Nobody has ever handed us a park that runs perfectly. If one did, they wouldn't need us in the first place.

Part of an operator's job is to inherit somebody else's mess, find the fix, and clean it up before it costs you more than it should. This week was a reminder of how easily you can add to that mess while you're trying to clear it.

This Week's Position

The capital going into the ground this quarter isn't the kind that shows up in a brochure. It's electrical.

A code change coming in 2027 means the newer RVs ship with a ground-monitoring-interruption (GMI) system, basically a giant GFCI, that a lot of our pedestals weren't built to handle. On top of that, guests keep upgrading to the bigger 50-amp destination campers. If your park can't power the new rig, two things happen. The guest with the new rig drives down the street to the resort that can plug them in. And you lose the first-timers before they ever become regulars.

That second one matters more than people think. When somebody buys a brand-new rig, they land in one of two camps. Either they're a lifetime RVer reinvesting in the life, or it's the first RV they've ever owned. If it's their first, it's on us as an industry to make that first trip good enough that they come back for the next twenty years. You can't do that if you can't power what they pull in with.

So the electrical upgrades come before the things people actually notice.

We don't have the whole sequence mapped yet. The logic is simple. Where we were already planning to open up the ground for an electrical job, we fold the upgrade in. And we start with the most desirable sites, the transient ones most likely to draw somebody in a new 2027 rig. Doing it section by section instead of all at once keeps the cost from getting out of hand.

It's not exciting work. It's the kind that keeps you in business.

In the Hangar

One of our parks had lost its sense of community. We didn't rebuild that from headquarters. We couldn't.

Hospitality is a person-to-person business. It runs on connection, and connection happens on the ground, not on a corporate call. So we put a strong onsite manager in front of it and got out of her way.

What that looked like on her end: daily linen swaps that pulled the reviews up, digging out the park's old history book to reconnect the longtime seasonals who'd been coming since they were kids, making the office somewhere people wanted to stop in, giving up a day off to host a weekly community coffee.

The harder part was on our end. We had to stop stepping into the loop every time. We had to stop micromanaging and trust her to own it.

When a guest complaint came in, the instinct is to jump in and solve it ourselves. We pushed it back to her instead. She owns the relationship, so she owns the fix. The relationships got stronger because we stayed out of them.

The turnaround wasn't a program we ran from above. It was a person we trusted, and then left alone to do the job.

On the Radar

Here's something I'm chewing on right now. When does it make more sense to sell a rental unit than to keep renting it out?

The easy answer is dollars and cents. Run the ROI, see what it does to NOI, done. But that math is incomplete if you stop there.

The real cost is labor, and you have to put an actual number on it. If one of our maintenance guys is spending his week keeping a single rental unit alive, that's a week he isn't making the whole park better. That opportunity cost is usually bigger than the repair bill in front of you.

So the question isn't only whether the unit still pencils. It's whether holding it is the best use of the hours we'd spend keeping it running. Sometimes you're better off recovering the capital, shedding the maintenance drag, and pointing your best person at higher-value work.

I'm not seeing a signal in the market telling me now is the moment to move on it. This one is simple math, run unit by unit.

The Debrief

We took over a park this year that had been running on somebody else's reservation setup. It taught me a lesson I won't forget.

When you inherit a property, it feels logical to just take the existing reservation accounts and transfer them over. Same system, keep it running, don't reinvent the wheel. But even moving from one reservation system to the same system, we found that taking over the old setup instead of starting a clean one caused far more heartache than it saved.

The old data came along with it. Bookings we had no record of kept flowing in past the day we took over. A guest showed up with a paid reservation we couldn't find in our system, on a weekend the park was already full, and we had nowhere to put them. That is a brutal way to meet a customer.

Airlines overbook on purpose. They price it in, and when it goes wrong they hand you a voucher and put you on the next flight. There is no next flight at a full campground. What works for the airlines doesn't work for campgrounds.

Here's the rule we run now. Kill every booking channel first. Shut down every way the property can take a reservation. Then off-board the previous operator. Then, and only then, start taking new reservations on a clean system, with the old data cleaned up before it gets imported back in.

The cost of learning that the hard way didn't show up as one clean line item. It showed up as hours. Man-hours for the accounting team, the onsite team, ownership, and executive leadership, all fixing something that should have been simple. Add up the hourly rate across all of those people and the real cost is far more than it looks.

Here's the bigger point I keep landing on. Inheriting a mess isn't the exception. It's the job. Nobody comes to us with a perfectly running park and asks us to run it. They come to us because something is broken, in the process, the marketing, the operations, the accounting, somewhere. If nothing needed fixing, they wouldn't need us.

So the goal was never to avoid inheriting a mess. The goal is to triage it and clean it up fast, without it costing more in money or labor than it has to.

The mistake I've made before is letting us get so stretched cleaning up other people's messes that we start making our own. Then you're cleaning up two. That's a compounding, vicious cycle, and the discipline is refusing to start it.

That's the position this week.

From the trenches,

Bob

P.S. What's the messiest thing you've inherited taking over an operation, and what did it cost you before you got it under control? Hit reply. I read every one.

There's an old tractor on my dad's farm in western New York. An International 1466, the type you drive with your whole body. Operating it feels like it could be an X Games event.

I drove it in high school, mowing hay for another farmer. That money bought gas and paid for school. When he passed away, my dad bought the tractor.

A couple of weeks ago I was on it again, mowing my dad's field. Twenty-some years later. This time it wasn't for gas money. It was to disconnect from the day-to-day and reconnect with my roots. Fresh air. Simple, tangible work. You look behind you and see the hay in the windrows, and you get the satisfaction of immediately seeing what you did.

That same week, parked at the farm in our camper, we closed the biggest deal of our year.

Then the next morning taught me something the deal never did.

This Week's Position

Unhitched Branson closed.

If you've been reading since February, you've watched this one crawl. Under contract, due diligence, a surveyor on site, financing partners, "the pieces are on the shelf." Five months of almost.

What finally got it across the line was changing the structure. We moved from traditional financing to seller financing, and once we made that call, the note and the mortgage had to be negotiated from scratch. Terms, guarantees, all of it. Once that was done, the capital came together and we were ready to close.

Then came the morning after.

Our team walked the property the day after closing and found roughly twenty sites that weren't taking reservations. Not twenty ruined sites. Most of the issues were small, the kind you fix in a day or two. But the seller had quietly pulled them out of the booking system, and we never knew.

Here's the thing we got wrong. We did all the physical inspections. We checked every site. What we didn't do was ask one question: are there any sites you're not taking reservations for? We assumed that if a site was functional and present, it was earning. What you take for granted as obvious may not be as obvious.

Long term, this one matters less than it sounds. One of the value propositions we underwrote was replacing that reservation system with a far better one to increase revenue. The lesson still stands.

That question is now a permanent part of our diligence checklist, along with access to the seller's reservation system before we close, not after.

The rest of the month was financing work. Five refis in the next thirty days across the portfolio. What the debt market is telling us: there's plenty of appetite for lending on RV parks, and the rates we're getting are more negotiable than what gets presented. Most of these are landing between 6.5% and 7%.

And the management side keeps moving. More owners are reaching out to us, and there are more properties coming in the fall. More on those when there's ink.

In the Hangar

Somebody asked me what I was proudest of last quarter.

It wasn't Branson. It wasn't the eight properties we onboarded. It was watching our middle bench grow. Area managers and regional managers stepping up, taking real ownership, getting better at jobs bigger than the ones we hired them for.

That's not an accident. It's the way we promote.

We put people in position based on their potential, not their past performance. When I look at someone for a bigger job, I'm not asking whether their resume proves they've already done it. I'm asking whether they've shown the work ethic, the drive, and the capacity to grow into it. If they have, I believe they'll rise to the standard.

One of our best park managers is moving up to run Branson. She's watched colleagues move up while we purposely kept her in place, because she was that valuable where she was. That's exactly the trap.

The bet doesn't always feel comfortable. It leaves a hole at the property she's leaving, and everyone involved feels it. But the alternative is worse. Hold your best people in place long enough and you lose them entirely.

We're also rolling out behavioral assessments across the leadership team and the manager level. Not as a corporate exercise. Because some of our best people were obvious hires, and some of them frankly surprised us. What I want to learn is how to uncover the unknown A players. The ones already in the company, or standing in front of us in an interview, who don't look like the resume version of the job.

On the Radar

Sellers are moving again.

A park we chased hard last year just traded, and the number made me laugh out loud. Owners who sat on their hands through two years of high rates are calling brokers. And the father and son with the waterfront park I wrote about last edition? Still talking. We may not be the buyer. We're still first in line.

I've been saying since the first edition of this newsletter that distressed and tired assets would come to market in waves. I'm not ready to call this the turn. But the phone is ringing differently than it did in January.

The other thing I'm watching is who shows up when capital starts sniffing around a sector. We've had conversations lately with sophisticated groups, including operators who've built and run their own properties. Those conversations always come down to the same filter for me: their ability to execute at the operation level. Capital is easy to find. Execution is the moat.

The Debrief

The same week Branson closed, Matt and I sat down and studied an operator who raised over twenty million dollars in six months off social media ads.

I've been in a room with this operator before. The meeting was painful. Up close it was platitudes and regurgitated one-liners tied together incoherently. Enough simple buzzwords thrown out like a shotgun blast that it might all sound like it works together.

The ads are the same act at scale. Rendered photos of properties that aren't his. Promises engineered to feel safe. And it works, if the only number you care about is the click.

Here's what I keep coming back to. His click rate beats ours because he's willing to say things we won't. I'd put our close rate against his any day, because when a serious investor sits across the table, the buzzwords stop working and the operations have to be real.

It's pretty easy these days to be a great marketer and draw a lot of eyeballs. That's not the hard thing. The hard thing is the operations. The systems, the processes, the unsexy day-to-day. That's been true through every magic-bullet cycle this industry has run, and it's true about raising money too.

Somebody asked me my rule for raising capital without becoming the guru. It's simple. Answer four questions and skip the show:

What is the investment?

What is the game plan?

How much money do you need?

What do you expect to give back?

The people who've built something truly worth owning, the Warren Buffetts of the world, tend to do it the subtle and honest way. Not because it's noble. Because it compounds.

I'm not doing an ice bath investment race.

At the end of the day, I want our capital raising to feel like that tractor. Slow, steady rows. Work you can turn around and see. Nothing about it designed to go viral, and everything about it designed to still be standing in twenty years.

That's the position this week.

From the trenches,

Bob

P.S. Where's your line between marketing what you built and manufacturing what you haven't? Hit reply. I read every one.

Someone in an AI session at the TACO trade show a couple months back raised his hand and asked where he could buy the AI software.

The room nodded. A few people pulled out pens.

I want to talk about that question. Not because it was naive. It wasn't. Because it told me something about where this industry is right now that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

I've been quiet on AI publicly for a while.

I'm going to make one careful exception. More on that later.

This Week's Position

Most of our best deal flow doesn't come off a listing. It comes from staying in touch.

There's a waterfront park in the Southeast our team first walked a few years back. Good asset, owned by a father and son. The timing didn't work then, so I kept the relationship warm. A standing reminder on my calendar, Friday mornings. A text every couple of months.

This month, the son called. His dad is ready to be done, and they're finally ready to sell. The first call they made was to me.

We may not end up buying it. The per-site basis is rich for where we are right now. But that's not the point. A couple of years of staying in touch put us first in line, and that's a kind of deal sourcing you can't buy a tool for.

On the other side of the table, we're holding the line on price. A portfolio came to us that's been shopped hard to everyone. As a clean purchase, the only honest number we can put on it is one the seller won't like. Add creativity, structure, a longer time horizon, and we can get more aggressive. We don't buy someone else's exit at their asking price.

Branson closes Monday. And we've got another deal with a 50/50 joint venture on the table where we'd bring the debt and some equity. More to share when there's ink.

