huge barriers to people just like stepping out, and going on a Camping trip.

So those early days, what I ended up doing was I started buying more gear for my quiver that I wanted to try. And that would be hand me down stuff for friends that would go and eventually this, in these trips, the demand was too big and I’d actually rent everything from REI. So I’d get a list of what people did.

I’d go to REI, I’d get it, I’d pick it up, I’d go to the spot a day early. I’d set it up, I’d assign tents. Then they would come on the trip. And it wasn’t until I could put these pieces in for them that I could get 20 somethings living at the beach in Los Angeles who had never been Camping to go on a Camping trip.

And poop in a backcountry toilet, to be totally honest. They weren’t comfortable enough to even stay there to do that hurdle, to get over that barrier. And so it was all about like, how do we get you there and then you can face those like other fears in that environment with other people.

And that’s the second piece is really community. I think that the fact that we all spend time in the outdoors is wonderful, but it’s pretty rare that we spend time in the outdoors, completely solo. Generally we wanna share it with someone. And if you can create an environment where sharing is not only intentional, but it’s also accidental.

And we do this in our campgrounds today, like I love it when there’s a line at the bathroom. ’cause I know everyone’s gonna talk about what they did yesterday to the person next to ’em, and they might make a friend. And if I can create funny environments like that, just by happenstance. You’re gonna be building more community and that can have a really good, maybe negate some things like SEO by building word of mouth and direct bookings.

Brian Searl: Okay, so you heard it from Sam first. You don’t need SEO, you just need to lower the amount of bathrooms you have at your campground. 

Sam Degenhard: I love it. Yes, absolutely. Bathroom lines are good. They’re healthy. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Sam, I absolutely love the business model. I can’t tell you how many times I am sent a meme. It’s the same meme every time, and it’s just. Make Camping easier and it’s something about somebody having to do a plugin in their RV or someone can’t get their tent put together. 

Sam Degenhard: Yep. Totally. Yeah, and it’s been fun. I think the ripple effect of trying to think from that customer’s perspective first has allowed us to create other streams of revenue as a business.

So we’ve taken that like gear concept of being, hey, people need equipment. And we’ve taken that to manufacturers and said, Hey, look North Face you can be at a music festival and pop up and have your tent and people could look at it for three or four seconds, they might buy it, or you could give us a tent and I’m gonna rent it for 40 nights a summer.

Show someone how to use it, let them sleep in it, they’re gonna stay dry in it. And then when they wanna make that transaction, they just had a salesperson for three days. Can you gimme the tent for free? Can you pay me to show off your tent? And I think, as we look to grow our brand at scale, those partnerships are a great source of revenue.

But really it’s all just coming from solving a problem for the customer and building our business in a couple different ways. Those add-ons become not just revenue streams, but partnerships.

Brian Searl: Are you all tent Camping then, or.

Sam Degenhard: Yeah, we’re actually, funny enough from previously, we’re RV free as a Campground, so we focus on car camp, tent camp, van camp so anything from, a camper van to a converted truck bed, to a slide in, to a rooftop tent, to tent Camping, that, that’s our bread and butter hammock Camping. We see quite a bit of that too, which is fun. 

Brian Searl: Like I think that’s a great underserved market, as you’re talking about. Greg, I don’t know have we talked to anybody who has an RV free Campground on any of these shows? I don’t know that we have.

Greg Emmert: No. No, but he’s, Sam essentially grew thoughts that I’ve had in my head for ages as a tent camper and a car camper and a back country camper.

He actually grew it into something that’s working and so awesome man. It is underserved. We know it’s growing, right? We’ve talked to Scott Bahr about this car camping is on the rise.

Greg Emmert: It’s that awesome bridge between, am I ballsy enough and fit enough to carry 50 pounds for 15 miles to get back country? But I can drive a gravel, two track for a few miles to get back to maybe some disperse Camping or a place like Campfire Ranch where I can have a similar experience but still have my car there. It’s open to people. I’m sure you get people that are. Not as fit or potentially even maybe have disabilities.

They can reach your camps and stay. That’s awesome, man. And I apparently need to start following it ’cause I’m always searching for the next best tent site.

