MC Fireside Chats - June 25th, 2025 - MC Fireside Chats, an Outdoor Hospitality Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brian Searl (00:45):
What is up everybody?
Welcome to MC Fireside Chats.
Another episode, our first week thatwe are ever going to have where the
show is no longer focused on the RVindustry, and we love the RV industry,
God bless them, but we felt like therewas a little bit more impactful things
we could talk about in week four.
So we're shuffling thingsaround a little bit.
Phil from RVDA of America and Eleanorfrom RVD of Canada are gonna be

(01:07):
joining us on our week one show goingforward, which is focused on data,
trends, analytics, things like that.
Greg, we just felt really sorry forhim, and so we just kept him here.
I don't know what his purpose is, but.

Greg Emmert (01:18):
Join the club buddy.

Just roll with it, man.
And then we have a new recurring guesthere, Kurtis Wilkins from our journey.
I'll let you introduceyourself in a minute.
Is it Kurt or Kurtis or I don't know.

Kurtis Wilkins (01:27):
I go by Kurtis, professionally.

Okay.
All right.
I just wanna make sure, like somepeople are the fancy versions
of their name and some peoplewere like, eh, I'm just casual.
I'm cool.
You're the fancy.
I got it.

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

Oh, okay.
All right.
So Kurtis Wilkins, I appreciateyou joining us and being here.
We're looking forward to havingsome good conversations about
marketing and tech going forward.
And then, Sam, am I pronouncing it right?
Dagenhard?

Sam Degenhard (01:50):
You got it.

Perfect.
Sam, welcome.
You're the founder andCEO of Campfire Ranch.
So why don't you go ahead and justintroduce yourself briefly, Sam,
as a recurring guest or a regular.

Yeah, totally.
No, nice to meet you all.
Stoked to be here.
Yeah.
My name is Sam Dagenhard, I'mfounder and CEO of Campfire Ranch.
We are an outdoor hospitality companybased out of Gunnison, Colorado.
So southwestern part of the state.
We focus on building a collectionof outdoor hospitality properties
that range from Camping all the wayto backcountry experiences, and all

(02:18):
the fun, weird stuff in between.
We focus on the subscale category,so everything about 30 rooms and
less where we can have a kind ofhigh touch, intimate experience, no
guests by name and we do that aroundthe best places to play outside.

Cool.
Thanks for being here, Sam.
I'm excited to dive intomore about Campfire Ranch.
Kurt, Kurtis.
Yeah, I'm gonna mess that up, man.
Can I just call you Kurt?

You can call me Kurt.

It sounds so much cooler if you're a Kurt.

Yep.
Kurt,

Alright, Kurtis, go ahead.
Sorry.

So my name's Kurtis Wilkins.
I'm with Our Journey RV Resortsand Advanced Outdoor Management.
We have 41 locations branded andabout another 1314 in the pipeline.
They're coming on board.
We.
And we run just over 12,000pads in the RV industry.
And I focus mostly, most ofmy role is focused around
our front end sales pipeline.

(03:05):
And then a little bit on themonetization side of camping.

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

Yeah.
None of them.

Greg Emer from, IHO.

I can't even spell my damn name.

Yeah.
Welcome, from Verio.

There we go.

There we go.
Now you flipped it around.

Did I flip it?

Now we got it.

Did I flip it?
All right.
As far as the name goes, we're gonnaleave it there 'cause all right.
Homeland Security might belooking for Greg Emmert.
This way I can stay underthe radar a little bit.
It helps, so.

It does.
Tell us about yourself, Greg.

Oh, boy.
Like anybody here needs to know, theysee me enough here and on Outwired.
But yeah, I'm the founder at VerioOutdoor Hospitality Consulting.
And I do all the things thathelp you build your operations
strategically and with soul.
There, how's that?
good intro?
Does it sound like I've been.

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

Yeah.
No, not that's not happening.
No, that's, that is definitelynot on the list of services.
There is no amount of moneythat would cover that.

Okay.
Alright.
So I wanna ask you guys what's come acrossyour desk recently in the last few weeks.
Especially just like arecurring guest mostly.
I know you're new Kurtis, but that'stypically what we'll start the show with.
But before I do that, I just want to talkto the audience here who's watching us for
maybe the first time especially in thisformat, and just say what I envision are
type of goal for this show in the fourthweek of every month will be that we'll

(04:37):
function the same as the other ModernCampground, MC Fireside Chats episodes.
Like we'll have special guests like Samwho come on share their stories, their
experiences, but a lot of it will be aboutwhat I've seen in the last week or so,
or month or so since we've last chattedabout, SEO or marketing or technology or
AI or anything that comes across my desk.

(04:58):
And those are things that we're talkingto clients about or they've asked us
questions about or just new thingsthat we think would be helpful to you
from a Campground operations standpointin working with your agency or your
website developer or your, like evenbootstrapping it yourself, right?
If you're designing your own website.
And so we're just gonna try toprovide a lot of value here.
And sometimes people like Greg willhave to tell me to shut up 'cause

(05:18):
I tend to roll and keep talkingabout things that are items that I'm
talking, see it goes and hopefullywill be valuable to all you guys.
So kick it off.
Is there anything that, that you guys Iknow we wanna talk about, SEO and your
website designs and things like that.
I think we'll get to that in the backhalf because we wanna focus on Sam's
company and Kurtis's company bit.
But before we do that, is there anythingthat's come across any of you guys'

(05:40):
desk that you feel is really important?
We should, I think probablyrelated to like our topic?

Something that's come across our desk is, and I'm sure
everybody's very aware of it, it'snot new news, but that transition from
regular search engine optimization, right?
To AI search engine optimization.
Our team, I don't think we'recoining the term, but we're calling
it AEO for AI Engine Optimization.
And so that's

(06:10):
a thing that's been talked about recentlyin a lot of the different spaces is 13% of
search traffic was diverted out of Google.
And that's a big bite.
You don't take that bite withoutsome notice being taken, especially
by all the marketing departments.
And then we've also seenthat same transition on the
social media side as well.

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

I just let you know that's what's coming across my
desk, things we're talking about.

Yeah.
No, that's what's comingacross my desk too.
Like I told you guys beforewe had that conversation.
All right, let's dive into this fora second then and make this kind of
our, and then we'll get to in theconsequence of talking about this, we'll
obviously talk about Campfire Ranch,but I wanna leave time in the second
half of the show, just talk specificallyabout all the things, campfire, ranch,
and all the things, our journey too.
Okay, so just tell me at pointlike, Hey, like we've done enough

(06:56):
talking about SEO, you can stop now.

Yeah.