In the Hangar

Here's the unsexy version of the same lesson about "where to buy AI" I opened with, from inside our own company, on the marketing side.

For a long time our marketing philosophy was basically: spend more and it'll work. We hired agencies. We wrote the checks. It wasn't working.

So we did something that felt backwards. We turned almost all of it off and ran the portfolio for close to a year with essentially no ad spend.

Not because marketing doesn't matter. Because we'd been pouring it on top of a foundation that wasn't built yet. You can't promote your way out of inconsistent operations. The ad just brings more people to a thing that isn't ready for them.

So we spent the year building the base instead. Standard work. The reservation and revenue systems. The reporting that tells us what's actually happening at each park. Only now are we turning marketing back on, with a reason behind every dollar.

Here's the part that makes the point. Through that whole year of almost no ad spend, occupancy held around eighty percent.

Occupancy isn't the whole scorecard. But holding it with nothing behind it in paid marketing told us the demand was real, and the foundation was doing the work marketing used to take credit for.

We could have kept buying our way toward a fix. Another agency, a bigger budget, a new channel. It would have felt like progress. It wouldn't have moved the asset.

Same trap as the AI software. Different label.

On the Radar

The wider thing happening here, the thing that's hard to see from inside that room at TACO, is that the frontier has moved.

Not five years. Not ten. The last twenty-four months have changed what a sophisticated operation can do. The gap between an operator on modern systems and one running 2015's playbook is now wider than the gap between any two operators in that TACO room.

That gap isn't a software gap. The operators at the frontier didn't get there by buying better tools. They got there by building better operations. The tools followed.

On the vendor floor, the loudest categories were the predictable ones. Anything with "AI" in the name. Dynamic pricing layering AI on what used to be rule-based pricing. Guest-experience tools promising automated personalization. A lot of what's labeled AI this year is last year's rule-based tool with a new sticker on it.

What I'm watching for the back half of 2026 isn't which vendor category wins. It's whether the operators trying to buy their way out of operating problems realize they can't, and whether the ones who do compound their advantage faster than the rest of the industry can close the gap.

The widening doesn't have to keep widening. But it will, as long as the room keeps asking where to buy the software.

The Debrief

The operator who asked wasn't dumb. Most of the people in that room have been running parks longer than I have. They love this business and want to do right by their guests and their balance sheets.

But the question, where can I buy the AI software, is the whole piece. They weren't asking about AI. They were asking about it as if it were an app. Something with a login that you open in the morning, run your park through, and close at night. The vendor up front was talking about AI. The room was hearing new software.

I've been at this long enough to watch the magic bullet change names a few times. Franchising. Then experiences, bolt on an axe-throwing range and the asset prints money. Then dynamic pricing. Now AI. Different label every cycle, same instinct underneath: somewhere out there, somebody is selling the thing that fixes my operating problem.

Here's what that instinct misses. The problems most operators face aren't one problem. They're a stack of compounding problems, and a stack of compounding problems doesn't have a single solution. There's nothing you can buy that clears all of it at once.

The buy-the-software story sticks because it's the kinder of the two answers. The honest answer is do the work: build the systems, run the standard work, train the team, have the hard conversations. That's slow and unsexy and you can't pay a vendor to make it go away. I've felt the pull myself on a hard week.

But AI isn't an app. It's closer to electricity. It only does work when somebody who already understands the operation points it at the right problem. Without an operator who knows what RevPAS should look like in their market and what the cost structure actually is, it doesn't fix anything. It just makes a confused operation slightly faster at being confused.

At the end of the day, operations come first. Tools come second. That's been the order through every magic-bullet cycle this industry has run.

That's the position this week.

From the trenches,

Bob

P.S. If you know an operator who's about to write a big check to fix something a system would fix cheaper, forward this to them. That's who it's for.

A client of ours owns multiple parks under one brand.

Three of them transitioned to our management last quarter. The rest are still run by the management company that lost the other three. He wanted a read on the parks we don’t manage.

So he sent me in as a prospective guest.

I drove in last week. Pulled up to the front desk.

What I heard surprised me.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

A few things moved this week.

We refinanced Unhitched North Pensacola on Friday. It’s a new-construction park, and we moved it off the construction loan into permanent financing with a local credit union on terms that came in better than we expected going in. Nothing dramatic on the surface, just the kind of balance-sheet work that quietly strengthens an asset we already own.

Occupancy is climbing, too, which is what makes the timing work.

If you’re trying to read the debt market right now, reply and tell me what you’re seeing. The picture is more open than the headlines suggest.

We also brought a new park online called Orange Grove RV Park in Bakersfield, CA. The first of the month is when a transition stops being a plan and becomes real. Signage, systems, reservation flow, staff. It all goes live at once, and you find out fast what you accounted for and what you didn’t.

Branson is close. We’re not signed yet, but the pieces are on the shelf. If the next couple of weeks go the way they should, it closes.

Accredited investors who want a closer look at how we evaluate deals can sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

Here’s a piece of building we’re doing right now that doesn’t make the highlight reel.

We’re standing up a real finance department. We brought on a finance leader not long ago, and he’s building out his team. Several new roles, posted and hiring.

This isn’t us getting ahead of a problem. It’s us in the middle of one. For a while, finance was something a couple of capable people ran on the side of their desks. That carries you further than you’d think at a few parks. Across a portfolio this size, it doesn’t. We found that out the way most operators do: the numbers start coming slower, and the answers start getting softer, right when the people who matter, your investors and your lenders, are paying the closest attention.

So we’re fixing it. Not with a better spreadsheet, but with a real function. Its own leader, its own people, built to give us clean numbers fast, no matter how big the portfolio gets.

If you’re scaling a portfolio, reply and tell me when you knew finance had to become its own function.

ON THE RADAR

The first real numbers of peak season are in, and the portfolio is strong. The parks we’ve held for a while are where we’d want them. The ones we onboarded over the last few months are still below target, but every one of them is climbing. A first full season under new management tells you more than any spreadsheet did during diligence.

One park we operate in Houston is worth singling out. When we took it over, it was sitting at 23% occupancy. As of June 1, it’s at roughly 76%. And this is a market everyone will tell you is overbuilt and oversupplied.

We didn’t run a clever campaign. We put a manager on-site who actually lives in the community. She called every past guest by name and invited them back. She went through the old contracts nobody had touched. That’s it. That’s the whole playbook.

It’s a useful reminder heading into the busy months. The thing that moves a struggling property isn’t usually a new idea. It’s someone present enough to do the obvious things well.

Reply and tell me what’s moving the needle at your place this season.

THE DEBRIEF

Back to that front desk.

The owner had sent me to get an honest read on the parks still run by the company he’s leaving. The GM working the desk had no idea who I was. To him, I was just another walk-in weighing a weekend.

He was a couple of minutes into his pitch when he went out of his way to tell me that the guest experience at three other parks under the same brand had really gone downhill.

The same three parks his company had just lost the management contracts on.

I asked the obvious follow-up. “They’re the same brand, right? Same name?”

That’s where the conversation got interesting. He had just told a prospective guest that the name on his own sign was unreliable. That the brand meant something (good) here and something different (not good) over there. He thought he was disparaging his competition, but it felt to me like he was disparaging his own product.

Worth clarifying: what he was telling me wasn’t grounded in reality. The numbers at those three parks have moved in the opposite direction since the transition (I know that because we run them). So have the reviews. The owner can see the data. That’s why he sent me to the others.

The GM wasn’t reporting an observation. He was repeating something. A line like that doesn’t show up in a GM’s mouth on its own. He’d heard it before, probably in a regional meeting, and by the time it came out in front of a prospective guest, it had been polished by repetition.

Culture isn’t what’s in your training manual. It’s what your team actually does when no one’s checking.

A caveat before the takeaway, because I don’t want this to land like a pitch. We are not a perfect management company. We have reporting systems that we want to be sharper. Standard work, we haven’t fully rolled out across all properties. Hiring decisions we’d take back. CAPEX timelines we missed.

Plenty of places we know we’re falling short, and plenty more we haven’t found yet. Operating while scaling in a big way means living with a list of things you haven’t fixed yet. Every honest management company has them.

But there’s a difference between a passive shortfall and an active one. Between “we haven’t gotten this right yet” and “we are actively working against our client’s interests.” Between “we owe the owner an improvement” and “we just told a stranger to think less of three of his other properties.”

Those are different categories. They get treated like the same thing in industry conversations. They shouldn’t be.

At the end of the day, what your management company says when you’re not in the room is your brand.

That’s worth knowing before you find out the way that owner is about to.

From the trenches,

Bob

I’ve been at this long enough to know when those meetings are special, high-impact situations. A client choosing to put his management company in that room, ahead of his broker or his accountant, is rare.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

The seller-financing arrangement on our Branson deal, which we walked through previously, is on track to close.

Also, the raise behind our Branson acquisition has come together faster than I expected and is close to closing out. We’re at roughly 75% firm commitments and circling soft commitments on the rest. If you want a look at how we’re evaluating the deal, reach out.

We’re still working toward opening the raise on the California deal. Stay tuned.

We also made an offer on a larger deal in Texas. More if it firms up.

The other capital threads from last edition are quiet this week. They’ll wait until there’s something material to report.

Accredited investors interested in keeping up with our deals can sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

While we’re still building and still have plenty of operational projects “in the hangar,” now is the time to focus on delivering exceptional guest experience. Several of the parks we onboarded over the last few months just ran their first Memorial Day weekend under our operation.

We’re working back through how each one performed. What held up, what strained, where the gaps showed once a park was actually full. A first peak weekend at a newly onboarded park tells you more than any spreadsheet did during diligence.

That review feeds straight into peak season. The fixes we make now are the ones that compound across June, July, and August.

Reply and tell me what your first big weekend showed you this year.

ON THE RADAR

What I’m watching for the back half of 2026 is something most of this industry isn’t seeing clearly yet.

The frontier has moved. Not 5 years. Not 10. The last 24 months have changed what a sophisticated operation can actually do. The gap between an operator running modern systems and an operator running the playbook from 2015 is now wider than the gap between any two operators in any room I walked into this spring.

That gap isn’t a tooling gap. The operators at the frontier didn’t get there by buying better software. They got there by building better operations. The systems, the scorecard, the standard work, the hard conversations. The tools followed.

What I’m watching is whether the owners who keep trying to buy their way out of an operating problem eventually realize they can’t. And whether the ones who do figure it out compound their advantage faster than the rest of the industry can catch up.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around: the real playbook from inside the operation.

THE DEBRIEF

As I alluded to above, I was recently sitting across from a client’s lender, supporting the client upon their request in a relatively high-stakes situation for the client’s asset.

We were meeting about an 8-figure loan on an RV park. The client was in a tight spot. Not underwater, but tight enough that the next conversation with his bank mattered. He’d decided the thing that would most strengthen his position was bringing the operator into the room.

Not his broker. Not his accountant. Us.

We’re honored to be there for a client working through an 8-figure situation. We’re proud that he decided what he most needed in the room was his management company. That doesn’t happen often.

Most owners hire a management company the way they hire a landscaping service. They’re buying a vendor service. Mow the lawn, run the park, send the reports, stay out of the way. For a certain kind of asset, that’s fine. A small park, a stable market, a forgiving loan.

That’s not what most of this industry actually looks like anymore. Most of it now looks like an 8-figure loan on a park that needs real operations to work. A tight debt service coverage ratio that doesn’t leave room for a bad quarter. A lender watching the monthly reports more carefully than they used to. A market that’s grown less forgiving.

In the current environment, your management company shouldn’t be just a service provider. They should be part of your credit and investment story. They’re part of what the bank is betting on when they approve a new loan, or keep a tight existing loan in place instead of calling it.

Which means the question isn’t who can run my park.

