MC Fireside Chats – March 15th, 2023

Brian: Welcome everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name’s Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground and whatever else I decide to do this week. Super excited to [00:01:00] have you guys back here again for another recurring episode full of Campground owners normally, but like everybody’s missing, delayed, scheduled, in airports.

It’s really weird week. We do have Scott Knepp here, who’s our one recurring guest who managed to show up here from Ivy Group who is a private management company. They work for I don’t know, 15, 20 marks or something like that, Scott. That’s right, yes, sir. Every single day. So super excited to have him here and his x y z .

And then we’ve got Jake and Tom from Swan Link co-founders of Lagos Collective, and they’re gonna talk to us a little bit about their park and what they have going on there in Minnesota and some cool things like that. I have notes here, right? I’m literally reading in Slack because I don’t come prepared to the show, which I should.

But anyway, it says Lagos handles guest experience, technology, implementation, landscaping, interior design, lots of other things that they’re gonna say, like everything basically, Is there anything you guys don’t, should we start?

Tom: That’s just a way to say that. It’s owner operator. We, from a guest checking in to the website, to the toilets, it’s all on us. So we’re a one park independent, small Campground I think [00:02:00] 35 sites, five cabins. And so this is something we dove into two years ago and have been attempting to get our feet under us and make sense of it all. But we’ve had an absolute blast ever since.

Brian: I’ve been doing this for 13 years at a marketing agency and I still don’t have my feet under me and haven’t figured out what I do on a daily basis. Good luck, but I understand what you’re talking about. So tell us a little bit about doing everything, putting all the hats on. Cuz that was me for the first eight years.

I did it all by myself, oh yeah. So tell us a little bit about Lagos Collective, Swan Lake and what you guys have going on. 

Jake: So the unique part of Lagos Collective and is that there’s actually five of us two of us on right now, but there’s five of us total. And we’re all. Young, energetic, entre, entrepreneurial minded.

Brian: I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt. How did you two get nominated? Where are the other three? Are they shy? Oh, sure. , it’s not as important. Sure. 

Jake: So Tommy Tom lives here full-time onsite even when we’re closed for seven months of the off season. But him and Anna live onsite. Anna’s another member.

And I live in Fargo about an hour away, so I commute to work back and forth from there. And then the other two are based in the Twin Cities. And they help with [00:03:00] administrative stuff online as much as they can. One of them is a ceramics expert, so he makes all the ceramics for the cabins and are lodging. And the other one is Andy, which is Tom’s brother who’s actually out in New York who has worked for startups and app-based companies. So he’s vital in terms of our online presence and things like that. So Lagos Collective is five of us, and we just run this one private Campground, Swan Lake Resort and Campground.

And it’s the only thing that we’re focused on right now. There’s a few of us that have other professions but Tommy and I are the only ones crazy enough to drop our our jobs, our day jobs, and just fully dive into the Campground world. So we take on these podcasts and things like that to, to try to explain what we’re doing here.

Brian: All right. I was just giving you a hard time. I really wasn’t gonna, wasn’t trying to put you on the spot, but, so I’m super curious. Let’s start, I wanna talk about the Campground, but let’s start with Lagos Collective. How do five people come together to start a Campground?

Tom: Lagos Collective is almost a pseudonym.

It’s like an identity that I created that I [00:04:00] guess we created and that I use as like our. Our personhood online because we don’t want it to be under any one particular name, Tom or Jake or Anna or Andy or Francis. That makes things easy for setting up social media accounts. I know Facebook doesn’t always love that you don’t use your real identity, but the idea was that we would all own and contribute 20% equally.

A couple years back, Jake and Francis and I had been a little frustrated paying rent and really wanted to find a clever solution out of that treadmill. And we had histories of Van Lifeing, I think for a couple years. And I had just been super curious about the tiny house movement. And so pre Covid, we like sat down in a living room and made a pact that we were gonna buy a plot of land and little by little kind of create a community of sorts and covid hit, everyone was working their careers.

Jake’s a strength coach. I was a technology [00:05:00] consultant. Francis was a ceramics artist. And then Covid just shook things up and I ended up getting laid off from that. And that was the catalyst for me to start building a tiny house and actually start taking the plunge into pursuing, my, my dream or , my current curiosity.

And very quickly, Anna, my girlfriend, it was, curious, where are we going to park it? Where are we gonna live? And so that question started to trigger the second half of the equation. And we needed land. And we were starting in Minneapolis and slowly searching for an acre or two on water that Jake grew up on a lake.

And it was really important to have this romantic feel to it, but we struggled to find affordable real estate that had utilities really the bare minimum that we needed to start this project of ours. And by happenstance we found a small Campground on Zillow and that kind of turned a light on for us.

And we thought, wow, [00:06:00] this is actually what we wanted. We just didn’t know it. It already had a label. People had already invented it, and they call ’em resorts or they call ’em campgrounds. And so that was made aware. We quickly ran and started Googling all over the place and ended up finding a listing and found a broker that said, if you don’t have a lot of money, you can still do it.

As long as you have confidence you can operate, there’s tricks, there’s seller financing. And so to accelerate the story a little bit, we knew we didn’t have the funds and we grabbed the team and said, Hey, this is something that we want to do. Let’s buy a Campground and run it together. And that was January of 2020, I wanna say October, 2020.

 And then by January 1st, That, one deal fell through, we found Swan Lake and I think within three or four months we closed the deal. We went through SBA 5 0 4 loan, but we basically just ran with the Campground idea and have been drinking from the fire hose . That makes sense. 

Brian: Is it [00:07:00] exactly like you hoped or have there been surprises and shocks along the way or 

Jake: So? I think the, what we were looking for in a plot of landing know was to build a workshop and to have all of us work out of, to have little cabins that we led about of and buying a Campground was just like a huge accelerant to all the dreams and hopes we had of this land. All just came true through a Campground.

