MC Fireside Chats – October 22nd, 2025

Brian Searl: Welcome everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground and a bunch of other places, apparently. I need signs for everything, I think, and then I’ll just have somebody who’s my sign changer and changes the signs randomly throughout the show.

That would be maybe two intrusive and I don’t know. Anyway, something came to my head. I probably should just stop talking now. But welcome to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. We’ve got a couple of recurring guests here. We’ve got Greg Emmert founder and principal at Vireo. What is like you’re the principal, like school principal or just you’re the owner or. 

Greg Emmert: Yes, Yeah. No, no, I’m.

Brian Searl: Is that without the principal? 

Greg Emmert: It’s more like school principal. Yeah. But it’s really strange when I have to paddle someone ’cause I’m a team of one, and that’s, you know what, that’s a. Let’s go into another conversation. 

Brian Searl: That’s, yeah, we probably should because I don’t think.

Greg Emmert: Weird direction now

Brian Searl: anymore.

This is 2025. I don’t think.

Greg Emmert: Yeah, it’s. Changing gears.

Brian Searl: And I thought I started the show awkward, but thanks for rescuing me, Greg. I appreciate that.

Greg Emmert: You’re welcome. Anytime.

Brian Searl: Matt, welcome recurring guest, Matt Whitermore from a new company since we’ve last seen him. Matt, welcome. You wanna introduce yourself briefly?

Matt Whitermore: Yes, sir. Thank you Brian. Good to see you Greg. Good to see you, Brent. I am, as of about a hundred days ago, I am director of market expansion in parallel roles at Climb Capital and Unhitched Management. So helping grow the management portfolio as well as the investment portfolio of RV parks and campgrounds across the country.

Brian Searl: Awesome. I’m excited for you man. So talk a little bit about, like briefly and I’ll give everybody else a chance to introduce themselves. So don’t take too long ’cause we’ll come back to you and talk about the things, but a little bit about kind of your history in the industry because you’ve been a voice of presence.

You had the podcast that you were doing for, was it Good Morning Outdoors for a while that, whenever. Screw them, they canceled a good show. But so you’ve been involved with a lot of different things, right? So do give us a brief history of Matt. 

Matt Whitermore: Yeah. Really appreciate the opportunity to share.

So I am in, based in Syracuse, New York. I have always been in commercial real estate, finance and investments. In some facet I would say I’m no longer in that industry. I try to preach that we are not in the real estate industry. ’cause I think that’s an attitude that’s pretty prevalent in our industry, especially with newcomers.

But I’m a part owner in three campgrounds, in RV parks in the Northeast. I’ve done some consulting in the space. And always been a big fan of Unhitched and Climb Capital and Rob Preston, and been in touch with him and had the opportunity to join. So bounced around a little bit. Fell in love with the industry after falling into it accidentally, almost five years ago and haven’t looked back since.

It’s a great industry and it’s a pleasure to show up every day and work, work in the outdoor hospitality industry. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here, man, and giving us a little bit of your time. My pleasure. Greg, I didn’t give you a chance to introduce yourself properly. Go ahead. 

Greg Emmert: I think you did it right.

You did a nice job. Yeah. Founder and principal, whatever the principal might be at Vireo outdoor consulting firm. Helping folks grow and scale and purchase and as Brian would say, do all the things outdoor hospitality related. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here again, Greg, and then our special

Greg Emmert: Thanks for having me.

Brian Searl: Brent Parker, please introduce yourself, sir. 

Brent Parker: Sure. That.

Brian Searl: Last, but not least.

Brent Parker: For sure. Yeah. So my name is Brent Parker. I’m the CEO of OpenCampground. And my kind of journey with OpenCampground. Oh, so first off, OpenCampground is a reservation management software enterprise software for medium to large enterprise parks.

Whether it’s campgrounds, RV parks marinas, equestrian, we provide that software. My background is from the property management payment space.

Brian Searl: Okay.

Brent Parker: So I was a general manager for a company called MRI software. They provide software for commercial and residential property managers.

So I was able to build out that space on the payment side on building products that were designed similar to campground owners. To optimize their operations. And then, more so on a personal side, I think I’m just a serial entrepreneur.

I just finished a book called the the Secret Power of Inversion Thinking.

Brian Searl: Okay.

Brent Parker: It’s essentially designed for startups to avoid failure by thinking backwards. So it helps you analyze things before it happens. And so you can see, instead of looking at the success, you say wait a minute, how could this fail?

And so we look at every single aspect of a business to determine how could something fail and then you form a planner on that. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. That’s one of the biggest, I think, I would say strengths that I’ve seen myself have in my company is and it sounds arrogant when it comes out of my mouth, right?

But I feel like I’m always 20 steps ahead of most people. And I don’t mean literally like I’m smarter than people. I mean that I have planned for whatever path is going to happen, I think. And obviously there’s always paths. You’re like, oh, I didn’t think of that. That sucks. But I’ve always thought about if this happens, I’m gonna do this.

If this happens, I’m gonna do this. If this happens, I’m gonna do this. And then I calculate the risk, reward, benefit based on all of that. So that’s really good advice for entrepreneurs and people to hear. I think so. 

Brent Parker: Yeah. Definitely. 

Brian Searl: I’m glad you wrote that book. Where can they find that book? 

Brent Parker: It’s just on Barnes and Noble. So I have a Barnes and Noble version and then also a eBook version. I’ll be more than happy to send it to you. 

Brian Searl: Yeah, please drop it in the, drop it in the chat here. The, not the private chat, but the, if you drop it in the, maybe you can you guys see the chat on the right hand side on your views or no?

Brent Parker: Yes, I can see it.

Brian Searl: If you drop it in the public chat, it’ll go to the platforms that support it too, so everybody can comment on it. Some of it, Facebook doesn’t let it go to groups, but you drop it in there, everybody can see it, and if not, we’ll share it on the screen. Cool. All right. Thank you for being here.

I’m excited to, to dive more into what OpenCampground does and all that stuff later in the show. I think how we typically start the show. So we’re talking mostly about AI and marketing and technology on this kind of episode this week that we have the fourth week of every month. Is there anything that has come across your guys’ desk?

Probably more to Greg and Matt since we took see each other. We haven’t seen Matt yet, but we will see each other once a month. Is there anything that’s come across your guys’ desk that you feel is worthy of discussion in those kind of domains? 

Greg Emmert: Matt, you go ahead. 

Matt Whitermore: I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an AI expert or a marketing expert, although I’ve been learning a lot.

I think it’s a really interesting thread to pull on for our industry because at least the way I look at our industry is it’s anti-technology, it’s anti, right. We’re looking for that human connection. We’re looking to foster conversations around the campfire, people putting their cell phones away.

And, we’re obviously using technology and it would be foolish to not embrace it and to try and stay on the cutting edge. But when I think about marketing and technology and AI, there’s almost a desire to make it invisible, right? It’s a force multiplier. But I personally don’t think I want to lead with technology in my campgrounds.