Sam Degenhard: Oh good. No thanks Greg. I appreciate it.

Brian Searl: Do you have birds near your Campground, Sam? 

Greg Emmert: Yes, he does. He is got gunnison sage-grouse.

Sam Degenhard: We do.

Greg Emmert: That’s one of the.

Sam Degenhard: Yep.

Greg Emmert: Are you near the Juanita areas at all? The Juanita.

Sam Degenhard: Very close. Just over the mountains from Juanita.

Greg Emmert: You should be marketing to birders. There’s a hundred million of ’em in the United States. We don’t have to,

Sam Degenhard: I see that quite often.

Greg Emmert: That’s awesome.

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. I just have to stay away. I’ve got a hunting dog, so we don’t go to those areas with her.

Greg Emmert: Because, fair enough. Yeah, they’re not on the the take, right? No, I don’t think you can get, because they’re still endangered.

Sam Degenhard: Correct. But they’re beautiful. Yeah. 

Greg Emmert: No he’s got an endangered subspecies of North American sage-grouse called the Gunnison sage-grouse specifically. Yeah, I’m sure you get your share of burgers that run out there looking for.

Brian Searl: Have you seen them, Greg? Are they on your

Greg Emmert: I have never. No. It’s one of those things

Brian Searl: What are you waiting for, man.

Greg Emmert: That’s on a list.

Brian Searl: It’s an experience for you right here.

Greg Emmert: I know. And he’s got the, all of it. So

Sam Degenhard: I can give you a pin where you’re guaranteed to see some.

Greg Emmert: Okay. All right. I’m taking notes. Yeah. Alright.

Brian Searl: This whole conversation is fascinating for me though because like we’ve talked about on our shows before multiple times over multiple years, different things about how, like we’ve talked about audiences and crafting buyer personas and reaching out to people and expanding our markets, especially on Outwired, right?

Diving into like, let’s spend a few weeks talking about niche audiences and like really getting into the type of person who goes like birders or people who have a barrier to entry of going Camping. And there seems to be in our industry, for lack of time or knowledge or whatever the reason is. My dog’s scratching at my thing, wanting to be left up.

Let up. Hello. Say hi. There seems to be a lack of desire or ability or time or whatever it is to focus on those niches. For whatever reason it is no judgment passed. Like I run a business, all of us run businesses here. We know how busy it gets to run a business. But everybody seems to just target, I just want people who own RVs. I want long term, or I want short term. Might be a focus if you get there, right? I just want the people who own RVs. But then you’re naturally limiting yourself to the people who then have to buy an RV first, which is a big ask, right? That’s a big ask, especially in a down economy when people are having trouble affording your first home that isn’t on wheels.

So being willing to expand, to allow car campers to allow more tent campers to allow customized setups like Sam is doing with guided ways to introduce you into the type of equipment you need that make you feel comfortable. Like the amount of people that you can reach through that is sick. It’s insane. Go ahead. Yeah. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Going in on that Rjourney, we love our tent campers. I want more of them all the time. I think we’ve all, I think a lot of people on this podcast have talked about how they are the, that’s the stepping stone, right? Like tension cabins are the stepping stone to RV.

And we run into a lot of pushback from all of the municipalities and the different local governments where we’re not allowed to offer it. Like you cannot do. It’s actually insane how many different governments are out there that are like, you can’t camp in the back of your van or you can’t camp in a tent in the back of your pickup. But if it’s on the ground next to the pickup, that’s good. 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. I think it’s interesting ’cause from our positioning. Our tent sites that are walk-in, so you’re not even next to your car. They’re walk-in through your point, Greg, little bit of backpack to it, right? Yeah. You don’t get to see your car grill, you’re looking at the canyon.

Those sites, we range from 80 to 120 bucks a night for a tent site. And, there’s value in that. And our occupancy in the summer is pretty crazy during peak season. And I think it’s just, you gotta think from their perspective, what does a tent camper want to feel like the most important camper at the Campground.

And a lot of times in RV parks, growing up that wasn’t the case. You’re stuck in the back corner, the kids are behind the RV.

