HIP E75 Greg Emmert - You Own a Job Not a Business

You want to own a hospitality asset and not be chained to it. You want to be the owner, not the employee. But here's the problem most people don't figure out until it's too late. If your property isn't generating enough revenue, you will never escape. Today, we're breaking down how much revenue a hospitality property actually needs, what most investors get wrong before they ever close a deal and what it really takes to build something you can step away from. Let's get into it. The Hotel Investor Playbook. Your guide to building wealth and freedom through hotel and hospitality ownership. Welcome back to the Hotel Investor Playbook. I am Michael Russell, founder of Milama Capital and your host. On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and in hospitality assets. My guest today is Greg Emmer. Greg has spent 26 years owning an operating, a 240 site campground in Ohio, and he won a bunch of industry awards, I think eight straight industry awards, and now he has transitioned into consulting. He helps investors and operators across North America figure out if the deal is going to make them money or not or if they're going to lose their shirt. So Greg, and welcome to the show. Thank you Michael. I really appreciate you having me on. This is great. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you very much for having me on. Absolutely. Well, I want you to go back down memory lane here and open up the vault a little bit because from what I understand, your family went all in on a campground back way back in what 1994. I believe your dad sold the house. He invested his retirement. I mean, he was a risk taker and he bought this, this rather large campground. And within 48 hours, realized Holy Heck, he's way over his head. And so what I want to know, and I think this relates a lot to folks that are getting into hospitality hotels. Sometimes you get a little over your head like back then, what do you specifically remember that was the single most expensive or otherwise important lesson you learned from those early days? Oh man, that's tough. So yeah, we're definitely open in the vault. I tell you, we had some assistance from the folks we bought it from. They were there with us during a handoff period. But when that ended, I mean, the treadmills on it 35 miles an hour and you're being dropped onto it at that speed, there's no other way to describe it. So really early on, the things that we learned and caused the full out of pain, one is regardless of what anybody tells you, regardless of what you think you're capable of, you can't do this stuff yourself. And we thought that that was our cross to bear. That was our task. We needed to put 120 hats on and try to do everything. And as you might imagine, we were either really average or really bad at most of those things. No, no one can do that much on their own. And it took us a while to learn to build systems and processes and delegate. We were really convinced that that's the way we had to do it. We just had to do it all ourselves 90 hours a week while we were open and you can't afford to hire people. It turns out you can't not afford to hire people. They make you better at what you do. They make the guest experience better. They make you more profitable. So that was a big one early on because none of us had, my dad was a machinist. My mom was an office worker and I was a 20 year old punk. I was like 20 going on 13, right? It was difficult. 20 year old, Gen XR. And we didn't know anything about hiring, firing, building a business. My dad got the idea to buy this thing because we were campers. So we camped someplace and we saw other people doing it. We thought we could do that. We had armchair quarterbacks in drum. It was very expensive armchair quarterbacks in drum early on. What do you mean by that? What does that mean? So my dad especially, he sat around and as a camper, we watched the owners and the managers run the place for so we thought and he thought, well, I could do this. They buy a house. They do it pretty well for themselves. Decides to get into RVing. It becomes an RVer. He gets to this place and he's looking at these people and he's like, we can do this. Look, they can all do it. I can do it. And that here's the ambition in buckets, right? But it wasn't tempered with anything. So sure I can do it. Well, there's a one for sale down the street. Let's go check it out. All right. Well, let's see about selling the house. All of this is to say that this entire endeavor, this campground for him, meant freedom. Because for as long as I can remember, he used to talk about how he absolutely despise punching a time clock for somebody else. He wanted to do it for himself. He wanted to work for himself. And so he did. He quit his job. We sold the house, he cashed his retirement, mom's retirement. I mean, every penny is you laid out in the opening to buy this place. But it was bought on the high of armchair quarterback. And look, we've seen these people do this. We can do it. Yeah, when you're a camper to campground, you're watching maybe two percentile. What those owners and managers do. You are not, you are not in any way prepared, especially not with, with his background as young as I was. It was very challenging in the beginning. But that's what I mean by armchair quarterback syndrome. Like we, we all had this idea like we saw that we can do it. Of course we can. It was rough, especially in the beginning. But you know what? It was a 26 year adventure and education. There was not a day that we worked there that three of us didn't learn something new. And that alone was worth it. I mean, apart from the award, then it was profitable. It was a constant education. And that is probably the part that I miss about it the most. Yeah, I think that, you know, we're all guilty of that a little bit, right? We go stay at a wonderful hotel. And naturally of course you can be like, wow, wouldn't be awesome to run something like this, whether it's a hotel, a glamping site, campground, you name it. It's all the same thing. It's hospitality. So what I want to know is for listeners who are coming from maybe a more traditional real estate background. Like what's one thing about owning a hospitality asset that maybe a multifamily or a self-storage investor, for example, what's one thing that they would never see coming? So likely, at least, okay, so from my experience and I've had quite a bit of this because, and I'm sure you saw this too, during the pandemic, when outdoor hospitality was like white hot, like the industry may never see again, right? Because it was the same thing you could do. You could still go outside and I mean, people bought RVs and tents and just they started camping even if they never had before. People who were already campers were going three and five times as much as they used to. During that time, lots of folks from other commercial real estate asset classes waited in or dipped their toe into outdoor hospitality because it was, I mean, and rightfully so it was hot. And it's still great now. It's the very evergreen industry, at least segments of it are. So it's a great investment. But what I saw people struggle with the most was the sort of like become to Jesus moment where they realize how management heavy outdoor hospitality can be, not all of it. And you can certainly, if you buy and build right, you can find ways to lessen that. But for the most part, outdoor hospitality is fairly management heavy one and to the experiential side because the properties again, strictly my experience, the properties that I see that are successful, lean into curating an environment, curating an experience. It's not just, you know, you're going to pay me for that parking spot or pay me for that cabin and then you're never going to see us, you know, have a nice weekend. There are a lot of glamping operators to do and this is not knocking anyone because some of them are wildly successful. But the ones that treat their operations more like a short term rental where you show up as a code, you check in. There might be a book inside the unit that tells you some stuff about the area. They are not seeing the same sort of success as the ones that lean into full hospitality, have a human connection, have someone on site, someone you can speak to or reach out to make contact with. That I think is probably the biggest gap or pain point or surprise that I saw for people coming from other asset classes getting in the outdoor hospitality with that realization of management heavy and I really need to figure out its outdoor hospitality. That second word hospitality to me is a very human connection. If a human thing, you need a person or people, a staff and you need to curate an environment where people feel that hospitality. It can't just be words on a screen or, you know, notes and a notebook that's got to be curated person to person. So that's probably the place where I saw people struggle the most coming over. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I'm really surprised by that actually. I guess in my mind, when I think about camping specifically, my first thought, I don't associate necessarily hospitality. I think about maybe exclusivity, seclusion, having privacy or just being somewhere that's really remote, all of the features of being outdoors. But what you're describing, it parallels very similarly to whatever other hospitality asset classes, whether it's a hotel, glamping site, you name it. Like we've been talking about, this seems to be the similar pattern here. This word we keep hearing, which is offering the experience, right? People are looking for experiential hospitality and the human connection or offering some extra level of service. This seems to be constant across all hospitality assets. And I guess I just didn't really see that connection until you pointed it out with camping, per se. But I guess that's equally important. Can you give me some examples then of maybe some ways in which you can enrich someone's camping experience by offering them a little bit more service? Yeah, sure. And I think it's important to note, as you've mentioned, that you can get a lot of experience with camping experience by offering them a little bit more service. Yeah, sure. and you just did a really good job of sort of lining up how it does. This is one of the areas where there is overlap. This is for what I'm speaking about is what my bread and butter was and what a lot of my clients are, which is RV camping, which we should just drop the word camping, right? Because if you're in an RV, okay, you're generally not camping. Not everybody is like that, right? If you got a pop-up camper, you're camping, you got a teardrop camper, you're camping, you got a 40-foot pre-vows, you are not camping. All right, let's just, I'm sorry, pre-vows, donors out there. If you're all angry with me at this point, you're probably not, because you know you're not camping, right? You've got an electric fireplace and three TVs and every all the comforts of home, that's not camping, right? That's our V-ing. So our V-ing and traditional hospitality are really close. They just, instead of coming to you and getting a key and going and checking in, they're rolling in with their hotel room all set. They just need a spot to put it on. But so some of the ways you can enhance the guest experience, okay? So that human touch point is huge. You know, obviously every hospitality, lane, you want the seamless booking, really smooth, frictionless check-in, right? Is a big deal. But once you're on site, okay, how do I make that work? How do I make that better for my guests? Well, if not amenities, it's partially layout, maybe, but it's not really even that it is communication. It is 100% communication. How do you communicate with the guest? How do you find touch points? And how do you make sure they've got everything they need? So first of all, if you own, if you're listening right now and you own or operate a campground or a glam ground, if you are on property as an owner, you should be finding ways to say hello to your guests, even if it's just driving by on a golf cart and waving at them, stopping and shaking their hands. If you have long-term guests, let's say, catch them doing something right is something I heard somebody say ages ago. And I love to use that because, you know, a lot of times maybe the manager or assistant manager is out on the campground or out on the property. There's a dog running the okay off to ask these folks, would you please put your dog back on the leash or would you please turn your radio down? Or whatever it might be, catch them doing something right. Just say hello, tell them their grill smells great. Make a joke, ask them when, you know, they should be by what can they bring anything for dinner. But let them know that you are the owner or the operator. I wish I could remember the statistic, but the chance of them re-booking after meeting you is the owner, even if it is just a quick handshake is orders of magnitude higher. So let them know you're there. Say hi, tell them thank you for being there. Train your front desk staff to be able to answer the em near anything and to even work as a concierge, which that is something that outdoor hospitality absolutely stole from traditional hospitality. Not a lot of parks do it, and it's really easy. I mean, usually you're employing people that are living in the area or even if they're a work camper, they're staying with you. They came from a distance away, but they're staying at your part. Learn the area, learn the attractions, learn to give people guidance on the best times to go places, the best trail heads, the best restaurants, offer to make them reservations, offer to buy the tickets for them. That's another really great way. And again, it's another human touch point. Make sure that every person on your staff understands their role and understands that guest communication is their absolute first priority. It doesn't matter if they're raking gravel, plunging a toilet, guest communication is your first priority hands down period. I want to stop here because what I'm talking about, like you're not talking about amenities. I was expecting you to say, you know, you're going to have a killer pool and you're going to have some sort of feature that these RVs may enjoy that the help to your location. But you've been just talking about human connection. And I see the ways in which you can offer better and a better experience. But to go through that process and to put energy and life force in bandwidth into running an excellent RV camp. I want to know, do these things make money? Because it seems like a hell of a lot of work you're describing, and a lot of life force, like do RV camps? Are they profitable? In comparison to a traditional hotel, it seems very easy. Like, okay, we got a $200 a night ADR that we could offer incredible hospitality experience and bump it up by 50%. Let's say, or maybe, you know, maybe more. But with an RV site, you put all that work in, I mean, what kind of margins? What kind of money do people make running RV sites? Answer to everything is always it depends, right? It used to be that you could ballpark, like if you were under to do napkin math, right? You could say, all right, my expense ratio is probably going to be in the 40 to 50% range, depending on what type of park I'm running. For hotel, we're talking, hotel is going to be 60 to 70% expense ratio. So margins are much slimmer. So if you can pull off 40 to 50% expense ratio, that's attractive. You got my attention now. Please continue. Used to be. Now that's changed a little bit, but it's still pretty good. I mean, now I think it's fairer to say more like 55 or 60. Like it's pretty much flipped, right? You're instead of being 60% falling to the bottom. Maybe it's more like 60% coming off the top and that 40% falling to the bottom. People want to know how do they get out from being mom and pop operators to own a business where they're the owners and not the employees of the business where they're not responsible necessarily for being there on site, being the one driving the golf cart as you described. How do they get to a point where they can separate themselves from the business and what I think it starts with, you've got to have enough revenue to be able to pay for the personnel and you can't do so if you're properly generating, let's say $300,000 in top line revenue. Like one employee is going to eat a good, maybe a third of that really, it's all said and done after taxes and payroll and all this stuff. So let's be real here. Like I always say that at minimum when we're evaluating an opportunity to purchase a hospitality asset, like anything less than a million dollars in revenue, we just can't even consider. Like ideally the bottom threshold is going to be a million and a half dollars of revenue because we have to have enough revenue to be able to pay for the resources, the staff, the all of the systems to put in place so that we don't have to be there on site, that we can operate properties as remote owners and really be the owners and not the employees. In camping or an RVing in this case, like I don't know what is someone charged per night for an RV space and how many RV spaces do you need to be able to generate a million and a half dollars in revenue? Is that even possible? And especially if RV sites are operating very seasonally, let's say four months out of the year, like you're a consultant. So you know the numbers like let's talk about let's dig in. What do you charge per night for an RV site? What's the minimum number of spaces for these things to be economical? Not for a mom and pop operator, but for a legitimate business owner. I'm glad you brought this up, Michael, because what you're talking about is something that I get questions about