I wanna make the booking process as easy as possible, as streamlined as possible. I wanna make the store purchase. Yeah. Like hook up the iPad, do the self-service retail, keep the store open 24/7 and give everyone a code to get in. But other than those few things, I am striving to find ways to use technology, but almost make it invisible to the guest in a lot of ways.

Does that make sense? 

Brian Searl: That’s the way it should be, right? That’s, so that’s, we’ve done, it’s I never self promote myself, but what we’re doing at Insider Perks is like a, we’re pivoting into operations, into figuring out how we can utilize technology in that way. So we went from like marketing and then we were doing AI and we’re still doing AI obviously, and marketing, but we’re also doing more of that consulting piece of how do we take technology and weave it in with AI into the operational aspect of the campgrounds.

And you’re right, that starts with just chat and calls. I still remember to this day, the first time we announced our ChatBot in 2023, I had a comment on LinkedIn and somebody said, I don’t wanna talk to AI more. Our whole goal is to do what you just said, right? Get people outside. We want ’em disconnected more.

And my rebuttal is well, the faster you can get them to the reservation, the faster you can get them outside. More so yeah. But to your point, you’re right. Like it, it has to be weaved in a way where like you step into the cabin and the lights come on, because you use AI and automations and smart homes and stuff like that to where you can speak and the TV comes on, or it just knows that you want it, right.

Without you pressing buttons to the point where you can, like you said, the self checkouts and the even robots delivering stuff is more of a visible aspect of it, but personalizing a guest day before they arrive, just ways that you can allow a guest to have a better experience without shoving a phone or a pad or something in their face.

Matt Whitermore: Yeah, it’s a really interesting discussion. I, for example, I think I was, I’m admitting I was probably wrong here. I had a immediate aversion to the AI phone systems. Answering systems. And I was definitely wrong about that. And it took struggling through the realities of being a campground owner and operator, having campgrounds in really remote places where there’s no cell phone service.

And yeah, we have the park wifi, but that’s a challenge in and of itself to have really reliable wifi out in the mountains in a heavily wooded environment. So I came around to it when I was banging my head against the wall of we’re not picking up the phone enough because the manager has their cell phone on their hip, but they’re out in the woods with no service.

And we played with the idea, do we centralize phone systems? Do we, do we do a call center outsourced? Do we hire somebody just to sit by the phone? And I came around to, wow, that AI phone system is really smart and yeah, people are just calling to get the information. They’re calling to get the answer or make the booking.

Yes, it would be wonderful if it was a warm human voice, giving them that wonderful human connection. But that might not always be possible. So the next best thing is to just give them what they want and what they’re. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. And it depends on how you implement it too. If you implement it as a UPS does.

And their whole point is just to cut staff and to make it as confusing as possible. And you can never get to a human. And it’s really frustrating. That’s what people don’t like about those phone systems. And that’s what we’ve had for the better part of 10, 15 years is the frustrating experience.

Matt Whitermore: Exactly.

Brian Searl: But if you implement it in a way that under that, like as guest service is your number one focus now I have an AI that can answer the phone call after hours when no one else would answer the phone call. Or I have somebody who can answer questions from guests when they’re on property where it just wasn’t possible. I didn’t have enough staff before.

But also to make the reservation, like we’ve fully integrated with Campspot now to where you can make the whole booking, you can get like the whole payment links where you don’t. You can have a human if you want, if they say human or if they say, is my package behind the desk from the FedEx, the AI knows that it needs to transfer a call to somebody, right?

And so we’re never trying to take the human equation out of it. We’re just trying to provide better guest service and whatever that balance is, and every human being will be different. If you start with a guest in mind with everything that you do, you’re gonna win. 

Matt Whitermore: Well Said.

Brent Parker: Yeah. We on our side, it is interesting ’cause we have the same kind of thought process met when it comes to using AI for people that might be they’re concerned about just AI in general and how does it work, and do I have to learn this?

Do I have to take a course and all these things, all these concerns that they have. So I look at it as saying, okay, how can we take AI and intertwine it into your day-to-day without you thinking about it. And really finding a way that you don’t look at it as a feature, but you just say, this is valuable to have.

And it would be invaluable to me if I didn’t have it. So how I approach it is saying, we could develop, and this is what my engineers are doing now, is developing reports and analytics based on AI and based on the data that you already have.

Brian Searl: Yep.

Brent Parker: So that way it prompts you and says, Hey, you know what?

This report is available to you because we’ve noticed this is the trends, this is what you’re trying to develop, and it already does it for you, versus you entering a prompt and saying, I want this, but we are working on something like that.

Where you could, let’s say, Matt, you have a park and you say, I need a very specific report. With these details, this KPI, and this is what I wanna achieve. We think that could be solved with AI. Just a simple prompt, right? I want this report so I can accomplish why. And that’s generated by AI. And then now you have a custom report, right? Or maybe you want a dashboard that has 5 or 10 KPIs that you wanna see on a daily basis that can be generated by AI.

So giving, I think, older demographics, tools that show value without having a very steep learning curve is, I think where you need to go. I think sooner or later people will have to adopt AI, whether we like it or not, sooner or later. And it’s gonna be who has the best ai, tools that’s gonna win the game?

I think. I think it’s really, it’s a matter of making sure that it shows value. Not just features, right? Just that it has to show value. 

Brian Searl: It goes back to being invisible, right? So what you’re talking about is one of the biggest benefits of AI, is the fact that there’s so much data out there that we can’t touch and we can’t analyze because there’s just not enough human beings on the planet.

There was a study that they put out, I think it was by Ohio State University, actually and I didn’t get deep into the study, but basically in one of the nuggets of the study was that there’s so many petabytes of data on research and science and biology just sitting there on hard drives that, that we just don’t have 10,000 or 20,000 human beings to sit there and pour over that data.

And so all that data is from research and case studies and scientists and people who have done experiments and then there’s scientists who are like, I have a great idea. And they’re repeating the same experiment that failed because it’s buried on a hard drive. That’s where AI is gonna be super powerful to unlock and it will like not pivoting away too much from our industry.

But what you’re saying too is, there are so many park owners who have so much data at their fingertips, who stays with me, when do they stay with me? What’s my demographic? Where are they coming from? All the Google Analytics data, all the, and they just don’t even know the right question to ask. To start, just like people don’t know how to prompt or people don’t know what to put in the box and Chat GPT or whatever else, right?

They don’t know where to start. And so as going back to our like whole weaving in our whole invisibility thing, as it becomes more proactive, you’re gonna see it get more helpful and the adoption curve of yes, we’re, there are 800 million weekly users of Chat GPT, it’s going to still take time for a certain segments of the population.

Although there are like 90 year olds that I overhear at restaurants now talking about how better search engine than Google. So I don’t know if you can pin it down to a narrow demographic, but there’s going to be segments of people who take a while to adopt that. But they’re all already using AI.

They’re using AI on Facebook. They’re using AI on TikTok. They’ll be using AI on YouTube since 2011 that we use AI in Windows. Everywhere else, right? So like it’s, you’re gonna get to the point where you don’t even need to know software. Like you don’t even I know this is maybe too much of a rabbit hole, so I’ll back myself out of it after I say this.