Brian Searl: You still are. It hasn’t changed.

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. So put ’em in the first position and there’s value to that. And I think. It comes from learning them and thinking about what they’re looking for in that market.

But we’ve had a lot of success and just trying to, in designing new campgrounds, we intentionally design walk-in tent sites with the best view. Like they’re the coolest sites, they’re the most removed for the vehicle. That’s what people want. Let’s put the best sites as walk-ins versus.

Brian Searl: But the value in that is like putting the thought into the tent camper and doing it differently.

Sam Degenhard: Yep.

Brian Searl: It’s not just setting up a dirt patch and charging 30 bucks a night for it. This is where many owners have problems getting to where you are is because they think tent campers are 30, 40, 50 bucks a night, and I could just put in an RV site and that’s $75, $100, $125 a night, whatever. But it limits your market and you’re not thinking outside the box.

If you set everything up for them, if you make it a guided experience, if you have amenities that curate that to them, if you give them the canyon view instead of the gravel road in front of them that leads to the other RV sites view, they will come. And especially if you can curate that experience to those new people.

I frequently bring up Earl from Black Folks Camp Too, and it’s the same thing he says in his company is the same thing that applies to beach people in Los Angeles. They don’t know what they don’t know. And everyone is afraid of the unknown. What are the bugs? How am I gonna go pee or poop? How am I gonna go, what? Whatever.

And if you set up that way to, to make them more comfortable, to curate the experience, to make it easy for them to embrace Camping, you don’t need them to get to an RV, Kurtis, they already love Camping and that’s all you need them to do.

Kurtis Wilkins: Yep.

Sam Degenhard: Yep. 

Greg Emmert: Yep. For certain, and that’s what Sam’s getting right about this. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had that I’ve tried to, as I’m sure everybody has seen North American Camping report, right? 60% to 70% of camper nights every single year are spend tents. A lot of those people are in the back country. That means a lot of those people are Sam’s client, right?

They might not necessarily be Kurtis’s client because they don’t want to camp with RVs. They don’t want to camp in maybe tighter spaces. And I’m Kurtis, I don’t, this sounds like I’m taking a shot at you, right? I like RV parks in general, to Brian’s point, they scratch out some stuff over here and that’s where the tenters go.

I got this place. I can’t turn into RV sites. That’s where the tenters go. And so many times I find that they have a really negative impression of tent campers. They their place is messy. It’s a wreck. They’re drunk and they’re loud and they’re playing radios and.

Brian Searl: Same thing as long term campers.

Greg Emmert: Correct. Yeah. But if that’s the tent camper that you are attracting, they’re not the problem, you are, you’re not building it. That’s why what Sam has built is bound to be successful because I’ve showed them pictures of my rig, look at my tent and my car and my tarps and my shit.

Look at how neat my site is. Do you know how much I’ve probably got $6,000, $7,000 in all my gear and stuff. Do you understand how if you had an $80 a night campsite for a tent, I would, you’re the place I’m looking at because it’s not gonna be a garbage place I have to make, all those sites have to be for my RVs.

Okay. It’s not for everybody, but I’m glad to see somebody’s capturing it. And that I think, goes to what you’re saying, Brian, that speaks to not just tent Camping. You can take that and apply it to a lot of these other niches. It takes a lot of courage, right? Because you see other RV parks, they’re doing it a certain way. They’re successful. Alright, I’m gonna try to emulate that and maybe I’ll nibble around the edges. Don’t nibble around the edges. Be a Sam, get in there, put your face in the ball and eat, man. Go for it.

Brian Searl: That’s the difference between a small business owner. Wonderful.

Greg Emmert: Yes.

Brian Searl: Amazing people and entrepreneurs.

Greg Emmert: Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Searl: Either one is better than the other, but they are different. 

Greg Emmert: Yep. And it does, it takes a lot of courage to do that. So hats off to you, man. Congrats on that. There are a lot of other people out there doing similar things in their niches, in their lanes.

Yeah. But to the point you were making before Brian. That’s, man it’s hard to do. But if you’ve got the courage to do it, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Sam Degenhard: Trust in it. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people tell you can’t do it and just trust in it. The customer will tell you. Yeah. 