We had a beach, we have boats, we have pontoons, we have workshops. And so we’re all of a sudden just in our dream, what we thought was maybe a five 10 year dream we’re all of a sudden just running it. And May 20th, they handed us the keys and we were just, In the middle of a season of operating, a fully functional Campground.

So I think we were severely taken back by all the work and effort that it was really gonna take to run this thing. I think it was originally a lifestyle . 

Brian: I’m certainly not brave enough to have own one. So 

Tom: naive is the word. I think we, we had, rose colored glasses on and we had closed the deal itself was a whole bunch of paperwork [00:08:00] and administrative things, and we thought we were done.

And that was just really the starting line. And so this idea of having a private plot of land for us has very much to get there. We had to buy a fully functioning business. And over the last, what, 20 months that we’ve owned it, we’ve come to terms with, hey, we have guests that have reservations, they have their family get togethers here.

We have to respect that. We have to honor that. And so we have. Adapted our original vision of just doing our own thing putzing on the side, to we’re gonna run this properly and then also benefit ourselves. 

Brian: I think it’s a really interesting kind of storyline and maybe, I don’t remember that we’ve ever touched on it on this specific show, but talking about the, I went in with intentions to do this and thought I was either done or had this plan or whatever, and then it adjusted.

It changes as it modifies and there’s a pandemic, or my guests are different or whatever. Maybe Scott, you can share a little bit about some of your growing experiences and some of the different parts you’ve [00:09:00] managed and how you’ve went in with maybe one plan and then something different happened.

Scott: Yeah. Sure. And I, I would be curious to hear if it resonates with Jake and Tom, there are definitely times that you purchase a park or that we’ve been brought on to operate a park. And you think immediately that you’re gonna put in cabins and then you recognize, Ooh, I’ve occupancy is such that we’re gonna be displacing a lot of folks if we where are they gonna stay while we put cabins on these pads?

And and then you hit pause and then you start monitoring what the park is actually performing like, and you recognize that what you’re seeing the park perform like doesn’t match what What the owners, what the buyers found during the due diligence process. And now you’re trying to figure out, okay, why doesn’t our occupancy now match what we’re looking back at the past in and so the next thing you know you blink and you have those conversations.

You look up and months have passed . And I’m, I’d be curious with Jake and Tom did you guys end up with a mix of the tiny homes that you were hoping to pick up 

Tom: Not yet. It we haven’t [00:10:00] changed a whole lot. Fortunately, the owners before us, I think we’re the fifth or sixth generation, and the ones immediately preceding us ran it for 16 years.

And John and Judy were the definition of humble, hardworking Midwest folk. And they had the infrastructure and the bones in perfect condition when they handed the keys over. And that was such, we are still now just realizing how lucky we were because we went. Blind. We didn’t know the gamble we were taking with all the stuff underground and how, what condition it could have been in.

Yeah. And even then with solid foundations, there’s been a lot of operational admin, marketing stuff just to modernize the current stack. And we haven’t added on the glamping units, the tree houses, the year’s. That’s an interesting direction that we want to go in funky architecture, but we have to preserve and [00:11:00] we want to honor the existing Status quo, but knowing that there is a vision.

Scott: Yeah. And from what you said, I think it sounds like you guys realized how fortunate you were that you entered into an agreement where the infrastructure was so solid. And if there was a piece of advice that I would offer anybody out there looking to acquire a Campground, it is, really focus on that due diligence process and uncover everything you can and pay the right people to do the right things.

And that underground component is such a big deal because it’s unfortunate how many times the deal gets closed and capital has been set aside to, to run up, roll out all the fun things like the tiny homes or the disc golf course, or the zip line that you want to do. And then you realize that you have to reallocate funds to.

To just meet code on this or that. And yeah. So I think that would be, that’s I’m super grateful for you guys. What a great situation to find yourself in and a cautionary tale for anyone, just to [00:12:00] focus on that due diligence period. 

Brian: Yeah, that’s probably one of the top reasons I don’t own a park is I don’t want to go and play by the rules and the laws and the code and the per it’s not fun for me.

I remember, I dunno if you guys ever saw it, there’s a documentary on Netflix about Action Park in New Jersey and it’s really cool, you should go check it out. It’s an about a amusement park in New Jersey, I think it was in the eighties or seventies or eighties or something like that. And there was no rules and no regulations and a bunch of people died at the park and they had all these crazy slides that like flipped you upside down in the middle of the water slide and all kinds of stuff.

But anyway, that was like, I’m not saying I would build that or want to build that, but it was probably easier to run that business. 

Jake: And like you said, Brian, you don’t like to play by the rules. We actually found that we had to play by the guest rules. We have thousands of guests that come in a year and they expect a certain culture and they didn’t maybe know about the management shift change in hands and they bring a certain energy because they’ve been coming for 25 years.[00:13:00] 

So we actually found that we had to sit back and see what our guests were bringing and what they were expecting first, because we had for sure grand plans we’re gonna renovate these cabins, we’re going to, blow out the game or, and it’s but when are you gonna do that on Saturday from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM probably not.

And then it gets cold. So I think we were humbled by, we had to take in what people were also bringing to the Campground and what they were expecting before we can implement really anything.

Scott: No, go ahead. No, but before getting into campgrounds, my background is hospitality management, and I’ve worked with a lot of the major hotel brands.

And one of the things that really surprised me is the level of ownership and the strength of the community in campgrounds. More so than any other sector of the hospitality industry that I’ve seen. Those guests have relationships. They keep in touch, they have Facebook groups, and there’s a lot, there’s a high degree of ownership to the point that, even at some of our parks the managers will get involved with planning activities and [00:14:00] things of that nature and they’ll say, oh no.

We’ve put a committee together. We have someone responsible for our activities. We’re good. Let us, we’ll do our thing. And it’s a really cool aspect of the industry, I think. But it, but to, to the point. It doesn’t always you need, it’s important for an operator or for an owner to find out how do you align with what the expectations are.