a lot because I'll get a client, they'll say I bought this park, but I don't want to be the guy driving the golf cart. I want to be a business owner, not an operator. Okay, well, there's some different ways we can try to go about that for you. Maybe we can hire a manager and you just supervise them. Maybe we can find you third party management. But and you hit right on the number, those third party management companies, if you're not looking at a million dollars top line, they're not returning your calls. And some of them even as high as one five, my carousen from CRR is a great example. Great guy, incredibly smart. CRR does a great job with third party management. I know this sounds like a commercial for them. It's not, but they're good at what they do. If you're not in that one five range, they're not taking the calls. And the calls that I usually get from these owners, they have the park that's they're like, you know, it makes 300,000 or makes 500,000. I don't know how to tell you this, but you bought an owner operator asset. And some assets just are, right? They're those are going to be owner operator asset in perpetuity. Unless you can figure out how to triple that or double that top line number, you're never, you're, it's always going to be on you. Does it mean that you can't raise the revenue to a point and put in place systems and procedures and get good employees where you're working less, but you're going to be there at that kind of a number. You're, you're going to be there. So I think the most recent stat that I saw was that average ADR for a campsite is around 59 bucks. So now let's say you've got a hundred sites and you can get a hundred nights out of each one. Am I doing the math right? Is that 10,000 nights total? Okay. So what you're saying is we got a hundred, hundred sites times a hundred days times a hundred nights. Let's say out of, I'm just speaking it to Northern Park. Let's say we're not open through the winter. So you got a six month season that's a hundred and eighty nights. If you can get a hundred nights out of each site, that's pretty good. You know, that's over most parks to be honest average somewhere around 30 or 40% occupancy. It's something that is kind of hard to parse out when you talk to owners because you'll get, you'll get folks that will say, I'm full all the time and you say, why you're full from Monday to Thursday. How do you figure that out? Because that's the gap in the industry. You must be near a giant attraction. Well, okay, I'm full in the weekend. Well, that's not full all the time. Full on the weekends only comes out to be about 34, 35% occupancy, right? Because you're missing the bulk of it, which is during the week. So if you can get a hundred nights out of a site, all right, that's pretty good. That's a decent baseline to shoot for anyway. So let's say 10,000 nights at the industry average of about 59 bucks a night. You're around 600K top line, you know. Okay. Now let's go with that. Let's say 600K with a hundred sites. So I'm just putting the pieces together saying, well, to me, I need a 200 site location for this worthwhile. And how is that pretty common for these sites to be 200? That seems like a lot of, that's like, if I think about a 200 room hotel, that's a massive hotel. That's a good hotel. Campground, like how many of these are there? You're following it. That's like, that's mid range. The park I owned was 240. There are parks that get upwards over a thousand between the different lodging types and the RV types. Because that, let's face it, that is one of the real upsides of RV type campgrounds is that you can get into a whole lot of different revenue streams. You can rent RV sites of differing types. You can decompress your rates by making some that are really a metady laden, really high end, you know, red carpets, like puts, called them down to the most basic wear a tent mic today. You can have cabin lodging. You could put in your or TPs or whatever you want to sort of diversify what you have to offer. Again, decompressing your rates, expanding the target market a little bit. You certainly don't want to reach out and try to be everything to everyone that the good way to fail. You need to identify who you're for and what you're providing. Well, let's talk about that real quick because I'm an outsider here. But I've heard that there's a little bit of conflict between RV sites and regular campers, you know, that pull up in their own vehicle and then throw it out of tent and that those two different, those clients don't intermesh very well. Can you just go, "What, why is that?" Yeah, that's true. And to some extent, glampers, the same way probably the worst failures I've seen in people that tried to lean into glamping were ones that they saw like the tremendous ADR that some glamping operations were able to generate with a canvas tent. I mean, let's face it, if you can invest in something like a canvas tent and get four or five hundred bucks a night, I mean, sign me up too, right? But if you put that canvas tent in an area where it's surrounded by RVers, you're not glamping anymore. You're running a tent in your campground and you need to market it as such. That's a really good way to fail at glamping. Glamping's not just an accommodation type, it's a full experience. So to your point, the tent campers, the RVers, the glampers, they can coexist at a property, but you are going to need to separate them somehow because they want, they want different things. A glamper wants seclusion. They want decent quiet. They want the connection with nature. If you put that glamping tent on the edge of a field across from your RV sites, that's not going to work out so well. If you have the space to get it separated where it's quieter, where you can build that terrific, same thing with tent campers. And if the market's there, of course, right? Like this can get really into the weed that I don't want to. But look, I'm doing the math here. I want to ask something on this point. So the glamping, look, let's say it's $500 a night. Now, granted, you got to offer some value there. You can't just throw it at a regular tent and charge $500. There's got to be some sort of amenity. It's got to be scenic. There's got to be presumably exoners and cold plunges and just whatever that is in addition to just a nice location. That said though, if I'm doing the math and we just figured out that, look, we need at least a 200 site RV camp for this thing to be able to support a staff to support the type of experience. If I look at roughly $500 a night and I divide that by the $59 a night RV pad, it's not exactly where we're looking at roughly around the equivalent and revenue to a comfortable we want to do. It's about 25 glamping sites will give us the same amount of revenue as a 200 site RV camp. And that's about the labor and the, all the cost, the moving parts, the bandwidth, everything involved in running a 200 site resort versus a 25 one. I'm going to lean to the 25 one all day every day. Absolutely. Like how do you reconcile that to where people that are considering opening up an RV camp or buying one when there's alternatives that require a lot less just involvement? Yeah. And that's a great question. And you can see why people can see why glamping continues to be so hot. It, as you know, it depends on market location, right? It is this a good spot for glamping versus RV. And it also depends on the investors, of course. Some people just feel that connection. They want to have an RV campground. But the real, to me, one of the big differentiators is that something like RV camping is much more evergreen as compared to something like glamping for 500 bucks a night, especially right now when people are, they feel very squeezed and they have for a number of years now, right? Inflation is really affecting wages are not trending along with it. People are feeling squeezed. It's a lot harder to keep those people coming to something that is in that 400 plus per night range as opposed to I already have this RV sitting in my driveway and yeah, times are tight, right? So maybe I don't travel as far or maybe I don't go as often. But I'm still going because it's sitting here. They're like, we're going to get our use out of it. And camping in general, whether it be with a tent with an RV, it is one of the most affordable ways that you can travel and spend your leisure time. So you're taking advantage of the hundreds of thousands of RVs that are already out there on the market, the ones that are being sold right now and you're leaning into something that's much more evergreen because you can. So when we talked about $59 a night, that's the short term rate. Then you have long term camping where people might pay you just to put it on a site for a month or two months or six months and treat it like, I'm if I could get away cabin, right? It fits there. It's ready to go. It's turnkey. They buy their camping from you in