The Power of Hospitality: Secrets to Successful Retreats

0:00Women tend to like to talk to each other face to face. men like to be facing the same direction. It feels safer for them to share more openly. So having these two-seater UTVs going off-road and we're driving together and there's an adventure element, once again, it allows. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Kevin Raines. He's a devoted husband, father of three, and grandfather who's always embraced the joys of the outdoors as a former body shop owner, entrepreneur, marketer, off-road writer, and fisherman. Some of my favorite things there.

0:40Kevin has prioritized family and nature throughout his life. In 2021, he and his family transformed their 50-acre property in Zoe, Kentucky into a haven for outdoor adventures and simple living where they've created lasting memories for over 15 years. So Kevin, welcome to the show. Thank you. Honored to be on. Excited. You and I have known each other for some time, you know, like everybody knows each other these days, right on the, on the internet, but I've followed your journey, entrepreneurial journey, especially in the auto body days. So I thought this is a little different take on a show, but I frankly, I, I'll just be honest, I had a personal interest in learning about it.

1:17So why not record it? So maybe give us a little background because I know you had a very successful auto body business. I believe you sold. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey as an entrepreneur and then obviously where you got to today. Yeah. So I started my career in the ministry, actually, in my 20s and early 30s, pivoted into the family business when I was 33 and felt like I had a bit of a knack for that and started to grow. in large part thanks to your books and learning. Coming out of Bible college, they did not teach marketing. So I had to learn it from John Jantz. And I learned step-by-step, course-by-course, book-by-book, pieced it together, eventually grew to five locations.

2:02We went from doing about$250 ,000 a year in revenue to doing over$12 million a year in revenue. And private equity came, knocking on my door, wasn't interested. They told me their number. I was interested. That shifted quickly. So I thought I was going to retire. I was 50, 51 at the time. I thought, this is it. I'm going to kind of cash out and do a lot of fishing and quickly realize that I was not made for retirement. So my kids came to me and said, hey, let's do something different. Let's do something else. I said, what do you want to do? They said, why don't we start by developing these 50 acres we've owned for, at that point, 18 years in Zoe, Kentucky.

2:41And here we are, we're building it out. We have 10, sorry, 11 rentable structures on the property now after a couple of years. We've been doing a short-term rental business and we're pivoting now into more of a retreat business. So it's been 80 % short-term rental, 20 % retreats. We're going to try to flip the script on that and go 80 % retreats, 20 % short-term rental starting in 2025. So what was the, well, first off, maybe what was your inspiration? I mean, what made you think, you know, other than this is a what I want to do next or a business opportunity? Was there any sort of driving? You know, I'm envisioning the ministry playing a part, maybe even in just the retreats.

3:19I mean, was there any drive towards we want to have this place where people can gather? Yeah, definitely. It's not connected to any religious tradition. Our retreat center is not. But as a pastor, I would take retreats. I'd go to different. I went to a monastery for a week at a time, at least twice a year. and that would fill me up and fill the pipeline with ideas and things that I could teach on to the church and all that. And it's just always been a part of my personal kind of formation as a person and how I've lived my life. And one of the things we talked about as a family is we have a high value for hospitality.

3:54So we said, what can we do to open this property up? Because we had really protected it for almost 20 years, 18 years, just for our family. And then we thought like through the gift of hospitality, what would it look like to really open this up? Use some of the resources we had gotten from the sale of our businesses and put those to work in a setting where we can invite more people onto this property. So I think that was the inspiration was kind of like my early formation going on retreats and then our family deciding together, we want to use our gift of hospitality and open it wide up. So what challenges did you run into turning a private resident, zoning, crazy neighbors, whatever it might be.

4:37I mean, and just even construction, large scale construction. What did you learn? What were the challenges? How hard was it? So when we started this in 21, we didn't have any utilities on the property. So when my family would go there, we would basically be, at first we would just literally camp. And over time we'd get a trailer, but we didn't have any running water. So we'd have to carry our water in. There was no place to really prepare foods. We had to learn to cook over the open fire. We eventually built a yurt on a cliff edge on one side of the property. That became the foundation for a cabin that we built.

