An RV Entrepreneur’s Journey from Corporate America to the Great Outdoors: Mark Koep

00:00:02
Welcome to winds of change. I am your host, Emy DiGrappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council. Wyoming Humanities Council is committed to sharing the stories of the people, places and history of Wyoming. In this special series, we are talking to Wyoming entrepreneurs and innovators.

00:00:22
And today my special guest is Mark. Mark is an entrepreneur and his new groundbreaking technology is called Campgroundviews.com. he says we make finding the perfect campsite easy. His company has reimagined the way travelers find, select and book their next campsite. Using his new proprietary technology, you can virtually tour a campground, get information on the campsites, and then click on the campsite to book it.

00:00:57
And that is so, so cool. So, Mark, I just want to welcome you to the Winds of Change podcast. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I was so excited to read about your journey.

00:01:10
Tell the audience, like, how this became your journey, how this became your passion. Yeah, well, it started in 2009, actually. So my wife and I at the time, I was running a digital Marketing agency and I worked from home at the time, so we didn’t meet with clients and we were recently married. And I said to my wife, hey, let’s sell everything and buy an RV and start traveling. She said, you’re nuts.

00:01:33
No way. And so that idea obviously went out the window there. And about six months later, she re approached me. She said, hey, you remember that idea about the RV? I thought about it a little bit and she’s like, I’m interested in it.

00:01:44
And so what ended up happening is we sold everything we owned, we bought a fifth wheel and a truck, and in 2009 and hit the road with the original plan of just traveling the country. We were young. Why not? Life’s short. We have degrees.

00:01:57
If we have to get jobs, we’ll get jobs, but life’s short. And so we hit the road with a plan of staying out on the road for a year to a year and a half and ended up turning into twelve years living in an rv, traveling this country, living in all the lower 48 states from the Florida keys to Acadia National park, all the way up to Anacortes in Washington and San Diego and California, all across this country. So really had an amazing experience. And what we learned from that journey was that the American dream is often elusive, but it’s also not necessarily the right dream. And so a lot of people spend a lot of time chasing a job, a career, that ladder.

00:02:43
And the reality is when you get there, and we witnessed this on the road, it was actually, we had some, some unique experiences because remember, we’re young and we’re traveling full time, and a lot of the people that are out there traveling full time in their RV are retired, right? They’ve done their careers, and this is their retirement plan. And so we end up spending a lot of time with retired folks. And when they find out we’re young and we’re working and we’re not homeless and, like, we’re doing this for fun and all that type of stuff, not there’s anything wrong with homelessness. I’m just saying, you know, that we weren’t, that we started getting advice from people and we started witnessing it firsthand.

00:03:13
And the first thing they would say to us every time is, you are so lucky to, to do this while you’re young and have the energy and all that to do that. And we quickly realized that this lifestyle, the ability to travel in an rv, is actually challenging. If you’ve ever camped. Anybody out there who’s listening to this, who’s ever tried to camp, knows this one issue with camping. You have no idea what you’re going to.

00:03:37
You don’t know what the campsite looks like, what the neighbors look like or anything. And so you end up having to be a little bit of a free spirit, a little bit of a risk taker in order to do it. So a lot of folks don’t ever actually venture outside and go camping. And so our concept came from that is, let’s show people what campgrounds look like, give them the ability to tour them on their own, lower that barrier to entry, and get more people to go outdoors. Wow.

00:03:59
And I love that. And, okay, so when you told me all these different places you camped and you were able to work remotely, which is super cool. So you’ve, so it’s not like this. Campgroundview.com comma, your new technology, it sounds like you’ve always been an entrepreneur. How did that journey start?

00:04:20
Whoa. Okay, so let me condense this. It actually started. My mother owned a small business, so growing up, she owned a balloon and flower shop. And my dad worked, he worked for an insurance company.

00:04:33
He was a vice president of claims. I was originally born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and my dad worked for St. Paul insurance there. And they were opening up an office in southern California. And so he moved the family to southern California, and that was where I grew up at in southern California.

00:04:47
My mom, she had a balloon and flower shop. So as a kid, and it’s actually unique. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but it’s very different then than it is now. We used to walk to and from school by ourselves, my brother and I. When we get home, my mom’s store was on the other side of town.