bulk because they pay you one price for 30 days or 180 days, whatever that might be. That takes the nightly rate and lowers it significantly. Now I get to use it all year long. And maybe instead of me spending $59 a night, maybe by the time I break it down, it's only $25 or $30 a night. Well, that's a hell of a deal for me and my kids and my way, even if things are squeeze, I can put it on a site for July and August because I know this is the two months we're going to camp the most. Yeah, it's going to be in the same spot, but that also offers me the freedom of not having to purchase the fuel to tow it, not having to get it ready every day or the time to prep it, hook it up, tow it, park it, bring it back home, clean it up. It just stays in one spot. It becomes a turnkey, almost like having a vacation rental. That segment of RV camping is incredibly evergreen. We bought my parents bought our park in 94, eight, everything went to L and we were really scared. We didn't know it was going to happen. You know what happened? Nothing. We got busier than we ever were. We had a ton of our business was long term. If we had had the resources at the time, we could have doubled the size of the campground and probably still had a wait list. Like those long term campers when a recession hits, there are you, you can trip over them. They are everywhere because people have these things. They don't, you can't sell it. You're in a recession. Nobody can afford to buy it from you. Let's get the mues out of it. Let's put it on a site and have a little weekend getaway and we'll try this park this year and maybe we'll move it to another park next year. But it's really evergreen compared to those higher ADRs for glamping. Yeah. I think I share your skepticism as well with glamping. I think that it's unproven to date because it is in relative terms a recent phenomenon that said there's a lot of value in being able to go and be an occasional camper and not have to have all the gear and not also have to, you know, if you're not accustomed to camping in the traditional form to enjoy a little bit more of a luxurious experience. So I think that time will tell, right? It's too soon. But to your point, if someone has a passion for RV camping, then this really fills that need for them, that fulfillment. This is the idea of hospitality. It's not just the business to make money. It's a business that provides personal joy and fulfillment. So that isn't something that's going to go away anytime soon. I'm curious to get your thoughts on another asset class that kind of runs parallel with this, which are kind of like the micro resorts, right? There's a lot of buzz these days about micro resorts. Now, I want to know, do you have an experience with this, particularly people that are perhaps purchasing prefabricated units, you know, like there's a frames, there's these tiny homes, there's modular cabins. This seems really appealing for someone who doesn't have the development experience to be able to rely on a supplier and just source the land. It also seems like it could cost a lot less money than traditional structures. And they look really cool. They build these really unique looking accommodations. So I want that your take on this. Do you have any clients that are building micro resorts of perhaps using prefab and what are the results that they're seeing? So I see a lot of this now. It feels like even like my personal Facebook feed is if you get into the reels of the shorts, there's, it seems like every third one I scroll past is, oh, if you own land, we can show you how to get hundreds of thousands of dollars out of it just with a few small structures. And yeah, I see it a lot. I'm not working with anybody yet, but I'm, I'm even more skeptical for the reasons that you mentioned before about size and scale. It sounds great to have four yards on your 20 acres and make 300,000 dollars, but I'm really skeptical of that. First of all, where the hell is your property? You can't just the era of if you build it, they will come. I think that's gone. I think you need to be near a population center. First of all, you can't be One of the things I hate to hear early on in a call is somebody tells me that they bought the most beautiful land in the world. It's going to be perfect. It's only four and a half hours from the nearest city and that's what people want. They want to drive out into the middle of nowhere and have an immersive time. That's true. They do. But that four and a half hours is way over what industry data says people are willing to drive to get there. I see those ads and I get really nervous for folks that are making the investment. Well, not only that, but the labor. So one of the advantages of describing is it's remote. One of the challenges is you don't have a large labor force to pull from. And so to in order to maintain people, you probably have to provide them housing on site. That's an opportunity cost. And then you go deep, something's difficult enough or do it yourself. And that is absolutely what I want to avoid. So I think that this does apply though for campgrounds as well. RV parks. Let's talk about that a little bit. When you're advising a client and looking at, well, how are you going to add value and in alignment with the experience driven type of hospitality that you got to include. Well, we may need to add more labor to provide this experience. Where? What challenges do RV camper or RV camp owners have in sourcing personnel? And how do you overcome that? Yeah, you're right into exactly where we just left off with the four and a half hours away from anything. If you're 90 minutes away from a metro area and you've just got small towns, you're in agricultural areas, think about the size of your labor force. It gets really, really hard. So you do have, there are work campers in the industry, right? I don't know if you're familiar with this term, but these are folks that full time live in their RVs and they will travel the country, stay at a park, work in that park, and then maybe move on to the next one, maybe repeat in that park if they really like it. I was very fortunate. I attracted really good work campers because I treated them really well, but there's a whole community of that, right? So you can get a work camper, but you've got to train those people new every year. That's not nearly the same as being able, right? If I've got 10 work campers that are helping me out in the year and they all leave and I get 10 new ones the next year, I got 10 new trainees every single year as opposed to if I can hire someone local and treat them really well and train them really well and keep them. Now each year as time goes on, my job gets easier and easier and easier instead of having to start with a freshman class every year, let's say. So that can be really, really difficult and that does go to the isolation factor. And it's not just labor, but like, where are you going to get anything? Okay, so we want to build some new stuff. You have to drive an hour one way to get to a big box store. You have to, there's two hours out of your day plus shopping times. There's a day gone just to supply things. You definitely need to make sure that you, this is where I do market research. So here I am, I guess this sounds a little self-promotional, but please, if anyone is listening and you're thinking about just building before you, if you don't feel like you can afford to have a market study and a feasibility study done, then you probably can't afford to build and operate your campground. You should skip it or wait till you can afford that because it can be awful. Let's say to spend $10,000 on a feasibility study to get your advisor to tell you that it's a no-go. He doesn't advise that you do it, but that is a lot cheaper than spending half a million dollars on land and investing all of your savings and then trying to build something and find out once it's built that it was a bad idea. You need to be able to parse some of that stuff out early on. It's such a risk to do it without that. So yeah, to your point though, hiring can be incredibly hard. Yeah. Well, the work exchange is a very, that's a very opportunistic way to go about providing labor for your business. In fact, this is very common with hostels and we've used it to our advantage and you're right, there's a tremendous amount of turnover. So you've got to have core employees. You've got to have at least two, three people. So if one goes on vacation, like you're not just that the house is not just operating without any leadership, but you can augment or you can supplement your labor force. Folks that one of the advantages that they have, if they are more temporary, is that they're typically more enthusiastic about the opportunity and that transfer of energy can be contagious and that can lead to really great results for the experience that you're trying to drive. And so once they get bored and they no longer enjoy