Newlyweds Operate Campground Booking Biz From RV

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome to a brand new week on Side Hustle School and a brand new week in general. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you are working on something that's important to you this week. I hope you've set some goals. And I hope that something we talk about in the program will be helpful and useful to you in your pursuit of those goals. We're gonna talk about goals and opportunity today.

When a young couple embarks on a journey by RV across the United States, they spot an opportunity in campgrounds that don't have a convenient way to reserve spots. And I sometimes say, once you go down the road of adventure, you don't always know where you'll end up. This story is an interesting reflection of that principle because this young couple, they weren't seeking a business opportunity, or at least not the one they found, but it's now doing more than a million dollars a year in bookings. So there's no guarantee that you'll have the same results with your adventure. But the point is if they hadn't taken that leap, if they hadn't said yes to this big idea of theirs, they never would have found this remarkable opportunity.

So let that sit with you this week if you're considering an adventure or just a big change of some kind of your own. The story is called, "Newlyweds Operate Campground Booking Biz from RV." And I'll bring it to you after this short message from our sponsor. [Music]

As a newly married couple, Heath and Alyssa Padgett were looking for somewhere to call their own. There were many places across the US that they could see themselves living in. Any one of those places might be the perfect spot for their honeymoon.

But when they began to map it out, they noticed that their dream destinations formed a huge zigzag-like pattern all across the country. The more they thought about it, the more it made sense to take the trip in an RV. If they were going all over the country, why not drive it and get to sightsee along the way? They also had an idea about creating a documentary centered around hourly workers. From there, the idea evolved into Heath working an hourly job in each of the 50 states.

Not only was it the perfect chance to see the country and bring their documentary to life, the couple was also unsatisfied with their current jobs and ready to try something new. So with that, they decided to drive into it head first, only four days after their wedding in May of 2014. As they moved from campsite to campsite in their RV, they began to notice a problem. At many of the campgrounds, they couldn't reserve their spot ahead of time. Heath and Alyssa couldn't believe that in this day and age, there wasn't some kind of online booking tool available.

Instead, they had to drive hours to a campsite, just hoping that there would be a spot left for them. For a while, this was just a nuisance, but it turned into an opportunity when Heath met up with a friend he had made through a Facebook group called the RV Entrepreneur. Another member of the group, Bob, just happened to be passing through the town where Heath and Alyssa were staying, so they decided to meet up. They ended up having a long conversation about the difficulties of booking campground spots and the potential to create a solution. They let the idea sit for six months while they were finishing up the documentary.

Then in the fall of 2016, they decided to really get their wheels turning. Heath and Bob envisioned an app that campgrounds could use to allow customers to book online. They purchased the domain name campgroundbooking.com and began to drop some prototype sketches, but they soon ran into limitations with their technical ability. They knew that they wouldn't be able to move forward with the design unless they got some help. So going back to that Facebook group, Heath made a post asking around for people who had strong backgrounds in tech.

They got a lot of response and ended up bringing someone named Paul onto the team. With Paul on board, they were really able to develop their idea. They spent much of 2017 working on the beta version of the software and performing some test runs. Finally, in January 2018, they were ready for their first client. That first client was at Lakeview Park on Vancouver Island, but just two days before launch, they learned the site expected 1,000 people to book through the app.

At that point, the software just couldn't handle that much activity and it crashed. The team had to spend the weekend calling customers on the phone to ensure that they were booked properly. According to Heath, it was an embarrassing and disheartening moment for the team. One of his partners even wanted to quit. Luckily, none of them did and they kept refining the app.

As they continue to improve, they got more clients. However, they weren't making as much money from campgroundbooking as they had hoped. They charged each campground 50 to $200 a month to use the software. At first, they were just happy that their business was rolling, but they had a feeling they could make a lot more money. They just weren't sure how.

One idea was to increase the price of the software, but they knew that these small privately owned RV parks simply couldn't afford to spend $300 or $400 a month just for the ability to book online. And that's when they realized that they could give campsites the opportunity to defer the cost to their customers. Campgroundbooking would give their software away to use for free, but in exchange, the campsites would agree to add a $5 convenience fee to their customers' bills whenever they reserved spots online. This way, the campgrounds would actually be spending less money and campgroundbooking would be making more, potentially a lot more. They decided to implement this new technique in January 2019.

Now pay attention to this. Instead of making $400 to $500 a year per park, they are now making $4,000 to $10,000 a year per park. By making this small change to their pricing, they were able to increase revenue tremendously. Heath also notes that they do this by using the popular payment processor Stripe. So every time someone makes a reservation, the $5 convenience fee goes straight to them instead of needing to invoice the campsite.

Since launching 18 months ago, campgroundbooking has processed over $1.5 million in bookings. Last summer, they processed $200,000 worth of bookings per month. You could say this is the wheel deal. Heath and Alyssa achieved all of this while working on other projects from starting the RV Entrepreneur Summit, which evolved from the Facebook group, to Alyssa publishing a book and even welcoming their first child, a daughter named Ellie, into the world last May. Right now, they're getting ready to take Ellie on her first international trip.

They'll be flying to Italy, but then true to form, the family will travel for a month in a camper van. [Music]

I have known Heath and Alyssa for a number of years now, I think five years, if not longer than that. I remember when they debuted this documentary they made Hourly America at the World Domination Summit. Also, I think, you know, three or four years ago at least. And it's so great to see what a huge success they've been able to make out of this project.

I don't think I even realized it was doing this well until working on this story. So good for them. And what a change the shift in pricing made. I mean, that was tremendous. They're going from making a few hundred bucks, you know, per campsite per year, to all of a sudden up to $10,000 per campsite per year.

And it's just a better system all around. It's a win-win system, you know, for everybody, including the campgrounds. And also very smart to find a way to capture that booking fee upfront, instead of needing to invoice each campground each month. It's not only better just in terms of getting your money sooner. I think it also makes it much easier for campgrounds to say yes, because this way those campgrounds never even see that booking fee in the first place.

They don't have to worry about taking all this money in and then passing it over. It's completely invisible to them essentially. So well done, well done. You never know what's going to happen when you say yes to that adventure. So listeners, if you've got an idea, if you're thinking about making a change, even if you're not sure, you know, how exactly it's going to look or work out, well, your first step is just to say yes, I'm going to try this and, you know, who knows what's going to happen, but I'm going to try it and we will see.

All right, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. To see the show notes for today's episode, learn more about campground booking and about Heath and Alyssa, just go to sidehustleschool.com/1017. That is 1017, 1017. Got a lot more coming up this week. I'm going to be on the road a bit, but I will, of course, be making episodes every single day and I hope you'll join me.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.