It's my turn.
Okay so let's start here with Sam,you were telling us before the show
started that you had a new agency youwere working with and you were working
on website redesigns and you've justgotten SEO reports and things like that.
So what does that look like fromyour world as, because I guess the
preface for my thing and why I wantedto talk about this and I told you
guys a little bit about this beforewe started the show, SEO specifically

(07:22):
is, this is a mess out there, right?
Like the only reason SEO existsis really to trick Google.
And I'm of the belief that as you movefurther into an era of AI, where AI has
a deeper understanding of what you'reabout, as long as you are providing that
information in a correct way, and as longas you are providing enough content to

(07:44):
allow AI to understand all the differentfacets of your business, that there is
not going to be a way to trick Googleor AI systems anymore in the future.
So I'm of the mindset that SEO's dead.
I don't even think youneed a new moniker for it.
I think you just need to do really whatGoogle's been saying all along, provide

(08:04):
value to people and then make sure thatthe systems both traditional and new in
AI SEO Land can understand everythingthat you're about and everything
you want to communicate to them.
So I'll go into what I think about allthat stuff after you two gentlemen, go.
And Greg, you can talkabout your journey too.
I know you're having a newwebsite redesign too, but

(08:25):
that's that's by us, right?
So that's, but talk about your, what.

Only the positives.
I understand.
Yeah.
I'm getting the wink in the nod.

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

Yeah, totally.
No, I think it's totally valid topic.
We're still a pretty young company.
This going into summer 2025 marksour sixth season in business.
Jumping back to the start ofCampfire Ranch I build our website
on Squarespace as a prototype.
And ultimately just startedupdating blocks as we got closer
to opening our first location,which was a 17 site Campground.

(08:59):
And
SEO kind of happened as an accident, andthen we brought in some support to revamp
SEO and this was really in keyword days.
And so a lot of it was just insertingkeywords into paragraphs, rewriting
paragraphs, like it got pretty wonky.
I didn't like it, it didn't feel right.
Went in and rewrote it all.
From my customer's perspective, again,stopped working with those folks.

(09:20):
Now we're embarking, as you mentioned,Brian, just a new website project.
We're getting to a place where we'reoutsizing our Squarespace site and
we're ready to actually have somereal infrastructure behind the
scenes as we scale our business.
As we've been going through this process,it's been interesting because we're
getting a little bit of an audit onour current site, like what's working
and what's as well as a bit of a,okay, this is what you're gonna have

(09:42):
when things are done in September.
So it's been a good learning process forus, I think when we think of SEO and AI.
Two things come to mind,so far in this process.
The first is going through abit of a brand discovery story
with our agency right now.
They actually got checked a lot of theirassumptions of the business through
AI and in that brand story audit.

(10:03):
So a lot of it was interesting to seelike, how much is AI actually picking up
about our business in search just rightnow, and how close is that to where we
want to be or where we think we are.
So that was a really good indicator.
It was actually fairly decent.
And I can talk about why I think that'sthe case, but the second piece of it is,
okay, then what role does a OA, excuse me,AI and SEO play in this new web design.

(10:24):
We're right at the beginning of thecopywriting stage for this new site.
So it's like today and this week is thetime to actually be talking about this.
So awesome topic.
Because our team's gonnado the copywriting.
We're not gonna have the agency do that.
And this kind of circles back in.
The biggest reason I believe that is theright move for us as a team is because
at the end of the day, it all comesdown to understanding your customer.

(10:46):
And we have a really hightouch hospitality experience on
the ground at our properties.
We have two locations, andlast year we had 3000 hours in
front of guests, one-on-one.
And if you can really understand thosecustomer segments, I think you can have
a lot of confidence in what you're sayingand communicating digitally to a consumer.
And that will win in AI as wesee in our little mini audit.

(11:08):
But also, when you go andyou go through, I got my SEO
report on the left screen here.
When you go through that keyword search.
Forcing those topics in or buildinggroupings of topics like doesn't
feel weird and you're reallyjust talking to your customer
the way you should be talking.
We try to pull that from onsite, put itinto the digital space, and then have
our actual team all the way down to frontof house write the copy of the website.

(11:29):
And that's really our intention with thisproject is to kind don't abandon that
customer with, new trends and things.
And just remember we know ourcustomer, we know 'em well.
We talk to 'em all the time.
Let's speak to them digitally thesame way we would at the Campground.

So I think there's two things I would love to take this immediately
into because , I know at SEO and thesetopics very well into how you think
the best way to do that is some of my
thoughts on what you said, but I thinkwe should dial it back just for a second.
For the people who are watching whomaybe don't have that agency or don't
have that big team behind them who arealready researching and have already

(12:03):
been through the, I've dismissed keep,there's so many owners who I talk to.
Being in the industry for 15 plus yearsthat have no idea that they should even
monitor keywords or that there's dataavailable for how much the keywords are
searched, or that speed matters on theirwebsite or that security matters or
that what core web vitals are, or Right.
There's so many different things.

(12:23):
So I think I'd love to have youwalk through the journey of what
you thought SEO was, and maybe we'lljust take that one question, ask the
same thing to Kurt and ask the samething to Greg, but what you thought
SEO was when you first got into it.

Yeah, good question.
At the beginning it was havethe right keywords in your copy.
That was it.
And it was, talk about those thingsyou think people might search.
Later on, it was a lot more of what youmentioned, Brian, security speed, back
links broken links, 404 pages, all ofthat stuff I really never even realized
played a factor in search results.

(12:59):
And something we learned with one ofour early agencies, and that was the
landscape we were pretty much operatingin, was it's all about keywords to,
there's all this other stuff we don'tactually technically understand at all.
We need help.
And that was really ourenvironment for a long time.

Kurtis, how about you?

Yeah, and Sam, I think everybody starts there.
My experience 10 yearsago, same experience.
You're just like, oh yeah,it's just a couple words that
we're putting on the website.
We're trying to rank for these things.
And then, you slowly startto peel back like the layers.
And good SEO leaned into Google,leaned into being, you just
said, Hey, whatever you want.
That's what I'm going to provide.
And I'm gonna make sure that there'sa lot of it and there's a lot

(13:36):
of different ways to look at it.
And I think that it's it comes downto structured data, well structured.
When you talk about that localizedexperience, making sure that you're
using for backlinking, right?
In terms of getting like backlinksfrom other websites is localizing your
product well enough to do interactwith the community around you, right?
Making sure that you're a partof your, each individual group.

(14:00):
I'll give you the BoyScouts for example, right?
Making sure that you work with thatgroup because they're in the community
and there's a lot of members there,and that builds relevance, right?
And as long as they're talking about youand you're talking about them and there's
some links back and forth it works well.
And so I guess from where I startedto where I am, that's a long journey.

(14:22):
Brian that's a big question.
We could talk about it for days,but I think right now, like our big
focus is like on structure, right?
Structured.
Targeted pieces of information.
And when we say localization, localizingit to the community that you're in, right?
For the relevant information out,but also for that user coming in and

(14:44):
making sure that, if you're in Texasand you're in Louisiana that user
wants to see specific language to them.
But if they're searching for a Texaspark from Wisconsin, swapping out
words to make sure that it's localizedto the individual that's searching,
that's a big important piece as well.

(15:05):
And that's I don't know how much ofyou do that, Brian, but I'd actually
like to throw that back too, ifpossible, or circle it around next.