How do you put your vision in alignment with and get those mutual goals accomplished. 

Jake: Totally. And we have 20 seasonal spots as well. We have people that have been there for years and that’s their summer cabin per se. So the expectations there, even, they use the bathhouse every day and expect it to be a certain way and they use the grounds every day.

And so it was definitely walking a bit of a tight rope and just getting to know people and what they expect initially. But now that we’re 20 months in and we start to implement our energy and people know what to expect from us, finally this season, it seems like we can start to do these renovations and make these changes.

Because now people have been coming for two seasons with us and they know what to expect. [00:15:00] They know where we’re going. We’ve been very clear with that what it’s gonna look like in the future and what we plan to do. So it’s been nice to finally be able to implement our own voice when we thought we would just be able to do that right away.

If the land was just ours, nobody was on it. We can do whatever we want with it. Not so much the case , 

Tom: And I think we did, we were pretty optimistic in how much you can get. in a window of time. The days go so, so fast. That first summer was like an odd time distortion for me. I’m 30 years old now, but that summer felt like a decade.

I don’t know if it was the 14, 16 hour days or the massive influx of new tasks and what is a water heater? I, we had never bought a house, and so it was home ownership on steroids under the microscope of gas with a time crunch. And it just, I loved it. I loved the energy I had. I had more, I felt more alive than I had in a long time, but I’ve also, it was the most [00:16:00] work I’ve ever done in my life. hands down. .

Brian: Yeah, that’s what like, that’s what fuels me honestly is like new challenges and new experiences and learning new things and doing new stuff and keeping busy. Like I’ll get bored. Like I, I mean I, when we started this company, I was just doing social posting and review responses back in what, 2009, 10, whatever else.

Like very quickly I need something new. I need to learn new tech, I need to learn. So this the AI stuff is, Scott knows, it’s fascinating to me, like I’ve learned it all. But it keeps my interest and so… 

Scott: He really is, Brian is actually AI and he has downloaded into his bald head..

Brian: I know it’s really fascinating.

We should actually do this cuz I’ve had it sitting here for a minute. We should actually have fun for two seconds cause I don’t even know if this is good, but it’s been sitting here cause I was gonna do it on the show like I read have you guys ever heard of Seth Godin before? 

Tom: Yeah, he’s on LinkedIn.

Brian: He’s a pretty famous marketing guy, wears yellow glasses. Anyway, like since 1998, he’s been writing a daily blog that [00:17:00] comes in an email and format. It’s really insightful stuff. Sometimes it’s about marketing, sometimes it’s about life, whatever else. But he wrote one the other day where he said it was a couple weeks ago, right?

It was basically about talking about AI and how pre 2020, like 2023 on is the moment where you don’t know whether anything is real anymore. Whether the content or the video or me talking on this show or my voice or like really, like it’s all possible now. And I think that’s really, it sounds paranoid until you see that it can actually be done.

And really what the point of telling people about that is, is just to make them aware of it. So like I threw together this clip, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago in about 30 seconds before the show. 

Announcer: Excited to welcome everyone to another episode of MC Fireside Chats, sponsored by Fireside Accounting.

Today is our open discussion show. 

So please what, 

Brian: so that took me like, probably half a minute to clone his voice and upload it and tell him what to say. Now, I should say for this specific episode, it is not sponsored [00:18:00] by Fireside Accounting. So that is my bad. It is sponsored by Firefly Reservations, which is a good transition to our sponsor for this week who runs Campground and RV Park reservation software.

So if you’re the need for something like that, then they’re great people and we really appreciate their support of the show. But it is interesting and I think it’s important for people to pay attention to. I don’t know I don’t wanna the whole ai, but 

Tom: I think this topic goes way beyond campgrounds and resorts. Generative ai, this synthetic media. I think as global political ramifications it is a scary world my, in my opinion, I think it’s the biggest problem facing humanity is this idea that one does not. , whether it was true or not, and our detection methods to verify its authenticity have a lag to them.

And so if if there was an election in four weeks and a clip come down,

Brian: or next year in 2024, that would decide the fate of the whole entire United States, perhaps 

Tom: Yeah. With video and it ends up being a bad actor [00:19:00] producing content, political or otherwise. It’s, it, even if it takes a week to debunk, with another AI algorithm that can monitor, its the file.

It’s too late. The damage is out, the genie is out. And so I don’t know how folks are gonna decipher reality versus non-reality. 

Brian: So it’s a really interesting topic and I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna make the whole show about ai, but we are light on guests, so I guess we can talk about it for a second if you guys are interested in the topic.

Yeah, totally. But it is I put that together in 30 seconds. I could like very easily make Joe talk and move his head in 10 minutes. . I watched a TikTok video I think a couple weeks ago where somebody put together like a video game. Like you’re watching somebody play a video game for Minecraft, and it was a TikTok video and in the bottom corner they had Biden, Obama and Trump trash talking each other and swearing and saying watch out for the spiders.

And their heads were actually moving and talking with headsets on. And this is all possible today, man. And so yes, ai, you need to be aware of what it can do so that you can try to defend against [00:20:00] it. But also there’s a lot of positive that comes out of AI too. Don’t just think about the negative, and I’ve exposed Scott to a little bit of that with just ChatGPT, but the amount of you’re talking about all the things you didn’t know, right?

It’s, and I was showing this to my maintenance guys who were at my apartment the other day outside in the hall working on somebody else’s unit. And I went on and said, have you guys seen this? Check it out. Like you can just ask it what’s wrong with the dishwasher? Ask it what the water heater is and needs, and it will just tell you.

. And 99% of the time it’s right. Unless it’s, more than, recent 2021 data, the amount of time that saves owners, researching, permitting, and all those kinds of things is unbelievable. 

Scott: Brian has been spread, spreading the words, the, to all that will listen. The computer will save Brian, Brian is safe from the ai, but but the rest of us are doomed.