Brian Searl: I wanna throw this out here and say we’re at an hour, so if anybody has to go.

Please go, but I’ll keep this going for a couple minutes that we’re having a good conversation. Does anybody have to go?

Greg Emmert: I do. I have to go.

Kurtis Wilkins: I do have to drop. I’m sorry, Brian.

Brian Searl: So then we will wrap up the show. We’ll talk about operator next week or a month from now, Kurtis, when we reconvene.

Kurtis Wilkins: Okay.

Brian Searl: A bunch of stuff. 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: We want to do. Sam, I’m curious you have a background you said in marketing in working for Red Bull, right? Correct. Are you interested in just being a recurring guest on the show? 

Sam Degenhard: Oh, I’d love to learn more. Yeah. Yeah, I’d love to. 

Brian Searl: There we have another recurring guest, Sharah. Sam will be here and join us next month and we’ll talk about

Sam Degenhard: Keep me posted. I’d love to.

Brian Searl: All right let’s wrap up the show then. We’ll talk about operator in a month or so. But and we will talk about Rjourney too next month. Of course. I know we didn’t get to that. Too detailed into, but you’re here with us. So we had to now Sam is too, but we had to prioritize him. We didn’t know that.

Greg Emmert: I’ll get outta the way next time and you guys can talk. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah. I was like, just put Rjourney into Chat GPT or Google if you want to do it. or the old school way. We’re there. 

Brian Searl: Sam, where can they find out more information about Campfire Ranch? 

Sam Degenhard: Yeah. Love to have people come out and check out our properties that come stay with us.

Pretty easy. Google Campfire Ranch or AI Campfire Ranch. We’re the only ones. And we have locations in Colorado soon to open in Bentonville, Arkansas in October. And a few more on the way that I can’t share just yet. Probably the best place to find us is see what we do and how we the experience we create is on Instagram.

That’s really our bread and butter spot. So @campfire_ranch. And that’s really where the magic happens. You can see what we do. 

Brian Searl: Cool. Thanks for joining us, Sam. We’ll, excited to talk to you in the coming months. Kurtis, we’re gonna learn more about Rjourney. 

Kurtis Wilkins: You can learn more about Rjourney at rjourney.com and you can also reach out to me as well. Actually let’s hold off on that one. Go to Rjourney.com and then. 

Brian Searl: Nobody watches the show. Just give your personal cell phone, please. 

Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah, I was gonna do that actually, Brian. ’cause I thought I was just on a Zoom with you.

Brian Searl: You’re like, yeah.

Kurtis Wilkins: And you can also our management company is Advanced Outdoor Management.

So you can find us there as well. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for joining us, Kurtis. And Greg. I know you don’t have a website yet. It’s coming and then I’ll be able to go to growwithverio.com. But in the meantime.

Greg Emmert: Real smart not to ask me where they can find me. ’cause I was all set to be like, you tell me, man, when’s it gonna be ready?

Brian Searl: I knew it was coming, man.

Greg Emmert: It’s real smart. Okay. 

Brian Searl: But [email protected].

Greg Emmert: Yep. That’s right.

Brian Searl: Consulting strategy, all that kind of stuff. So thank you guys. I appreciate it for another good episode of MC Fireside Chats. If you’re not bored and sick and tired of hearing me yet, we have Outwired coming up in less than an hour with Greg Emmert and Scott Bahr.

We’re gonna be talking about credit card fraud and some ways that hackers are taking down Campground reservation systems in some cases and how you need to pay attention to the security of your website. And then what else are we talking about, Greg?

Greg Emmert: How to deal with this damn heat.

Brian Searl: How to deal, okay, so the heat waves and being prepared and things like that, and

Greg Emmert: Keeping your staff and your campers safe.

Brian Searl: Evacuation route, stuff like that, so.

Greg Emmert: You got it.

Brian Searl: We’ll see you later on Outwired in about 55 minutes from now. Otherwise, take care guys, we’ll see you in a month or so. And next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats.

Kurtis Wilkins: Bye guys!