00:05:07
We grew up in Simi Valley, California, so if anybody’s familiar with that area, it was about 10 miles away from our house. And so I remember at eight, nine years old, we would get home from school and we would actually ride our bikes to my mom’s store and then hang out with her as she closed up the store. And so that was where kind of our entrepreneurial journey started as we watched my mom start a business from scratch, grow it and operate that business. I ended up going to college, and my original degree focus was geology. And I was a year and a half away from finishing with a geology degree.

00:05:39
And I realized that it wasn’t for me. I just wanted to be outdoors and kind of free spirit. Kind of wanted to just go out. And that’s what I thought geology was. And then I learned that it really wasn’t that.

00:05:48
And I made a hard choice. Cause it is a hard choice when you’re in college and you’re paying for, you know, I paid for my own way, so I’m paying for this tuition. I made the choice. You know what? I actually wanna start my own business.

00:05:59
And so I changed majors to Marketing and ended up having to take another two years to finish and finish with a Marketing degree. And when I graduated, the reason I’m going to the story is, this may be useful for some of your listeners. Cause there’s people out there that have the want to start a business, but they don’t know what they wanna do. And so when I graduated from college, from undergraduate, I knew I wanted to start a business, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I needed to make money, right? I have bills, I have to pay for stuff, right?

00:06:24
And so at the time, in Simi Valley, the largest employer that wasn’t the government was a company called Countrywide Home Loans, which became famous as the company that blew up. And over the home loan thing. In 2008, my job, get this, my job was a business analyst in the foreclosure department at countrywide home loans. And I was the liaison between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the foreclosure department. And this was in the run up to the mortgage debacle.

00:06:53
And I remember at that time, first off, I hated the job. I was miserable. Just completely miserable. So very good motivation to go do something else, right? And that’s kind of the hint there.

00:07:02
I needed a job. But I didn’t want to have a good job that I would like and do well at. I wanted a job that I would be miserable at and get out of there. So kind of a little bit of a sadist there, but that was what I was doing anyway. So I saw that because I was intimately involved in that company, I saw what was coming.

00:07:18
And in 2004, 2004, I left the company and I went and got an MBA. So I went to Pepperdine University, which is a christian school out in Malibu, and I got a one year MBA program with the singular goal of, I’m done working for a corporation. I need to create something. And if I’m going to ask investors for money, I want to make sure that I’ve got the chops to back it up. So I went and borrowed the money.

00:07:46
I didn’t, you know, there’s no, this isn’t Mommy daddy’s money. This is me taking on the debt to go get a degree. Went and did a degree program and I took the last $5,000 of my student loan and I started my first business. And that business came to me during the MBA school. It was when Google and Yahoo launched their local directory.

00:08:06
So people were like, what’s that? Well, if you’ve ever done a Google search, you know, Google Maps and you see the little icons come up, that’s Google directory. And when it came out, I knew that businesses would not know how to get on there and optimize themselves. And so I started what was called a local SEO firm. And so I could take any business in three weeks and get them to the top three results in Google Maps.

00:08:25
And that was my first business and I ran that. I still have clients today from when I started that back in 2005. And so that was what started my entrepreneurial journey. And from there, it’s, you know, I’ll stop with that because that’s how it started and see where we go from here. Oh, that, that is so cool.

00:08:42
And when I was reading your bio, I was like, oh, my gosh, he has an entrepreneurial brain, or passion. What would you call it when I think everybody has that inside of them someplace. But how did you have the guts to, like, know, I’m going to do this and I don’t even know if I’m going to make any money, but I’m going to try. I mean, what was, what were the hardships that you faced as you made these decisions? That’s a good question.

00:09:12
And what I’ll say is I find that a lot of people need permission. They need somebody to say, you can do this, and they actually need somebody not only to say, they can do that, but tell them how to do that. I don’t have that drive. In fact, if you tell me what to do, I’m probably going to do the opposite of what you tell me to do. It’s an ingrained trait.

00:09:30
For example, my parents divorced when I was in my early teen years. That’s a very traumatic time for your parents to get divorced. My drug of choice at that time became mountain biking. And I actually, because I lived in a valley with mountains, my escape from the day to day was to hop on my bike when I got home from school and go for a mountain bike ride. And so that ended up being a driving force for me.