I, my, my wife won’t even talk about it. I mentioned it and I’ll be like, have you tried Chappy cheapy tea? And she’s get out, get outta the house. . mean, I think it super serious, 

Brian: You can’t hide from it, that’s the thing. Yeah. It’s coming whether you like it or not, but that’s all.

Anyway. Go ahead Jake. 

Jake: I typed in Chappy gt. I was just hanging out with it [00:21:00] and, having a conversation with it essentially. And I was just telling it there’s five people young entrepreneurs starting a Campground in Minnesota. Tell me a small story about it. And it gave me, paragraphs in this much time that I could easily just put on the website.

And it had stuff like what I do is outdoor movement coordination. And Billy is the head of outdoor activities and he loves to take hikes and play disc golf. And describing me, it was so believable and I had told it nothing more than simple, yeah. Input. And I’m just thinking about for text, for script, for social media, for website.

That stuff is not nec, that copy is not necessarily easy to write. Especially write at attractively. And so I think in our industry alone, just having words play off of each other and having it sound nice is a huge advantage in that way. And I’m trying to understand why people don’t. like that so much.

If they found out oh, they didn’t actually write that. 

Brian: If it is change, right? Like everybody, whether it’s AI or tech or the new burger [00:22:00] chain that comes in, or Walmart that replaces the local, like it’s all changed throughout history. They said the same thing. Gary V says this a lot in some of his videos that I watch once in a while is about AI is they said, when the tractor came out that it was gonna kill all the farm.

It didn’t, like farmers are still here and so everybody kind of worries and they’re, and it’s not that they’re wrong to worry, but they’re all change adverse because they’ve been doing so many things the same way for so many years. But it’s different now. This is not something you like Facebook, you can’t just ignore this for seven years.

This is here and it’s moving so fast. It’s unbelievable. Nobody’s ever seen anything move this fast since the sewing machine moved into a factory. . 

Scott: One of the biggest changes that I’ve seen with and Brian, you really have been my mentor and you’ve, and what you’ve shown me has become part of my business practice and part of my business day.

And I’m grateful for what you have shown me. And and I think it was said earlier that, , there’s, there is obviously so much out there, and right now, two months ago, prior to knowing about ChatGPT, [00:23:00] if I wanted to research the legislation or code or permits required for a Campground in a given state you’re putting that into Google and you’re trying to find, okay, what voice do I trust?

There’s 30 web pages here and some look credible, and I’m making that decision based off of how good the graphics look and how, sophisticated the font is. And you it’s tough to know what voice to listen to and what is credible. And one thing that, I think we’re in the process of finding out is I can go to ChatGPT and I can say, what, permits need to be required to operate a Campground in this state.

And it can, it, I go to one singular spot and it acts as a voice of authority and it gives me a great list Now, a starting point now, keep in mind as a starting point. Yeah. And I think that the tool does a good job of reminding you this is a starting point, because it’ll always give that thing at the end.

But but it’s a great starting point and it, and it’s, it is [00:24:00] nice to have that in a world where there is so much information at our fingertips, it’s nice to weed out some of the noise and get an answer instead of 50 different resources. 

Brian: Yeah. It’s better for the user, which is why Bing search is gonna take off.

If you guys haven’t played with that’s Chat G P T four, which they just released yesterday, but it’s always been GBT four and Bing search and it can cite, it’s just a better experience for the customer. It’s a better experience for you. . There’s no reason to search in 10 blue links anymore. It hasn’t been modified or changed in 24 years since Google launched and like Google fell asleep.

They did, but that’s gonna change entirely how you market your Campground. It’s gonna change how people find you. They’re like, I firmly believe in five years websites are gonna be irrelevant. I think they’ll take 15 to 20 years to die. Completely. Huh. But think about it. What’s the point?

If you have a ChatGPT and you can search on Bing and you can search on Google that way, and it’s [00:25:00] integrated into a voice assistant, which can already be Microsoft can announce their own. But now with the APIs they have, you can make your own voice assistant. So if it’s there and it’s in your car and it’s in your TV and it’s in everywhere, and you can talk to it natively and you can ask a question and get an answer and you can say, show me photos of the Campground.

Sure. I sent those to your phone. I put them on your tv. Why do you need a website? It just takes longer for people to get to the point to. to navigate all the tabs and learn how to do it. You can just say, I want a book. Great. When do you wanna say, 

Tom: The, your face or your website page may just be the content that these top layers pull from.

Brian: A whole nother game, right? Like I’ve been talking to that with some of our bigger enterprise clients about the future. And I think I told you this, Scott too is the future of seo and this is what we get paid to do, right? But like we, we’ve talked about how I think SEO in a game of search where you have questions and answers and not 10 blue links to show up to and try to gain your, gain your keywords and trip.

Google is an answer for how many questions can I [00:26:00] be the answer to? And in that case, it’s not just your website, it’s a blog post. It’s podcast episodes. It’s your social media because bing. semantically, understands and can tie all this stuff together, and it understands that. So if you write a blog post about a local business that’s 18 miles away from you, there’s a chance you’re gonna show up for that because being will understand that you wrote it, it’s on your website, you’re the authority, but also the business is 18 miles away.

So maybe you’ll show up in a question about that business.

Tom: I think my attitude has been tempered a little bit, that it takes longer and as fast as AI is moving and it is moving so, so fast, things just have momentum. The status quo has momentum and it just, it feels that it takes longer for change to occur even when the tech is ready.

It’s almost like the people and the systems aren’t quite there. And we interact with a lot of Minnesota resort and Campground owners and. [00:27:00] as much as, maybe SEO or websites will fade in 20, 30 years for the next 3, 5, 10 years. There is still a lot of low hanging Yeah. Opportunity there.

And there’s a lot of money to be made, a lot of occupancy to increase. And this is I would never suggest selling the website. 