Okay.
Let me let Greg answerfirst and then, yeah.

Oh, my answer's way short.
Are you kidding me?
My first website, I don't know how oldyou guys are, but my first website for our
Campground that we owned in Homer, Ohio.
Went live when people werestill using Yahoo and the web
crawler for search results.
I don't know if

Yeah.

Web crawler was cool.

Yeah, it was cool.

Logo wasn't it?

Yes, it was.
Yeah, it was an erected for sure.
Yeah.
Our SEO what we did, we calledup the person who hosted it.
Shout out to Roxi Baxley.
Sorry, Brian.
But Roxi's great.

No, Roxie is great.
I know her.

Roxi's great.
We'd call her up and be like,what are you doing to get us
on these here Google things?
We didn't know we're too busyplunging toilets and fixing
roadways and water leaks.
Fast forward to now.
So I've learned nothing.
Nothing.
I go to Chat GPT for everything, right?
So I've got.

Then you've learned something

Brian said and so I've learned a lot.
It was a really long exercise building.
I started out with a book anda process and figured out,
okay, what's my brand, right?
And what, and I wanted it to be verypersonal because I was an owner operator
and that's who I'm speaking to when I'mtrying to get a consulting client, right?
So I'm speaking to owner operators.
Boy, I know those conversations'cause I've been wearing all the hats

(16:28):
and doing everything they've done.
So I need my sight's gotta reflect me,not necessarily what I'm shooting, I don't
wanna look fancy, I wanna look like me.
I want it to look and soundlike me 'cause I'm the brand.
So in going through this exercise,the interesting thing that I
learned was as things shift towardsthe AEO as you, I like that by
the way, it's totally stolen now.

(16:49):
You should, that was, that's really good.
But towards the LLM searches is that, ittends to look for, obviously it looks for
different things, but it likes narrative.
It likes things that read almostlike they're being spoken.
So a lot of my website reads like that.
My business profile reads likethat was totally new to me.
And the only reason I know it's importantis 'cause I do a podcast with Brian.

(17:11):
Otherwise I would be woefully ineptand just meeting people and, trying
to let my work speak for itself, whichit does, but obviously I need this
website, otherwise people think I'mjust a crazy guy with a dot card on
my phone who will take their money ifthey'll sign a contract with me, right?
But that's, so I have honestly as Brian,as his team builds my website, I've
pretty much thrown SEO out the window.

(17:32):
I'm tailoring the entire thingtowards LLM because I don't see
what the point is in trying to dosomething that's on its way out.
I know some people will find me thatway, but the website is typically
not how I get business anyway.
It's just a way for people toverify that I'm not a maniac.
I've put some thought intothis, and it actually aligns
with what I do and what I say.

(17:54):
But yeah it's wild because just acouple years ago I formed another
consulting company with Jeff Hoffman.
He's a great guy and he'sstill got that company.
He and I recently split becausewe had different visions, but we
still work together on projects.
We're dating now we're not married.
But when we built that website,it was totally different.
That was like two years ago, and wewere still planning for SEO and we

(18:17):
structured the website very differently.
So the speed at which all of thisis happening is crazy to, at least
to me, because I don't play in thisspace as much as Brian or by the
sounds of it, you two gentlemen.
But yeah the most interesting partto me was the way that it grabs text
that is more like conversational anddescriptive and whereas with SEO,

(18:37):
that wasn't necessarily a big deal.

Yeah.
I think, you've touchedon a lot of good things.
All three of you have, right?
And we could probably spend hoursdiscussing this, or maybe days like
Kurtis said, probably days in my case.
But I think there's a couplethings that I would hit on, right?
Number one is for the people whoare listening who likely don't know
anything, or in their first beginningsteps of SEO or just probably as

(19:02):
most people who come, at least to ouragency, think about it as it's just
put the keywords on the page, right?
I just need to rank for the keywords.
Just put them 5, 10, 15,25 times on the page.
Whatever you gotta do,just make me number one.
And then, like the goal of our agencyspecifically is we wanna educate people,
but now it's, we almost don't have tobecause if you're using a tool like
Chat GPT, it's very easy to go to ChatGPT and say is my agency full of shit?

(19:26):
And it will tell you, right?
And so I think the number one thing thatI would recommend to people who, whether
you're dealing with me or any otheragency out there that exists, or like
an individual like Roxi, who's a greatlady who does SEO and has been doing
it for, websites for a long time in ourindustry, is you need to know things,

(19:47):
but you don't need to know everything.
You should know 5% of everything thatyou're talking to everybody about, whether
that's marketing or tech or anything else.
And that used to be a heavier lift thanit is today with a tool like Chat GPT.
But now it's not because you could just goto Chat GPT and say, I need to know 5% of
website design so that I know that I'm notbeing like, played for all my money and

(20:07):
my website developer is not full of shit.
And then it will tell you what youneed to know, and then you can say, all
right, gimme questions that I need toask them and what should they answer?
And then, you have, obviously you have tobe careful when you're talking to your web
dev team that they're not just using ChatGPT to answer your questions, but that's a
whole nother can of worms that will crackopen on some other show some other time.
But yeah, the big thing is I think youneed to know that enough to be dangerous.

(20:30):
You need to know enough to ask theright questions to the people because
you don't know what you don't know.
And then going forward into some of themore deeper stuff, the keyword stuffing
is what I'll call it, like where youjust put the keyword on the page.
For people who have been deeplyinvolved in SEO or obsessed with,
I have been unhealthily perhaps forthe last 15 years, like that kind of

(20:52):
died in like 2012 or 2013, I don'tknow, like a long time ago, right?
Like keywords are still important, but weevolved so quickly beyond just keywords
to things that we won't have time totalk about on this episode, but like
entities and latent semantic indexing andNLP and all the different things that,

(21:16):
like Google has an idea when they cometo your website, I guess is the easiest
way to say this, of what it expects tosee when you tell it what you're about.
Now this is 101 from I don't know, 1992or whenever websites first came out.
H one tags.
So many websites don't evenknow what their header tag
actually is and are wasting it.

(21:37):
But assuming you can get the topic ofyour page right, and you tell Google
what it's about, a Campground nearSan Antonio or Ohio, we'll talk about
Ohio Campground in, where was it?
Homer Bill, Ohio?

Homer Bill, Ohio.

I don't see Akron or Canton just as a bigger, Cleveland
is a bigger example, right?
But if you want to attract a market fromCleveland, you're a Campground or an
RV park, or an RV resort, or a glampingresort near Cleveland, you need to tell
Google what the topic of your website is.
And that doesn't mean stuff, the H onewith your keyword, but it means put it
there and then once Google has a basicunderstanding of what the structure of

(22:08):
your page is supposed to be about, itknows that if you're trying to say, I'm
a Campground near Cleveland, these arethe things that I want to see on the page
to verify that you're not foolish yet.
This is Google's bot, right?
Which is a dumb bot, bythe way, not a smart bot.
They're not sending AIto crawl your website.
At least not by default.
And so it will want tosay I'm from Cleveland.