00:09:55
Because mountain biking, any sort of cycling related event, is a very, even though there’s team activities around it, it’s an individual pursuit, right? It’s yourself against yourself. Your mind is your biggest limiting factor. And so from an early teen years, I challenged myself with cycling, and I was escaping from the day to day of the noise around the divorce and going up and riding my bike, and I became very good at it and ended up racing in national championships and world championships and all that type of stuff as I went through that. But the point being is in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to challenge yourself, because your biggest detriment to doing anything is your own mind.

00:10:34
And you telling yourself, you’re not good enough, you can’t accomplish this, you’re failing. I joke now that I literally run into walls all day long. That is my entire existence is to get up and run into that wall right there and then get up when I fall down and hit it again and hit it again, because that’s what entrepreneurship is. It’s not easy. You literally hit walls all day long.

00:10:56
It can be very, very frustrating because then you start questioning yourself, your business, your idea, is it worthwhile? Why don’t I just get a job? It would be so much easier. And you have friends that are on vacation and you’re working. Being an entrepreneur is not easy.

00:11:12
It’s actually a very, very, very challenging. And, you know, you’re talking to a real entrepreneur when you are an entrepreneur and you talk to somebody who’s really done it, like you got, you will immediately connect because you both have been through that challenge and you’re able to connect on that level. So somebody listening who’s considered starting something and they haven’t done it yet, I actually encourage you start listening to Tony Robbins start doing self improvement, start challenging yourself and recognizing that the biggest detriment to your success is your own limiting beliefs and what you believe about yourself and your ability to do things. That is so true. And I am a big Tony Robbins fan.

00:11:52
So I even took the course where you have to break the board. And it was so fun. It was so fun. So, yeah, I absolutely do believe that. And I have two daughters who are entrepreneurs, so I get it.

00:12:10
They’re constantly trying new things. You are your own worst enemy. Yes, you are. You know, I mentor for, there’s a program in Wyoming that’s called G Beta. And if you want, if you have an idea for a business, it’s free and you can join their program.

00:12:26
They’ll help you through the process. And so we actually went through that process as a business here in Wyoming. And also I mentor for other businesses that are in there. And it’s one thing to be the business and getting the mentorship. It’s another when you switch on the other side and you’re mentoring somebody.

00:12:42
It’s like teaching somebody. You actually make yourself better by trying to teach what you’ve learned and what you know. And what I realized in doing the mentorship is, again, it is. The limit is usually on the person itself that started the business. They’re usually the one that holds it back.

00:12:58
And unlike any other time in history, today you have the ability to cheaply and quickly test concepts that 1520 years ago you couldn’t do. I can take a business concept today and in one week tell you whether or not it has a valid Market and spend maybe $1,000 to do that. Like you can. You can literally put together a business, a brand, a website, put it on the line, test it, call up the lead people that you think you would sell to and test the concept and find out, yes or no that this is a viable option and then start heading down that path today. The tools available to you to start something are amazing.

00:13:36
The trick is knowing what those right tools are and kind of the path to go about doing that. So I’m going to go back for 1 minute because of something you said earlier. So you went to Pepperdine to get your master’s. What was your degree in? So I did an entrepreneurship MBA in entrepreneurship.

00:13:54
So that was like my, my kind of focus. And I did a one year program. I mean, it’s expensive. I mean, it’s in Malibu, right? It’s 65,000.

00:14:02
And I actually still lived in Simi and I commuted with my pickup truck back and forth like I. You know, it’s. I love. I grew up in California from a young age, grew up in Simi Valley, and, you know, being in Wyoming, there’s a negative connotation with California. But what I can tell you is there’s actually a lot of people in California that have this.

00:14:22
Not just California, across this country, we’re all Americans, right? And we all kind of have that same spirit of I love California. It’s a beautiful state. And where I lived in Ventura county was amazing and very similar in environment to what you find in a lot of places in Wyoming. When I was majoring in entrepreneurship as an MBA, I had a singular focus, and that was, I’m done with the corporate world.