But if you saw something come out a few weeks ago, there was a product that Claude released called Imagine that was only live for their $200 a month subscribers for I think five days. But there’s still YouTube videos online about it. It’s called Claude Imagine. And it was basically a desktop that they showed AI, not just coding, but literally building the entire operating system on the fly as you clicked a button.

So you set, you clicked a button that said, build me an email program from 3025. And it built like an outlook, just the shell of it with the inbox. And then when you went to go click reply, it built the reply function in a couple seconds, and then when you click send it built the sent function. That’s the future of software.

So people are gonna be able to start with maybe a shell of OpenCampground, for example, right? And then they’re gonna be, say, they’re gonna say I want a housekeeping feature that does this. And it’ll just build it if you allow that right on your platform. And then everybody’s gonna have their own different version of OpenCampground that works perfectly for them at their park.

Brent Parker: And you, it’s funny, Brian, you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what we envision OpenCampground being, is that you can just come in and build your own experience. If you want a housekeeping tool, if you want a maintenance tool or a portal or whatever you want, just use the prompt. We’ll create it for you.

And there’s no cost to that, right? That’s, I think that’s the modern way of, instead of having, 10, 15 engineers just typing away and making new features, let the user determine what features they want. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. And they’ll be able to just speak it into existence. And that’s been like.

And I almost take I don’t want to, I don’t really mean this, but you see all the people who are like, forever, I don’t need to adopt a computers. I don’t need to embrace technology. Maybe they were right. ’cause now they can just talk to it. Like ever since the Dawn of computers, right?

You’ve had to learn PCs or learn Macs. If you wanted to learn Photoshop, you had to learn that. If you wanted to learn CRMs, you had to learn HubSpot. What do I do with a spreadsheet? I gotta learn Excel. Now you just talk. Not yet. It’s getting there. You’re gonna just talk to everything, make me a spreadsheet, do this, do that.

You’re not gonna have any learning curve anymore. So it’s gonna open the door to all kinds of creative use cases for people. And this idea that it no longer do, you have to spend 20 to 40 to 80 to a hundred hours taking a course and learning something and getting certified. And I think that’s great for humanity long term.

It might be terrible for software companies, what else is come across our desk guys? I’m happy to jump in if you want me to, but Go ahead, Greg. 

Greg Emmert: I, so this, it’s not necessarily what came across my desk, but just what I came back from. I just spent a couple hours with TJM and from Campsite 360 he’s right up the street from me here.

I live in Akron, he is in Cuyahoga Falls. So we met for coffee that turned into three hours of discussions around the industry and where he’s headed. And I love connecting with him and people like you, Brian and Matt, Brent. It’s why I’m looking forward to the upcoming OHCE so much because it just it’s a great perspective expander, right?

I feel like my perspective goes from the blinders to, it just starts moving outward. So it was a really good conversation with him and everything they’ve been doing and his travels and with their product and where it’s headed . Total plug for TJ, I guess I just earned my coffee, but yeah, that was it.

Had a really good time talking with him. Looking forward to catching up with him again at OHC and all four of you guys too, I’m assuming. Brent, are you gonna be there? Are you gonna be at the conference? 

Brent Parker: Yeah, I’m, we’re gonna try.

Greg Emmert: Okay.

Brent Parker: That’s coming up in two.

Greg Emmert: Two and a half, three weeks, something like that.

Brent Parker: November. Okay. 

Greg Emmert: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: Yep. Yeah, TJ’s a great guy. Like it’s interesting and he runs a great company too. He has a great product. I think it’s interesting.

Greg Emmert: Absolutely.

Brian Searl: To think about how, as we look at some of these vendors, how what AI is going to become is going to impact their product and service. And it doesn’t mean necessarily put them outta business, but change.

The way that they create or the way or the features that they have in their product or things like that, right? So if you look at 360 tours, we’re gonna just pick on this because Greg brought it up. So maybe you’re gonna unearned your coffee here in a second. But, so if you look at 360 tours, we just saw Chat GPT release a browser yesterday.

We’ll play a video on that in a second about Chat GPT Atlas where it can basically use Agentech features to navigate all the websites for you. So you can give it a task, it can open up tabs, it can do all the things for you. You can come back to it 10 minutes later, it’ll shop for you. It’ll do whatever you want, right?

Plan trips, et cetera. In that world where you say, go research me a camping trip and it knows your Gmail and your calendar and all the things we’ve talked about before, right? Does it care about the virtual tour on the website? Does it look around and click? Does it watch the little videos? Maybe. But I like, certainly that’s valuable data.

And again, I’m not saying that TJ’s in trouble, I’m just saying it’s an interesting question that businesses like TJs should be asking and thinking about where does this go? How does this do it? It’s the same way we we’ve been telling clients for a year and a half, much to their screaming protest and some leaving us that design doesn’t matter when an agent, like an agent doesn’t care what your colors and your call to action are, that you’re agonizing about for 15 hours in a marketing meeting.

So nobody really wants to hear that. But so that’s where it’s how does that change how you do marketing and how you reach people and how you like, I don’t know the answers to all of these things, but they’re questions that need to be asked Now. You don’t have years. You don’t even have months.

Greg Emmert: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think actually only speaking for his product, but the data that it’s able to draw from the customer, what they where they spend their time, what I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna try to dive too far into it ’cause it was a conversation that was at length with TJ, but I’m not gonna be able to do it justice.

But the data that he’s able to draw from the new products, and if you guys are, if anybody’s gonna be at OHCE, stop by the Campsite 360. Now I sound like I’m reffing him. I’m not. I just, I He’s got a good product.

Brian Searl: How much vodka good did he put in your coffee? It might have been.

Greg Emmert: It was a lot of caffeine. Lot of caffeine. The data that he’s able to draw, I think is gonna be really sexy to the agent, to the LLM because it gives it, as Brian as you have taught me, right? All, all of those extra points that it can see when it looks at a site, when it does this, okay, so it goes out and says, book me a camping trip.

And it goes out and it looks at maybe the it’s if it’s my personal agent, which Brian, we’re gonna have those in what, like three weeks? Not really, but really fast. 

Brian Searl: You already have one with all the memory and all the things like not yours, but 

Greg Emmert: Right. Yeah. But we’ll all have, we’ll all have agents in what, a couple of years tops, max.

Brian Searl: Yeah, max two years.

Greg Emmert: Once you have that, to your point, and this is for you two guys, if you don’t know, this is what happens when you hang out with Brian too long. You start repeating everything that he says to you, you are gonna have, there’s gonna be no more , let’s see. I wanna go camping near sleeping bare dunes.

So let me Google these campgrounds and all that. Oh, and it I know. I don’t need to look at, for me, I’m talking about me. No offense to anybody. I don’t want to camp at a KOA or a Jellystone. That’s not my jam. I’m still a tent camper. I wanna camp out in the woods, so I’m not gonna look at those. The agent’s gonna do the same thing ’cause it knows me and it’s gonna go down from, I wanna look at these few parks to, Hey dude, here’s the camp site that you need to book.