The question is, who can I walk into a hard conversation with?

There’s a part of this that we can offer that a non-owner manager can’t. We own parks, too. I’ve signed the same kind of personal guarantee my clients sign. I’ve had hard conversations with my own wife about a deal that wasn’t penciling the way the model said it would. I’ve sat across from my own banker on my own loan.

The pressure my client was under wasn’t theoretical to me. It’s hard to fake your way through that conversation.

If you want to know whether you’ve hired the right management company, picture the scene from your own side of the table. A banker calls. He needs to meet about your loan. You think about who you’d want in the room with you.

If your management company isn’t the first name that comes up, you’ve hired the wrong company. Not because they’re bad at making sure the lawn gets mowed. Because they’re not the company you’d want or need when it counts.

At the end of the day, what you’re hiring isn’t a service. It’s a seat next to you when the conversation gets serious.

From the trenches,

Bob

Beautiful lakefront. The kind of asset that, on paper, would make anyone with capital lean forward.

Thirty minutes in, I realized the most important thing I was seeing wasn’t the condition of the property. It was the reservations system.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

It’s been a few weeks since the last edition of The Position Report. We’ve been heads-down getting ready for peak season: the Florida-Alabama Outdoor Hospitality Convention, the Texas Association of Campground Owners Spring Show, and a lot of property visits in between.

Before I get into the update, a quick thank you. A lot of you came up to say hello at the shows, and several of you had real feedback on what you’ve been reading here. I don’t take that for granted. This works better as a conversation than a broadcast.

The Florida show also had the whole family along, kids and all. And it wasn’t just mine. Several of our team members brought their families to Orlando, too. There’s a camaraderie in that, the people you work with and the people you go home to all in one place, swapping stories between sessions.

That’s just how it goes in this business. Outdoor hospitality doesn’t let you draw a clean line between work and family, and we don’t try to. That’s a big part of why this industry fits me.

Here’s where the capital side stands.

Our Branson acquisition is still moving, just not the way we drew it up. Our bank left us at the altar. Rather than restart the whole financing process from scratch, we worked out seller financing instead.

Here’s the lesson I’m taking from it. When a deal is tight, when the historical financials are messy, or the DSCR is thin, that’s the wrong moment to be leaning on a bank you have no track record with. A new lender has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt, and a hairy deal gives them plenty of reasons to walk.

On a clean and obvious deal, a new bank is fine. On a deal with nuance, it’s probably better to go with a lender you’ve already developed a real relationship with.

Our California deal is also progressing. Legal is doing their thing, and management onboarding is already underway with our team onsite this week.

On the financing side, one big item cleared this week: official approval on a $4.25 million refinance out of a construction loan on a park we recently built. I’d been holding my breath on that one for a while.

Separately, we’re structuring the financing on a land acquisition as a single, crossed loan, secured against a park we already own free and clear next door. The appraisal is ordered. A few weeks out.

One more item, and this one’s a preview. We’re getting ready to open a raise on that California deal. I’m not going to get ahead of the details here, but it’s far enough along to be worth flagging. More on that as it firms up.

None of this is dramatic. It’s the unglamorous part of the calendar: financing that has to close, properties that have to be ready, systems that have to hold before the guests show up.

At the end of the day, peak season doesn’t reward the operator with the most deals in motion. It rewards the one who did the quiet work before Memorial Day instead of during it.

Accredited investors interested in keeping up with our deals can sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

For a couple of months now, I’ve mentioned the centralized website we’ve been building across the portfolio. As of this week, version one is live.

It took longer than we planned. Getting the old setup and the new one to work together surfaced more issues than we expected. That’s usually how these projects go. The next phase is building out detailed subdomains for each property, but the core is in place and working. You can take a look at unhitchedrv.com.

One other system worth a mention: CallRail is now running portfolio-wide. Every property’s phone traffic runs through one place. We’re early, just starting to collect the data, the numbers, and the patterns behind them. For the first time, we can see how the phone actually performs across every property at once.

There’s a third system taking shape that I’ll save for its own edition. So many of the parks we take over arrive in rough shape that we were forced to build a methodical process for bringing a struggling property back to standard. We’ve started calling it the rescue protocol. More on that another time.

If you’re running an operating business of any kind, reply and tell me what you spent this week building.

ON THE RADAR

One of our properties is close to opening. We don’t have the certificate of occupancy in hand yet, so I won’t put a date on it, but we’ve already started the ramp-up booking process. Not delayed. Just not finished.

The bigger thing on my mind heading into Memorial Day isn’t a launch. It’s the seasonal-park question.

I’ve spent time this spring up north watching what it actually takes to run a seasonal park. The shutdown, the startup, the labor of opening and closing a property every single year. A seasonal park has a short window to make its money. One bad stretch of weather and the whole year’s numbers move. You de-risk it by collecting the season up front, but the rate has a ceiling, and that ceiling doesn’t climb much with inflation.

I’m not making a call on it here. It’s just the kind of question worth working through in the off-season, because peak season has a way of answering it for you.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around: the real playbook from inside the operation.

THE DEBRIEF

Back to the property I toured.

The condition was rough. Common areas, sites, store, signage, and landscaping. None of it is catastrophic on its own. Together, it told me the asset hadn’t had real operating attention in a while. That part wasn’t surprising.

The thing I hadn’t expected was what I learned about how the property actually runs.

The on-site phones don’t really work. The internet at the property isn’t strong enough to support them. So reservations are routed to a call center. The call center is offshore. The call center is also, according to the consistent account of the staff and the guests, not very good. They don’t know the property. They aren’t friendly. They don’t try to sell anyone on staying.

The guests have figured out a workaround. They’ve stopped calling the reservation number. They call the staff’s personal cell phones instead.

That’s how reservations are getting handled at this property. On the cell phones of the people working at the front desk. Without a system. Without notes. Without any of the infrastructure that a reservations process is supposed to provide.

The staff member who explained this to me did so plainly. She wasn’t complaining. She was just describing how she gets her job done.

A property in this condition is almost always a property that nobody with authority at the management company has walked through recently. The call center isn’t the problem. The call center is the symptom.

Properties rarely decline like this overnight. They decline by inches at a time. A call center decision here. An untrained hire there. A site that doesn’t get attention this quarter, then doesn’t get attention next quarter. None of it shows up with flashing lights. Unfortunately, most of the time, it shows up, eventually, when a fresh pair of eyes takes a close look.

The on-site staff becomes blind to it. The guests either get used to it or leave. The people running the company often don’t know. Or don’t care to know.

Either way, the property keeps slipping, and nobody on the inside sees the inches.

Then someone new walks the property for the first time. The missed attention, the process that was never built, the small wrong calls, the pieces that went missing along the way. None of it happened at the same time. But at the end of the day, it all ends up looking the same in a first impression.

From the trenches,

Bob

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Last week, we started warming up our investor list on an acquisition we’ve been working toward. By Friday afternoon, soft commitments covered almost half of the raise. Firm commitments covered about 25%. The investment paperwork is in process, and I’ll share more in The Debrief about the early response.

Nothing else signed or closed this week. The raise is what moved.

Anyone else opening a raise this spring? Reply — I’d like to hear how the first week’s been on your side.

IN THE HANGAR

On the operations side, Dave Willner, our COO, rolled out our new weekly scorecard to the regional managers.

The old one measured what was easy to measure. Occupancy, revenue, expense ratios — the basics. It kept us honest enough, but it didn’t separate a park that was quietly trending up from one holding ground or starting to slip. At this portfolio size, that distinction matters.

The new version sharpens the signals. RevPAS is in there now — revenue per available site — which catches what pure occupancy misses. Occupancy can look fine while rates are compressing. RevPAS tells you whether the revenue per site is actually going up or coming off.

Training and calibration are the next steps. A scorecard isn’t useful until everyone reads it the same way. Every regional manager needs to understand what “green” and “red” actually mean, what triggers a conversation with a property manager or asset manager, and what conversations or actions a trend in any metric should drive.

If we do this right, we end up with 35+ properties being evaluated on the same lenses when applicable, and unique ones when appropriate. Same signals, same response protocols. That’s the real value — not the metrics themselves, but the alignment underneath them.

This scorecard is another one in the column of systems we’re building that we probably should’ve had in place a few properties ago, just like centralized reservations, which we discussed in the last edition.

Some of the tools we build do feel innovative — rare, but it happens. Most of them feel overdue. That’s the honest reality of scaling an operating platform: you spend a lot of months (or years) catching up to the scale you already have.

The value of getting them in place isn’t that the team finally has the right metric. It’s that everyone — home office, regional managers, property managers — is reading the same numbers the same way. Alignment at this scale is harder than it sounds, and it’s what compounds.

Working on improving your own reporting systems right now? Reply — I’d love to hear about it and compare notes.

ON THE RADAR

A few things we’re tracking heading into peak season.

The master website and the marketing build-out:

Phase 1 of our new master website is going live this week. MVP level, consolidated entry point across our portfolio, with centralized reservations infrastructure underneath. The foundation is solid now — which is the harder part. That unlocks the next tier of investment, and we’re moving on all of it: email marketing, SEO, GEO (for AI search), paid acquisition, and conversion tracking by property. Infrastructure first, horsepower second. The horsepower starts now.

Trade show season and property visits:

Starting this week, I’m on the road. TACO on Tuesday — I’ll be there for the day. The following stretch includes Orlando, where we’ll have a booth — if you’re attending, come by and say hello. Later in the week, I’ll visit one of our existing Texas properties, plus stops at two additional properties we expect to bring onto our management platform in the coming weeks. The relationships that set up the back half of the year get made in April and May, not in June when everyone’s already running hot.

The 50-property math:

With the management platform additions queued up and the deal threads in motion, we’re on a trajectory that puts us past 40 properties this summer and in range of 50 by fall. A year ago, that number felt aspirational. Now it’s sequencing — which team members go where, which systems have to be in place by when, which markets we’re adding versus deepening. The number itself is less interesting than what it forces us to solve before we get there.

Seeing the same setup-versus-execution tradeoff in your operation? Reply — I’d like to compare notes.

THE DEBRIEF

We started warming up our first capital conversation in a long time this week — and it’s surfaced something I’d taken for granted.

For the last couple of years, we’ve been heads down operating. No open funds, no monthly “we’ve got another one” updates, no drumbeat of raise emails. Everyone I talk to has some version of the same line about the market right now — capital is harder to raise than it used to be, CRE is wonky, LPs are holding. I don’t know enough to contradict any of that. What I do know is that our own network has been quiet for a while, and the response on the first touch has been warmer than I expected.

A quiet network and a saturated one are different kinds of audiences. That’s not a controversial point, but it’s one I’d underestimated. The investors we haven’t been in front of every month have been more engaged on the first touch than the ones we’ve been communicating with regularly.

One other thing stuck with me. A longtime LP relationship — historically a tough sell on timing and distributions — called this week. I braced for pushback. Instead, he said he was retiring and a little bored, and asked if we had any work he could do.

At the end of the day, I’ve been finding that the longer we’re in business, the people we assume might be a little frustrated with us often turn out to be our best advocates and allies. Worth paying more attention to the ones you’ve written off as cool on you — they may be further along from where you last left them than you think.

If you know another sponsor or investor who’s been rethinking how they stay in touch with their network, I’d love to discuss.

From the trenches,

Bob

This week, I want to walk you through why — and answer the K-1 timing questions we’ve been getting. Plus: where our next park managers are actually coming from, and a short list of systems we should have built three years ago.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

No deals closed this week. No PSAs signed, no deposits wired.

What did move was the back-office machinery behind the last portfolio we bought. The Beyonder acquisitions are still getting cleaned up — entity by entity, and they flow into our fund-level K-1s. That cascade is one of the bigger reasons we’re filing taxes on extension this year instead of by March 15, and it’s worth understanding why that’s not the failure it’s sometimes made to sound like.