Brian: Like website. Yeah. And, sorry, I didn’t mean interrupt you. I thought you were done. Please finish. Go ahead. 

Tom: It just I love fantasizing about the future as well. I just for listeners and for folks, this does feel like it is still a 10 plus year before, 

Brian: and maybe maybe I’m wrong, but I, And for sure, that’s why I quantified it with saying 15 to 20 years before it dies. , right? Because the consumer behavior will still lag where the technology is. . But I think in five years you’re gonna find people have the ability to get those answers. And it’s been more widely look at, this is the fastest app adoption in history.

A hundred million people were using it in January. 

It took Facebook four years to get there, Instagram, two years 

to get there.

Scott: It’s [00:28:00] almost like the tip of the iceberg thing, right? Like the tip of the iceberg is what we see when we open a browser but underneath the water is all, is what they’re pulling from.

That stuff is happening right your technique of of a Campground posting and having a blog and, running the Google ads and appearing on top of searches, like all that is currently is already going on, 

Brian: yeah. Just now it’s more cost effective because you can use AI to do the blogs and do the podcast and do the everything else.

So now it makes. Whereas maybe you didn’t before if you just had a small marketing budget as an independent Campground owner. But I agree with you, nobody’s misleading people and saying stop working on your website tomorrow. Nobody’s saying that. Certainly not, and I would never suggest probably even five years from now that you kill your website or anything like that.

It’s, it is a content hub, but in addition to just having your static one to five page website, you need to think about where else you can, again, it’s a competition thing, right? Yes. So what can I do to make sure people come to me versus someone else in my area? Great. We’re all friendly, but still it’s [00:29:00] business.

Jake: And we’ve had a great anecdotal experience with going from, we essentially bought a mon ha Campground where you had to call to make a reserv. There was no online schedule. The website was made in the nineties with clip art essentially, and that’s what we inherited or what we, got with the deal.

And so we’ve been going through the paces of modernizing quite literally everything in terms of technology. They had the cash register that went bing, bing, and it, the slide popped out. It was as far back as you can get. So we’re so aware now of all the tech that you can do and should be doing to be relevant.

And Tommy and I had conversations, 

Brian: let’s talk about that from a camper in our perspective, right? Because this is also an important topic now that we can maybe not shift away from AI bit include lots of other things besides ai, right? So how do you as a park owner decide all this stuff’s on my plate?

And also now look, here’s ai, what do I do? What do I prioritize? What comes first? What comes last? What can I put off? What can I wait on? How do you decide that? 

Tom: I think it. [00:30:00] Those first days I couldn’t plan more than 10 minutes, and I was just running around realizing, oh my gosh, I have to cut the grass.

Oh my gosh I don’t even know how to start this machine. , can I, can you help me start it? Literally asking guests if they know how to run a Cub cadet and then all of a sudden the trash is full. And so little by little as you flow through that, you’re just putting out fires. And then I could plan an hour ahead and then six hours, and now we’re to the point where I think we could plan a week ahead.

There’s still crises that come up, something breaks, but it feels very nice to be able to look ahead and know that there’s something of a schedule. Yeah. And the prioritization happens based on like friction. If there’s a problem, and I keep answering the same question to a guest we probably have bad signage.

If I’m on the phone for three hours on Thursday and Friday, because folks wanna book, their RV sites that, that’s just inefficient time because we’re not presenting a calendar or we don’t have [00:31:00] an online reservation system on our website yet. And so that was immediate number one. We knew that I cannot spend two or three hours a day on the phone with guests looking at calendars when I have a million other things in my physical environment that I need to do. And so when we talked to other resort owners, some of them were pushing back and saying, no, it’s super nice to talk to guests to vet And I, I noded along, but I knew in the back of my head, there’s no chance I’m gonna do this for the next 20 years. And in the middle of our first season, I came from a technology consulting implementation software background. And so I, we picked a vendor cam, we ended up running with CampSpot

and we launched it. So we poured it over old reservations and it was just such a sigh of relief because as soon as we go live and the system is configured and the lights are on, there was an immediate, two hours of my day every single day back. And so that was number one. And it just, we knew that was number one, and it was because the amount of friction that we were encountering.[00:32:00] 

Brian: Look, we have a new maybe AI person joining us. Joe, can you prove you’re real? Huh? Sorry, can you prove you’re real? 

 So Joe is one of our recurring guests on the show once a month here. He runs at my community. They make really cool apps for campgrounds and stuff like that.

So welcome Joe. We were just talking a little bit about Lagos Collective here. They own a park in Minnesota. Five people came together, did some really cool things, found out some really cool things they thought they didn’t know. Basic story of the Campground ownership. . . But it’s definitely been interesting.

And then we have Scott here as well, and then we delved a little bit into we always end up on AI somehow cuz I’m obsessed with that.

I’m sorry I can’t help it. It’s interesting and it’s impacting everything, but but, so anyway, what’s uh, what’s on your agenda, Joe? You’re going to Waco soon, 

Joe: It’s train shows. Yep. I actually leave tomorrow to drive to Wisconsin for Waco. And then as I tend to do every year, drive over to Michigan right after that to do the Michigan show in Mount Pleasant Michigan.

So trade show season in full effect. I’m doing four or five this March. So it’s. [00:33:00] pretty busy and it’s all encompassing. Between that and also it’s my busy season, it’s the times that all of our customers are wanting to go live and get their apps in the app store right before their season starts in, end of April, end of May.

So that’s pretty much taking all my time. I don’t have, I don’t have as much time to delve into ai. But I have been playing with some things that’s been very helpful. 

Brian: Yeah, don’t tell my employees that I have that time to delve into ai. They don’t know that I just, that’s all I do all day and doing anything else.

But how have the shows been so far? 