This is the one. It’s yours. Here it is. This is the one. And I know this because I know you and I know all your preferences and I know what you want. A 360 tour makes it easier for that agent to get to that. So I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of runway for those tours if they’re built. And it’ll be interesting to see, to your point, Brian, it’d be interesting to see where the agents, where the AI takes us in the very, very near future. Because I really look forward to that. ’cause I, I do struggle. Okay, let’s make it personal now. I totally struggle because we are tent campers and we’re not good at people like we want to, we, if ideal world, we backpack every time we go camping.

That’s just not possible. So we car camp a lot. You have to deal with people when you car camp, there are other people around. I want that site. I want the one with the most seclusion with the, I can’t wait for the agent that just finds that for me. Oh my gosh. ’cause right now that’s tough because most of the industry is built around, come and stay 20 feet from your neighbor and enjoy the bounce pillow and pool and chocolate slip and slide.

And I’m like, oh my God, if I could get I can’t get far enough away from that. Again.

Brian Searl: Yeah.

Greg Emmert: Lots of my clients use these. I love you guys. Thank you. I There’s no problem there’s a market for that. It’s just not for me. I’m speaking personally at this point 

Brian Searl: .But to your point like how does it decide those things or questions that every company should be asking themselves to Brent?

Greg Emmert: Yeah.

Brian Searl: Have a plan for the future. Like you can look at a company as big as KOA, right? KOA has got a well established brand, great reputation. Lots of locations have been here forever. If you ask AI about camping, it’s probably gonna return something about KOA in some form or context, right? Depending on your question.

Greg Emmert: Yeah.

Brian Searl: And so in the future, there’s a very reasonable explanation that something related to camping will continue to surface KOA, but when the agents are personal, even when the agent is yours and it knows that you like to stay at KOA, is there a point where the AI is this is still a better option for you, then the KOA.

You might be brand loyal. You, as Greg, might be brand loyal, just pretend putting on you, right? But Greg you really don’t know what you’re missing here, and I know you better than you know yourself. So then at that point, are you gonna second guess the AI?

And I’m not saying this will happen, I’m just saying this is a question that KOA should be asking, and maybe they already are. They have a lot smart people out there, right? But a question they should be asking, like, how does brand loyalty look like in an era where everybody gets what’s perfect for them, or as close to it as the AI can find?

Greg Emmert: And as a married man who technically already has an agent who second guesses himself all the time, you do not question it. You just do. It’s I, sorry. 

Brian Searl: Remember the simplest example of Google maps? Like I, I still remember, when Google Maps, maybe not first came out, but when I was starting to use it all the time, you used to second guess the way Google was sending you on the map.

Greg Emmert: All the time.

Brian Searl: And every time I did that, I would run into a traffic jam for 30 minutes. Fuck. I thought I was smarter than Google, but no. So I, yeah. Every way Google takes me, this is just how I go now. 

Greg Emmert: Yep. 

Brian Searl: I know there’s something hidden that maybe it’s not telling me in a red line, but it’s there. 

Brent Parker: I think so, when you think about AI and figuring out like personas. That those persona building and kind of understanding to what, Greg mentioned, like AI has to know, your likes, your dislikes, your concerns.

So the typical, when you’re putting a business together and you’re trying to figure out what your ideal customer persona is. They have to know exactly what your likes and dislikes are. So I think, Brian, to your question, if Greg always wants to do tent and they said, okay, this one over here in Tahoe is perfect for you, they’ll know, Hey, I might want to show you this one because I understand that you might be a little flexible in your persona.

Or you might be someone that says, you know what? Let me try something different that I normally don’t try. So AI should know that, and then give you some other options to say, here’s your main one, but perhaps here’s two or three that might, you might, yeah. 

Brian Searl: Yep. But then how often will people just be like which one do you think is best for me?

I already do that with AI. Which one do you think is best? I don’t always listen to it, right? But I’m curious to hear what its unbiased opinion is of my own psychology. 

Brent Parker: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: And oftentimes it gets it right. Yeah. It’s just these are questions that everybody’s gotta start asking about their software, their products, their brands, the discovery, everything’s and we’re just still people think this is moving fast.

This we’re still like in the bottom end of the exponential. You wait a year and see how fast, what’s happening right now. And I saw this statistic the other day. 92% of the first half of 2025’s, GDP in the United States was driven by AI and data center spending. 

Excluding that our GDP would’ve been up 0.1%. Nothing else is happening in the economy. That’s good. Blanket statement, but from a spend perspective, and GDP is, yeah.

Greg Emmert: Nothing’s driving it, right?

Brian Searl: Yeah. GDP is an imperfect number. There’s all kinds of things that that’s not the best calculation we should be using for the economy. I know all that.

But just based on that number 92% is staggering number. And we’re, what they’re doing now is building these data centers. So you’ve got still a little bit of time, and by a little bit of time, six months, like you have a little bit of time while these data centers are being built.

But once the da the compute comes online, then you’re gonna see all these data centers being used to solve diseases and biology and physics. And they’ve already got them that are solving foundation level math problems, frontier level math problems, sorry. In winning gold medals that these super complex competitions that only 10 mathematicians in the world could solve before Chat GPT and Gemini just won another medal on it, like I think a week or two ago.

And so once, like you, they’ve basically solved math. They’re like 99% of the way to solving math. Once you solve math, you solve everything in the world. And all those data centers are gonna start. So you think it’s moving fast now?

You wait six months. You still have maybe a chance to get in here and start to learn and play and nobody says that we know where it’s going. I don’t know where it’s going in two years, but I know you need to play with it, touch it, feel it, and learn how to prompt with it and talk to it. And if you can do that and figure out how to level up your skills, like I think we’re headed into a world, and this isn’t a year away, but like I think you’re headed into a world as a, as an employee at wherever you are, that you have to learn a skill.

And in 30 days it’ll be outdated and AI will do it better. And you have to learn another skill, and then it’ll start to go to three weeks, two weeks, one week and a day that you have to, you’re gonna have to, everybody who wants to retain a job is going to have to be a constant skill learner or a Yeah, an orchestrator of AI or whatever you do.

But you still have a chance to be in on that. We’re gonna talk a little bit about that on Outwired later today about how to obtain some of those skills and do all that kind of stuff. What else we got guys? 

Matt Whitermore: I was recently reading an article about Expedia and Booking.com. The integration with Chat GPT and I wouldn’t say I’m on the cutting edge of this, catching up, but really good follow on LinkedIn.

I don’t know him personally, but I’ve been enjoying following his stuff as Brad Brewer, a company called Agentic Hospitality. So he should he should be on this show ’cause I think he’d be probably schooling us all and and where this is all going, but just super interesting, right? I had a little taste of this, which was eye-opening on my newsletter.

I noticed the first new newsletter subscriptions that were attributed to Chat GPT and Claude. And that was like, mind blowing to me. And that’s not that cool. I, as I said, I feel like I’m trying, I’m like, I’m catching up in the world of AI. I use it every day, but I’m just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Brian Searl: I’m obsessed with it, man, and I’m catching up with AI every day. 

Matt Whitermore: It’s crazy. It’s 

Brian Searl: Yeah.