March 15 is a partnership tax deadline designed around a company simpler than ours. Some sponsors can hit it — bigger teams, bigger in-house finance and accounting departments, simpler fund structures. Climb’s structure — funds holding portfolios of properties, each with its own entities and waterfalls — doesn’t finish cleanly in 75 days from year-end. Not without forcing a rushed return that we’d likely have to amend later.

The extension buys time to do it right. I’ll go deeper in The Debrief at the end of this edition about what some CPAs seem to get wrong about tax deadlines.

Navigating K-1 timing on your side of the table? Reply — curious how other operators and investors think about it.

IN THE HANGAR

We’re adding parks, which means we need more great managers. I used to think of that as a hiring problem to solve. It’s turning into something else.

Several of our newest park managers didn’t come from a job board. They came from inside our own parks — camp hosts, guests who kept showing up, the person the current manager leaned on when things got busy. Our best managers have a keen eye for that kind of talent. They find it in their own community, highlight the person, and we start developing them.

That’s changed how I think about taking over a park’s operations. The first great manager we put in place builds the culture. The culture surfaces the next great manager. If the top of the park is right, the bench below starts building itself. We’re growing semi-organically, and it’s the healthiest growth I’ve seen in this business.

On the benefits side, May 1 is the launch — portfolio-wide, roughly 200 employees. The first-year pricing was ugly. Healthcare underwriters can’t price you fairly when you have no track record as an employer offering benefits, so the quotes reflect that. First year is going to be rough for everybody, company and team both. Second year, once we’ve got history, the math changes.

But we had to cross the threshold. Benefits at this scale only work because we aggregated the portfolio — no single RV park can afford this at our revenue per property. That’s what the platform is for. It’s one of the reasons we built it.

Ever recruited a manager from your guest base or part-time staff? Reply — I’d love to compare notes.

ON THE RADAR

Three things on the near-term list that’ll change how readers experience us as a brand.

New master website goes live in about 15 days. Not a redesign you’ll notice if you don’t already know our sites. A consolidation — every Unhitched property, every brand, finally sitting behind one clean entry point.

Centralized reservations are about 45 days out. One drop-down, every Unhitched location, real-time availability by date and by market. Hilton-style, but for RV parks. This isn’t cutting-edge; plenty of operators have it. It’s the kind of thing we should’ve built 15 properties ago. We’re finally getting around to it.

Both of those are infrastructure. They don’t win you customers by themselves. They stop costing you customers — the person who wanted to book two properties in one trip and couldn’t figure out how, the traveler who didn’t realize we had a park at their destination, the prospect who called three numbers before giving up. That’s the problem these systems solve.

The other thing on the radar is me — on the road. After next week, I’m traveling almost every workday through May. Trade shows, conferences, and property visits. The start of peak season is six weeks out, which is the window when the relationships and partnerships for the back half of the year actually get made. If you’re at any of the industry shows over the next six weeks and want to connect, reply, and I’ll make time.

What’s the infrastructure upgrade you keep putting off? Reply and tell me what’s on your list.

THE DEBRIEF

This week, we got a number of questions about K-1 timing. It’s a fair question — and since we filed an extension this year, it deserves a real answer.

Part of what’s driving our timeline is the Beyonder portfolio still getting integrated, which flows through the fund structure. But that’s not the whole story. The truth is, for most complex private investments — funds holding multiple properties with their own entities and waterfalls — March 15 was never a realistic target. Some sponsors can hit it. We’d rather extend and get it right.

Here’s what almost no CPA will say out loud: if you’re invested in partnerships or syndications, filing an extension is the norm, not the exception. Functionally, for many, tax day is October 15. That’s when the real returns get filed — after the K-1s land, after the cap-table adjustments, after the year-end true-ups. April 15 works fine if your income is W-2 and your forms arrive in January.

If you’re getting K-1s from multiple partnerships, the calendar looks different. One industry survey found nearly 40% of venture funds experience delays or errors in K-1 distributions. Real estate syndications, private equity, and partnership investments follow similar patterns. Extensions aren’t a failure mode. They’re the workflow.

If your CPA is telling you otherwise, I’d push back. Three things they may have wrong:

Myth 1: Filing an extension raises your audit risk.

It doesn’t. The IRS has never said that. What actually raises your audit risk is filing a rushed return in April and amending it in July because a K-1 came late or a 1099 got corrected.

Nathan Goldman, an NC State accounting professor writing in Forbes this week, put it bluntly: taxpayers “still awaiting important tax documents, like a K-1,” should “elect this extension and file their taxes once this information is available” rather than risk incorrect information.

Form 4868, he wrote, lets you “wait rather than guess” — because “guessing what income and deductions may have arisen from complex activities can result in understating taxable income, which can lead to fines and penalties.”

Amended returns get flagged. Extensions don’t.

Myth 2: An extension means you’re behind.

An extension means you’re deliberate. By October, you’re nine months into the following year — which means you already know pretty much how the year is shaping up before you finalize decisions on the year you’re closing. That visibility changes what you can claim, defer, or restructure.

Intuit’s Tax Pro Center makes the same case to CPAs this year: extensions unlock real planning tools — Section 179, bonus depreciation, retirement contributions — that you can’t reach if you’re scrambling in April.

It’s not late. It’s informed.

Myth 3: Paying on time and filing on time are the same thing.

They’re not. Payment is due April 15, either way — sophisticated filers send an estimate when they need to. But filing is a different exercise. Filing is where the math has to be right, the K-1s have to be in, and the deductions have to be found. Confusing the two is how people end up filing a return they shouldn’t.

The short version: if your CPA is framing K-1 timing as a problem, they’re working off a W-2 calendar instead of a partnership one.

File the extension. Use the time. The K-1s will get to you when they’re right.

Sponsors and LPs, did you file an extension this year? Reply — curious how other investors are navigating this.

From the trenches,

Bob

We’ve been building toward this for months. The deflag is finally here. And this week, while we were getting ready for it, we stumbled onto something that put the whole transition in sharper focus.

We started recording phone calls.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Today, Wheeler Lake officially becomes Unhitched Wheeler Lake.

Three weeks ago, I told you this was coming. The franchise flag is finally coming down. KOA and Unhitched agreed to part ways — and April 1st is the day.

When a franchise flag comes down, they pull everything with it. Reservations system. Marketing listings. Brand signage. The infrastructure you’ve been operating on goes dark. So before we flip the sign, we’ve spent the last several weeks making sure the back end is covered: new branding, new booking funnel, proactive outreach to existing guests confirming their stays are still valid.

We’re also using this as a moment to introduce those guests to the broader Unhitched portfolio. They know Wheeler Lake. Now we want them to know our other parks — and we’re offering promos to make that easy.

Occupancy is already moving in the right direction heading into summer. We’ll have a fuller read in a few weeks once we’re fully transitioned and the peak season ramp kicks in.

Accredited investors interested in keeping up with our deals — sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

Last week, we started measuring our phones at one of our newer properties on a whole new level. First weekend of recording and measuring: what we found was painful — and expensive.

Nearly half of the calls went unanswered. When calls did go to voicemail, the box was full. Sorry, can’t leave a message. This is after a caller has already sat through 45 to 60 seconds of button menus inherited from the previous system. Press 1 for reservations. Press 2 for the marina. Press 4 if you want to find out about boat fuel.

And when the calls did get answered live, we found plenty of opportunities for improvement.

All said and done, four or five bookings lost.

That’s one weekend. Extrapolate that rate across a full season, and you’re looking at roughly $25,000-$50,000 in lost revenue — from a broken phone process and a team that needs better tools and training to succeed.

It’s not just about lost revenue, either. By the time a caller gets through the menus and maybe sits on hold, they’re already frustrated. That’s starting the guest experience off on the wrong foot, and it hurts your brand. Not to mention, your staff is walking into that every single call, taking the hit for a problem they didn’t create.

Here’s what is encouraging: we have proof that it doesn’t have to be this way, and we know how to fix it. Our properties that are further along run a simple, clean phone setup with a trained team.

What we’re doing right now in certain ways at certain properties is getting back to the basics: answer the phone, and make sure the person answering it is ready to take a reservation.

That alone can move your numbers in a big way.

How are you improving your operation? Reply and tell me what you’re working on.

ON THE RADAR

The phone data forced a question we hadn’t asked in a while: what else haven’t we finished?

When you’re running 30-plus parks and acquiring at the pace we have, onboarding doesn’t always complete cleanly. You close, you transition the team, you move to the next deal. Some items fall into a gap between “done enough” and “actually done.” Website. Branding. Phone systems. Training playbooks. The stuff that doesn’t break until it does.

We’re taking a harder look at that gap right now. Not just at one property, but across the portfolio. Property by property, what did we skip or shortcut during onboarding that’s quietly costing us? Where do we think we’re on step five when we’re really still on step two?

It’s not a fire drill. Most of our properties are running well. But the ones that aren’t hitting their numbers — I’d bet the answer is somewhere in that unfinished onboarding list more often than it’s in the market or the asset.

We’re building a more systematic way to track it. If we can close those gaps before they show up in the data, that’s a different operating posture entirely.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

My wife and I had our 13th anniversary this weekend.

We took a couple days to slow down, which doesn’t happen much. Thirteen years, five kids, a career change, and two businesses that didn’t exist four years ago. When you’re moving that fast, it’s easy to forget how much ground you’ve covered. It was good to just sit with that for a minute.

At some point, the conversation shifted. A few people in our circle have dealt with health scares this past year. Nothing happening with me — just the age where you start to see it around you. And it led to a thought experiment.

If something came up — if you knew you had until next April to get the business ready to run without you — what would you change?

What has to happen? What’s missing? What are you holding too tightly?

I found it to be a useful lens. Not morbid — actually clarifying. When you strip out the assumption that you’ll just handle it yourself, you start to see what’s actually built and what’s just held together by your presence.

The phone system is a version of this. It never got fully onboarded. We thought we were at step five. We were still at step two. We knew it, in the background — but it wasn’t urgent, and there was always something more pressing. The problem didn’t surface until the data did.

Blind spots like this often survive because individuals hold things together in their heads, not in a documented system. If you build the business to run without you, that’s no longer an option. The gap has to actually get fixed.

At the end of the day, the question isn’t whether you could step away. It’s whether the business has what it needs to function when you do.

That’s the work.

From the trenches,

Bob

We hadn’t asked for any of it.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Branson is moving. The surveyor was on-site this week, which is when due diligence stops being paperwork and starts being real. You find out if what you thought you knew is actually there.

Nothing unexpected yet. The model gets updated with on-site CapEx findings, and we need to finalize financing partners by next week. Two lenders in the conversation. Those calls are overdue.

We also sent a counterproposal on a deal in CA. This is a property we’ve been negotiating a management and equity partnership on — not a straight acquisition. The seller came back with terms that didn’t work for us.

We’re tightening up the structure and formalizing the operating partnership terms that had taken a back seat to the higher-level deal points until now.

Stafford and Wharton are live. The buyer who outbid us on a property we wanted back is now expected to retain us for management — and they own a second property they want us on too. One deal you don’t win turns into two you didn’t have to chase.

Accredited investors interested in how we evaluate deals like Branson — sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

I’ve been deep in the AI weeds for the past few weeks. My mind gets blown on a fairly regular basis at this point.

I’m going to keep the specifics close to the chest — for reasons I’ll explain in the Debrief. But I’ll say this: George has moved from learning to doing. The first time he came back with something I hadn’t asked for — a full analysis of a property we’re evaluating, unprompted, with conclusions I hadn’t reached yet — it stopped me cold.

That’s a different thing than asking AI a question and getting an answer. This was the machine connecting dots across our portfolio data on its own. It changes how you think about what’s possible when you stop treating AI as a search bar and start treating it as a colleague who’s been reading every file in the company.