(22:30):
I don't know if you guys knowanything about the city of Cleveland.
But it will want to know does itmention the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Does it mention Lake Erie?
Does it mention, all the thingsthat I wanna see that are related
to what I expect someone who'stalking about Camping and the city
of Cleveland to be on the page four.
And those are entities andthings like that, right?
And those all play a role in SEO andthose have been in place since 2016,

(22:54):
20- Again, I have no idea what Google'salgorithm was or what the dates are.
I'm just like on my radarsince, at least back then.
And so what you were talking about,Sam, when you had your original first
company, like kind of start to notonly put keywords in, but start to
put longer fragmented sentences in.
And maybe those were entities,maybe they weren't, I don't know.
I don't know what the agency was.

(23:14):
It doesn't matter at this point.
But like we worked our waythrough that problem too, right?
Like years and years ago we workedour way through let's just write
more copy on the pages to make surethat we have the right sentences.
And then it just got disjointedand ugly and long and like it
really wasn't written for the user.
And that was the real problem.
And I think as much as we like topick on Google and say Google fucks

(23:37):
with us and doesn't rank us numberone, or wait, can I say, fuck,
it's on the Outwired show later.

It's your show.
Jesus, man.
Messes with us.
This is the family friendly show.
As much as we like to complainabout Google, Google has told us
what we should be doing all along.
Google has told us that youshould just write for your user.
And if you write for your user and likeyou're not a horrible writer, and you're
providing the information that peopleneed to know, then you'll be fine.

(24:04):
And there are times where youneed to deploy extra strategies.
Like I had a client emailing meabout why does the speed report on my
website give me a B instead of an A?
Because it doesn't matter.
Like Google only cares aboutspeed because Google cares
about usability of your website.
Google wants people to be able tobrowse it, to load it quickly, to be
able to not have a bad experience.

(24:25):
And so it released a set ofmetrics that help you understand
how to make that better.
It's not a test that you have topass at a hundred percent, right?
But so there's a tendency fromSEOs to get distracted and go down
rabbit holes and not focus on whattruly matters, which is the user.
And Google's doing the best itcan, but I know I'm going a little
bit of rant here, but let's.

And Brian, I'd like to elaborate a little bit on that.

Yeah, please.

Like that point.
That's a great point in likewhat is Google's function, right?
What is it doing for its users?
'cause at the end of the day,remember we're not really the product.
We are the product, but we'renot the thing that Google is
really trying to extract, right?
That's the user themselves.
That's what Google's product is.

Yeah.
Google doesn't care about you or OurJourney, or Campfire Ranch or Verio.
It doesn't give two hoots about you.
It cares about its users.

It cares about its users.
And so I always try to frame thisin a way, it's imagine you were
making a recommendation for a hireor a place to go to a restaurant.
What are the things that you wouldneed to know to recommend that
to somebody very close to you?
And that's what Google needs from you.
And they want to know thatit's a good experience.

(25:34):
They wanna know all of those pieces.
And that's SEO in a nutshell, right?
It's like Google's making arecommendation and they wanna make the
best recommendation because at the endof the day, they want their user to
go, that was a great recommendation.
I was satisfied.
And they come back to Googleto make another recommendation.

Correct.

And I view that same behavior and that same user behavior.
Wrapping this back to AEO, AI EngineOptimization, it's the same concept.
They want to have accurate information.
They wanna have that be ableto make that recommendation.
And so that's that kind of goinginto what you're saying, right?

(26:14):
Just right back into it is like that'swhat Google is, that's all SEO is.
But how does it work?
There's a lot of liketechnical pieces to it.

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

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

Yeah, I just want to go through a little bit of this, right?
So I think you're right.
I think there's different typesof SEO from my standpoint.
And I don't, I'll play devil'sadvocate and say I don't know
that we need a new acronym.
'cause I think acronymswill just distract people.
But you're not the onlyone who's come up with
AEO and I've heard like GEO andall kinds of other things, right?
But I think it's still the same thing.

(26:52):
It's still the same game.
It's providing the informationto bots and to humans.
So to make them understand yourcontent and to allow it to that
information, to both do good.
On page SEO, which is like on page tome is like the words of the content
that are written on the page forboth now bots not just like AI and

(27:14):
Chat GPT, but like the bots thatare gonna be browsing your website
instead of humans in a couple years.
Forget about humans, come to yourwebsite, it's not gonna happen.
And now until that point to getthe humans and eventually their
personal AIs to understand thatyou're speaking their language.
And so we talked about, Sam, you talkedabout this a little bit with having your
team write it instead of the agencies.

(27:35):
If I was playing devil'sadvocate, I would say.
I agree with you except for like youragency should be good enough to do that.
And I would also say that I would trustAI to write it way better than my front
desk team or like my internal team at all.
And maybe they are using AI.
I'm not saying they aren't.
But we do this for our clients, like thisis a big focus of us in the last year

(27:57):
or two, is I wanna understand what myideal customer profile is for a client.
I wanna understand what types ofbuyer personas are going to come to
that client and are likely to stay.
I wanna understand what language and wordsresonate with those different types of
buyer personas to put them on my website.
I wanna understand and build anaudience style guide based on all

(28:19):
that for what they wanna see and notsee, and words to use and not to use.
And then I wanna use all thatto write the copy of my website.
And AI will do that way better thanalmost any writer that I know could.
Certainly writers could use, likesomebody has to use the AI, right?
Because sometimes you'renot gonna agree with that.

(28:41):
Sometimes you're gonna wanna say, Iwant the people in Cleveland and I wanna
write it toward the people in Cleveland.
But the people in Cleveland, despiteyou really wanting them to come to
your website, are not the ones thatare gonna come Camping with you.
And so that's why it's great to havean objective viewpoint, like a Chat GPT
or something, run that stuff for you.
But that stuff helps in two ways.
One is it helps the AI understandwhat you're about because you've got a

(29:05):
body of content that is not extensivelong stuff with keywords, whatever,
but has the things that AI looksfor when it's scraping, crawling or
when Google's scraping and crawling.
It's easy to understand, right?
And it speaks to the buyer personasthat you have, and it helps them
while you have a few years here whereyou still have humans coming to your
websites before their databases.

(29:29):
It helps people to understand, hey,this is a page that's written toward
me because I'm a single mom withno kids and I travel in my car.
Or I am an adventurer and I like togo hiking, or I'm a retiree and I
like, and you have to blend thosepersonas together or create pages
specifically geared toward them.
So like it's a lot.

(29:49):
It's a lot, but it's all the same.
It all goes back to value in providingwhat the consumer wants to see.
Is that where you thinking was going Sam?

Yeah, no, I think that's spot on.
We even look for different indicatorsin the way that our customers
speak to us via email, communitymanagement, on social media platforms.
Like how do people engage talk totheir friends, share, repost things,
and if we can pull in their behaviorsthat they're doing with one another,
then it's an indicator of how theymight interact with us and trying

(30:21):
to just meet them at that level.
As you mentioned before Greg,it was like, your Campground
was your brand, it was you.
It was very much me in the early days.
Now there's 10 employees at Campfire.
It's not just me.
And so we have to spend moretime thinking intentionally about
how do we speak to customers.
And that could be through copy,that can be through tools like
AI and helping us, learn more.