Joe: The shows have been good. They, there’s been good attendance to them. I didn’t go to NCA last week. I heard it was it was a good show. But Ohio I thought was great. It went really well. We met a lot of new campgrounds that I hadn’t met before. And then Carolina was Carolina merged with Georgia. And so we had some Georgia presence in there and we’ve had some interest. So then it’s been pretty 

Brian: good. Jake and Tom, have you gone to, are you members of the Minnesota Association? 

Tom: Yeah, we have the community of Minnesota Resorts, which I don’t [00:34:00] is our organization.

And so we’re members of that. We miss the fall, get there is usually when they have a big thing. We were checking out campgrounds in Africa actually, and so we missed that one, but we’ll be at the spring one coming up here in a couple weeks. And I did attend the National School of RV Management hosted by RV.

Yeah. That was just weeks there, right? No, I went last year at In Myrtle Beach. Oh, 

Brian: okay. Yeah, they just had another one. They have it every year 

Tom: yes. Yeah. And so that was a good, like 1 0 1 after running it for, I guess we had one season under a belt. When I went it was just a check that, hey, I’m not missing anything.

You’re thinking about HR marketing. Tech and, 

Brian: Let me selfishly pivot here for a second and talk about something related to education. But first I wanna get your perspective a little bit more deep dive from Jake and Tom and Joe please. And Scott, how, like what education resources besides the, I’m going to the con, which is great, to be clear, you need to go to the national conferences, to the state association conferences.

I’m gonna hear the [00:35:00] topics of the speakers. Joe gives a session, a bunch of other people, gives a sessions and we listen to that and we soak it up. But besides going to that one in person, what are the other educational resources that are available to park owners from your guys’ perspective right now?

Is there enough? 

Tom: YouTube University, hands down, , I spend a disgusting amount of time just getting an idea of basic repairs and maintenance. There’s a lot of RVers, full-timers that share their perspective on what apps should you use. And so when I’m figuring out how, we wanna boost occupancy, how do we get our name out there?

I know the internet is the tool to do that. The internet is vast. I don’t know, not being a full-timer myself, that there are 15 apps that have reviews and directories. Yeah, there are different booking platforms. And so discovering those is really just Googling and putting into a search engine. You know how campgrounds near me and then if I were not on that one, we find it.

Or there’s folks who made a seven minute video and said, these are the apps we use. [00:36:00] And so when I hear that I’m not actually interested in using the app for my own travels, I’m thinking we need to make sure that we are listed there, our photos are proper, our descriptions are our email addresses.

And so I spent months in the first off season just making sure that our online presence was consistent across. Every platform that you can imagine. 

Jake: . But the community of resort owners itself is a huge resource for us. The meetings that we have, whether it’s on Zoom or in person of 20 or 30 other people in our same shoes, doing the same job every day and in the same location, you can talk to someone who owns a park in Florida and it’s gonna be much different than a Minnesota Park.

So local people that do the same thing that we do has really been beneficial to just, to, as a sounding board even, here’s what we do that works. Does anyone have advice on such topic? So that’s been really beneficial for us. And we’re finding that there are a lot of man pa and older generations running these places.

So we’ve been in these meetings and now we’re, we’re always thinking so vividly that we’re starting to find ourselves like [00:37:00] outreaching, they’re not talking about these current topics or these certain activities. It’s interesting to, to hear other people doing the exact same thing.

For me personally, that’s been the best resource. 

Tom: Yeah. We lurk on a lot of Facebook groups. There’s probably six RV, Campground operator Yeah. Facebook groups. And a set up, a social media presence and then wow, hey, this, either this group was recommended to us or in a random search it appeared.

And so that’s actually been good to just consistently read through that because a random post will talk about how to handle, fish guts. And, oh, you should freeze them and dispose of them and instead of letting them get stinky throughout the day. 

Brian: Is that really a post?

I wanna go back and read that,

Tom: that is a post. And that was a real problem for us. That’s huge problem. Random stuff we bump into that. I never would’ve expected my life 

Jake: to keep going. be, We’d be digging a trench to put fish guts in. We didn’t think we’d ever be there. 

Brian: Interesting. 

Joe: And we have a we have a customer in Minnesota and they have a fish gut station.

And I don’t know exactly how they how they get rid of theirs, but I saw that post and I thought, oh, that’s interesting. 

Tom: When we came to the first [00:38:00] dollar that Swan Lake ever spent besides incorporating as an LLC, was actually to rent a backhoe from the local general rental center. And we rented it, trailered it, brought it to Swan Lake before we had ever even signed the paperwork, knowing that we were going to sign and dug a six foot trench in anticipation for the first summer that we would have to dispose of the cuts.

So we’re aware of how stinky it can be, especially when my Absentmindedness and I miss a day. 

Brian: It’s not making me wanna buy a Campground anymore.

Joe: We stayed at Campground in, in Minnesota and I was surprised. So we. We we don’t full-time, but we’ve done four months on the road, three months on the road. But I was surprised at seeing all of the ice castles that are also RVs and that was something that you just never see if you’re anywhere.

Really us at Minnesota it seems we see, probably six campgrounds in Michigan and never ran into ’em. And it’s a whole different world with all the fishing. 

Jake: It’s all the rage around here. People are staying in their fish houses and they seem to be about half the [00:39:00] price actually too, but they’ll just pull their fish house into the site during the summertime. And then we’re actually associated with a guy, I can’t remember the name of the Campground, but he does winter. He runs all season long and he actually owns fleets of these ice castles and he paves 20 miles of ice roads on the lake.

That go out to his cabins on the lake, which you don’t need permit for or , you just need a license that’s saying, this house is mine. But he puts out, I think, close to 15 ice castles on the lake and rents those out during the winter. So they are really multi-functional, especially out here because people use ’em to Camping in, in the summer and then fishing in the wintertime.

Tom: And I believe his winter business sometimes exceeds the summer business, which, we have zero coming in now. Yeah. Cause we’re a five month open, seven month closed operation. So it is an avenue, but it is more work, I think, than most operators want to bite off. 