Matt Whitermore: You can’t you can’t really be on the cutting edge of it. I guess you can, but it’d be a. 

Brian Searl: Well in one narrow field, you can’t be all of it. 

Matt Whitermore: I use it, I’m on Gamma every day now, messing around, trying to figure out how to create graphics ’cause I don’t have a design bone in my body.

And switched over from Chat GPT to Claude to help, increase writing output and I feel like I, it took me like two years. Like I would, I was really resistant to it and probably two years ago I would, I would dabble with Chat GPT on the free account and like, all right, I’m gonna try and figure out how to tackle this project with AI.

And I would spend two hours on it and then just be like, this doesn’t work. Get fed up with it. Yeah. And it really took me like probably clearing everything off my plate for two weeks to just bang my head against that wall and dive into prompt engineering and try a bunch of different stuff.

And then it was honestly, it was like two weeks and then it clicked for me to at least learn about prompt engineering and actually have it be a tool in my tool belt. And it’s been, every month I dive into some more prompt engineering and watch some more YouTube videos.

And I feel like I’m gradually increasing my my grasp on it. Still total novice, but it’s it’s been fun and it’s super fun to think about all these things of where it’s going and you know that, the next step is that first campground booking that’s attributed to, to Chat GPT or, through your own chat bot.

Brian Searl: Yeah. Like we’ve had that. Yeah. But yeah, that, that’s. 

Matt Whitermore: Right. Yeah. 

Brian Searl: I think they’re probably existing, just like I know you’re talking about coming direct, right? Direct from Chat GPT. I think those have already existed if you trace it.

Matt Whitermore: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Brian Searl: Google Analytics. Yeah. 

Matt Whitermore: Yep. Definitely. 

Brian Searl: But yes, there’s a couple interesting things you mentioned.

I’ll touch on the easy one first. Like the learning thing. There’s a great course that we’ve been going through and we’ve been trying to teach our team this for two years, but there’s a great course that Google came out with, or I guess a, maybe a program called Google Skills. That’s pretty new.

And it’s 50 bucks a month, I think, or somehow, I don’t know. They keep saying it’s free, but somehow I ended up paying 50 bucks a month worth. Anyway but it’s a good, it’s a it’s a prompt, the, one of the main courses in there is like prompt engineering and learning how to prompt, and so they talk through the key elements of the prompt and it’s really easy to understand and it’s from people in Google and they break it up like into short videos and teach you everything.

So that’s a good place to start there. I think is Google skills. Other than that, YouTube. But you bring up an interesting point too, like going back to your Expedia Booking.com thing. I have told people for years that OTAs are in trouble. Because OTAs were primarily built because Google sucked. Like you search something in Google, Google didn’t understand you the way AI does now. And so then you had to go to a site and click filters. How many bedrooms do you want? How many people are there? Do you have young kids? Can I bring pets to this? And you had to check a bunch of boxes and that’s what the OTA served.

And then they began to aggregate everything together for convenience and all that stuff, right? So the convenience aspect is still there, but the big problem they were solving no longer exists because AI can understand everything you want and for all the reasons that we talked about personalization.

But where you’re headed now is like I would’ve told you, and I’ve told clients on this on the call, that I don’t think AI itself is ever going to prefer a Booking.com or an Expedia. I think AI will take you straight to the source if it exists. I think, I don’t know, but my gut instinct says AI will take you directly to the campground website, right?

But it is interesting now that you’ve got these big players like Expedia and Booking.com who are integrating and who have thought about this. And who know this and are now building these integrations, campgrounds aren’t gonna build that kind of integration. We’re probably very unlikely to see a campground reservation system book an integration like that in the next couple years for whatever, like they all have different things and different priorities, right?

Matt Whitermore: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: So it’ll be interesting to see. I think the model is that Expedia and Booking.com end up paying millions of dollars in advertising to have their little button surface or whatever in Chat GPT to make the booking. But I think, otherwise, it goes straight to the consumer and like the example I gave a year and a half ago is with Delta Airlines.

I think like right now, Delta probably spends millions of dollars a year on pay-per-click advertising on Google. And the people who click those ads for Delta Airlines in whatever market they’re advertising on, often don’t find what they want because they need a flight that leaves at six o’clock in the morning, or they’ll only sit in first class, or it has to leave from this airport at this time and connect in this city.

And so that $2 or $4 or $8 that Delta’s spending on that click is completely wasted, right? But where you’re going is a direct integration with Delta’s API into the AI. So the AI can search the inventory and when, and the AI will know that somebody, because of their schedule and their calendar and Google and everything, they know, they like to leave at six o’clock in the morning.

They like to fly first class. They only leave from this airport, whatever else, and it will surface Delta’s inventory right in front of you and say, I have this seat for you that’s available, do you want it? And when you click that, Google will pay a cost to acquire the customer, which is a number in Google Ads.

Now that’s typically if you’re doing really good, it’s like 20 to 30 bucks, right? If you’re doing terrible, it’s 125 bucks or whatever. But, so they’ll just pay, instead of $4 $8 a click, they’ll pay $35 for a 99% guaranteed customer. That’s where I think advertising is going in the middle of Chat GPT and AI and all that stuff.

But you’re, so you’re gonna see these companies pay for these millions of dollars. I don’t know how long they can last doing that, though. Probably a while. 

Brent Parker: Brian you bring up a good point of, and I’ve gone back and forth on this as a software provider is integrating to OTAs. 

When the average consumer wants to book directly. But I know how convenient it is for campground owners such as yourself and Matt, where you could say, Hey, I just need more guests. I need more traffic to my website, which OTAs provide. But then there, the other side of that is the guest sometimes doesn’t wanna pay those extra fees, and they want that personal touch of going directly to the I go back and forth on this, I’m leaning more towards this future state where these, Gen Zers, these millennials, these folks that are using chat, they’re gonna start using that for everything to search, to your point.

Let me, I think Greg mentioned, you said earlier, using 360 views to look at that campground. That looks cool. Let me book it now, and they’re done. I think I even read that Google SEO is down a little bit because people are using Chat GPT between these other tools to define what they’re looking for.

So I, I think the future is where people will do more direct bookings. And now it’s up to the campground to say, how do I expose my my sites, my spaces, my inventory to Chat GPT? Or do I have to use the software to do that? So it’s, I think it’s something we’ll have to figure out. But. 

Brian Searl: If I was you, I would be building a natural language, API at OpenCampground. That’s what I, and I’ve told all the big players this. 

Brent Parker: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: I don’t think anybody’s listening to me. That’s okay. I’m not saying you should listen to me, but you wait and see natural language, API. But what what, that’s part of what we’re doing here too, like with. And it’s just natural. Like I, I really, Greg knows me, right?

Like Matt, you don’t know me as well. Greg knows me. Like I don’t talk about myself in self-promote, right? It just it is one of those things. But like we’ve built these chat bots now that integrate directly with Campspot that basically piggyback. So you can talk to them and they do check in and check out the display photos of the sites in real time.