the experience, all right, off to the new and then someone else comes in and they're fresh. I think that the work exchange model can be tremendous and for any listener, I mean, that's something you should definitely at least investigate. As you were kind of leading in talking about like, hey, look, the feasibility study is super important and look, you're a consultant. This is what you do as your day job is you look at hundreds of scenarios annually and you advise your clients on the best way for them to go about to build their dream. And let's say their dream is they want to build a micro resort or an RV campground or whatever it may be, it's not already established and they want to go find the raw land. They want to find that location. I'm intrigued. I want to know, like walk us through your process, like 8-Z, like where would someone even start if they have the inclination to go develop, like I said, a resort or campground would have you, where do they start and what are the steps that they need to pay attention to if they're going to be successful? So and actually I just this year developed, now here's where I go back to AI and say it's great. I developed a really quick site screening tool that I can throw in either coordinates or an address on and it'll give me back things like wetlands, fire danger, distance to hospital, distance to grocery, distance to big box, distance to local Walmart because, and maybe you may know this already, I just learned this. There is a lot of times a CRE, I don't know if you want to call it a life hack, but they do such great ED, right? That if you've got, if you're close to, okay, you're nodding your head, I was today years old when I learned that. I had no idea and I thought, God, that's great. Okay, so I put it in the site screening tool. So it can kick back a really quick and it sets these different parameters that I have with like a red light for a hold on effect and yellow, okay, we can proceed with caution or green as go, right? If they're within a certain distance. So you definitely want to be within 30 minutes or so of most of those things I just rattled off if you can be, right? A little bit further on some of them is okay. It depends on who you're catering to. Is this going to be a more luxury RV resort? You're probably going to want to be closer. Is this a place that's geared toward overlanders and maybe it's a really rustic type campground? Okay, you can probably be a little further out, but obviously wetlands and fire, you want to watch out for those kind of things, floodway, are you in a floodway? That little tool that I have will parse all that out really quickly. But really, if you can get within 90 minutes of a million or so people, that's a really good jumping off point and that is no secret, right? That's pretty much the same across a lot of different types of real estate or business in general. You want to have an audience. It used to be that being on the way park was okay. If you look at I-80 going out across the central plains, there's some tiny little parks in pounds where there's not, I mean, there's two intersections and there's a KOA there that 20 years ago used to be. What's KOA? A campgrounds of America. I'm sorry. They spell it with a KOA. They're the largest franchise system in outdoor hospitality. They've got roughly 500-ish franchisee-owned campgrounds and then I think they have a couple dozen or maybe 30 that KOA themselves own and operate. But they're franchises and I operated as one for nine years, my last nine years. These parks, they could make their entire year on the traffic that they would get from people just going to the Black Hills for the Sturgis motorcycle rally or heading out the Yellowstone because all of that East Coast traffic people go into the national parks that were going by there. Travel patterns have changed now and a lot of those on the way parks are the first ones to suffer if the economy contracts. We talked before about how folks might stay closer to home. They might not travel as far. Those on the way parks are a little bit tougher. You can make it out in the middle of nowhere, but that's a lot harder. You want to be near an attraction, near a destination if you can be. To go back to what we said earlier, a 50-site park, a stone's throw from Disneyland, might be plenty to make you enough to get your million, million and a half, depending on what you can get. But if you're going to be. If you're going to try to tuck yourself out in the hills and make it on a view and piece and quiet, there are certainly people that want that that are in much more challenging value-prob. I don't think it should be. That's my jam. I don't own an RV on there well. I love camping in my tent. I want to hear crickets and campfires and sea dark skies, but not everybody does. We ran into this a little bit when we were looking at the set of hotels in Montana. The on the way location is tricky because, look, the closer you get to the natural attraction, let's say it's a national park, real estate prices, skyrocket. So naturally you look like, "Okay, well, let's just outside that boundary." The upside is you can buy it for less money. The downside is clear that you just sometimes suffer that there's less demand. That's a real tricky fine line that you really. You've got to walk and you've got to understand how that could potentially be consequential for your projections. There's no single answer, right? If it were easy, everyone would do it. It's in the plants. You're talking a lot about demand indicators. What about supply indicators? What do you got to be aware of? What are some of the obstacles that maybe you're obvious that you should. You can be able to track. Yeah, I'll definitely parse out things like how many campsites are within a 50 mile radius, 25 mile radius. Again, that depends on the market. Some areas, I'll stretch that circle out a little wider because it just makes more sense to you. Maybe there's another metro area that's right on the edge. Okay, well, I'm gonna stretch that out because I know those people are gonna drive to this potential development that I'm working on, right? So I'll stretch out that demand and supply circle a little bit. I'll look at how many sites are within there and then you can find out how many RVs are registered in that area or you can just extrapolate out X amount of Americans own RVs. There's this many households within this circle. There are roughly this many RVs within this circle that are potential customers. Now, you're constantly narrowing that down, right? Because the last thing you wanna do is build a property that is designed, I want every camper to camp at my campground. Great way to fail, right? You need to figure out who you serve, how you're going to serve them. If you try to build a good for everybody campground, you're gonna be really average. You won't really excel at anything. It's just like I talked earlier about when we were trying to wear all the hats and do all the work. We were really average at everything, at bad. We weren't excelling at anything. So find your niche, figure out what your clientele is before you build it. Okay, so we're narrowing that funnel down, but we can fill their ways that I can figure out roughly how many RVs are in that circle, okay, and then how many sites are in that circle? What's the national average for supply? And then is this area over-supplied or undersupplied? And I will tell you that far more than 50% of the time, the areas that I look at are undersupplied. There are a lot of RVs and even with the burst of interest during the pandemic, there's still some campsites that need to get built. Certainly there are areas that are probably overbuilt, but the majority of the ones that I look at could still take supply. Okay, well, like from a high level, can you give me an idea of where are some of these places where you see that it's a good idea to invest in a campground there? Like I am working on one right now, and so here's this one's kind of crazy. They're about an hour out from Pittsburgh. So not too far from me, because I'm in Akron, Ohio, Pittsburgh's about 90 minutes two hours away. This one's over a little further east near the Ohio, P.A., West Virginia border. There's that little sliver of West Virginia that comes up really narrow, this area's right in there. There are campgrounds quite a few of them in that area, but compared to what my client is looking at building, there's nothing like it supplied in that area. And honestly, it's that area alone at 50 miles. There are more RVs than there are RV sites, and it's relatively sparsely populated over here, but it's within 90 minutes of Pittsburgh, 90 minutes of Columbus, Ohio, which is a really big metro area, 90 minutes of Youngstown, which is smaller, but still, by the time you combine those three, I think what did I have like two and three-quarter to shy three million people? That's a solid audience. - Right