(30:42):
We often get caught thinking that,I think probably every Campground
owner probably feels this way, butyou get often thinking about how,
your customer knows everything that'soffered, every amenity on your property
you're like, of course they knowthat we do this in the shower hours.
And like you just take it forgranted because you see it, you
deal with it every single day.
But even just communicating the basics ina way, like AI has taught us a lot of that

(31:06):
is just what do people want when they'recoming to Gunn and Crested view to camp?
We think we know, but a lot of that stuffwe just never thought was important.
We don't talk about it.
So we've used it to pull a lot ofindicators out that otherwise we've just
glanced over and try and get too detailed.
And sometimes the basics.
It's a good reality check.
I'm using AI to try and understandhow people are behaving.

Yeah.
If you use GPT-4.0,
like I know there's different models.
We won't get into that stuff.
But I think it's the one that'sdefault on the free tier now.
But in the top left you canswitch this, but that and 0.3,
which is available.
I think if you have a paid plan,we'll go out and search the internet.
And you can say to it, just go lookat my current website and tell me
what I'm f***ing up, messing up.

(31:46):
Sorry.
Oh, yeah.
Get the censorship eventually.
But and then it will tell you and likethe input equals the output, right?
So what am I messing up?
It could do anything, but what am Imessing up specifically about SEO if
I wanna target these buyer personasand blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And write a big paragraph and thenit'll, especially O three, it'll
think through all that stuff.
And it'll give you a really good answer.

(32:07):
Greg knows, Greg plays with Othree quite a bit for all his
consulting work and things like that.
But did Greg just disappear?
You just disappeared, man, wentblack and then you came back again.
I'm surprised I haven't done that yet.
Like the last couple weeks.
Yeah, I just chinked it.
Jessica told me like, I disconnect twotimes during podcasts now randomly.
I don't know.

(32:27):
Anyway.

The plate in my head, I'm sorry.

But I, sorry, I got distracted now.
I lost my train of thought.
But
I think it's just I'll give you an exampleof something you were talking about.
I think Sam briefly is like theinformation on your website.
We take over so many websites fromclients that have a paragraph of
information on the homepage andmaybe two paragraphs elsewhere on
the contact page and sentences ofhere's our photos on the gallery page.

(32:53):
It's not enough.
Like you don't need to stuff youmight, in the future of 40 pages of
content, like we're talking about,I'm trying to not give away like
some of the stuff that we're tellingclients proprietary level wise.
But you you need a little bit ofinformation to help AI and to help
users understand what you're about.
And so an example I'll give is we'rerunning, like we've recently set up

(33:14):
some automations to run AI LLM reports.
For all of our clients who we havewebsite design and Camp Vantage through.
And what it does is it basically goes outand it says, what are 50 questions that a
user would typically go to a Chat GPT ora Gemini or a Claude or whatever else, and
ask that would return a result that wouldtypically include my Campground name.

(33:36):
And there's a whole bunch ofprocesses through that, but it'll
pick five and it'll go out and askthe engines in a delivery report
and basically how to destroy yourcompetitors, all that kind of stuff.
But the base core thing of it isan example I always cite is, Mike
Harrison from Verde Ranch, RV Resortlikes to let me use his property as
a demo and break things all the time.
And so we were trying this, monthsago for him on a first pass and one

(33:58):
of the demo questions that askedwas he's in Camp Verde, Arizona.
Are there any luxury RV resorts inCamp Verde, Arizona that offer bicycle
rentals or something like that, andwe've learned that by studying these
LLMs, they all have different behaviors.
Chat GPT is willing to guess.
So Chat GPT's response was, there's noluxury RV resorts that I can find in
Camp Verde that offer bicycle rentals.

(34:20):
However, Verde Ranch, RV Resort,and a couple of these other ones in
the area are likely to have bicyclerentals because they're resorts.
So I would call them and ask, right?
And then the other two, Claude andGemini that we're currently testing
now, refuse to guess, they just saidthere's no luxury of your resorts period
in Camp Verde to have bicycle rentals.
And so if you determine that, andyou can't do everything, but if you

(34:41):
determine that bicycle rentals isa core key driver motivation of why
somebody might come to your area.
If you have lots of bike trails inthe area or outside Scenic Mountains,
or you're near rivers with bikepaths or whatever else, right?
Then you take that and you look at thatand say I really wanna be an answer
to that question because I think alot of people, because of where I am.

(35:02):
Lots of bike trails, lotsof mountains, lots of right.
We'll be asking that question.
Or in the future when you have theai, like Google has announced and
Chat GPT has announced, we'll takeyour search query and just rewrite
it in the backend and won't even tellthe user well that the AI will infer
that's what they really wanna know.
Then at that point, the way I show upfor that is to build a page or write

(35:26):
a blog post, or put a section in theexisting page about bicycle rentals
so that then the AI knows here, eitherI offer bicycle rentals or here's
some resources of people who offerbicycle rentals in the local area.
And then that page shows up in traditionalGoogle search, which is what AI is not

(35:46):
using Google search, unless it's Gemini,but in some form or fashion, is using a
search index to see what content you have.
And if you have a page bid on itthat shows up for those queries in
traditional search, then that will showup for the AI in their search index.
And it's very easy to winthe answer to that question.
And so those are the things that, likeyou, you just have to pay attention to.

(36:08):
And there's so much more behind it, butlike listing an amenities list of 20
bullet points, it says, I have bicyclerentals is not as powerful and won't
show up as a page about bicycle rentals.

Yeah.
And that's what I was going onthere, Brian, with like structured
data, and making sure that you haveall of those structured components
and everything that you do.
Because RV parks I'm probably ostracizedfor saying this, but I look at RV parks,
I look at like campgrounds as we runmany businesses in one business in terms

(36:41):
of how we interact with the internet.
Like we don't have abucket that we fit into.
We fit into many buckets and you needto make sure, and that's the same
problem we're seeing with the AI search,it's the AI we fit too many things.
And that's why I actually ChatGPT guessing, because it, at least

(37:02):
it's giving us the answer, right?
Or it's giving the consumer theanswer that they're looking for.
But we have to optimize aroundall of our components, right?
If you're running like a stone, right?
You might wanna mention thewaterpark because it's not implied
usually through the website, right?
You might wanna imply thatyou have a gift store.
You might wanna imply, and you should bebuilding things along that side where,

(37:26):
if you just end up on my website, you'llsee there are pages about dump stations.
And that was before we evenwere optimizing for AI, right?
We were just trying to fit into search.
And I think that's a great point.
And going along that too is likethe social proof, where you're
talking about we're talking aboutreviews and the listings, right?
And where your consumers are interacting.