00:14:44
In fact, when I work for countrywide home loans, I saved them $45 million a year. And as a reward for that, I received a nice plastic trophy for that. For that benefit I gave that company. So for me, that was like, wait, if I save this company $45 million and I get a plastic trophy, imagine if I can do a fraction of that on my own and actually keep a check in the bank account that you can use for things. And so I had real motivation, and the goal with the MBA was, and it goes back to that advice you learn after you do things.

00:15:16
I hadn’t actually given myself permission to fail or try. I felt like. I felt. There’s a line called imposter syndrome. Often people have this when they start a business, is that they feel like they’re not worthy of it and they’re not there.

00:15:30
And I didn’t, at that time, feel worthy of it, and I felt like I needed the degree to get to that level. I actually would challenge that if I was advising myself back then, I would challenge that entire concept to say, you’re nuts, that you don’t need to do that. But it’s my journey. That’s what I went through and did it. So I needed that degree to have the permission to do what I ended up doing, if that makes sense.

00:15:50
Yes, absolutely. It does make sense.  But why Wyoming? That was my next question.

00:16:31
Why Wyoming? I want to go into it because I think it’s important for people that live in Wyoming who grew up here to understand why people are coming here. So my wife grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. Her father worked in the chemistry lab at UW. Her aunt, you know, so she grew up in Laramie.

00:16:48
And it was just through happenstance that we met in southern California. So that’s kind of how we connected. Now, when we went full time, mind you, and I’m going to insult myself in this, but I think it’s a good, truthful story here, just to be really honest. When we left California in the rv, I was, frankly, a snob. Straight up, I was a snob.

00:17:07
And we started traveling, and I quickly realized that everything I thought about where you live and what your experience is like and access to amenities and all this stuff that you have around a major city, I realized that I was wrong. And my perception on what you should do is wrong. And so it was about a year and a half in where I basically had that epiphany that I had the wrong mental state on everything. And so we started traveling, and I quickly fell in love with the rural lifestyle and being in a rural area and being away from the cities and just dropping the noise and all the stress and the people just trying to kill you when you’re driving down the road, just losing that. Right.

00:17:47
And so that’s kind of. There was that mental shift there. And if you notice, I went to the mental. A lot of your challenges in life are in your own head. And so if you can recognize them one, and then overcome them two, you’ll be able to grow.

00:18:00
And so as we proceeded down that twelve years of full time rving, the only place we returned to over and over and over again was Wyoming, South Dakota, Black Hills, and then into the Wyoming area. Right. So we spent a lot of time here in our rv already. And then obviously we have family and Laramie and so forth. And so our journey ends up leading up to the COVID period, and we’re full time rving.

00:18:27
So I want you to imagine this. Your home is on wheels. You are in an rv. Full time rving is, and I recognize this right away, is full time rving only works when society is operating around it because you’re really required fuel, food. Like, you can’t store stuff, so you rely upon being able to buy stuff.

00:18:47
And when Covid hit at that time, we were in Arizona, and my brother had a piece of property in California. And so my concern really wasn’t so much the virus, it was the economic impact of what was going on and how that was going to impact our business. And so Katerina and I decided, let’s go park the rig on my brother’s property. We don’t know what’s coming with all this stuff that’s coming our way. We obviously have hindsight now, but at the time, we didn’t know what was coming.

00:19:13
Right. And so let’s go back to family. Let’s stay there. And so we ended up in California during COVID And it completely shook my faith in society and just logic. It honestly, they closed hiking trails with $10,000 fines for trespassing on hiking trails due to Covid in California.

00:19:33
Now, remind you, I already kind of hinted at this. If you tell me to do one thing, I’d do a different thing. So I won’t say that I was tearing those signs down and putting off to the side and continuing to ride on the mountain bike trail. But it may have been what I did on a regular basis. Point being, is at that point, I was like, this is getting really weird.

00:19:51
This doesn’t work as full time Rvers. Where do we feel most at home? Where are we most? Like the individuals were around and the simple answer was Wyoming. And so that was what ended up back here.

00:20:04
Now, our daughter was born already in Laramie, so our daughter was born in Laramie, Wyoming. And then our son, we had another son who was recently born in Gillette. And so Wyoming is our home. And it’s not just a home because we live here, but we feel at peace here. We feel connection here.