They’ll descriptions, they’ll, check availability. They’ll give you dynamic pricing, they’ll send you pay now links. You don’t need any humans. Newbook is coming next and then we’re moving through the reservation systems, right? To have all this stuff integrated. But what we can do with that now that we’ve built it is we can actually, there isn’t a system in place for this yet from Chat GPT side, but we will be able to hook that database, that process into Chat GPT.

So then you basically, even if Campspot and Newbook and none of, and I’m, they may, I’m not sliding them in any way, but even if they don’t move as fast as we are, we can now offer campgrounds the ability to hook something up that they can make reservations directly in Chat GPT with for Gemini or whatever else. Because we built that path.

Brent Parker: Yep.

Brian Searl: So I don’t know how that looks. I don’t know how that plays. I think eventually all websites become APIs. Like I, I think they do ’cause an agent browsing a, with a mouse and a keyboard is a terrible experience for an agent. It’s pretty slow. ’cause I think somebody brought up, maybe that was on the call I was on before that here, but yeah, like I think you’ve just gotta think about the new way consumers are discovering things.

They don’t need to go to your website, they just need you just need the booking. Who cares where it comes from? To your point, Brent who? And I would say like I would’ve advised, three years ago, four years ago, I would’ve advised any company. To say who, who is integrating with, considering integrating with Airbnb or hotels.com or Booking.com or whatever you’re integrating with, right?

There’s probably better things you could do for your software from a competitive standpoint besides just doing that. But now you can go to a cursor and you can say, build me an integration with a Airbnb’s API, it could be ready in I don’t know, six hours so if you can get to that point, then why not do it?

And you can check a box without tying down 10 engineers for two months or six months or whatever else. It’s like it could go either way. Like they’re gonna have a lot of money to spend and power to play in these booking engines. So if they’re, maybe they do win for a while and if they do win, then you might as well have your inventory available through them.

Is that, yeah, I feel, I don’t know. Go ahead, Greg. You were gonna say something? 

Greg Emmert: I wasn’t, no. 

Brian Searl: You looked like you, And then. 

Greg Emmert: I was gonna go invisible. I was gonna try to slide on it and I can’t, I don’t have enough room.

Brian Searl: There’s a wall there, man. There’s a wall there.

Greg Emmert: There’s a wall. I need to go to my, I need to go my other direction.

Brent Parker: Just that Homer Simpson meme, Greg. The one that he, the bush.

Greg Emmert: Melting into the hedge.

Brent Parker: Yeah.

Greg Emmert: In the background. Right on. 

Brent Parker: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: What else we got, guys? That was good. Yeah. And it’s just to close the loop there too, like the Agentech commerce is already there in, right? Like you can buy through Shopify. Yeah, you can.

No, you can buy through Etsy Now. Shopify is coming. Stripe has a partnership with OpenAI. Walmart announced they’re gonna sell all their stuff on OpenAI. This is, that’s coming. So like you’re go, every, the checkout is just gonna be seamless. People are gonna grow to expect this. So your fancy website still matters for a little bit.

Yeah. But even the boomers are, as we discussed already, like all in on Chat GPT, segments of the boomers. It’s not a.

Greg Emmert: Yep.

Brian Searl: It’s not a, my audience. It’s not, you can’t, you can no longer say like you could with social media for a while, that my audience is baby boomers and so it will take them 15 years to catch up.

That’s not the case. There are some boomers who won’t catch up, but there are some Gen Xers who won’t catch up too. 

Greg Emmert: And it’s not the same or the case for every industry either. Certain industries, you are gonna have human eyes on your website, right? They’re gonna come to your site, they’re gonna see what you’re about.

But to your point for how much longer it probably starts disappearing rather quickly. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. Traffic does for sure. Like your, yeah. Your conversion should still go up. Like the quality of traffic you will get will be better. So the percentage of people who convert will be higher, but the traffic will be lower.

But nobody wants to hear that. Like you have so many of these companies that are built with these marketing managers. In the helm of their CMO role. That aren’t really strategy people. Now, there, that’s not everybody. There are a lot of good Strat strategy people, right? But we’ve been through a lot.

There’s so many marketing managers that sole function is just to, to call the agency and say, do this. And they don’t have that ability to see what’s coming. And they don’t have the skillset to adopt the new technology. Like they’re smart people. I’m not saying that but their skillset is managing, that doesn’t need to happen anymore.

All the meetings that you’re sitting in, all the strategies you’re sitting in talking about design and call to action, and whether the button is rounded or squared or whatever, it’s all bullshit. All your email marketing, like all your email marketing is about to be summarized. iPhone’s already doing this on the screen, even though Apple is shitted AI, they’re trying to do it.

Gmail’s doing this at the top, and eventually it’ll be on the summary of your notifications. Here’s the daily digest of your emails you got today. Even if you’re lucky enough for the AI to summarize the marketing email you sent to 7,000 people carelessly, that wasn’t segmented. Even if you magically get that to happen, it’s not gonna do it in your brand tone and voice.

So what are you agonizing about all this stuff for hours. Like just the way things are changing and we see this, we see clients that are either like I will and there it really is no middle ground. I’m all in this with you Brian. We’re like, oh no, I’m going all the way back over here. Right there, there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground yet.

Matt Whitermore: You bring up a really interesting point about segmentation and it’s really more of a question, and I think this is probably in your wheelhouse, Brian is right how can we use AI to get to know our customers better, to gather information as we interact and do business with them in a more, in a deeper and more efficient way that can in turn allow us to segment our marketing in a smarter and deeper way, and then do more proactive marketing.

To then drive more revenue. That’s something I think about that, it’s on birthdays or, we get a lot of repeat campers. We have some, if you’re ever, Greg, you’re a tent camper. If you ever find yourself in the northeast, come check us out. ’cause we get some really spectacular, primitive hike tent sites that.

Greg Emmert: Yes.

Matt Whitermore: People, we have families that book, the same site like eight weekends a year. And they literally, we’ve had people try to book seasonal primitive tent camping sites for us. They want it every weekend. I’m like, sure it’s gonna be like 10 grand, but Sure. And like we’re, we have the data, we have the data of when they typically book those sites, what weekends they typically book.

So I’m sure there’s a way for AI to like proactively send that email and here’s your cart. Here’s your cart already ready to go.

Brian Searl: Ready to go. Yeah.

Matt Whitermore: With bags of ice and bundles of firewood and let’s, get that booking ahead even further ahead. If they’re booking it a year in advance, maybe we can get even further in advance.

And Right. Then the marketing campaigns of we’re always looking at booking windows and dynamic pricing and booking velocity. I’m sure people are already figuring out a way to automate that in a way that it’s looking ahead and reading your calendar, sending promo codes automatically. 

Brian Searl: But yeah, Disney’s done really, Disney does true dynamic pricing. We don’t have true dynamic pricing in this industry. We have a bunch of fields you can fill out. 

Matt Whitermore: Yeah, true.

Brian Searl: Yeah. But to your point yeah I, I think the, there’s two pieces to that, right? There’s the piece without AI that you’ve been able to do for a while, which is just organizing your database, right?