5:09It was kind of an off-grid cabin for all that time. So the earliest challenges were actually not zoning, believe it or not. That part of the world, central Kentucky, they don't care what you build as long as it's like, honestly, I can't think of it. We went to the building department and said, please give us any warning or restriction because we want to do this right. They said, honey, it's your property. Y 'all do what you want. And we're like, okay, well, we did. And cooling all those utilities on was probably the biggest challenge. So we wanted to bury the utilities. So we have no electrical lines running on the property.

5:43So everything's in the ground, the water, the electric, internet, everything is run under our driveway now. And then we branch out from there to the various structures. And then most of the buildings then, outbuildings, were built from scratch as well then. That's correct. Yeah. We had a contractor come in and just they started drilling posts in the ground and we built decks and then we put tents on top of those. Now we're building a 2 ,000 square foot. We call it the rookery, which is a place where birds gather because all of our tents are named after birds because they're elevated in the canopy.

6:16So they're kind of like in the tree, like treehouse type places. so we're calling it the rookery and it's going to be a couple thousand square feet with a 2 ,000 square foot deck so great place for retreats to gather in that space so I think we were chatting a little bit before we jumped on the air and you said that you know to date it's been a lot of short-term rental Airbnb kind of thing but you are now really trying to move towards people having retreats maybe coming in reserving the whole facility are you just kind of learning like what you have to offer for that kind of thing, ways to, you know, whether they're activities or adventures that you need to add, what's that going to look like, you think?

6:55Yeah, great question. So the area is really well known and it balloons in population on the weekends and certain seasons. So there's an underground kayaking area, there's canoeing, there's rock climbing all around us, there's guided hikes and climbing. So there's all kinds of like just, it's an outdoor enthusiast dream because of the way the cliffs are constructed. So, and we have great hiking on our property and we have access to Daniel Boone National Forest coming off of our property. So we've hiked, I think we hiked seven miles one direction with no trail in the National Forest just to see how far we could get.

7:31And if we ran into anything, saw nothing. So we have this beautiful playground and we're just introducing people to it. There's a 200 foot waterfall that cascades off of our property into the national forest. People can hike down there. So we're trying to think of some things we could do, maybe eventually like a ropes course or some other things on property. But the area is so rich with opportunity. We feel like our main role is really to host people and create a very comfortable place for them to be as a base of operations for their own adventures. I'm curious how, are you running this as a family business?

8:07Then the kids are all, everybody's involved. So I'm curious, how has moving to hospitality business in a way, you know, changed any, impacted your family dynamic at all? Because obviously that's different than, you know, going to work and working on the cars. You know, now we're like, now we're hosts. What has that done to the family dynamic? I'm curious. It's been interesting. So it was a chance for my kids to kind of elevate into a, cause at the time they were coming into my business. We were already three, four shops at that time. So they kind of got slotted as like customer service reps or helping me manage the part room or something kind of simple.

8:43My daughter helped me organize my office and create an operations manual for our office team. She's only, at the time she was 17, believe it or not. So I did put them into some roles. It may have been a little bit like outside there to give them a chance to kind of spread their wings. But now it feels like they're really kind of at the top of an organization that's going to grow over time. So we're starting fairly small. We've invested a few million dollars at this point. So it's definitely starting to be built out. We're not seeing a big return on that. So they're having to think through, like, how do we do marketing?

9:18How do we sell retreats? How do we handle HR for this size of organization? So they're learning the resource constraints that I had early on as a business owner. I'm letting them experience that as we go. And, you know, the secret for me is like, I don't care if it turns money for the next couple of years, but at some point it's going to need to. So I can be patient even though I watch them kind of freak out about trying to get to break even. It's my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast, our friends at Active Campaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with a must-have platform for intelligent marketing automation.