We’re now building toward the next layer. I won’t say what it is yet, but I’ll tell you the principle behind it: we’re looking at where our team spends the most hours on work that follows a pattern. Not judgment calls — pattern work. The kind of thing where a person is mostly translating between two systems or repeating a process across dozens of properties.

That’s where the leverage is. Not replacing people. Freeing them up to do the work that actually requires a human in the room.

More on this when we’re further down the road.

Building in this direction? Reply and tell me what you’re working on.

ON THE RADAR

Wheeler Lake — The deflag from KOA to Unhitched is set for April 1. We’re in the final stretch — managing the booking transition, the rebrand, and everything that changes when a property loses its franchise identity. There’s a real story here. I’ll break it down once we’re on the other side.

The scorecard — We run a company-wide performance scorecard. It’s good, but it’s missing a metric that matters: RevPAS, Revenue Per Available Site. Occupancy tells you how many sites are filled. RevPAS tells you how much revenue you’re generating per site in your inventory, whether it’s occupied or not. Those two things don’t always move together.

We’re also running the scorecard off manually maintained projections, which creates a forecasting problem. The goal is to automate it — pull directly from the right systems, add algorithmic forecasting, get it to a place where it’s producing reliable forward visibility instead of trend-based guesses. Working with our finance team on an overhaul.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

We had a small reminder this week that automation and relying too heavily on AI without a human check often defeats the purpose. In fact, it can wipe out all the returns of implementing that tech.

No damage done. But it reinforced something we keep coming back to: the tool gets you close. The judgment and human refinement is where you close the gap. Skip it once and you remember why it’s there.

There’s something a little ironic about that. We’ve spent a few months being fairly public about how we approach AI. The philosophy, the architecture, what George is doing. I still believe all of it. But here’s the thing: the whole industry is talking about AI now.

A few months ago, sharing our approach was genuinely useful. Different. Now every operator newsletter, every conference track, every LinkedIn post is about AI in outdoor hospitality. The signal has become noise.

So we’re pulling back a little. Not because we’re slowing down — we’re not. But because there’s a meaningful difference between talking about your playbook and running it. The operators who come out ahead aren’t going to be the ones who documented their AI strategy the most publicly. They’re going to be the ones who were quietly executing while everyone else was explaining.

Consider this the last time I write about AI in much detail for a while.

I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it again eventually and reserve the right to change my position.

Run into a situation where your process broke down before the tool did? Reply and tell me how you caught it.

That’s the position this week.

From the trenches,

Bob

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Remember the property we lost the bid on? You know the backstory. This week, that story moved forward.

The new ownership reached out about management services. The conversations have gone well. They don’t just want us managing the one property. They have a portfolio of other parks and they’re interested in having us manage those too.

We’re in early conversations, working through alignment on how we’d operate their properties and what the relationship would look like. There’s real interest on both sides. We’ll know more after the next round of meetings.

What I keep coming back to is the pattern. Operate well on one property, and the next opportunity tends to find you. That’s happening here in a way we didn’t plan for, and the scope is bigger than we expected.

Branson is still moving through due diligence. No surprises. Just the work.

What’s one relationship in your business that’s paying off in ways you didn’t expect? Reply and tell me.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate deals like these, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

Last week we introduced George, our first AI employee. This week, we started teaching him how we think.

Here’s the problem we’re solving. We manage over 30 properties. Every day, someone on the team is pulling data from dozens of accounts across multiple systems, formatting reports, cross-referencing numbers across accounts. It’s not hard work. It’s repetitive work. And it eats hours that should go toward running the properties.

George’s first job is data analysis. Pull the numbers, format the reports, push them to the leadership team. The stuff that used to take someone half a day happens in minutes.

But the interesting part isn’t the speed. It’s how we’re building him.

Most people drop an AI into their business and start asking it questions. We went the other way. Before we ask George a single question, we’re investing time teaching him how we think about the business. Our priorities. Our operating philosophy. The lens we use when we look at a property and decide what needs attention first.

That matters because a generic answer isn’t useful at our scale. I don’t want a report that any operator could get. I want a report that reflects how we evaluate performance and where we focus.

We’re early. A few weeks in. I can already see the manual pulls and spreadsheets going away. The next step is layering in more analysis — the kind that used to require someone senior to sit down and build from scratch. George does the prep work. The judgment still stays with us.

Anyone else building AI into their operation? Reply and tell me how it’s going.

ON THE RADAR

Wheeler Lake — April 1 is the date. We’re transitioning this property from its current franchise to the Unhitched brand. I teased this last week and promised a bigger story. That story is still coming. The playbook is in motion and the team knows their assignments. When we’re through it, I’ll break down the full case study... deflagging, rebranding, booking transitions, and everything that happens when a property changes its identity.

Onboarding acceleration — Two of the four properties we mentioned last week moved up from April to March 22. That’s four properties coming on board in about 10 days. Our team handled eight onboardings last July. This time it’s half that with a more experienced crew. We’re not bracing for it. We’re running the playbook.

Benefits launch — Quarter 2, still on track. Company-wide benefits across roughly 200 employees. This only becomes possible at a certain scale of revenue and headcount. We hit that threshold. More on this once it’s live.

What’s the next big operational shift on your radar? Reply and tell me.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

I mentioned the book about factories. It’s called The Goal by Eli Goldratt. It’s a business novel about a plant manager who’s about to lose his factory. The central question of the book is deceptively simple: What is the goal of your organization? Not what do you do. Not how do you make money. What is the actual output you’re trying to produce?

That question has been stuck in my head all week, because I realized I’ve never clearly defined ours.

It’s not a management fee. It’s not an investment return. It’s not an IRR or a satisfied LP.

The product is a property that’s performing at its economic expectations. A property at proforma. That’s the finished good.

Once I landed on that, a lot of things clicked. If that’s the product, then it doesn’t matter whether the customer is an LP investor or a third-party management client. The product coming off the line is the same. We take raw materials... capital, a property, people... and we produce a finished product. A property operating the way it’s supposed to.

Here’s what bothered me. Right now, we have a lot of raw materials going into the system. A lot of work in progress (WIP) sitting on the line. And not enough finished products coming out.

Work in progress that sits too long spoils. An investor waiting three years for a property to hit proforma is not the same as an investor waiting 18 months. The longer inventory sits in the system unfinished, the more value it loses. Unhappy investors. Unhappy guests. Unhappy staff.

The Theory of Constraints says any system can only move as fast as its slowest part. If one machine on the floor is running at 10% capacity, it doesn’t matter that every other machine is running at 50%. Your output is stuck at 10%.

I realized I’ve been trying to move everything forward at the same pace. Every department, every initiative, every property. Nothing gets ahead, nothing falls behind. Sounds disciplined.

You would never run a factory that way.

The answer isn’t fixing everything at once. It’s finding the one thing that’s choking the system and fixing that first. Everything else can wait.

We’re working on identifying that constraint right now. I’ll share what we find.

What’s your biggest bottleneck right now? Reply and tell me.

That’s the position this week.

From the trenches,

Bob

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Branson is still under contract. Due diligence is progressing — no surprises so far.

The update on the property we recently sold and were trying to acquire again is more interesting. We lost the bid. Got outbid in what amounted to an auction. That chapter’s closed.

Here’s the twist: the buyers reached out about management services. They’ve got a portfolio of other properties, and they’re interested in having us manage. We’re meeting with them next week to figure out next steps, if any. Either way, the goodwill from managing that property without a contract for months is paying off in ways we didn’t plan.

The bigger story this week is the deal we said no to. In-place 12-cap. Numerically, it checked every box we have. The kind of deal most operators would jump on.

We passed.

The revenue and NOI scale were certainly attractive. If we could operate it the right way, the NOI and cash flow would have been a great add to continue reinvesting in our business, but that’s never the whole picture.

The demographics weren’t right. The market didn’t feel right. And we’ve learned — sometimes the best deal on paper is the worst deal in practice. A 12-cap that doesn’t fit your portfolio creates more problems than it solves.

We’re tying this into the larger theme of getting our house in order before we go 100 miles an hour again. That means being more selective, not less. It means the financing pipeline we started reengineering last week. It means saying no to deals that work on a spreadsheet but don’t fit our road ahead.

Thinking about a deal that checks the boxes but doesn’t feel right? Reply and tell me how you’re working through it.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate deals like these, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

Meet George.

George is our first AI employee. The name comes from my time flying the MV-22 Osprey — we nicknamed the autopilot George. But George wasn’t just a button you pressed for convenience. In a commercial airliner, autopilot makes the pilot’s job easier — it’s a tool. In a military aircraft, autopilot is a weapon. We engaged George so we could focus on the enemy, the emergency, the complexity of the mission. George wasn’t a feature. He was part of the crew.

That’s exactly how we’re approaching AI.

George is a team member. Has a name, a role, and a roadmap. George was operationalized this week and the first job is clear: a unified, consolidated financial database and data transparency. Tying into our accounting systems and our reservation platform’s API to give us real-time visibility across the portfolio. No more jumping between accounts. No more manual pulls.

Second priority: marketing automation. Dynamic ad management, email segmentation, spend allocation based on booking windows and occupancy signals. We’re fortunate to have friends in tech and in our industry who are already running this playbook.

On the sales training front — the consultant we engaged had a first meeting last week. Follow-up is next week. One anecdotal data point that reinforced the urgency: somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of all reservations in our portfolio are still completed via phone. George and his future AI teammates handle the back office. The person at the front desk still has to close the sale much of the time.

Building out your own operational infrastructure? Reply and tell me what’s working.

ON THE RADAR

A few things we’re tracking:

Houston portfolio expansion — We’re naming them now. Jetstream Stafford and Jetstream Wharton are coming on board. The reason we earned these: our Houston KOA Med Center property, which we took over in late December, just posted its highest revenue month in the history of the operation. January was the second-highest. When you prove it on one property, you earn the next. That’s the playbook.

April onboarding surge — Four properties coming on board in one month. Two from one ownership group, two Jetstream properties. We onboarded eight in a single month last July, and the team came out of that sharper and more battle-tested than ever. Four at once doesn’t faze us anymore. Credit to the operations team for building a process that actually scales.

Two new developments launching June 1 — Unhitched North Pensacola and Roosevelt Cottages. Brand new construction. Launching a new build is a different animal than onboarding an existing property. Different process, different timeline, different problems. More on these as we get closer.

Wheeler Lake — We’re deflagging this property. KOA and Unhitched have agreed to part ways at this location, and we’re rebranding it as an Unhitched property. There’s a bigger story here — one about franchise fit, hospitality turnarounds, and what happens when a franchise stops being the right fit. Saving that for next week.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

Last week, I said I was facing a question I didn’t have an answer to yet — hold the margin or start another reinvestment cycle. I think this week gave me the beginning of one.

We passed on a 12-cap deal. We lost a bid we wanted to win. We’re restructuring how we approach financing. We’re hiring an AI employee instead of acquiring another park.

Every single one of those is a version of saying no.

No to the deal that numerically works but operationally doesn’t fit. No to overpaying for something just because we want it back. No to the old way of scrambling for lenders when a deal hits the desk. No to adding properties before we’ve got the systems to support them.

I think the deals you say no to define your portfolio more than the ones you say yes to. Any operator with capital can buy a park. Discipline is knowing which parks to walk away from.

Rebranding is the perfect example. We’re in the middle of rebranding properties across the portfolio, and in some ways, it is kicking our butts. The problem isn’t any single piece — it’s that everything is contingent on everything else. You rebrand digitally, but the physical signage isn’t done. You rebrand the signage, but the interstate road sign takes three months to change. Something is always out of sync. Do you wait for the slowest piece, or do you accept that guests are going to see a mismatch for a while?

There’s no clean answer. And that’s the point. Growing fast creates a backlog of things you should have done right the first time. Saying no to new deals right now means saying yes to finishing what we started.