there. - Yeah, that's a pleasure. That's not a place that's top of mind when I think about those things in hospitality. What I'm hearing when you say this is, there's an opportunity to invest in a niche that's less competitive. Is there any accuracy in that? I just said that, but I have no idea. To be honest, what I assume, but is that true? - Yeah, they're absolutely, and I'm sure, and actually, I'd be curious to hear your take on this from the traditional hospitality side. Maybe you look at a market and you go, well, it seems like it's really well supplied, but everybody that's in that circle is doing the same damn thing. There's no one is catering. Okay. - All the offerings at every little 20, 25 unit resort is offering wellness and all the buzz. And it looked beautiful. And on Instagram, they look really awesome, but it's all the same. And so there's a lot of competition. People are overpaying, that's it. - Interesting. - Okay. So it does happen in traditional hospitality too. It's the same thing. And it almost like fosters itself, because somebody, they see a campground, it's successful. I've got a campground. Well, what's that guy down the road got? Oh, he's got a swimming pool and two jumping pillows. Well, I'm gonna build a swimming pool and two jumping pillows because he did it and he's successful. And what kind of events is he having? Okay, we'll just copy those events. And the person down the road from them does it. And pretty soon, a market is saturated with parks doing pretty much the same thing. Okay, well then what's missing? And that's where I tend to, I really try to focus on my feasibility and on my advice when I'm coaching clients is like, find the gap. Don't play to what your neighbor is doing, that he's already doing it. Don't do that. What's missing? So go out and even if you have to commission your own study, if you have to find out for me, what is the market look like? If you have to go to somebody like Scott Barr at Karen Consulting, great friend of mine, market data guru, he does the K-OA North American camping report for K-OA every year. He does work for the Overland Expo and the glamping show Wealth of Knowledge, ton of data in his brain. Let him run you a survey. You can do a study and find out exactly what's missing in that area. Build to that. Why are you trying to attract the same customers? There's already 15 other parks or properties that are catering to those customers to your Palm Springs example, right? So what is someone not doing? That's where you should ask the space you need to try to play in. So even if the space seems oversupplied, it could technically be under supplied. It all depends on who's in that market, how many of these other types of campers do I have, and then can I provide the gap? Can I fill that gap? Yeah, I see so much similarity in what you're describing between outdoor hospitality and, well, specifically RV camping and hostels. It's a lower cost accommodation, and it serves a larger, you have to have a high volume of travelers. We talked about this in the example of the clamping versus the 200-site, 200-pads-site. It's like hostels, we go through the same thing. There's relatively very little competition. It's an overlooked asset type that does extremely well from a financial perspective, has relatively really good margins. But if you get two, three, four hostels in the same location, like Miami, for example, everyone thinks you should invest in Miami 'cause it's so international, and there's such a happening spot, and then there's 13 hostels there, and they're all just driving down the price because they're all offering the same thing. They're just basing their whole model based on cost, and what is the cheapest place for a visitor to stay at. And so to your point, we took a slightly different approach, with hostels being the stigma of just a cheap place to stay, we're charging more, but we're offering activities. We give people tours and let them meet others and the connection experiences what the added, that's our secret sauce, that's the added value. - Absolutely. - And I think that that probably applies to a lot of tar being. People go there and sure they want to experience a great outdoors, but at the same time, they want to talk to their neighbor, right? They want to play being go-or-shoffle-board, or maybe it's now that all the rage is, it's like tennis, what's that thing with the ball? - It's a ball. - Here's a ball. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Low rent tennis, sorry, I just offended every pickle ball or everywhere, but I'm sorry, that is low rent tennis. I don't know what to tell you. - Okay, well let's expand on this a little bit here, because if you're looking at suicide selection, and of course you want to do the feasibility study, pay for the feasibility study people. - Yes, please. - Absolutely. - Even if it's not with me, just do it, please, yeah. - But I want to understand, you know, like, what are some of the infrastructure obstacles that people should be aware of when evaluating the feasibility of a particular location? I'm talking about water and sewer and electric and roads and all this stuff. I mean, if you buy an existing site, then you can add value to it. But if your vision is to go develop from raw dirt, how does one approach that? What are some of the obstacles they need to be aware of? - So first, the start with this, probably if anybody's listening in their experience, this is maybe sounds crazy to you, but I have had clients call me and tell me they bought the land without checking the zoning, only to find out that they spent their life savings on a piece of land that they can't develop. It's within a, there's a floodway or it's wind in a conservation easement and they bought 100 acres, thinking they could put 600 sites on it and they found out that they can only develop five acres. So please, by all means, start with a zoning dome, yeah, sign a check until you know that you can actually develop this into the type of campground you've got or the type of property that you want to build. Number one, road class, you mentioned is another one. If you're building a park that's really rustic and it's meant for people who are more adventurous and maybe overlanders or tent campers, if the last five miles is gravel, no big deal. If it's an RV resort and you're expecting the guy with a $2 million pre-vose to come down that five mile gravel road, sorry, mistaken, he might, but he's gonna write you a skating review and never come back again. So incredibly important. And then, yeah, power, water, waste water, power is typically easier. If, you know, there are some really remote sections, right, that maybe it's gonna be hard to get your power, but even on most semi-remote or rural areas, you've got power within. If it's not on the road, it's close. The biggest ones are wastewater, because again, water, if it's not there, again, typically, I'm very high level, typically, you can drill a well. - That is so scary to me. I was waiting for people thinking, okay, you know, you go build a campground and you're not tied into municipal water, you're just crossing your fingers and being like, well, I hope we can drill and get water. I mean, waste is obviously there's a process to get a septic or whatever it is, so that you can place wastewater somewhere, but to find and locate and source water, for drinking water for everything, how do you even know if there's water in the ground? - Yeah, that's tough. You've got to really be, you need to search the other properties around, right? Are there some homesteads around the area? If it's really remote, are there other homes in the area? Do they have wells? What's the oddity? for like and you can typically find that by going to the H days right if you go to your authority having jurisdiction and you find out okay who handles drilling the wells off issuing the permit all right in this part of the county you have good water you have bad water because it can be that that precise right Hawking Hills Ohio perfect example really if second highest tourism driven area in the state of Ohio and on one side of the county not a problem good water good quality on the other side of the county can't get enough to fill a tank let alone supply a hundred sites so it can be really specific you do have to be very careful with that and if I have to make a choice and choose okay you can only get one you can either get municipal sewer to get rid of your waste water you can get municipal water so you don't have to drill wells give me municipal water all day long all day long because to your point I probably have a higher likelihood of getting a perk test and and finding out that I can get septic or there if you're in if you're in a dryer area with rockier soil there there are different ways to get rid of wastewater in different places water first of all you have to have it too it is a way that you can really charge yourself