Christian Osgood and Cody bought the Robin Hood Village Resort for $4.5 million on seller financing. They're replacing the old software with Logify, cutting the two-night minimum to one night, and dealing with furnace failures, flooding, and power outages while building a repeatable resort management model they can scale elsewhere.
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Hey, welcome to the Pub Suite. Today we're talking about the Robin Hood Village Resort, our seller-financed resort we picked up for— was it $4.5 million here?
$4.5 million bucks.
Really excited to talk about how we run it, a little details on the campus, the cabins. Really excited to share with you.
Welcome back to the channel. This is Cody, and I'm here with Christian today, and we are talking about how we actually run the resort. It's one thing to buy a piece of real estate, it's another thing to never lose it. And when it comes to never losing something, you have to manage it better than the other people around you. You have to be able to take great care and make sure that things don't degrade over time. We picked up the resort and this was brand new for us. It was hospitality, we're multifamily guys. But we bought it creatively, it was a great opportunity, we saw the vision, and we wanted to make it happen. There's been a huge learning curve here that we've had to really acclimate to and overcome and when it comes to running a resort, there's a few things you really should know.
First thing that I had to learn was personnel. Hiring personnel we've done before, and letting go of personnel we've done before.
Oh yeah.
Adopting someone else's personnel when you had no say on who's on your team and who's not was a whole new thing. We've actually never done an acquisition where we brought on someone else's employees. When we started, we had 9 employees who we had met maybe 2 or 3 times before, we've had brief discussions with, So the first difficulty that we had that was just a major, major challenge was how do you mesh your team with that team? Are there people who need to be moved out? Unfortunately, there were a couple where we had to move some players. We downsized the staff a little bit as we had more active players available. We didn't need as many people, which was a hard thing to do, but we moved some people out. We're going to be hiring some new people in, which I'm sure is going to be hard. Every time, at least for us, we've done hires, it's basically hire 3 and someone's not gonna work out. Yeah, so that would be the next adventure, but stabilizing the people was the first thing we had to do, and we're probably about 80% of the way there.
Yeah, and after you figure out the people, then we have to shift into the systems, because the systems that the prior ownership used versus the systems we're using, they're almost 100% different. Yes, like the prior ownership had a completely different software they were using to manage the people, and they actually had to run the resort themselves. They had to be hands-on every single day that they were here for the turns. For us, we can't do that. We had to get different systems with those people so that they could be competent and go in and actually get the jobs done. We went from 2-night minimums to 1-night stays. And so managing that, now we have to figure out, okay, how do we actually get people checked in remote from wherever we're at? Christian was in Cabo, I was over in Renton. Watching all the cats. But we had to be able to build out these systems, so we use different platforms. What's the platform we use? Logify?
We use Logify for the software. By the way, best practice versus what we actually did: you don't want to change all of your systems at the same time.
We changed everything.
We changed everything because we really could not run anything the way we wanted to with the systems we had. They worked really well for the old owners who lived here. Uh, the husband was the maintenance guy. He was the head of maintenance. He was very handy. He had a lot of tools. They The wife was quality control. She's run multiple businesses before. She's really good at running her roles. You remove the two people who live on site, it's like, okay, the software didn't work. The website was a little old and clunky, and we're marketing people, so that had to go with the Logify software. It's also our booking software, and it got— it's a lot of chaos. You're changing employees, you're changing systems, you're changing schedules. And we moved from two-night stays only— to one-night stays as an option.
We also opened up different time periods for the weddings. We often offered one-day weddings. We do two-day, three-day. It's completely different packages than the prior ownership. And we picked up another property next door. A lot of systems. But moving forward, what we're doing to manage this as excellently as we can, instead of doing the old check-in where the key's just left on the counter and we tell people as soon as they get there you can go in, now what we're doing is we're gonna rekey everything and it's gonna be key code. It'll sync up with Logify so that the people, when they're doing their check-ins, the guests come in, they're automatically gonna get a text. Systematizes everything and takes a lot of the burden of getting check-ins done off of our plate, off the prior ownership's plate, and off of our staff.
And I'm super excited for that. That's gonna be huge. Once we have that all in place, you have the systems, everyone's used to the systems, we've done a few quarters of the new reporting, you have the right employees, which we have some great people in the right spot right now. Oh yeah, which has made a world of difference. We've got through a majority of storm season. We had our first snowstorm and our first flood and our first major power outage in several years. So now that we're through those things, it's fun to get to enhance your systems, to really optimize this. The project here and the opportunity that we saw was we have a resort that no one will buy because it has to be hands-on. The systems are awesome for a retired couple. They're not awesome for a business owner. How do we retool what we have here so we have a repeatable system that we can plug and play anywhere else?
Yeah, that's what we're working on here now. And all the big resorts on planet Earth have systems. Small resorts don't because typically they can't afford them. We want to find a way— how do we afford it? The Robert Kiyosaki model, so that we can systematize this resort and really just make it a community to where the ownership structure can be super involved but doesn't have to be.
Yeah, speaking of the resort, if anyone wants to check this place out, we're standing in the historic pub suite. We just got the furnace back on for the historic Robin Hood suite, which used to be the restaurant. Awesome campus. It's about 12 acres. We're gonna be opening up the property next door. Where do people actually find the booking website for this if anyone wants to visit us?
Robinhoodvillageresort.com. And if you want to book direct and save a little bit of money, you can send a text message to 360-490- 8168.
Yes, very excited to have you guys here. Now, when this resort was actually built— I mean, this is a historic property. It's another thing in the operations that we should really talk about.
Built by John Beckman.
How do you love a building and really take care of the history of a 1934 building? The maintenance is a piece we haven't talked about yet. Oh no, for maintenance, for us, we've had a few things that were a little bit just Crazy timing. The furnace has never had a problem.
Until it did when we bought it.
And that will happen every time you buy a deal, by the way. That happened to us in Moses Lake on a septic tank before. It happens on electric. But problems don't happen until suddenly you own it and instantly, boom, things fail. For us, it's a huge campus. There's lots of things that can fail. It just happened to be that one furnace.
A lot of things happen. However, it's all fixable. And when it's done, if you take care of things, they will last a very long time. Yep.
We are, uh, speaking of systems, I'm going to end on this. We are hiring for a director of maintenance. If anyone is a local, ideally, or wants to live in or around Union, right now I'm taking on that role. We had someone for that role. It wasn't a good fit for them, which was fine. They're still an awesome member of our staff. Sometimes you just have the right person in the wrong seat. That's part of that personnel maintenance. But one of the big things that we're working on now is having one point person who knows this is exactly how we run things. This is where everyone is. Right now it's me. I don't want that to be me forever. That's not a repeatable system. We want it documented in a book, in an operations manual, and have a point person responsible for it.
Yeah, so we'd appreciate if you want to reach out, just put a comment down below. And as always, make sure to like, comment, and subscribe, and we'll see you guys next time.