At the end of the day, the discipline to stop adding and start finishing is harder than the discipline to say no to a bad deal. Saying no to a good deal because the timing is wrong — that’s a different kind of hard.

We’re learning that one this week.

Have you faced a similar inflection point — growth available but systems not ready? Reply and tell me how you handled it.

That’s the position this week.

From the trenches,

Bob

There’s a lesson here for any leader. Words matter. There’s a big difference between “I” and “we.” Success is never an “I” thing. Not at home. Not at work.

Now that I’ve given credit where it is due, let me tell you about the week that has me rethinking everything at work.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Branson is officially under contract. EMD wired, due diligence started.

This one is a straight acquisition with bank financing. Nothing exotic about the deal structure. The work now is confirming what we think we know — walking the property, validating the books, making sure the infrastructure matches what was represented.

The bigger theme this week was financing.

We’ve been too reactive on the lending side. Deals come in, we hustle to find the right lender, and we start from scratch every time. For a company with $100M+ in assets, that’s not a process. That’s a fire drill.

So this week, we started building out a better financing pipeline. Mapping lender relationships more comprehensively, identifying who does what in the outdoor hospitality space, and getting more organized before we need the money — not after.

The goal is to be on third base with every lender in our space. A broker and direct lending network where we’re not starting cold on every deal.

Eventually, we want to be in a position to pursue warehouse-style credit facilities. We’re not there yet. But you don’t get there by calling banks when a deal hits your desk. You get there by building relationships before you need them.

If there’s a banker reading this who specializes in outdoor hospitality lending, I’d love to talk. That’s not a pitch. That’s a gap we’re actively trying to fill.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate deals like these, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

Here’s something I realized this week that I probably should have caught sooner.

Nobody in our company sufficiently owns revenue across the board.

We have property managers. We have regional managers. We have a marketing team. We have systems and SOPs for almost everything. But if you asked me who truly owns sales — specifically, connecting marketing to driving occupancy and converting the phone call that’s ringing right now into a booking — the honest answer is nobody.

Revenue gets managed. Expenses get managed. But the actual sales function? The phone skills, the objection handling, the “can I get your name and number” basics? We’ve been assuming that happens organically. Sometimes it does. But that’s the problem. Sometimes isn’t a system. It’s chance.

So we’re exploring the idea of bringing in a sales training consultant.

The plan is frontline training for our property managers and camp hosts. Basic hospitality sales psychology. Not scripts. Mindset. How to listen, how to ask the right questions, how to close without being pushy.

The challenge is turnover. Camp hosts and seasonal staff rotate constantly. So whatever we build has to be systematic. Week one, you learn this. Week three, you learn that. New hires in July get the same foundation as the ones who started in March.

Here’s the part that’s been nagging at me. Everyone in the industry right now is chasing AI. Us included. And we should be. But I don’t know if anyone’s really saying, “Hey, let’s also get professional sales training for the human answering the phone.”

AI will handle the after-hours calls. AI will score the marketing channels. AI will tell you which campaigns are working. But the majority of our bookings still come through a phone call with a real person. If that person can’t sell, nothing else matters.

We need both. The technology and the training. Right now, we’re behind on the training side.

If you're looking for a management partner who's built the infrastructure to support scale, set up a talk with Matt from our team (he’ll catch me up on the details and loop me in).

ON THE RADAR

A few things we’re tracking:

Management portfolio expansion — Our COO, Dave, visited two new properties we’re onboarding last week. One of them needs significant work — the kind of deferred maintenance that builds up when a property doesn’t have dedicated, on-the-ground management.

Trips like this remind you how much opportunity there is in third-party management for RV parks and campgrounds. When ownership and management aren’t on the same page, nobody’s accountable for the property.

New ownership group conversation — Dave and I had a strong call this week with a multi-property ownership group that’s exploring third-party management. They’re not in crisis. They’re organized, they know their properties, and they’re considering turning operations over to a professional manager so they can focus on scaling.

Those are our favorite conversations. When an owner comes to you from a position of strength rather than desperation, the transition works better for everyone.

A competitor to CallRail reached out to us after reading last week’s newsletter. Their pitch: “We read your article about call tracking. We can do better.” I’ll take it. We’re now using the newsletter as a negotiating tool between vendors.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

First, an apology.

Last week, I wrote that I homeschool my kids. My wife actually homeschools our children every single day. She does the teaching. I show up occasionally and try to take credit for the results.

Now back to RV park business.

I’ve been reflecting on something all week that I don’t have a clean answer for yet.

For the last 18 months, we were in what I consider survival mode. We invested heavily into the business — more payroll, more talent, more infrastructure than our revenue justified. That’s what it took to get from where we were to where we are.

I don’t regret it. But it was expensive, and there were months where I wasn’t sure the math was going to work.

We got through it. The last couple months, we’ve been sustaining. Maybe even thriving. Margins are looking healthy as ever. The team is executing. The systems are starting to catch up to the growth.

And then this week happened.

Management leads are accelerating. Our footprint is expanding, maybe even internationally. Conversations with portfolio owners are accelerating. The pipeline is fuller than it’s been, maybe ever.

So now I’m facing the question I wasn’t expecting to face this soon: Do we hold the margin and grow at a sustainable pace? Or do we start another big reinvestment cycle now — hire ahead, build infrastructure for 75 or 100 properties — and put ourselves back in the uncomfortable position we just climbed out of?

Two months of healthy margin. That’s what we’ve earned. And the question is whether to spend it or save it.

I don’t have the answer yet. But I think the question itself is worth sharing. Because most operators face this exact inflection point, and nobody talks about it. You survive. You stabilize. And then you have to decide if you’re willing to be uncomfortable again.

At the end of the day, playing it safe is its own kind of risk. But so is moving too fast. We’ve done both. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and we’ve got to figure out where that is in the next couple of weeks.

I’ll let you know what we decide.

That’s the position this week.

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, I’d appreciate it if you’d forward it to an operator or investor who’s trying to figure out this space.

From the trenches,

Bob

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

We’re putting an offer in on a property we previously owned.

I won’t get into specifics yet. But the backstory matters. We sold this property a while back. The sale was miserable — there were moments where we probably should have walked away from the table. After closing, we didn’t really have a management contract or anything. No agreement. No obligation. But we just kept running it. Did the right thing and said, “Let’s manage it until someone shows up.”

That goodwill is what’s landing us back at the table.

The current owner is looking to exit. We’re bidding to bring it back into the portfolio — different deal structure this time, different capital stack, but the same property. By the time you’re reading this, we should know if we got it.

Sometimes you just need to stay in the game and see what happens. All things come back around.

We also signed the PSA on a park in Branson this week. Moving through due diligence now. More on that as we get further in.

On the California preferred equity deal — our prospective partners were traveling, so we’re in a holding pattern until they’re back. Nothing new on the Florida deal either. Quiet week on the pipeline, but the two active items above are keeping us busy.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate deals like these, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

This week, we rolled out our Vision/Traction Organizer across both companies.

If you’re not familiar, the V/TO is a core EOS tool. It’s the document that defines everything — core values, purpose, 10-year target, 3-year picture, 1-year plan. It’s the thing that’s supposed to keep everyone rowing in the same direction.

We actually built two. One for Unhitched (the management company) and one for Climb Capital (the investment company). That separation matters. The management business and the investment business have different purposes, different values, and different goals. Treating them as one thing was starting to create confusion.

On the Unhitched side, we landed on five core values. One that sparked the most discussion: “Own the Outcome.” That one got real fast. The team talked about what it actually means when things go wrong — not blame, but ownership. Having the conversation that says, “yeah, we didn’t do right by you, here’s how we’re going to earn it back.” That’s what “own the outcome” looks like in practice.

On the Climb Capital side, one of our core values is “Pursue Mastery.” The 10-year target is $1 billion in equity under management. That’s a big number from where we are today. But defining it creates clarity. You stop chasing things that don’t move you toward the target, and you start saying no to what doesn’t fit.

A month ago, I said we grew faster than our systems. The V/TO is one piece of how we’re fixing that. It’s not the sexy part of running a company. But when 200 people need to make decisions without calling you, they need clarity, and something we can all point to that tells them what matters.

If you're looking for a management partner who's built the infrastructure to support scale, set up a talk with Matt from our team (he’ll catch me up on the details and loop me in).

ON THE RADAR

A few things we’re watching:

CallRail rollout — We’re close to deploying AI-powered call tracking across the portfolio. 360 phone numbers, about 9 per property — dedicated numbers for the website, Facebook, Facebook Marketplace, road signs, and email campaigns. Every marketing dollar gets tracked back to a call.

The system also scores every call with AI, records them, and uses keyword analysis to determine if the call converted. We’re negotiating pricing down from $3,900/month. The part I’m most interested in: after-hours AI agents. One for each property, plus one that knows the whole portfolio.

AI as a department — We engaged a consultant and received a proposal for building a roadmap and our first custom AI automation tools. We’re planning a trip to Austin to co-work and start building. The shift for us: we’re no longer thinking about AI as a project or product we buy. It’s a strategic department we’re building. More on this in the Debrief.

Two new Houston properties — Got the green light on a couple of properties in Houston. Still early. More to come on this soon.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

A few weeks ago, I told you AI was only a back-office play for us. That we weren’t comfortable with AI answering phones or talking to guests. That the technology wasn’t there yet.

That’s changed. I was wrong about the timeline.

This week, I sat down with CallRail and realized we’re not evaluating a product anymore. We’re designing an AI architecture. Call tracking, marketing attribution, quality scoring, after-hours agents — and that’s just one vendor for one function. Multiply that across reservations, maintenance, guest communication, and financial reporting. It adds up fast.

The epiphany for me: AI isn’t a product. It’s a strategic department. It needs to be treated like one — with a roadmap, a budget, and someone owning it. We decided to prioritize it this week in a way we hadn’t before.

Here’s what made it personal.

I homeschool my kids. Monday, they went to a survival camp. Thursday, I took two of them (9 and 10 years old) to an AI training summit for business leaders. They brought their laptops.

Think about that for a second. Survival skills and AI skills in the same week. Both matter. Both are needed. And the vast majority of people aren’t seriously engaging with either end of that spectrum.

One of my boys uses Claude. He built a website last week. Another one is building a video game following Gemini’s instructions. They’re not waiting for someone to teach them. They’re just building.

I sat in that room watching my kids absorb things that most operators I know are still resisting. And I thought: if my 3rd and 4th graders get it, we don’t have 2 years to figure this out. The timeline everyone’s working off is wrong. What felt like a 2-year horizon is probably a 6-month horizon.

At the end of the day, the speed of change means your strategic timeline is wrong. You either build the architecture now, or you’re catching up later. We’re choosing to build.

That’s the position this week.

If you’re thinking about how AI fits into your operation — or you’ve already started building — I’d love to hear what you’re testing. Hit reply and tell me.

From the trenches,

Bob

The 6 months that got us here? Messier than we expected. We’re still finding vendor invoices that were never tracked. Software migrations that took months instead of weeks. Administrative cleanup that reveals itself slowly.

Integration always takes longer than you think. Here’s what we learned.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Last week marked what felt like the end of something we started 6 months ago. Nothing final, but at least an end to one phase and the start of another.

We’re merging the Beyonder investor group with our Climb Capital investors. Last week marked the careful migration over to AppFolio and an investor town hall to get everyone acquainted with the new system and portal. From here forward, they’ll be part of the broader investor community. That brings us to nearly 300 investors across the platform.

Beyonder was the 6-property preferred equity deal I mentioned a few weeks ago — the distressed portfolio that needed operational rescue. We came in with capital and took over management. The previous structure wasn’t working. The original investors voted to bring us in.

6 months later, here’s where we are:

6 properties. 1,250 sites across Louisiana, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and Alabama. We didn’t take ownership until November 1st, which made the early progress even more challenging — most of the turnaround happened while we were still acting as third-party management, before we had full control or could deploy capital.