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10:36That's right, duct tape marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15 % off an annual plan. That's activecampaign.com slash duct tape. Now this offer is limited to new Active Campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue, and save precious time by upgrading to Active Campaign today. I'm curious, you know, you talked about a lot of people that really love outdoor experiences. It's not just the doing, it's actually the being in a relationship with land. And I'm curious if, you know, bringing guests onto that, if that's going to, are you going to be able to impart that same sort of feeling or ambiance?

11:19And I'm making some assumptions that you have, you know, for the land itself. Now that you're bringing in guests that are going to be there very, you know, temporarily, how do you get them to experience that? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that, like, initially, a lot of the retreats that we're running are people that we know, love, and trust, to use your language. So we're being very selective about some of the early days of people that we do bring on to the property. They share many of our values. They understand how important this space is to our family. Now through the short term rental, there's been a lot of people on the property that we don't really know.

11:54but it's been an opportunity to get to know other people and to bring them into kind of the fold so I travel down as often as I can my son travels down very regularly and we have an on-site property manager as well who welcomes people onto the property so I think having eyes on the property is kind of helping us feel a little level of comfort about like it's just not come one come all we have a gate at the front and we're kind of making it a secure environment for people to feel safe and to have an experience that their family can enjoy. And we make it clear that this is really for families. If just because a lot of my listeners expect me to talk about business and entrepreneurial ventures, have you had business retreats?

12:38And if so, what have you learned from doing those? Because I'm sure they run a little differently. And again, I'll stop there and just ask one question at a time. What have you learned from hosting some business retreats and how they kind of differ from, say the family reunion. Yeah, great. That's, it's interesting. One of the things I found that I actually love is when you get men in particular around a fire, you know, sometimes there's an adult beverage and a cigar involved in that as well, but the fire, the adult beverage, the cigar, the relaxed environment, it really tends to open people up, especially men who may not be as open with their feelings or how they're really doing or peeling that onion or not trying to posture position.

13:20So I've taken several retreats that led several retreats there with small business owners from my area who want to scale, who want to leave a legacy, who want to kind of do what my family's been able to do and enjoy that space with them and get them into an environment where they can start to open up. So I love getting around that fire. Sometimes there's tears, there's always laughter. It's a place of transparency. The other thing that we do along those lines is we have side-by-sides, kind of those off-road vehicles. And I don't know, I'd have to do a little more research on where this came from, but I've heard that women tend to like to talk to each other face-to-face.

14:01Men like to be facing the same direction. It feels safer for them to share more openly. So having these two-seater UTVs going off-road and we're driving together and there's an adventure element, once again, it allows some of those walls to fall. So retreats for me are really about helping business owners lower those, their defenses and get real and honest about what's really going on in their life and their business. So on that vein, have you seen, you know, a lot of times, like I do a lot of events and, you know, we sometimes struggle with how much downtime or playtime, you know, versus say working on whatever it is ostensibly we came there to work on.

14:43Have you seen some mixes or best practices or even ways in which people have incorporated those two? Of the opinion, and it may not be the majority opinion, that whatever needs to be talked about will get talked about. So I go very low on the curriculum side for my retreats. And I trust my own facilitation skills in that moment to kind of pull the group together to talk about what we need to talk about. Sometimes it is a business topic and I'm more than comfortable talking through those topics as well as family or personal challenges that they may be facing. So we're not trying to pigeonhole people and say, you know, come to a retreat and you end up crying and sharing your heart and going through all the layers and it'll be like therapy.

15:30That's not the point. It's just the point is to let them be the curriculum so the content comes out of whatever they bring into the retreat versus me having a script or a pre-package i am not a i love teaching i love content i love books but i also think there's this the wonderful thing about retreats is it's kind of open-ended and i can bring some of those things i've learned to bear on their real kind of called live animals whatever live animals they come with we wrestle with those well and i've Even people that go to conferences constantly comment on, yeah, I heard some good things in the meeting rooms or in the keynote, but it was the three or four conversations I had at break that really made the difference.

16:12And you hear that all the time. And I do think there's a real feeling by event organizers to like, let's pack a whole bunch in. But sometimes you just bring people together around an idea and just see what happens, right? That's it. I think that feels scary. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go over the numbers. How many people could come to an event? Do they get catered? I mean, what are the logistics? Yeah. So if you could imagine that the 10 rentable structures, like each of the tents are set up like very well-appointed hotel rooms. We have large, like queen-size or even king-size mattresses, Tempur-Pedic, wonderful pillows.