00:20:21
We love the environment. We love the weather, which is a big thing. If you live in Wyoming, you better love the winters because you ain’t going to last very long here. We love the winters, like we are so eager for. It’s 80 degrees out right now.

00:20:32
As we’re recording this, we can’t wait for that first snowfall to hit. So we love Wyoming. This is our home. And it was a long story, but it kind of gives you a background why we came here and how we ended up calling this place our home. That is such a cool story.

00:20:46
And every time I turn on the news, I’m like, thank God I live in Wyoming.

00:20:53
I don’t know, because it’s that rural identity you have. It’s that it’s a small population. You can know so many people across the state, and it kind of gives you this really good comfort feeling that you’re not surrounded by cement and a million people. Yeah, absolutely. There’s a no nonsense attitude in Wyoming.

00:21:19
There’s, there’s, you know, I’m gonna let you do what you’re gonna do as long as you don’t get in the way of what I’m gonna do. And if I can help you, I’ll help you. But if, you know, if you’re gonna go do something stupid, go do it. You know, if that’s. That’s your call to go do it.

00:21:32
In addition to that, it’s the rural nature of it, but also the access. You know, growing up in southern California and Simi Valley, we had the Ventura county fair, and I vividly remember this. Went and saw Chris Ledoux in concert at the Ventura county fair, and his song, beneath these western skies, is, like, my all time favorite song. You know, I listened to his music beforehand, and then seeing him live in concert was just epic. I didn’t know he was from Wyoming.

00:22:00
Had no freaking clue he was from Wyoming. I just, like, in my mind, like, he’s singing about Wyoming, but I didn’t know he was from Wyoming at the time. And then once I moved here, I’m like, that makes sense. Like, duh. Like, I didn’t even know, because I don’t follow stuff like that.

00:22:12
I just found out after the fact. But that mindset of it probably came from the mountain biking. So when I mountain bike, like Simi Valley, well, Ventura county, the county I grew up in, the population of that county is greater than the population of the state of Wyoming. So just that county, it has a greater population in the state of Wyoming. But when I would go mountain biking, I would ride up in the hills, and oftentimes I was the only one there.

00:22:35
In fact, I used to often do. As I got older, I started doing 24 hours mountain bike races. So I used to do a lot of training at night where I’d have a headlight on my bike, and you would ride up into the mountains, and you were literally. I mean, I’m driving, I’m riding 1015 miles back into the hills. I mean, similar to Wyoming.

00:22:51
You are on your own. You need to defend for yourself. You need to get yourself out of there. Twice during those rides, I crashed. Once I broke my ankle.

00:22:59
Once I broke my wrist and had to get myself out of there on my own. I couldn’t call a paramedic and get out to that point. That’s almost like a Wyoming mindset. You need to defend for yourself. You need to understand what you’re getting into and you need to be prepared.

00:23:14
The reality is, in a turbulent times, that type of mindset is going to get our state through. And it’s the reason why the state is thriving so much is because in aggregate, the people that live here have that ingrained in them that I’m responsible for myself. I’m going to take care of myself and I’m going to get stuff done right. We have a lot of grit. A lot of grit, yes.

00:23:37
I want to know how you really like what inspired you. I learned as you were talking what inspired you to create campgroundview.com, but how did it all come together for you? So it was incremental steps leading up to it. So the first concept was if you go back to 2012. So this is about three years into our journey, smartphones started coming out.

00:24:00
Some of your listeners, I mean, they’re gonna be like, wait, these didn’t exist before? No, they didn’t exist. In fact, we had a Motorola flip phone and you would flip it up like that was. And there’s like little keypad on it. We didn’t have this smartphone stuff back then, but the smartphone started coming out and the concept was, again, I want to show people what the campgrounds look like.

00:24:17
And so we started having people send us just footage off their phone and we make these little videos and they’re still on YouTube. Now we have over 3000 campgrounds that people shot with these little. And they’re not viral videos. Like, these aren’t stuff that you’re going to seek out. Unless you’re looking to go to that campground, then it’s very useful.