Since November 1st, we’ve had full ownership. That’s when we started making real capital investments and taking full control of the operations.

We’re now seeing results. Revenue is up significantly. NOI is climbing. The on-site teams stayed through the transition, and they’re the ones making it happen.

The integration process has been longer than we expected. More on that in this week’s Debrief.

A $97M portfolio deal (not ours) was closed and announced last week — 7 properties, 1,500 sites, off-market. More to come on that when we get more information. It was a completely different structure than Beyonder — a stabilized acquisition with seller financing, not a preferred equity rescue. But it shows the appetite for scale.

We’re always tracking what’s happening in the space. It’s useful to know what deals are closing, how they’re structured, and who is involved.

On the California pref equity deal — we presented our approach to the investment group this week. We think it went well. More to come on that soon.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate deals like these, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

April 1st, we’re launching comprehensive benefits across the company (for about 200 people). While we’re proud of our team for making this happen, it’s truthfully the kind of thing I wish we could have implemented from day 1.

Taking on the cost of offering benefits requires a certain level of scale — mostly revenue. It can be either at the park level (big parks with lots of revenue) or portfolio level, but below that scale, it feels prohibitive. You also need the infrastructure to support it — people and systems. Without that foundation, benefits administration becomes a mess.

Our people and payroll lead, Sara, has spent the last 7 months building that infrastructure.

For context, when Sara came over with the Beyonder acquisition, we were getting about 100 emails per month with internal payroll questions. That’s down to about 15. We migrated to Paylocity and standardized people onboarding across all properties. Performance reviews are now built into our tech systems, and training modules are coming soon.

Benefits are the visible milestone. But they sit on top of months of unglamorous infrastructure work.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the economics of running a lean home office — the challenges of managing 30+ properties before you hit a certain revenue threshold. Benefits were a big part of that equation for us.

That equation will be different for every operator. If you’re running a large resort pulling something like $2-3 million in revenue per year, you can probably absorb the cost of benefits at the park level. But our path was different. We built the portfolio through smaller properties with leaner operations.

For us, benefits were only feasible once we aggregated enough revenue at the portfolio level to support the cost and the infrastructure to administer it.

If you're looking for a management partner who's built the infrastructure to support scale, set up a talk with Matt from our team (he’ll catch me up on the details and loop me in).

ON THE RADAR

We’re gearing up for peak season.

First week of March, I’m taking the family down to Houston to walk the Med Center KOA property and check in with the team. It’s been one of our better turnaround stories, and I want to see it again in person after the early progress we’ve made.

Dave, our COO, is on-site next week at Snug Harbor and Canary Island — 2 recent additions to the third-party management portfolio. The ink is barely dry on the contract, so we’re still working through the integration process on both.

We had an interesting meeting with KOA last week on a few fronts. We’re reviewing franchise agreements and plans at a few properties, and we’re seeing some progress on branding and marketing opportunities. Separately, we’re working to become an approved third-party management partner with KOA. That would give us (and our management clients) access to their brand and reservation system for properties where the franchise model makes sense. Still early, but made some progress on the framework. Worth tracking.

Tax season is in full swing. We’re running 3-4 CPAs now to handle the complexity across the portfolio. The compliance load at this scale is real.

Conference season kicks off in April, then another wave in November and December. That’s where we source deals, build relationships, and stay plugged into what’s happening in the industry.

And then peak operating season hits — May through August. That’s when the properties need to perform. Everything we’re building now — benefits, systems, onboarding — it all gets tested when the parks are full, and the teams are stretched.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

Now, back to the investor group migration I mentioned earlier.

The merger is straightforward. The integration process behind it has taken longer and been far messier than we expected.

Migrating investor data to our platform has taken months, not weeks. We’re still working through AP cleanup — finding vendor invoices that were never tracked or paid.

Here’s what we got right: the contract structure gave us the authority we needed to make decisions and move forward without getting stuck.

But the thing that mattered more was keeping the people.

We inherited the on-site teams and some core back office functions when we took over, and we kept them through the entire transition. We were open and transparent with them about what was happening and what we were building, and we were fortunate to keep the core teams intact. Those teams, now integrated into our home office and regional teams, are the ones making the turnaround work.

Inheriting an operation is different than building one from scratch. When you build it yourself, you know where the problems are because you created them. When you inherit someone else’s operation, you discover new problems every month. The software doesn’t talk to the accounting system the way you thought it did. The vendor relationships aren’t documented. The processes live in someone’s head.

The lesson: integration takes longer than you think, even when you plan for it to take longer than you think. But if you invest in the people on the ground — keep them, communicate with them, give them clarity — they’ll carry you through the mess.

If you’ve been through an acquisition integration, I’m curious — what took longer than you expected? Hit reply and tell me.

That’s the position this week.

If this was useful, forward it to an operator who’s been through an integration — or is about to go through one. These lessons are expensive to learn the first time.

From the trenches,

Bob

Also this week: the Florida deal got more expensive, a management client raised their hand to invest alongside us, and why Fund II might not look like what we originally expected.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

The electricians came back on the Florida property. The quotes confirmed what we were worried about — several hundred thousand dollars to bring the electrical infrastructure to where it needs to be. That changes the math on the deal. We’re in conversations with the seller to bridge the gap, but we’re not going to force it. If the numbers don’t work, the numbers don’t work.

Missouri is grinding through PSA negotiations. Nothing new to report there.

On the CapEx side, we made a decision I’m pretty interested to watch play out. We’ve been leasing a fleet of boats at one of our properties — pontoons, kayaks, that kind of thing. Last season’s gross revenue made the math on leasing versus owning pretty clear. We’re buying our own fleet this year.

Ancillary revenue is one of the most underutilized levers in outdoor hospitality. Most operators focus on site revenue — nightly rates, occupancy — and leave thousands on the table with activities, rentals, and add-ons. This is one of those cases where the data made the decision easy.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate deals like these — infrastructure risk, CapEx math, and all, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

The fractional CFO model is proving out.

We brought on a fractional CFO a few weeks ago, and in that short window we’ve saved around 20 to 30 hours a week for our finance team. Processes that were manual are now automated. Reporting that used to take half a day pulls from the system in minutes. The value isn’t just the person — it’s the model. You get senior-level capability without the full-time cost, which matters when you’re at the stage where you need the expertise but can’t justify the headcount yet.

The key is fit. We talked to several candidates before landing on the right one. At our scale, you need someone who’s comfortable with complexity across multiple entities — not just a single-company finance leader. That filtering process matters as much as the decision to go fractional in the first place.

On the third-party management side, we’re growing — and the pattern is interesting. We’re finding that adding value on the first property or two is quickly turning into more engagements with the portfolio owners. Prove it on one park, earn the next. That’s the growth model we want.

We’re finding the way we approach contracts seems to be different from most of the industry.

A lot of management companies default to long contracts with big buyouts. That feels like an indicator they’re not confident in their abilities to add value. If the only reason an owner stays with you is because it costs too much to leave, that’s not a management relationship — it’s a hostage situation.

Our approach is the opposite. We prefer both parties be able to walk away with reasonable notice. The relationship has to work on merit, not on contract terms.

If you’re looking for a management partner who earns the relationship — not one who locks you in — set up a talk with Matt from our team (he’ll catch me up on the details and loop me in).

ON THE RADAR

Fund II is on the horizon — and Fund I taught us a few things about how to approach it.

Now that Fund I is fully deployed, one honest takeaway: deployment was lumpier than we expected. Big chunks of capital going out, then dry periods. We probably thought there’d be more deals to deploy into than there were. That’s shaping how we think about Fund II — pacing, pipeline development, and making sure we’re not sitting on dry powder longer than we want to.

We're also evaluating opportunities to play on the debt side of the capital stack — not just equity. It's a different risk profile and a different return, but it opens up deal structures we haven't had access to before.

An interesting development on the capital side: one of our third-party management clients has raised their hand to invest alongside us. That’s not something we planned for, but it makes sense when you think about it. They’ve seen how we operate from the inside — our systems, our reporting, our approach. The trust was already built.

It’s a reminder that the management business and the investment business aren’t separate tracks. They feed each other in ways we’re still discovering.

That’s also opening up a broader conversation about capital raising strategy. There’s a real tradeoff between raising larger commitments from institutional partners — more efficient, fewer relationships to manage, but you give up more control and flexibility — versus building a base of high-net-worth investors at smaller check sizes, where you retain more control and probably get slightly better economics, but the raise is a grind.

We’re working through where we want to land on that spectrum. Both paths have real trade-offs, and the answer probably isn’t all one or the other.

What we’re seeing in the market right now is raising as many questions as answers about how Fund II should look. We’re not ready to share the full picture yet, but it may not look like what we originally expected. More to come.

Lessons like these are what we’re building RVU around — the real playbook from inside the operation. Join the waitlist.

THE DEBRIEF

The franchise model in outdoor hospitality was built for operators who need guardrails. Single-park owners learning as they go. Newer investment groups entering the space and scaling into a portfolio. And in that context, it works. The brand brings booking visibility. The system provides structure around operations, marketing, branding — resources that let you narrow your focus and not get lost in the weeds.

The rigidity is a feature, not a bug, when you don’t know what you don’t know. But here’s what we’re seeing: operators outgrow it faster than the model expects.

We operate under a major franchise brand at some of our properties, and the system isn’t built for operators at our scale. They try to fit us into the same box as a first-time owner with a single park. We bring resources — marketing, revenue management, operational systems, staffing infrastructure — that go beyond what the franchise provides. But the model doesn’t accommodate that. In some cases, it feels like they’ve taken functions away from us that we do better internally.

We’re not the only ones feeling this. We’re seeing other investment groups who entered the space through a franchise — used it to learn the industry, build a portfolio — and are now bumping up against the same walls. The model helped them get started, but it’s holding them back from running their properties the way they want to.

The emergence of multi-park operators at scale is breaking a system that wasn’t designed for them. At the end of the day, this is part of a bigger shift. The infrastructure — franchises, management companies, lending products — was all built for a fragmented, mom-and-pop industry. Operators are professionalizing faster than the ecosystem around them. That gap is creating both friction and opportunity.

If you’re operating under a franchise, I’m curious — are you feeling the same tension? Hit reply and tell me.

From the trenches,

Bob

Also this week: three deals in the pipeline, a banking transition we probably should have done 15 properties ago, a Florida tax issue worth watching, and lessons from rolling out brand standards to 32 property managers.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

Last week I mentioned early conversations in Missouri and California. Those moved forward — and we’ve added Florida to the mix. Three deals in the pipeline right now.

Missouri is furthest along. We’re negotiating the PSA on a straight acquisition with bank financing. Feeling good about where that’s headed.

Florida is close behind. We’ve got an LOI agreed to in principle — the deal structure is ironed out. But we’ve identified a potential issue with the electrical infrastructure, so we’re sending electricians out this week to get quotes. If it’s several hundred thousand dollars, we’ll have a hurdle to deal with, but we like the deal.

California is earlier stage — a preferred equity opportunity. We’re negotiating terms.

None of these are done. I’m not announcing anything. But I said I’d report what’s actually happening, and this is it: three active conversations, all at different stages.

On the CapEx side, we’re finalizing our approach to cabins and lodging units across the portfolio. We’ve decided to design our own floor plans rather than buying off-the-shelf. We’re negotiating enterprise pricing with manufacturers. And we’re exploring ways to monetize that work — potentially white-labeling our designs to other owners down the road. More on this as it develops.

Here’s where I’m spending my time this week: that electrical due diligence on the Florida property.

This is the unsexy part of deal-making. It’s not finding the deal — it’s making sure the deal is actually what you think it is. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. You close on a property thinking you bought a 10-cap, then dump $200K into infrastructure you didn’t budget for. That 10-cap becomes a 6. Maybe worse.