16:50They're beautifully designed. They're probably a few hundred square foot. I think they're 310 square feet each. So it's a big space, a big room. So you can put one person. So when I do men's retreats, one guy in each tent, so they have solitude. If we do a couple's retreat, then it's like obviously two per tent. So if it's a couple's retreat, easily 25 people. And then we work with a local barbecue joint. There's a kind of a grass-fed beef that does like hamburgers and tacos also in our area. We partner with local restaurants. to bring food on. The rookery that we're building is going to have a nearly almost like commercial grade kitchen in it.

17:35And our dream is to bring chefs down for retreats so that there can be meals prepared on site that are healthy, beautiful, delicious. So that's the dream. But I'd say our retreats tend to be anywhere from five to six people all the way up to 25, even 30 once the rookery is completed. And any, any plans for, you know, making it a hundred person place or is this kind of the intimate sort of scope that you want? Yeah. So we have, I have a partner in that area and we've bought up more property down there. So we have about 500 acres and we're currently using seven acres. So yeah, the end, the long-term answer is yes, we plan to go bigger, but we want to get really good at those five to 25 retreats before we start thinking about more conference level type stuff.

18:29So, yeah. So, any advice that you would get now? I don't know that there's going to be a lot of people listening to say, I'm going to do build a retreat center myself, but to kind of like majorly pivot, you know, whole different industry, whole different skillset, whole different customer-based, different vibe, everything. Is there any advice or something you've learned along the way to somebody, a family or an individual that was contemplating their next thing? I would say that I've learned most of what I've gained over the last 20 years of being in business applies to what I'm doing now. So there's not a huge disconnect, right?

19:06It's still, we want to do great customer service. Now we call them guests. Previously, I called them customers, But really, it's the same idea. We're dealing with people that need to be cared for and given an effortless experience and done. You know, they need to be communicated with in a way that's meaningful and helpful to them. So a lot of those skills are highly transferable. I would say, like, if somebody is considering a big pivot to feel like you're not starting over, like you're just taking what you've learned and you're applying it in a different context. And for us, it's like any fears that I had around, could we do this or not?

19:43It's been over the last two years have been completely set aside. We're just, our confidence is very high that we can make this happen, drawing on the skills we've learned in our previous enterprises. So how would you describe where Zoe, Kentucky is? It is in central Kentucky. So it's probably about an hour east of Lexington. So it's not easy to get to. It's a couple hours from Cincinnati, an hour from Lexington, a couple hours from Louisville. So some of those major metropolitan areas, like three hours from Nashville. So it's not always easy to get to. The payoff is the cliff edges. Like we could have bought property a lot closer, but to have these 200 foot soaring cliffs on one whole side of our property, you can't get that within an hour of Cincinnati.

20:31So we feel very lucky to have what we have. Yeah, I spent some time. What's the national park in Kentucky down in southern? It's a cave, wind cave or something like that, right? Mammoth Cave. Mammoth Cave. There we go. So I'm envisioning some of that same limestone. It's a lot of limestone, some sandstone, which makes it really good for climbers. I don't know a lot about climbing. I'm not built for climbing. I'm more built for podcasts. But the climbers tell me like the way the rock formed down there, it's just ideal. So it's a world class. Like it shows up in almost every climbing magazine every month somehow.

21:03Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. Awesome. Well, Kevin, again, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would people connect with you or certainly find out about the facility, which I don't even think we've mentioned the name, Dappled Light. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Dappledlightadventures.com. So Dappledlightadventures.com. Everything's there. You can see our facilities. You can reach out. If you email us there, you'll get to my son, Isaac. But would love to have any dialogue with people who are interested, either in retreats, talking about a business pivot, or want to talk about the hospitality industry, things we've learned in our first two years.

21:39I'm an open book. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully, we'll run into you soon one of these days out there on the road.

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