(37:48):
That social proof is becoming it,I don't know how it's weighted.
I don't know, but I'm noticing thatthe more weight or the more reviews or
references around a particular topic ofyour business, the more relevant you are.
In terms of specific types ofsearch, like you said, great.

(38:08):
They have to be good reviews, but if theyjust were searching for the thing overall
and they just have any reviews, it's proofto the engine itself that this exists.

Yeah.
It's the same thing as thebicycle rentals page, right?

Exactly.

What you're talking about.
There's three differenttenants here overall.
On page SEO we talked about.
What you're talking about isbrand more than anything, right?

Yep.

A good, strong brand.
And I'll talk about that in a second.
And then three is the technicalSEO, which is all the code and the
optimizations and speed tweaks wewon't have time to get into today.
But behind the scenes.
But what you're talking aboutis really important for AI SEO
it's not the number one thing.
Content is the number one thing.
And you're not gonna trick it by lying.
It's way smarter than me already.
It's way smarter than you already.

(38:50):
Forget it, give up.
It's gonna be a hundred thousandtimes smarter than you in five years.
It's over.
Forget it.
But like brand, so the conversation aroundyour brand on social, not what you are
saying, what people are saying about you.
To a certain extent, back linksbecause they build trust and authority.
Although that's not even somethingwe really spend time on anymore

(39:11):
because I think you get naturalenough back links from local listing
citations and stuff like that.
And again, AI is not going out andsaying how many backlinks does this
website have before I put them in ananswer that would, it's not doing that.
But it is important.
We know we have data for thatand like just the conversation
around your brand period.
You have to build your brand.

(39:31):
You can't just be one of manycampgrounds near wherever city you have.
It's the conversation around it.
It's think about sending out pressreleases like these are things
that the AI references and knowsthat you, even if it's just a press
release on I'm not talking aboutWoodall's or Modern Campground.
Those are good.
Those do well, at least ModernCampground shows up in search.

(39:51):
I'm pretty sure Woodall's will,but I honestly haven't seen it.
I know they're my competitor and I like,I'm sounding biased or whatever, but
like we know those show up in search,but I'm talking about sending a press
release on the wire, like somethinglike a PR news wire or something.
Not only does that give you backlinks and yes, they're all the same
back links and yes, they're duplicatecontent, but it doesn't matter.
They're conversations in media.
And so they nudge it a little bit, right?

(40:12):
If you're distributing it to theright places, if you're getting a
link on AP News, if you're gettinga link on Bloomberg, if you're
getting a link on, market wire orwhatever else, or market watch, sorry.
But those things arelike votes of confidence.
They're conversations around your brand.
And so it looks at PR, it looksat local listings, it looks
at social media conversations.
It looks at not in realtime while you're searching.
It form as they redo the LLM indexesand the training and things like that.

(40:37):
That's it's a long tail game guys, butthat brand conversation for sure, building
a strong brand is tremendously important.

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

Yes.

Is that

Sam?

Oh, sorry.

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

That sounds great.

Alright, 'cuz I want to learn about it too.
Yeah.

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

Yeah.
So I've been an outdoorsman my whole life.
I actually grew up RVing.
First and foremost, my grandfatherbought my parents an RV for their
fifth wedding anniversary, and theyhad no idea what to do with it.
And that created my lifestyle,adult life and childhood life.
Been Camping my whole life.
Long story short, went toschool in Colorado, moved to
LA for a career afterwards.
Very big change from a town of 5,000people to a town of 11 million.

(41:44):
Was still trying toget out and go Camping.
Found myself squeezed into thebox of state park campgrounds,
national forest campgrounds.
It wasn't Colorado where you can justdrive up a dirt road and disperse camp.
And that was like every weekend forme when I was in school and started
putting ideas on paper of just like,why isn't there a Campground that's
designed for me and my friends?
Like, why doesn't this exist?

(42:06):
And I started organizing groupCamping trips back in the day then.
And most of those wereto Joshua Tree and St.
Bernardino National Forest.
Pretty illegal actually.
Just, no permits, but we'd bring 50people out and do Camping trips and
we build this like ideal Campgroundfor ourselves for a couple nights.
And that's when it started to stickwith me that just, there might be an
opportunity to design a facility thatwould be more purpose-built to my

(42:26):
generation and kept doing my career.
Got to the point, I justcouldn't ignore this idea and
decided to take a stab at it.
Left my career.
I was working for Red Bull insports marketing at the time.
So my background's all in kind of content,and it was funny we brought that up in
a few ways, but a lot of that space hasinspired me to deliver hospitality, but
in and create my own brand and the waythat Red Bull was able to create theirs.

(42:49):
And yeah, it just took the leap in 2019,quit my job and decided to go find the
first location to bring this idea to life.
I knew it, it couldn'twork with one location.
It would just be a fun seasonaljob for what I had in mind.
And yeah we're multiple years laternow, and we've gone just beyond just
Camping, as I mentioned, we look atkind of different types of lodging
assets from the backcountry experienceto the Camping experience and all

(43:13):
the fun weird stuff in between.
So we're pretty opportunistic.
Our goal is to go coast to coast, withCampfire Ranch as a brand and be in
those top outdoor recreation marketswhere we can stand out and be one of one.

So what are some of the things when you we're looking at that
journey with your friends and you weregoing out to, I think you said Joshua
Tree, and you were saying, I wannacreate this ideal Camping experience,
what were some of the things thatyou really felt were missing from the
existing Camping experience that youfelt you needed, did now, you have now?

Yeah.
Yeah.
Things that we actually put in place.
The biggest piece I thinkwas gear and equipment.
Even with expendable income, there'sa pretty big barrier to like, what
to buy and what do you need tohave and what is the right piece
of equipment that you need to have.
There's so many questions that go intobuilding an outdoor Camping quiver, and
I'm talking about tent campers here.
But you know what tent.

(43:59):
What brand, what size, what color,like, how long do you expect to have it?
Like all those questions are hugebarriers to people just like stepping
out, and going on a Camping trip.
So those early days, what I ended updoing was I started buying more gear
for my quiver that I wanted to try.
And that would be hand me down stuff forfriends that would go and eventually this,
in these trips, the demand was too bigand I'd actually rent everything from REI.

(44:22):
So I'd get a list of what people did.
I'd go to REI, I'd get it, I'd pickit up, I'd go to the spot a day early.
I'd set it up, I'd assign tents.
Then they would come on the trip.
And it wasn't until I could put thesepieces in for them that I could get
20 somethings living at the beachin Los Angeles who had never been
Camping to go on a Camping trip.
And poop in a backcountrytoilet, to be totally honest.

(44:42):
They weren't comfortable enoughto even stay there to do that
hurdle, to get over that barrier.
And so it was all about like, howdo we get you there and then you
can face those like other fears inthat environment with other people.
And that's the secondpiece is really community.
I think that the fact that we all spendtime in the outdoors is wonderful,
but it's pretty rare that we spendtime in the outdoors, completely solo.