Most of the real work happens here — walking properties, calling contractors, collecting data and running the numbers until you trust them.

More updates as these move forward.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate and structure deals, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

The headline this week: we rolled out centralized banking across the portfolio. Right decision. Painful execution.

Here’s the context. When you’re managing 30+ parks, each with its own bank account, its own payment schedules, its own vendors — it’s chaos. We needed to centralize. One system. One place to see everything. Better controls, better reporting, better sleep at night.

So we made the switch. And in the process, a few automated payments got missed. Vendors who were supposed to get paid didn’t. We had to scramble to clean it up.

In a perfect world, we would have done this 10 or 15 properties ago. But I’m glad we did it now rather than waiting until we hit 40. The pain only gets worse the longer you wait.

That’s the trade-off with big system changes. You’re making the right decision for the long term, but it creates a lot of work in the short term. We’re still in cleanup mode. But we’re through the worst of it, and the infrastructure is better for it.

A quick snapshot from Houston — a market that’s been oversupplied lately. We took over operations at the Houston / Med Center KOA Holiday in December. When we came in, it was struggling under the previous management. As of this week, we’re seeing real progress — occupancy is up significantly, revenue is climbing.

I wanted to share the specific numbers, but our finance and ops team told me it’s too early to publish. Fair enough. We’ll report them when we’re ready to own them. But the early signals are strong. Same park. Same sites. Different approach to operations.

This is what we mean when we say operations matter. The asset didn’t change. The execution did.

We also held an all-team marketing meeting this week — 32 property managers — to roll out new brand standards and SOPs across the portfolio.

The tension we’re navigating: we want authentic content from each location, but we also need systems that scale. What’s scalable, repeatable, and efficient doesn’t always equal authentic. Most companies fall into one of two traps — full corporate control (scalable, but soulless) or total property autonomy (authentic, but a grind).

We’re trying to find the right balance. We think it’s the right way.

We’re building RVU to teach what we’re learning — the systems, the playbooks, the hard lessons. Join the waitlist.

ON THE RADAR

A tax issue in Florida has my attention.

Here’s the situation: in Sumter County, some RV parks are getting hit with special assessments based on total property acreage — while hotels get assessed on building square footage. Florida statute says RV parks should be assessed as commercial entities “in the same manner as a hotel, motel, or other similar facility.”

That’s not what’s happening.

One operator I know saw his assessment basically triple. We’re talking a $50K increase. And it appears somewhat deliberate — the county wants that land developed, and this is one way to push RV parks out.

There’s active litigation — park owners are suing the county — and at the same time, lobbyists are pursuing legislative changes in Tallahassee. I attended a Florida & Alabama Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (FARVC) board meeting recently to discuss strategy.

The issue has cleared a few legal hurdles and is moving through the process again. I’ll have a more substantive update in the coming weeks.

If you own parks in Florida, this is worth watching. The precedent matters.

On a different note: we’re moving on AI.

Last week I mentioned we’re studying adoption across the org. This week we took action — engaged a consultant to help us build an organization-wide AI roadmap. Where it makes sense, where it doesn’t, how to sequence it.

In parallel, we’re running our first pilot project: acquisitions screening.

Here’s the problem: every deal that comes in requires 45-60 minutes of manual research before we know if it’s worth pursuing. Broker packages arrive daily. At scale, we can’t screen enough deals to hit our LOI velocity targets. Deals fall through the cracks. Good opportunities get missed because we’re buried in the mediocre ones.

The pilot automates that screening workflow — ingest the broker package, parse the OM, enrich with market data, score against our buy box, and generate a napkin model with a recommended offer price. The goal is to compress that 60-minute process to under 10 minutes.

Look, this isn’t cutting-edge if you’re deep in the AI world. But for a lean team running 32 parks with Fund II about to launch? Everybody’s stretched. Shaving 50 minutes off every deal screen adds up fast. That’s bandwidth back for the work that actually moves the needle.

If exiting your operation is on your radar — or you just want help running it — set up a talk with Matt from our team (he’ll catch me up on the details and loop me in).

THE DEBRIEF

Here’s something I’ve been chewing on: the math of property management at scale doesn’t work until you hit about $20 million in gross revenue under management. Maybe more.

Let me break it down.

If you’re managing $20-25 million in gross revenue and collecting somewhere around market rate management fees, that sounds like a real business, right?

Now look at the cost side. A lean home office team — and I mean lean, stretched thin — eats up most of that fee revenue in payroll alone. And that’s before you’ve hired the CFO you need, the CTO you need, other leadership you need. Add those roles and you’re basically at break-even. Maybe underwater.

But here’s the part that makes it really hard: you’re not managing one company. You’re managing 30. Each park is its own entity. Its own books. Its own bank accounts. Its own compliance requirements. Its own vendors. The complexity isn’t linear — it’s exponential.

This isn’t just theory. We’ve had versions of this conversation with a lot of operators lately — groups running 7, 10, 12 parks who are hitting the same wall. Some we’ve partnered with. Some we’ve acquired. Some just wanted to compare notes. The pattern is consistent: they’re past the “small and scrappy” stage but not yet at the scale where the home office pays for itself.

It’s a tough spot. You need infrastructure to grow, but you can’t afford the infrastructure until you’ve grown.

At the end of the day, the real returns come from ownership, not management fees. But the risk comes with ownership too.

Management fees give us something else: the ability to build our team, systems, and processes without relying entirely on ownership returns to fund that growth. It’s how we make our business the best it can be — and that infrastructure benefits every property we touch, whether we own it or manage it for someone else.

If you’re building a standalone management company hoping to get rich on fees alone, the math probably doesn’t work. But if management is part of a vertically integrated platform — where the infrastructure you build serves both owned and managed properties — the math starts to make sense.

That’s our position this week.

Know someone evaluating RV parks — as an investor or operator? Forward this their way.

From the trenches,

Bob

This is where I’ll share what’s actually happening inside our RV park portfolio — where we’re deploying capital, what we’re building, and what I’m learning along the way. No hype. No highlight reels. Just a weekly report from inside the operation.

First, let me set the stage.

THIS WEEK’S POSITION

This section is where I’ll report on capital deployment. Deals we closed. Deals we passed on. Where we’re reinvesting in the portfolio. CapEx decisions. The investment side of what we do.

Some weeks will be busy. Some weeks, nothing moves. Both are worth reporting.

Here’s where we stand today:

We just deployed the last dollars out of Fund I. The fund launched in 2022, we closed the capital raise in 2023, and the last money went out in November 2025. Expected exit is 2028-2030. The portfolio now stands at 32 parks and nearly 3,500 sites. We’re vertically integrated and manage every one of them ourselves.

In the past few months, we’ve added 12 properties. 6 came through a preferred equity deal — a distressed portfolio that needed operational rescue. The previous structure wasn’t working. We came in with capital and a management takeover to stabilize and reposition. Those parks are spread across Louisiana, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and Alabama.

The other 6 are a mix of acquisitions and third-party management contracts across Texas, Georgia, Arizona, California, and Minnesota.

All 12 are now in the middle of onboarding. Fund I is fully invested. Now comes execution.

If you’re an accredited investor curious about how we evaluate and structure deals, sign up for our investor portal.

IN THE HANGAR

This section — In the Hangar — is where I’ll report on what we’re actively building. Systems. Processes. Team. The operating business, not the investment portfolio.

If Position is about where capital goes, Hangar is about how we run the company that deploys it.

Here’s what’s in the hangar right now:

Onboarding 12 properties at once. That’s the main event. Every new park needs to get integrated into our systems — finance, marketing, operations, and technology. It’s not glamorous work. It’s checklists and SOPs, and making sure the right people have access to the right tools. But it’s the work that determines whether an acquisition actually performs.

Leveling up finance. We brought on a fractional CFO — senior-level help to build our operational infrastructure on the finance side without the cost of a full-time hire. We moved to accrual accounting. We rebuilt our 2026 budgets with a clearer structure. The goal: financial information we can actually trust, delivered on time, across every property.

Building a real CRM. On the acquisitions and business development side, we’re implementing HubSpot — outreach, relationship management, deal tracking, and pipeline management. We’re also evaluating AI tools for prospecting and databasing. Sounds basic, but we’ve been running deal flow through spreadsheets and memory. That doesn’t scale.

Gearing up for Fund II. The legal and admin work of setting up a new fund is underway — the unglamorous minutiae that have to happen before we can raise a dollar. We’re also rebuilding the capital raising function after not actively raising for a while, and building out AppFolio Investment Management fundraising on the tech side. More on Fund II itself in the Radar section.

We’re building RVU to teach what we’re learning — the systems, the playbooks, the hard lessons. Join the waitlist.

ON THE RADAR

This section — On the Radar — is where I’ll report on what we’re tracking but haven’t committed to yet. Early-stage deals. Initiatives we’re planning. Risks we’re watching. The forward-looking stuff.

If it’s not live yet, but it’s on my mind, it goes here.

A few things we’re watching:

Distressed deal flow is picking up. That preferred equity deal wasn’t an anomaly. We’re seeing more deals where the original capital structure isn’t working, and operators need a lifeline. Preferred equity, rescue capital, management takeovers — the phone is ringing more often with these conversations.

Not all of them make sense. But the ones that do share a pattern: solid assets, broken execution. That’s a problem we know how to solve.

We’re in early conversations on a few deals in Missouri and California. Nothing to announce yet. But the pipeline is active.

Fund II is on the horizon. With Fund I fully deployed, we’re gearing up for the next raise. We’re seeing a lot of creative opportunities — ground-up development, projects already in process, deep value-add plays. The industry is shifting in the wake of post-COVID normalization. Transient demand is down or shaky at best. OpEx is up across the board. We’re watching where the industry is heading and how operators are adapting. More to come on timing and structure.

AI adoption across the org. We’re monitoring and studying AI for adoption across the entire organization. Our philosophy: AI should enhance the human-to-human guest experience, not replace it. We’re not comfortable with AI answering phones or guest emails yet — the technology isn’t where it needs to be for that, at least not for us.

Where we are digging in is at the corporate level — back office, back-of-house operations. That’s where we’re implementing now and seeing real value.

If exiting your operation is on your radar — or you just want help running it — set up a talk with Matt from our team (he’ll catch me up on the details and loop me in).

THE DEBRIEF

This section — The Debrief — is where I’ll share what I’m learning. Wins. Misses. Surprises. The stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into capital deployment or operations updates.

If Position is where the money went, and Hangar is what we’re building, Debrief is what it’s teaching me.

Here’s why I started this newsletter:

I got tired of the guru noise. Polished decks. Big promises. Courses from people who teach more than they operate. Most content in this space is either hype or headlines — neither shows you what it actually looks like inside a real portfolio, week after week.

I wanted a place to share what we’re actually doing. The wins, yes. But also the misses. The things that aren’t working. The lessons we’re learning the hard way.

Here’s one:

We grew faster than our systems.

That’s not a humble brag. It’s a problem. We added properties faster than we built the infrastructure to support them. Communication got inconsistent. Onboarding was uneven. Our finance team was stretched too thin. Some of our people were asked to perform without enough clarity on what we expected.

But here’s the thing — we have a great team. They’re handling it. They figure it out, cover the gaps, and keep the parks running while we build the systems to support them. That’s not an excuse. It’s a reminder that we have work to do. Better processes. Better systems. Growing this team deliberately, not just quickly.

We’re working on it. That’s a lot of what’s In the Hangar right now — SOPs, playbooks, better tools, more support. But I’m not going to pretend we have it all figured out.

That’s what this newsletter is for — transparency from the trenches — not a highlight reel from the stage.

That’s our position this week.

If you made it this far, hit reply and tell me what brought you here. Investor? Operator? Just curious? I read every response.

From the trenches,

Bob