00:24:34
And so through that, it ended up incrementally growing to where we started playing with the 360 technology and then for what we built. So to explain for your listeners how this technology works, think of Google Street View, only better. So what you do is you hit play on a video and you start driving through the campground. The video is playing as the camera travels through that campground, but it’s 360, so you can grab the screen and look around as you’re driving through the campground and as you go by campsites. We have augmented the experience, meaning we’re adding more information over the video to where you can click on a campsite.

00:25:11
And it tells you this is site five and it has these amenities and these hookups. And then we also put a link on there that allows you to click it and go into the booking engine to potentially book that site. So that’s an explanation of the technology. That technology, when we conceived of the idea as we were playing with this technology and building out this tool. And we thought, hey, somebody has to have created this already, right?

00:25:34
There’s somebody has to have developed this. Let’s go license it. And so we started looking around and our search started out in the US, then it went to Canada, then it went worldwide. And we could only find one entity in the world that was actually using 360 video for something productive. And the way they used it was very cost prohibitive and data size prohibitive for us to be able to use.

00:25:57
And so it ended up circling around to, well, we’ve got to create it ourselves. And so that ended up leading us to a development cycle and building this proprietary. We’re the only ones using video based experiences with an augmented experience. And we have now currently in our queue, we will pass 3000 campgrounds and rv parks that we have filmed and that will be available on our website for you to virtually tour. And I haven’t gone onto it, but I encourage everybody to go on campgroundviews.com dot.

00:26:25
I did go onto it, but I didn’t actually do one of the views. But I think it is very helpful. And just thinking about myself and my family and camping and doing the, you know, wanting to know where you’re going. And of course, we pretty much only camp in Wyoming, but because we love Wyoming and there’s so much to see, there’s so many places to go in Wyoming alone. I mean, have you been to the, the winds, the wind, river, mountains?

00:26:55
Those are so fantastically beautiful. I just literally got back on Monday from a trip I went over. So I live in Sundance, Wyoming. So went through Casper, up through Du Bois and then over to Wyoming Humanities Council. And I camped at the little foresters campground right there at Wyoming Humanities Council.

00:27:12
Woke up before sunrise, drove over, watched the sunrise on the Tetons, went around through Ri ri, Idaho, all the way up to Island park, ended up in Polson and then back through interstate 90 into the state. We’ve camped all over the state of Wyoming, love, like every single section of it. And you know, kind of in all this recently I, I found, and many people in Wyoming know about this, but I didn’t. The Koep Pritchett series, the Wyoming game warden and all that stuff and his adventures. And so I’ve been following, reading those books, which are amazing, by the way, just if you live in the state of Wyoming, you need to read those books because it gives you an appreciation of what we’re surrounded by.

00:27:50
And it’s cool when you drive around the state, like, oh, yeah, hey, this is where Koep, you know, it’s obviously a fictional character, but written around the state of Wyoming. So we’ve stayed at many one of the. If you haven’t been to the medicine lodge archaeological site, there’s an amazing campground there. Great place to go. And there’s so many places across Wyoming.

00:28:10
You could spend all summer camping in Wyoming and not be bored at all. I agree. I absolutely agree. I guess that’s what made me think about your website, this 360 degree view and how it became something really thriving. How do you get all this information to you?

00:28:30
Do you, do you have people in other places that are sending you the view of the campground that they’re in, and then from what they send you, you’re able to turn it into this 360? Yeah. This kind of backs up to remember we originally talked about entrepreneurship and starting something, so we knew we were doing something way different. Right. And everybody has a phone, but they don’t necessarily have a 360 video camera.

00:28:55
Right. And the actual video files that come off those video cameras are very large. Even though I said they’re small, they’re actually relatively large compared to a cell phone. So, like, a picture you take with your cell phone is going to be two megabytes. A video of a campground is going to be 6gb.

00:29:10
So much larger video fans. And so initially, as we started building out the concept, actually the first 30 campgrounds that we filmed, I filmed in the middle of the pandemic. I actually rented a car, and it’s in the middle of everybody’s locked down. And I drove to Arizona and I figured because you didn’t know, I was like, oh, well, I’ll just stay in the car. And I’m not going to get Covid, and if I have Covid, I’m not going to give it to somebody else.