(45:03):
Generally we wanna share it with someone.
And if you can create an environmentwhere sharing is not only
intentional, but it's also accidental.
And we do this in our campgroundstoday, like I love it when
there's a line at the bathroom.
'cause I know everyone's gonna talk aboutwhat they did yesterday to the person
next to 'em, and they might make a friend.
And if I can create funny environmentslike that, just by happenstance.

(45:24):
You're gonna be building more communityand that can have a really good, maybe
negate some things like SEO by buildingword of mouth and direct bookings.

Okay, so you heard it from Sam first.
You don't need SEO, you just needto lower the amount of bathrooms
you have at your campground.

I love it.
Yes, absolutely.
Bathroom lines are good.
They're healthy.

Sam, I absolutely love the business model.
I can't tell you how manytimes I am sent a meme.
It's the same meme everytime, and it's just.
Make Camping easier and it'ssomething about somebody having to
do a plugin in their RV or someonecan't get their tent put together.

Yep.
Totally.
Yeah, and it's been fun.
I think the ripple effect of trying tothink from that customer's perspective
first has allowed us to create otherstreams of revenue as a business.
So we've taken that like gear conceptof being, hey, people need equipment.
And we've taken that to manufacturersand said, Hey, look North Face you can
be at a music festival and pop up andhave your tent and people could look at
it for three or four seconds, they mightbuy it, or you could give us a tent and

(46:21):
I'm gonna rent it for 40 nights a summer.
Show someone how to use it, let themsleep in it, they're gonna stay dry in it.
And then when they wanna makethat transaction, they just had
a salesperson for three days.
Can you gimme the tent for free?
Can you pay me to show off your tent?
And I think, as we look to grow ourbrand at scale, those partnerships
are a great source of revenue.
But really it's all just comingfrom solving a problem for the

(46:42):
customer and building our businessin a couple different ways.
Those add-ons become not justrevenue streams, but partnerships.

Are you all tent Camping then, or.

Yeah, we're actually, funny enough from previously, we're RV
free as a Campground, so we focus on carcamp, tent camp, van camp so anything
from, a camper van to a convertedtruck bed, to a slide in, to a rooftop
tent, to tent Camping, that, that'sour bread and butter hammock Camping.
We see quite a bit ofthat too, which is fun.

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

No.
No, but he's, Sam essentially grewthoughts that I've had in my head
for ages as a tent camper and a carcamper and a back country camper.
He actually grew it into somethingthat's working and so awesome man.
It is underserved.
We know it's growing, right?
We've talked to Scott Bahr aboutthis car camping is on the rise.
It's that awesome bridge between, am Iballsy enough and fit enough to carry 50

(47:42):
pounds for 15 miles to get back country?
But I can drive a gravel, two trackfor a few miles to get back to maybe
some disperse Camping or a place likeCampfire Ranch where I can have a similar
experience but still have my car there.
It's open to people.
I'm sure you get people that are.

(48:03):
Not as fit or potentiallyeven maybe have disabilities.
They can reach your camps and stay.
That's awesome, man.
And I apparently need to startfollowing it 'cause I'm always
searching for the next best tent site.

Oh good.
No thanks Greg.
I appreciate it.

Do you have birds near your Campground, Sam?

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

We do.

That's one of the.

Yep.

Are you near the Juanita areas at all?
The Juanita.

Very close.
Just over the mountains from Juanita.

You should be marketing to birders.
There's a hundred millionof 'em in the United States.
We don't have to,

I see that quite often.

That's awesome.

Yeah.
I just have to stay away.
I've got a hunting dog, so wedon't go to those areas with her.

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

Correct.
But they're beautiful.
Yeah.

No he's got an endangered subspecies of North
American sage-grouse called theGunnison sage-grouse specifically.
Yeah, I'm sure you get your share ofburgers that run out there looking for.

Have you seen them, Greg?
Are they on your

I have never.
No.
It's one of those things

What are you waiting for, man.

That's on a list.

It's an experience for you right here.

I know.
And he's got the, all of it.
So

I can give you a pin where you're guaranteed to see some.

Okay.
All right.
I'm taking notes.
Yeah.
Alright.

This whole conversation is fascinating for me though because
like we've talked about on our showsbefore multiple times over multiple
years, different things about how,like we've talked about audiences and
crafting buyer personas and reachingout to people and expanding our
markets, especially on Outwired, right?
Diving into like, let's spend a few weekstalking about niche audiences and like

(49:25):
really getting into the type of personwho goes like birders or people who have
a barrier to entry of going Camping.
And there seems to be in ourindustry, for lack of time or
knowledge or whatever the reason is.
My dog's scratching at mything, wanting to be left up.
Let up.
Hello.
Say hi.
There seems to be a lack of desireor ability or time or whatever

(49:49):
it is to focus on those niches.
For whatever reason itis no judgment passed.
Like I run a business, allof us run businesses here.
We know how busy itgets to run a business.
But everybody seems to just target,I just want people who own RVs.
I want long term, or I want short term.
Might be a focus if you get there, right?
I just want the people who own RVs.
But then you're naturally limitingyourself to the people who

(50:11):
then have to buy an RV first,which is a big ask, right?
That's a big ask, especially ina down economy when people are
having trouble affording yourfirst home that isn't on wheels.
So being willing to expand, to allowcar campers to allow more tent campers
to allow customized setups like Samis doing with guided ways to introduce

(50:34):
you into the type of equipment youneed that make you feel comfortable.
Like the amount of people that youcan reach through that is sick.
It's insane.
Go ahead.
Yeah.

Going in on that our journey, we love our tent campers.
I want more of them all the time.
I think we've all, I think a lot of peopleon this podcast have talked about how they
are the, that's the stepping stone, right?
Like tension cabins arethe stepping stone to RV.
And we run into a lot of pushbackfrom all of the municipalities and
the different local governmentswhere we're not allowed to offer it.

(51:03):
Like you cannot do.
It's actually insane how many differentgovernments are out there that are
like, you can't camp in the backof your van or you can't camp in
a tent in the back of your pickup.
But if it's on the ground nextto the pickup, that's good.

Yeah.
I think it's interesting'cause from our positioning.
Our tent sites that are walk-in, soyou're not even next to your car.
They're walk-in through your point, Greg,little bit of backpack to it, right?
Yeah.
You don't get to see your cargrill, you're looking at the canyon.
Those sites, we range from 80 to120 bucks a night for a tent site.
And, there's value in that.
And our occupancy in the summer ispretty crazy during peak season.

(51:42):
And I think it's just, you gotta thinkfrom their perspective, what does a
tent camper want to feel like the mostimportant camper at the Campground.
And a lot of times in RV parks,growing up that wasn't the case.
You're stuck in the back corner,the kids are behind the RV.

You still are.
It hasn't changed.

Yeah.
So put 'em in the first positionand there's value to that.
And I think.
It comes from learning themand thinking about what they're
looking for in that market.
But we've had a lot of success andjust trying to, in designing new
campgrounds, we intentionally designwalk-in tent sites with the best view.
Like they're the coolest sites, they'rethe most removed for the vehicle.
That's what people want.
Let's put the best sitesas walk-ins versus.