So using something like a CRM, like we use HubSpot at our company, right? But and HubSpot has traditionally been super expensive, but now they have starter plans that’re like 20 bucks a month for the basics. And the CRM’s always been free. And so just like you can’t count on your property management software to be that because they’re not a CRM.

It’s like the old TV VCR combos. If any of you guys are old enough, like I am to remember that they worked, but they didn’t work as well as a separate VCR and a separate TV. And so the, your PMS system is not intended to be a CRM. It can function as that because it gathers all the data and collates it in one place and whatever else.

But like Campspot has a really nice integration with HubSpot that pushes all that data over to HubSpot. I’m sure Newbook actually has a little bit better of a CRM built in, but it’s still not a HubSpot. And there are other good CRMs, to be clear, I’m just giving one example, but organizing that data and segmenting and collecting information on people like what is their birthday, for example, where are they from?

What state did they stay in? And your property management system has a lot of that. But the extras of starting to prompt your guests when they check in and saying Hey, we would like to personalize your stay and make it a little bit better. This will help us do this. Here’s five questions or 10 questions.

Just answer whatever you want. We’re not asking for your email. We’re not trying to email market. You we’re trying to make your stay better. Now or in the future, let me ask these questions of you. What is your birthday? What is your, whatever? And some people will fill it out, some people won’t.

But that’s the first step is segmenting and organizing that information. The more data you can collect, the better. So you have, if you do email marketing and you track that, you can tie that visitor who click the email to what they did on the website, what pages did they browse, and then if you do we can get into all geeky stuff, right?

But so segmenting all that stuff and tracking it is the first place and organizing it, and then having AI act on it as the second piece of it. But there’s, even, there’s been plugins for years. Like we use a plugin called WP Fusion for WordPress that links CRMs to WordPress. And then you can take the data that you have available in a CRM for a customer, and you can, if they’re logged into the website or it knows who that person is, you can show or hide a coupon on the sidebar of WordPress that’s specifically only for that person.

It doesn’t show to anybody else, right? So there’s all kinds of ways that you can do that personalization, but then just taking the data and putting it into AI and forecasting it out. Yeah. This is a big underserved opportunity, right? Like a lot of the big reservation Campspot specifically I’ll call out, does a good job with sharing their analytical data and stuff like that.

And they do a great job. But even then, like we’re gonna put, I’m gonna put some significant capital into data from the Modern Campground side in 2026. And I think we can do some very interesting stuff with AI to help the industry that we’ll release publicly. We did MC Reports for a while. We put that on pause in 2025.

’cause Scott and I were pretty busy, but we’re gonna get back to that. But the amount of like just data we’re gonna collect and collate and release for the industry and be able to forecast, I think is gonna be really interesting. And AI lets you do that to the level we’ve never been able to do it before.

Brent Parker: I think the question is now Brian, like adoption of how do you get customers that are older, that aren’t used to using these types of tools adopting the philosophy of you should start using AI. You start, you should start using these tools that we’re giving you because they’re so valuable.

So I think it’s just more of a question, I think for the group because it’s always, I think, a challenge for me to figure out this adoption for people that aren’t as tech savvy as what you want at that. When you think about that learning curve at the bottom of that bell curve is I think a lot of our customers.

Brian Searl: Why don’t you speak to that, Matt? ’cause you said you went through your struggles learning and adopting AI. How do you think, how do you see that? 

Matt Whitermore: It’s a really interesting question. I think as younger generations get further into the workforce, I think it’ll be a problem that solves itself.

But I, I do write it. I think it’s. I speak with some like marketing purists and I get it right, copywriting, purists that get so offended by the thought of AI helping somebody write something. But I think that’s going away, right? I think it’s not, there’s always gonna be the purists and I respect that.

But one thing that I’ve really tried to keep in mind, right? I think there’s a lot of fear about AI. AI is gonna replace me. AI is gonna replace my job function and my role. And I think there’s some truth to that, but I think it’s way overblown. I think what’s really more true, this is an original thought to me, this is, following people in the industry and who share their thoughts on AI, but it resonates is that the people who adopt and embrace. And learn AI are gonna be able to do the job functions of eight to 10 people. 

Brian Searl: For sure. 

Matt Whitermore: You’re gonna get indirectly replaced by AI. You’re not, probably not gonna get directly replaced by AI. You’re gonna get a, your role is gonna get absorbed by the person who does adopt. 

Brian Searl: Yeah. Oh yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. 

Matt Whitermore: And you don’t like, you don’t like, I primarily use it for content creation and writing and I still edit everything that I write and still write. I give it a thousand word prompt on what I want to create and then I tell it 10 different ways how I hate what it came up with.

But it’s still so much, the as like somebody who’s just really dove into writing like. The hardest thing is sitting down at the blank page. I get, I go for my morning writing session. I used when, before that two week period that I talked about of like really just going hard to learn it.

I would wake up at 5:00 AM and I would sit at my computer and try and write five tweets from 5- 7:00 AM and it would take all two hours and I would be exhausted after that two hours. And then I was like, I gotta find a better way. And that was when I spent that two weeks, like going through all different prompts and prompt engineering and then it, right?

It was, first it was like, it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna write for me. It’s gonna help me. I generate ideas and angles and hooks and all the things that are gonna make my writing perform better. And then it was like, all right, I’ve figured that out. Now I’ve got the, I solved the idea generation thing and now it’s migrated from just writing to, I’ve been dabbling with this AI called Co-Founder.

Brian Searl: Okay.

Matt Whitermore: And it’s pretty interesting. It’s through like a commercial real estate group. Jake Heller, who puts out a lot of really good content specifically for commercial real estate. But, hooking up Google Scripts to the AI and hooking it up to my email.

So now I can have an AI that scrapes all my email for broker OMS and corrects the listings. It puts it into a street it or a sheet. It parses it, it collates it, and it then even starts to dive in and tell me what it thinks about those deals. And I think about the CRM point that like I, CRMs might be in trouble.

Brian Searl: Oh yeah. 

Matt Whitermore: Because I and I’m a HubSpot evangelist. I think it’s an amazing company and software and I love it. But do I need a CRM if the AI knows everything I do, and eventually it’s gonna know everybody who I talk to on the phone, it’s gonna read all my emails and tell me, it’s gonna tell me what campground I should buy.

It’s gonna have completely underwritten the entire deal and done a, not to call you out, Greg, but it’s gonna do the equivalent of a $20,000 feasibility study. Like that’s not so far fetched to think that guy Jake, and put out like a mega prompt of a feasibility study. And obviously there’s a human element and intuition and I’m not saying you’re, you’ll be replaced by AI.

I don’t believe that. ‘Cause it’s years of experience, but over time you’ll be able to download all of that years of experience to AI. And right, if you’re doing feasibility studies, you’ll be able to do them at 10 times the clip than you can do now. And I think it’s it’s pretty fascinating to just look at, okay, what do I spend my days on?

Let me track my time and see how I’m investing and allocating my time. And then start to think about. 