00:29:34
And I’ll just go up in the forest and film campgrounds around the state of Arizona. So that was our first batch is me on the road driving around filming these campgrounds. Where we’re at today now is we have multiple rvers and folks that just like what we’re doing who are in different regions across the country. He’ll go capture park. So we’re actually finishing up a massive project this summer where we captured a significant proportion of the state park campgrounds across the country.

00:30:00
So we already captured 65% of the federal parks, which would be forest service and national park. And now we’re capturing a large portion of the state parks. And then when it comes to private parks, private rv parks there. We’re working with the park owners to get those locations captured, which becomes an interesting business conversation altogether, because there are some private park owners who don’t actually want you to see their park before you get there, for whatever reasons those may be. And so it’s a challenge, of course, to say, hey, this is going to add value to the camper experience.

00:30:33
And if your place is a dump, they’re going to find out when they get there. It’s probably better if you let them know it ahead of time, stuff like that. It’s a challenge. What age audience are you really reaching? Are you reaching a really young person who wants to just travel the world, live out of an rv, or are you reaching.

00:30:53
Are you reaching that person that has retired? Because where I live in Moran, Buffalo Valley. Oh, okay. You went by my house. I meet so many retired people.

00:31:08
They make this their living. Like, they go around the country, and they, you know, depending on the weather. So when it’s winter here, you know, the park closes. Right. So then they go someplace else, and they have a, you know, a map of basically where they go every year.

00:31:24
So the numbers on our website, 50% men, 50% women. Average age is 55, but we have all the way from 18 up to 75 plus that range. But primary average audience is 55 years of age, half men, half women, from all over the United States. Again, Covid was very impactful to our industry. It was the only way a lot of people can travel.

00:31:48
I know you experienced it where you’re at. Like, people just flooded the state of Wyoming during COVID like, just overwhelmed it. In fact, I was surprised, and I don’t know if you’re local there. You know, it seemed crowded when I was there this last week and just seemed like there’s still a lot of people in the area, because what happened during COVID is the only way you could really get away was to buy an rv, especially if you’re in the coastal states. It’s like, well, it’s so crazy here.

00:32:12
Let’s just get an rv and go escape. And so what people discovered is rving is actually a lot of fun. It’s adventurous. You get to visit all these areas, and so what’s happened is a lot of those people have continued to rv afterwards. The scope of work has changed, so people are able to work remotely, and they don’t need to be in an office.

00:32:30
So their vacation time is morphed into, I can be on the road for six months as long as I have Internet. Right. Starlink has empowered people to do that. So they have Starlink Internet, they have high speed Internet wherever they are at. So all of a sudden, the rv is not only a viable way to travel, but it’s a viable way to live.

00:32:48
And so there is not hundreds of millions of people, but there’s a few million people right now in the United States who own an rv as their primary residence. And they move from, basically, there’s a joke that they follow the 72 degrees. Wherever it’s 72 degrees. That’s where they’re at in the country. And so they kind of move around that way, but it.

00:33:07
It ends up being amazing. So, you know, for example, when I was in your area last week, and it was, the highs were like 65, 70, the crowds are obviously lower than they were during the peak summer. It’s absolutely beautiful this time of year. And so being able to travel like that allows in an rv outside of the peak camping season or the peak vacation season, it offers you the ability to discover, explore. And also the last piece, which I think is important for everybody, is live.

00:33:39
And what I mean by that is you’re not just vacationing there, but you’re actually living there for two weeks, a month or whatnot. It changes the entire dynamics of the experience. No longer you just there to go get gift shops, but you’re there to go grocery shopping, use the library, use the public services, like the pools or whatever are available within a community. And so it ends up creating a personal attachment and personal connection with that area, which I believe is actually important for us now and kind of a disconnected world to be able to get people more connected with areas on that personal level. And so I think the biggest challenge, all that brings is there is that battle between the connected world and the real world.

00:34:20
And that challenge is really where we’re seeing a lot of the noise and the strangeness. When people walk off the trails in Yellowstone and drop into a pool. It’s like, well, what the heck are you thinking? There’s a sign there. Read the sign.

00:34:33
Like, stop looking at your phone and read the sign. Or the people doing the selfies in front of the bison. Now, that’s a real animal that a rancher won’t go near because they’re mean and they hurt you. And so I think that’s a big battle. And it goes back to the question.