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

Yep.

It's not just setting up a dirt patch and
charging 30 bucks a night for it.
This is where many owners haveproblems getting to where you are is
because they think tent campers are30, 40, 50 bucks a night, and I could
just put in an RV site and that's$75, $100, $125 a night, whatever.
But it limits your market andyou're not thinking outside the box.
If you set everything up for them, if youmake it a guided experience, if you have

(52:44):
amenities that curate that to them, if yougive them the canyon view instead of the
gravel road in front of them that leads tothe other RV sites view, they will come.
And especially if you can curatethat experience to those new people.
I frequently bring up Earl from BlackFolks Camp Too, and it's the same thing he
says in his company is the same thing thatapplies to beach people in Los Angeles.

(53:05):
They don't know what they don't know.
And everyone is afraid of the unknown.
What are the bugs?
How am I gonna go pee or poop?
How am I gonna go, what?
Whatever.
And if you set up that way to,to make them more comfortable, to
curate the experience, to make iteasy for them to embrace Camping,
you don't need them to get to an RV,Kurtis, they already love Camping
and that's all you need them to do.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.
For certain, and that's whatSam's getting right about this.
I can't tell you how many clientsI've had that I've tried to, as
I'm sure everybody has seen NorthAmerican Camping report, right?
60% to 70% of camper nights everysingle year are spend tents.
A lot of those peopleare in the back country.
That means a lot of thosepeople are Sam's client, right?

(53:47):
They might not necessarily beKurtis's client because they
don't want to camp with RVs.
They don't want to campin maybe tighter spaces.
And I'm Kurtis, I don't, this soundslike I'm taking a shot at you, right?
I like RV parks in general, to Brian'spoint, they scratch out some stuff over
here and that's where the tenters go.
I got this place.
I can't turn into RV sites.
That's where the tenters go.
And so many times I find thatthey have a really negative

(54:09):
impression of tent campers.
They their place is messy.
It's a wreck.
They're drunk and they're loudand they're playing radios and.

Same thing as long term campers.

Correct.
Yeah.
But if that's the tent camper thatyou are attracting, they're not the
problem, you are, you're not building it.
That's why what Sam has built is boundto be successful because I've showed
them pictures of my rig, look at my tentand my car and my tarps and my shit.
Look at how neat my site is.
Do you know how much I've probably got$6,000, $7,000 in all my gear and stuff.

(54:40):
Do you understand how if you had an $80 anight campsite for a tent, I would, you're
the place I'm looking at because it's notgonna be a garbage place I have to make,
all those sites have to be for my RVs.
Okay.
It's not for everybody, but I'mglad to see somebody's capturing it.
And that I think, goes to whatyou're saying, Brian, that
speaks to not just tent Camping.

(55:01):
You can take that and apply itto a lot of these other niches.
It takes a lot of courage, right?
Because you see other RV parks,they're doing it a certain way.
They're successful.
Alright, I'm gonna try to emulate thatand maybe I'll nibble around the edges.
Don't nibble around the edges.
Be a Sam, get in there, put yourface in the ball and eat, man.
Go for it.

That's the difference between a small business owner.
Wonderful.

Yes.

Amazing people and entrepreneurs.

Yeah, absolutely.

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

Yep.
And it does, it takes alot of courage to do that.
So hats off to you, man.
Congrats on that.
There are a lot of other peopleout there doing similar things
in their niches, in their lanes.
Yeah.
But to the point youwere making before Brian.
That's, man it's hard to do.
But if you've got the courage to doit, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Trust in it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of people tell you can'tdo it and just trust in it.
The customer will tell you.
Yeah.

I wanna throw this out here and say we're at an
hour, so if anybody has to go.
Please go, but I'll keep thisgoing for a couple minutes that
we're having a good conversation.
Does anybody have to go?

I do.
I have to go.

I do have to drop.
I'm sorry, Brian.

So then we will wrap up the show.
We'll talk about operator next week or amonth from now, Kurtis, when we reconvene.

Okay.

A bunch of stuff.

Yeah.

We want to do.
Sam, I'm curious you have abackground you said in marketing
in working for Red Bull, right?
Correct.
Are you interested in just beinga recurring guest on the show?

Oh, I'd love to learn more.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'd love to.

There we have another recurring guest, Sharah.
Sam will be here and join usnext month and we'll talk about

Keep me posted.
I'd love to.

All right let's wrap up the show then.
We'll talk about operatorin a month or so.
But and we will talk aboutOur Journey too next month.
Of course.
I know we didn't get to that.
Too detailed into, butyou're here with us.
So we had to now Sam is too,but we had to prioritize him.
We didn't know that.

I'll get outta the way next time and you guys can talk.

Yeah.
I was like, just put Our Journey intoChat GPT or Google if you want to do it.
or the old school way.
We're there.

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

Yeah.
Love to have people come out and checkout our properties that come stay with us.
Pretty easy.
Google Campfire Ranchor AI Campfire Ranch.
We're the only ones.
And we have locations in Colorado soon toopen in Bentonville, Arkansas in October.
And a few more on the waythat I can't share just yet.
Probably the best place to find usis see what we do and how we the
experience we create is on Instagram.
That's really our bread and butter spot.

(57:13):
So @campfire_ranch.
And that's really where the magic happens.
You can see what we do.

Cool.
Thanks for joining us, Sam.
We'll, excited to talk toyou in the coming months.
Kurtis, we're gonna learnmore about Our Journey.

You can learn more about Our Journey at ourjourney.com
and you can also reach out to me as well.
Actually let's hold off on that one.
Go to our journey.com
and then.

Nobody watches the show.
Just give your personalcell phone, please.

Yeah, I was gonna do that actually, Brian.
'cause I thought I wasjust on a Zoom with you.

You're like, yeah.

And you can also our management company is
Advanced Outdoor Management.
So you can find us there as well.

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

Real smart not to ask me where they can find me.
'cause I was all set to be like, youtell me, man, when's it gonna be ready?

I knew it was coming, man.

It's real smart.
Okay.

But greg@growwithverio.com.

Yep.
That's right.

Consulting strategy, all that kind of stuff.
So thank you guys.
I appreciate it for another goodepisode of MC Fireside Chats.
If you're not bored and sick andtired of hearing me yet, we have
Outwired coming up in less than anhour with Greg Emmert and Scott Bahr.
We're gonna be talking about credit cardfraud and some ways that hackers are
taking down Campground reservation systemsin some cases and how you need to pay
attention to the security of your website.

(58:33):
And then what else arewe talking about, Greg?

How to deal with this damn heat.

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

Keeping your staff and your campers safe.

Evacuation route, stuff like that, so.

You got it.

We'll see you later on Outwired in about 55 minutes from now.
Otherwise, take care guys,we'll see you in a month or so.
And next week on anotherepisode of MC Fireside Chats.

Bye guys!

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MC Fireside Chats - June 25th, 2025

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