Joe: And somebody wants a time, wants time off at some point in time in the year,

Brian: Scott, what do you do for education? 

Scott: I think I’ll promote IVEE for a moment. I think one of the great parts about being a part of a portfolio [00:40:00] with a third party manager is the fact that you get the shared experience and the shared knowledge base, and it’s my favorite time of the week is our management calls where we get our whole team together and just throw out an issue.

Hey guys, what are we doing about early check-ins? We every, we’ve got our policy and our procedure, but managers think of things in different ways and everybody’s trying things out, and it’s so awesome to lay a topic on the table. And get that hear back from the collective voice much with, like you do with your podcast.

The other thing I throw out there is that vendors can also often provide a great deal of information. Property management systems even your, housekeeping, your chemical providers, there’s a lot of great resources to just ask the person that you’re purchasing from.

What resources do you have? What training can you give our team? Brian, same goes for you. You’re we contract you out for all these various services and you’re always coming to us with various resources for education for 

Brian: that all comes from Joe. I just called Joe before our [00:41:00] meetings and he tells me 

Scott: that’s why sometimes it’s redundant cuz sometimes I’ve had to run into Joe and be like, Hey, Joe

And so I think I think that vendors are a great resource. And then, there’s a lot of people in the community too that just like to have these talks. One of the things that I’ve found about about this group and this and the world of campgrounds is because there is such little benchmarking, because there are so few tools.

We like to talk and we like to, we all learn something anytime we sit around the campfire like this and have this type of discussion. So there’s a lot of experts out there. I know that you’ve had Connor on the line with Sage and like just the other day we had a an hour long conversation with Sage just to look at some benchmarking and say this is the marketing should be this percentage of revenue.

And this is about what utilities should be running. And wait, what’s, 

Brian: wait, what’s the percentage for marketing? I wanna know . Oh

Scott: you can type it into ChatGPT, you’ll get a really good answer. , 

Tom: we’d like to reiterate the [00:42:00] vendors. forgot to mention that one, but wow. Not coming from a construction background, YouTube and life can only teach you so much, and so very The first person I call was Dad

You have effort for owning a house for so long when a pipe was leaking, but even his expertise eventually comes to the end. And what was incredibly comforting was having a rockstar electrician, a rockstar septic guy, a rockstar mechanic. And in a small town like this, there’s only one or two, a handful, five to 10 of each trade, and a lot of ’em don’t even have an internet website.

And so you gotta hear through word of mouth. And so once we found our people, it feels like we just, that the downside, a massive downside was capped and it was very comforting. . And oftentimes I’m in the kind of the trenches with them. I’m not really helping and in fact, I’m probably bothering them , but I’m helping them with questions and at asking them, what’s the 1 [00:43:00] 0 1 on electrical again?

And how does a two 40 volt system work? And where are our pumps? And quickly, Sketching up diagrams because a lot of this is not documented. And so little by little we piece together some foundational knowledge and then of course our underground utility maps. And so I’ve really been kinda leaning on them and inviting them over.

, even if we don’t need it if I could have solved this problem alone, I’m in these first few years, I’m more than happy to pay them to come on out because it’s like having an expert there for two hours. 

Jake: Now we’re looking to even nurture those relationships further cause we’ve seen the value in it so much and that you can call ’em and they’ll be out in an hour.

That’s so beneficial for us that now we’re trying to host potlucks to have ’em out, come out and meet each other and, talk to us more personally rather than so much business. So we’re trying to nurture those relationships as much as we can because it’s so valuable to not have to go and, crawl under the cabin and fix that water pipe when you have a guy to do it.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if I’m freezing or lagging or all you guys are, but probably it’s me. But anyway yeah I [00:44:00] agree. And so I, I think that’s important to recap that cause I want, I wanna show you something that we’ve been working on at Modern Campground, which is why I selfishly said I was gonna switch top education for a minute.

But I think it’s important to recap first, like some of these things you often forget that all these available resources are out there, right? Especially with the vendors, with the Joes who talk to so many different Campground owners with, the Ivys who run, who do Campground management for so many different properties with, again, everybody you’re talking about, right?

Everybody who comes to all these little state association trade shows and talks to people and works with campgrounds already and has all this specialized knowledge. It’s just, it’s really finding them and then do this, people have enough time, which time is finite, right? But getting to talk to them and hearing their knowledge and all those kinds of things is priceless and so is YouTube.

And again, nothing’s gonna replace going in person to talk to your peers at a trade show. State professional. 

Joe: it’s very interesting the questions that I get in a trade show asking me, oh, what amenity should I add? I don’t really know, I don’t know your clientele well enough to to tell you what amenity you should add at your property, [00:45:00] but here’s what some of my customers have been using that have been worked out well for them.

They’re on a lake and they added, women equipment or something like that. And we have to judge what we’re gonna say. Property management systems. I get that question from almost every single customer. Who should I use? There isn’t one answer, there, there’s not one answer.

Cause there’s one feature that you need that whatever the one that I like the most doesn’t offer. My, my suggestion for them is talk to every one of ’em. Talk to every one of ’em. Look at it, trying to compare and then figure out where they might be scaring you wrong, cuz that does happen, unfortunately sometimes too.

Brian: Yeah, it’s it’s a good point to bring up all that stuff. And then I just wanna show you like we, we did this, so I don’t know if Joe, you’ve seen this, I think Scott, I told about it, but it’s called MC Masterclass. So we created a podcast and it’s available more places than just Spotify. Just pulled it up here to share my screen.

But this is, we’re gonna end up creating dozens of different courses here for Campground owners and operators and everything. We’re starting with these four part series on Campground Management 1 0 1, right? [00:46:00] But we’ve got one done in customer service. We’re gonna do one on dozens of topics like operating a retail store, and who knows, right?