some problems if something goes wrong with your wastewater treatment you hire a septic hauler maybe you have them come out and you have them empty tanks out of your your customers camper you can build a dump station in a lot of jurisdiction still where you put a tank on the ground and if your wastewater treatment goes out okay folks you can use the dump station and you can have that pump out later if something goes wrong with your well water you can make people sick or you can you can strand them with no water for the weekend right or for the week so if I got to choose give me municipal water all day long and I'll deal with wastewater but wastewater is probably your most expensive because between the testing and the permitting and the design and the engineering incredibly expensive when it comes to building and developing and then why that gets me the most hung up on I so look I go on Instagram and I see all these people talking about micro resorts and and we apply the same principle to RV resorts but it's like build your dream you can build micro resorts is so profitable look how awesome they are on Instagram and in all this and then that's fine if everything all the infrastructure is there but what I'm thinking about negotiating to purchase the raw land from a seller it's one thing that I come to terms on the price for the land but then there's all these unknowns and these variables that you're describing that you will not know until presumably 60 90 120 days maybe longer and in many cases the seller's like look man 30-day escrow you got to buy this thing you know you buy it or not but and so you've got oftentimes take on this risk you buy this land and you really have no idea what the water situation is that's right I mean sure we can do a feasibility study that's what 10 grand so 10 grand for feasibility okay demands there supplies right this theoretically makes sense but how do you pull the trigger to be able to invest in raw land without the certainty of all these other logistics and then if you do take a stab at it and maybe you don't buy the land maybe you get the process done during due diligence you've still spent presumably 10 grand for the feasibility plus whatever costs for all this other surveying and things that you need to determine if there's water feasibility next thing you know you're out 20 25 grand and that's just one property and it's like okay now I'm gonna start this process over again like to me it seems overwhelming is there a cheat code here that you can share those to give us some like inspiration or some hope that hey this isn't as difficult as I just mapped out yeah don't build by that is the advice nine times out of 10 that I give especially somebody that the first timer it sounds glamorous to build your own place and have it be fully you right and exactly what you want laid out exactly the way you want but especially if you're new to the industry don't try to build right would I mean would you if somebody said I want to get into you know what a boutique hotel is anything under a hundred keys is that right or is that I mean it's not to someone's kind of subjective yeah it's totally subjective yes okay so let's say I want to get into hotels Michael I want to build my first I'm brand new I've known nothing about it I want to build one for my first one for like my first for a would you would you tell them that's a good idea because I typically don't I typically tell folks let's find you a cash flowing asset because then you can learn can learn all of this you can always go buy one later in fact if you have a cash flowing asset you have something that's really valuable you could borrow against could you and you can show a bank hey look I have experience in this now I've been running this place for the last four or five years look at how profitable I am look what I've done with the numbers okay now you want to loan me the the money to buy the land and build the next one great because now I have a track record because it's really hard if you don't have a track record and it's harder to secure money to buy the raw land then it then it is to buy the cash flowing asset because if you goof up if to your point if all of this stuff checks out to a certain point and then stops checking out I have a piece of land that I can't do anything with maybe or I can't make as much money as I thought I could but a bank can look at an asset and go well let's do the books oh we can figure we can underwrite this thing we know what it's worth sure we'll earn you the money to buy that because it looks like it it's a profitable business it's so much easier so would you I mean I know I'm turning this around on the interviewer I'm making you the interviewee but how would you advise somebody if they said you know what for my first one I'd like to build it instead of buying it well look we what are the reasons we're in touch right now is because I reached out to you for your services because look I was considering very much involved in pursuing purchasing a property in Idaho and for my audience look you hear me talk about this right so here's what happened so there's a hotel in Idaho it's a couple hours outside of Boise beautiful location the demand wasn't as strong as what I'd hoped for after doing my research but there was some upside to develop the adjacent properties into you know a clamping site microzoar maybe even RV pad and that's what that's what's how we got connected the challenge was exactly what we described is there was so much uncertainty with the water because electricity was provided by the city or county but they're on septic and there was a well but these were for two you know individual small residential homes not enough to supply a 200 pad RV resort and so everyone that I spoke to about how can we find water was very much like well you know you kind of got to just buy the land and see what happens and I got full well yeah I couldn't I couldn't move forward because I just wanted to have enough experience with the ground up development particularly when it came to outdoor hospitality and number two I wasn't even sure if there was enough demand if I were to be successful in developing this so it just to your point if I were reevaluating yeah I would say okay of course I would like to buy let's say an RV resort that's already established and pursue the value ad component bigger out an opportunity where an operator is underperforming and all the infrastructures in place but with better hospitality I'm using AI to augment so that there's better communication all the things you described yes ding ding ding that seems like the most obvious route to go and so you know moving forward I would pursue that any day over taking on the risk of developing a microzort and without any experience ahead of time so for those developers that are out there doing though I have heard great things from folks that have been on this podcast before I'm the success that they're having but there's let's just face it there's more risk involved with that and that's more risk than I personally am willing to take on absolutely and I have clients that are building from scratch but yeah that certainly more risk but to your point so I kind of copped out on that question if they don't don't build it just buy it so what's the cheat code it really is just whether it's you or or somebody else you hire doing it for you digging as deep as you can and try to stay within a reasonable distance of those metro areas like we talked about earlier don't it sounds great to be oh we're totally isolated we're in the middle of nowhere that sounds great to a certain degree because a lot of people do I mean look dark skies and crickets and campfires and man that especially to me that's that's everything that's great about camping but man if it's gonna cost me a fortune to get what I need there if that road class isn't right if I don't know about the water table or the act such a risk I had one of one of my biggest heart breaks was a it was a feasibility study that I did for someone who had land this is in Alaska and the property was I mean it's Alaska and it's not that anchorage so I mean you're looking at mountain ranges and they bought this property right on the backside of state land so it was gonna remain isolated it wasn't gonna be developed and they had this incredible plan that they wanted me to parse out for them what I didn't know was that they had almost two and a half miles to get the the land was completely landlocked the last road ended like two and a half miles away well and anchorage has nothing flat right we're going into the mountains so you're talking about bench cutting roads they have really high standards on the size and the slope and the time of year you can work and it was gonna be multi million dollar investment just to get from where the road ended to the property with a roadway and with electricity then on the property there were streams