Greg Emmert: Yep 

Matt Whitermore: . What can I automate? What can I do? 10% of that with AI? Oh, okay, I mastered that 10%. Can I do 50% of it with AI? And then you’re, you, it’s a cliche, and I don’t, I don’t wanna sound like a, I’m overselling it or anything, but you’ll almost get more than 24 hours in a day, right? Compared to. 

Brian Searl: Oh, yeah. Before. I still remember 20, like pre COVID, 2018-19 living in Cleveland. And I would wake up at 5:30 in the morning and I would go work out, and then I would come back and I would voice over two different podcasts that I had going on Spotify. And then I would sit down in front of the camera and I’d film two videos and it would take me like five hours.

And I’d, to your point Matt, like I’d be tired at nine o’clock in the morning, but I did all that manually and now I can do that automatically. And yeah, it’s really interesting where it’s going. Did I answer your question, Brent? Were you talking more about the consumer or business or. 

Brent Parker: Yeah I think the customer, the owners of, these campgrounds and RV parks just trying to figure out, what’s the best way to get them to adopt new technology that breaks the mold of, previous thought, the previous strategies. And 

Brian Searl: I think they’re gonna have to run into a problem. That’s what I think. And it’s even with our chats and calls, we see the same thing with I would’ve told you I don’t understand why you don’t want somebody answering your phone when nobody’s answering your phone after hours. I would’ve told you that would’ve been like a no brainer for people.

And lots of people have signed up, right? But not to near the extent that I would’ve expected. And so I think it’s gonna take something that make is a pain point for them. And whether that’s revenue dropping or camper nights going down, or the economy continuing to soften to the point where they’re like maybe this is a little bit more affordable, or I need more revenue, or I need whatever.

I think that’s what it’s gonna take. It’s like a pain point that they can clearly see that is gonna make them wanna adopt that. But yeah, we have to wrap up the show. I think we’re over.

Final thoughts Matt, you want to, since you have to go, final thoughts and then where can they learn more about Unhitched and Climb Capital?

Matt Whitermore: Yeah. Final thoughts are, I gotta go learn more about AI because ’cause there’s so much more to do and so little time. So many more guests in demand to capture. Unhitched you can go to unhitchedmgmt.com. We are excited about the third party management segment within the industry.

We’re seeing a lot of movement on that side of the industry, growing that quickly. And Climb Capital is our investment company that owns 16 parks. We currently third party manage another 10. So if you’re looking for tips or you’ve had in the back of your mind third party management looking to, step out of the day-to-day operations as a legacy owner, that’s what we love to do.

So you can go to like I said, unhitchedmgmt.com and reach out and we’ll we’ll chat. 

Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here, man. I really appreciate your time, Greg.

Matt Whitermore: Thank you. It’s a pleasure. 

Greg Emmert: Great discussion today. Really enjoyed this. Enjoyed meeting Brent and Matt. Oh, Matt Is Matt just pulled a Claude Reigns. He is. That was fast. 

Brian Searl: He said he had to go in the chat. He had a meeting. That’s why I let him to go first. 

Greg Emmert: Oh, I couldn’t see the chat. Okay, I got you. Yeah, he, that was quick. No, really enjoyed meeting you guys. Brent, hopefully you’ll make it to OHCE would learn, love to learn more about OpenCampground and what you guys are doing there.

Brent Parker: Yeah.

Greg Emmert: And to just to push back against Matt a little bit, you can’t replace this. You can’t. 

Brent Parker: You’re irreplaceable. 

Greg Emmert: You can’t replace this, not necessarily this, but the contents that. No it’s certainly gonna be he’s not wrong. Pretty soon GPT is gonna know. I use it all the time for my work.

So it’s learning everything that I know. Somebody else goes in and says, oh, I want, I wonder what a feasibility study looks like. It’s gonna draw from what it learned from me in a billion other people, but. Working on some interesting stuff there. And that’s also why I lean a little more. I think my due diligence end is gonna go a long way for me.

’cause until you can buy a robot, send a robot to a property, teach that robot what to look for, I think I still gotta, I gotta a good runway on that one. So if you wanna learn more about me and what I do with Vireo, growwithvireo.com. If you don’t like my website, call Brian at Insider Perks. He designed it for me.

I think it’s beautiful. But if you have complaints, just go directly to Brian and thanks for having me on, man. Appreciate it. 

Brian Searl: Thank you. Appreciate it Greg and Brent, last but not least. 

Brent Parker: Yeah, same thing. I’ll echo everything Greg said. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It’s always good to have these discussions of kind of forward thinking, right?

We always tend to stay in the moment and think, okay, how do I serve the customers today? But you always have to have an eye out for, 10 years down the road. Now it’s a year, two years down the road, you’re lucky technology is not gonna wait for you. Yeah, you have to keep up. So this is just a good reminder, good discussion, reminder for me to say, Hey you may need to make some tweaks that might be uncomfortable, but it’s for the better.

And, your customers will gain a lot of value from it, and so just trying to find ways to show more value to the customers I think is paramount. So no, this was a really good discussion.

Brian Searl: Where can they learn more about OpenCampground?

Brent Parker: Yeah. opencampground.com, of course, is the website.

We recently, went through a slight change as far as, doing more enterprise, level features and benefits. So yeah, opencampground.com and if you ever need a demo or anything like that, you can always feel free to contact us. We’ll walk you through it. So yeah, we’re excited. 

Brian Searl: All right, Brent. We’ll definitely see you at OHCE ’cause you’ll be there, right? You’re promising us right now.

Brent Parker: I’m gonna try.

Brian Searl: No, that’s not a promise.

Brent Parker: I think my partners will. But I, yeah, we’re gonna. 

Brian Searl: We need CEO, we need the CEO. You come and I’ll get you a whiskey. Do you drink whiskey or no? You whiskey guys? 

Brent Parker: Yeah, I my, my wife just bought me a Johnny Walker, Blue Label. It was our anniversary yesterday. 

Brian Searl: Oh, nice. Happy anniversary. 

Brent Parker: Yeah. 28 years. 

Brian Searl: 28? 

Brent Parker: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: Congratulations. 

Greg Emmert: Congrats, man. 

Brent Parker: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. 

Brian Searl: I’ll buy you a nice whiskey and we’ll talk about how OpenCampground can be really successful in the future in a geeky way if you want.

Brent Parker: Yeah. 

Brian Searl: Not that we need me, but I’ll give you some cool tips you ignore later. 

Brent Parker: No I love collaboration. I, I. 

Brian Searl: All right. Thank you guys, Brent, Greg, to Matt who had to leave us a little bit early. I appreciate it. It’s another good episode of MC Fireside Chats. If you’re not sick and tired of hearing from me yet, in about an hour, maybe less, 53 minutes, I will be on Outwired with Scott Bahr.

We’re gonna be talking about a couple different topics today appealing to Gen X and or Gen Z, I think, and one other topic that I can’t remember. And then we’re gonna talk about a little bit of learning lessons and stuff on how to prepare yourself for the world of AI, teach yourself some skills, stuff like that, and then the latest AI news.

Other than that, we’ll see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Thanks guys. Really appreciate it. See you later. 

Greg Emmert: Bye-bye.