Sky’s the limit. But these are all done with the assistance of AI that we couldn’t do before. And it’s obviously vetted by a human writer and it’s fact checked and all that kind of stuff, right? But like it’s voiced by an AI too, 

Announcer: Owners and managers who want to improve their skills and knowledge in running a successful Campground business.

Brian: So this is all voiced by ai. And then we created a quiz based on the content that you can take to test your knowledge of the episode before it. . So we’re hoping that this kind of supplements and gives people another great resource that’s very Campground specific for learning. So it’s all available for free.

We’re not selling anything, but love to hear you guys input if you feel like there’s courses that you don’t find out there that should be out there. 

Tom: Yeah, this is interesting. Audio is such an, a great format because a lot of times we’re multitasking, so if you’re driving, yeah I learned a lot from those 10 minute snippets [00:47:00] that RV Mastery podcast, I, Frank, I forget what he owns a bunch of them and he puts out very kind of business oriented bits.

And so I consumed a lot of that and some was useful, some was redundant and I can see this format being similar, whereas I might know things already and it might not be the most efficient as a conversation with an expert, but you, it’s background information. You make sure that you’re checking the boxes and nothing’s gonna teach you.

real world experience. But no, this gets you at speed and make sure you’re not missing something. 

Brian: So yeah, that was our hope with it, just to supplement what’s already out there. Cool. But 

yeah, 

Scott: I think it’s really cool because there’s a lot of you, we spoke, we speak with a lot of people, obviously as Jake and Tom and forwarded us at the beginning of the show.

A lot of folks get into it and then they, oh my gosh, I had no idea. And then let’s call a third party management group. And hopefully IVEE management group is the group that they call. But it’s, there’s, there is so much and people are so hungry for information. I thought that was [00:48:00] put. So great audio is, if I’m, if I am doing laundry or dishes, like I will go find my headphones and I can’t do a chore without headphones in my ear.

It’s become ridiculous. But I think that’s an awesome resource, Brian, because there’s a lot of people that , I don’t know that you, that I could point to anything else of that nature that exists to just help people as was said. Just know that they’re checking the boxes and to generate some ideas.

I think it’s awesome that you’re doing that well. 

Joe: And to go to the audio portion with Campground owners, I saw a question not too long ago about asking for about headphones for when they’re mowing. And I have five acres and I spend a lot of time on the mower with headphones as well,

And so I would imagine Campground owners and managers have that have that need. 

Brian: Yeah. And it’s a, it’s not a, it’s not a bo No. It’s a supplement to everything else that we’ve already talked about. But I wasn’t aware of anything comprehensive podcast wise, long, like these are hour long deep dive courses into this different stuff.

And so I think it’s just really [00:49:00] interesting where some of this technology can take us and some resources that were previously unavailable. 

Tom: I think in general that’s been a trend. 20 years ago I feel like these campgrounds were very simple. They were pen and paper. They had these boards on the wall that represented a calendar, and I think you’d take a piece of paper and slip it from one spot to the next. But I guess the trend from simple man, PA and I guess an early industry, I feel like it very quickly the money is coming and all these companies these equity. Are starting to bring the modern business practices to this industry. And some of the older, folks who have been running ’em for a long time are almost overwhelmed.

They’re not even sure whether or not they need a website, whether they should do online bookings. And so it’s a very complicated evolved business now, I think. I think in order to run successfully, you have to have a little bit of everything. Whereas back then, I think you just got by [00:50:00] with ha answering the phone and having a primitive 10 site and having a simple rustic cabin.

Guest expectations are higher and the technology is sitting right there where if you don’t use it, you’re gonna be in trouble and maybe fall behind the rest of the folks, the campgrounds that are run by IVEE. 

Brian: That’s a good little slide in there.

But yeah I completely agree and I’m just, I’m excited to see where this goes and, again, whether it’s AI or it’s online reservations or it’s talking to it it’s just the opportunity to level that stuff up is available now in so many different ways. And I think technology just supplements it in one more way, but maybe gives us that extra boost that we need or extra incentive to, to learn something new, to change it to level up our Campground or our revenue or our guest experience or whatever it may be.

We’ll figure out where to bury fish guts. It’s important too, apparently. Anybody else have anything to add? We got about two minutes left on the show. 

Tom: I think maybe it’s important to mention that this is all, all the tech is [00:51:00] just a means to an end and we’ve been talking about it a lot, but Jake’s focus, which is awesome because I’m operational tech admin side of things.

Jake right away maybe isn’t as interested in that, but it’s all about the experience and making sure. Look, I don’t care how you got here, how you paid, what really matters is once you’re actually on the grounds, what? What was your experience , did you have a good time? Did you set your phone down?

Yeah. Did you have an emotional high? And did you leave wanting to come back? And I think you’ve done just an awesome job doing that the last two summers. But it’s easy to get distracted by all this, these budgets. Yes, 

Brian: I agree. I’m guilty of it more than probably anybody. But I we do breach that too, like customer service and the guest experience and how you treat your, like I can bring you parks all day from a marketing agency standpoint, but if they are not having a good experience when they get there, then that’s a customer service.

That’s a staffing issue. That’s a, I don’t have an app to tell me what the activities are. That’s a whatever. It’s something that needs fixed,

Alright. I’m lagging a little bit over here. I don’t know what’s wrong with my computer I’m just gonna assume that [00:52:00] we’re wrapped up for the day and you guys can hear me okay. Super appreciative for you guys being here today, Scott from IVEE appreciate you being here on a monthly basis.

Joe from at my community, hope your conferences go well, Jake and Tom, great story. Love really deep diving into Swan Lake and hopefully we can have you guys back on as a guest in the future and hope you have a great summer there in Minnesota. Thank you guys for joining us and thanks again to our sponsor, Firefly Reservations.

If you need Camp reservation software definitely give them a call. Check them out. They might be the solution that you are looking for. So until next week, we’ll see you. Another episode of MC Fireside. Chats. See you guys. 

Joe: Thanks so much. 

[00:53:00]