that can't be culverted can't be diverted can't be in it you know the feasibility study came back I told them I said might you know based on what you want to develop I'm giving you and no, I'm saying no. And they were really upset with me actually. Because they felt like it was my job to find them a yes. And I said, well, look, this type of development won't work. And frankly, with that kind of a cost getting here, I don't know what development does. And I'm not afraid to say that. I'm not going to make something up. I said, let's, you know, we can look at these other lanes of maybe there's opportunity to work a different land use in. And they were just really set on what they had. They wanted me to give me a yes. And like, I can't, you know, we're, I think it was close to $7 million just to get them to the property because they're just, it's a very unique situation in Anchorage. They had to have a fire tower and a water tower and the amount of sites and what they wanted to build back there. You're talking about a huge main electric line going in plus the road. Plus, you can only work about three months of the year up there with the climate. So it was a no. It was bankable. But-- Yeah, a doctor and he had to give him the bad news. Yeah. He also dealt like-- Yeah. You're too little. That's really a hard pill to swallow. It is. And I hated it. But it was, it's the right thing to do, right? It's not going to pencil. I'm not going to tell you, yes, and have you invest your time and money into it. You could certainly still do it. But I stood by my work. And yeah, it hurt. I'm sure it hurt that more than it did me. But it was difficult. But they had bought land that looked beautiful, had the remoteness. They thought it was going to-- and maybe it can be. Maybe they can do helicopter in fly-in camping or something. But even still, then they got a helicopter and everything. They got a build. It's really tough. So don't think that remote piece of land in the middle of nowhere is necessarily the best idea, folks. It needs to be reasonably near something. Right. In your experience, how hard is it actually to get a lender to write a check on a campground? It's pretty tough. And it's getting tougher. There are, as I'm sure there are with traditional hospitality, I'm sure you could rattle off three or four lenders that you're like these guys specialize in traditional hospitality. These folks loan to people to hoteliers. They're same for outdoor hospitality. But even those guys are getting their pockets are definitely getting tighter. It's getting more and more difficult because as we talked about earlier, those margins are tightening at its part. Well, first, look, if you're looking at a value add deal, you're oftentimes buying a property that's under water. That maybe it's not under water, but it's underperforming. And so from a bank's perspective, what collateral do you have? You have maybe some concrete pads. You have some amenities, but you don't have a typical structure that they're accustomed to. Like you would find a multifamily warehouse, you name it. So that's got to be pretty tricky to circumvent as well. It absolutely is. And this is where-- and this is something that I've just seen over the last three or so years. And maybe there's folks out there listening that would say, oh no, Greg, this has been going on longer. But the last three or so years, what I've started to see lenders do is say, OK, what's your background? And if they don't have-- if the borrower doesn't have a background in outdoor hospitality, that's a deal killer right there. And it wasn't always like that. It wasn't necessarily easier either. This industry is so poorly understood by-- it's much better now, post-pandemic. But it's still fairly poorly understood. If you just go-- you've been doing business with your local bank for 30 years where you live. And you want to, hey, I want to cash in my retirement. I want to buy this thing like my dad did. It was incredibly hard back then. He had to educate the bank on what it even was. But they thought it was a trailer park. They thought it was a mobile home park back in the mid '90s. That was what people thought our Vcam grounds were like. There's a better understanding now. And there are lenders now that specialize in it. But now those lenders that specialize in it understand how valuable the experience is because the asset class is so unique. And because a lot of buyers to go full circle back to what I was talking about earlier came in during COVID, bought up a bunch of them, and thought, this is going to be great. It's like printing money, right? It's as easy as self-storage. You just let them show up. They stay on there for a while. And then they leave. They didn't realize how labor-intensive it was, how much you had to operate. And a lot of those folks didn't do so well. So the lenders got really specific. And now they're like, all right, well, we want to know what your outdoor hospitality background. And if you don't have one, there are some now that are even saying, like, we will not loan you any money to buy this place unless you secure third party management. We want you to have a CRR or a horizon or an AOM or a blue water. We want to see that they are signed on, that they are going to manage your park, then we'll loan you the money. And back to what you said earlier, the only parks that those companies that I just named you're taking on, they've got a million dollars top line revenue or higher. So it's not easy. It's definitely not easy. And probably for that reason, most of my clients are clients that do have the experience and already own 6, 8, 10, 12 parks and are continuing to add to their portfolio slowly. Yeah. The one thing I want to counter, though, with you're right. Look, the banks-- and this applies for traditional hospitality as well. The bank should be like, what's your experience? And they say, oh, I don't have experience. So the next thing you can bring to the table to get around that is say, well, I'm going to hire a property manager that has the experience. That is, in my experience and the communication with banks, that's going to help you to continue the conversation. That's not a guarantee. It is they're going to look at your personal financial, your track record, your net worth. But it will certainly give you a leg up if you don't have it. The experience already for your first acquisition, partner with the property manager. And I think that what you've described with campgrounds is the same deal. And not only from the banking perspective, but look, if you've got to go raise capital, I want to tell you right now. And I experience, I get people bringing deals all the time who want me to invest in their hotel opportunity. And great people, smart, intelligent. I know they're going to be successful, but they still have a lot to learn. And I don't want them to learn my expense. Right? Right. Right. Right. My dime, I often invest people that have already have a track record. So one way, again, obviously, to get over that is like, I've had conversations. I say, go hire a property manager. If you want an investor in your deal or we consider doing so, I need to trust that there is someone who has the experience in the operations already. So you're not learning and making mistakes. And then I'm paying for it. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, this has been great. Don't go ahead. Before we sign off here, is there anything else that you would want to share with our listeners? Yeah, absolutely. Educate yourself. There's so much out there available. And find out what the best sources for info are to set you up for success before you go making a purchase. Yeah, I just, I think education is the answer to everything. So that's what I would tell you. If there's anything you want to take away one thing, find the organizations around you that play in those lanes, join them and make use of all the resources they have for you. 100%. James Plugged for this podcast. Keep listening, folks. You're going to learn. Absolutely. But Greg, look, man, this has been-- honestly, this has been a really practical conversation. And I've really enjoyed having you on the show. So how can our listeners stay in touch or continue to follow your journey? You can check me out on LinkedIn or find me at growwithvaryo.com. That last little bit is spelled, V-I-R-E-O. You can learn about what I offer there for consulting services, due diligence evaluations, property evaluations. You can have me on your podcast, too. This has been a lot of fun. You can tell. I like-- I like to talk about the industry. And I really appreciate you having me on your Michael. This one's different than any other show I've done. I really have enjoyed my time. Thank you. Awesome. Well, listeners, thanks again for tuning in. This has been another episode of the Hotel Investor Playbook. And we will catch you again next week. Aloha. [MUSIC PLAYING]