00:34:46
I didn’t really answer it earlier, which is, why? Why are you doing this? Why is this what you chose? I believe that outside in nature is our last chance to reconnect with ourselves, our family and friends, and the world. And if we can get more people, even just a few more people, to go do that, we’re going to improve the quality of life.

00:35:08
We’re going to open people’s eyes to the reality of the world we live in and that life is short and fragile. And if you don’t get along and stop with the noise, we’re going to screw this up. So let’s get more people outdoors, send them camping for a weekend, let them get smoke on their clothes, and maybe they’ll come home a happier, better person. I love your attitude. Maybe they’ll come home a happier, better person.

00:35:32
That’s really good. That should be a quote. You should have that t shirt. Don’t come home until you’re happier and you’re a better person, period. It’s a good excuse.

00:35:45
Then we’ll have a bunch of people on the road saying, I’m not happy yet. I’m going to keep driving. They’re still driving around. It was interesting during COVID because talk about things you couldn’t buy. Trucks were crazy.

00:35:59
Rvs, boats. People started living on their boats, all kinds of things like that. There’s been a change. So. And I noticed this last week, and you see it, and people are now able to talk about what went on during COVID You couldn’t talk about stuff like that back then.

00:36:16
You couldn’t openly say, like, this is nuts because you didn’t know where the other person stood on it. And we’re now in a place where you can actually look back and say, you know what? That was kind of stupid. You know, $10,000 fines for hiking trails. Does that make any sense?

00:36:29
Right? So we’re at that point now where you can start having that conversation and people are starting to reflect on it a little bit. Again, I go back to the reason I know, because we’ve seen it, we experience it. And I know from when I was growing up and, you know, I joked my drug of choice was mountain biking. The reality is there’s actual science out there that simply walking in nature has a whole bunch of health benefits for you.

00:36:51
Like, it’s crazy. Do you know that if you hug a tree, there’s actually a metaphysical transfer of energy that improves a whole bunch of from your brain waves to your rhythmic cycle to your heart rate, literally hugging a tree. Like, it sounds funny, but it’s true. So getting out in nature actually makes you a healthier, happier person. And so it was a good thing and it was actually a natural thing for people to go, hey, everything’s going nuts.

00:37:18
Let’s just go out and go camping. Like, let’s get outside into nature, right? So yeah, it’s real. It’s absolutely real. And if we can get more people doing that, I think it, you know, I legitimately think that if you can get more people outside and enjoying it, it’s one thing to go camping and have a horrible experience.

00:37:32
That’s totally different thing, but having a good time, they’ll do it again and then they’ll actually have a better life. Oh my gosh, it’s so great talking to you. I want you to share well all your links so that people can find you. So I know there’s campgroundview.com views. Where are the other places that people can find you?

00:37:54
So the easiest way is go to campgroundviewswith.com dot. We also have an app on the Google Play Store and the iOS store. So if you have an Apple device or an Android device, you can download the app. You can connect with us on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, all at campground views and, you know, follow us. We are building something pretty powerful.

00:38:18
And it’s cool when people discover for the first time, especially if they’re campers and they understand the value of it. They love it. Like we. It’s always funny when I get an email now and we, mind you, we’ve been at this business for twelve years and this technology for four and a half. When they’re like, this is the best thing ever, I’m like, well, yeah, we’ve been working on it for four years.

00:38:36
We’re glad you found it. You know, it’s, it is, you know, now is it perfect? No, but that may be another kind of back to the entrepreneur thing. Nothing you ever develop will be perfect. It always be kind of there and you’ll kind of be improving it.

00:38:49
So is it perfect? No. And if you find something wrong with it, let me know. We’ll get it fixed. And we think we’ve got something pretty powerful.

00:38:56
If you go camping, if you go rving, if you like to get outdoors, we invite you to connect with us at campground views. I think that is so terrific. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate this opportunity. I love it.

00:39:08
Thank you. Absolutely.

00:39:16
Thank you for listening. I’m executive producer Emy DiGrappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council, our co hosts and all the people who generously share their stories and their time. For more information, go to thinkwy.org subscribe and never miss a show.