The Power of Hospitality: Secrets to Successful Retreats written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with AJ Wilcox
In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Kevin Rains, an expert in the hospitality industry and founder of Dappled Light Adventures, a company specializing in creating unforgettable retreat experiences. Kevin Rains is renowned for his innovative approach to hospitality and ability to transform ordinary spaces into extraordinary destinations. His background in community building and family-man personality offer a comprehensive guide to building and managing successful business retreats.
Kevin Rains’ love for nature and extensive experience with hospitality and retreat management provides listeners with practical tips and advanced techniques to enhance their retreat offerings. He explains the importance of understanding guest needs, the role of personalized experiences, and creating a welcoming environment that encourages relaxation and connection. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to elevate their business retreats and achieve outstanding results.
Key Takeaways
Questions I ask Kevin Rains:
[01:20] Could you share your background, especially your successful journey with your auto body business, and what led you to where you are today?
[03:06] What inspired you to start this venture? Was it purely a business opportunity, or was there a deeper drive, perhaps influenced by your ministry?
[04:26] What challenges did you encounter in turning a private residence into a retreat center? Were there issues with zoning, neighbors, or large-scale construction?
[06:29] You mentioned focusing on short-term rentals like Airbnb. Now, you’re shifting towards hosting retreats. What are you learning about what you need to offer for such events?
[10:59] How do you plan to impart the same connection with the land to your guests as you have? Is it challenging to create that ambiance for temporary visitors?
[12:47] What differences have you noticed between hosting business retreats and family reunions? Are there unique challenges or advantages?
[16:29] What are the logistics for hosting events? How many people can attend, and do you offer catering services?
[18:47] Do you have any advice for families or individuals considering starting their retreat center?
[19:55] For those unfamiliar with the area, Can you describe the location of your retreat center in central Kentucky?
[21:09] Where can people find more information about your facility, Dappled Light?
More About Kevin Rains:
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Kevin Rains (00:00): Women tend to to talk to each other face to face. Men like to be facing the same direction. It feels safer for them to share more openly. So having these two seater UTVs going off road and we're driving together and there's an adventure element, once again, it allows...
John Jantsch (00:20): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kevin Rains. He's a devoted husband, father of three and grandfather who's always embraced the joys of the outdoors. As a former body shop owner, entrepreneur, marketer, off-road writer and fisherman, some of my favorite things there, Kevin has prioritized family nature throughout his life. In 2021, he and his family transformed their 50 acre property in zoo Kentucky into a haven for outdoor adventures and simple living where they've created lasting memories for over 15 years. So Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Rains (00:57): Thank you. Honored to be on excited.
John Jantsch (00:59): You and I have known each other for some time, like everybody knows each other these days right on the internet, but I've followed your journey, entrepreneurial journey, especially in the autobody days. So I thought this is a little different take on a show, but I frankly, I'll just be honest, I had a personal interest in learning about it, so why not record it? So maybe give us a little background because I know you had a very successful autobody business that I believe you sold, and so I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey as an entrepreneur and then obviously where we are, where you got to today.
Kevin Rains (01:34): Yeah, so I started my career in the ministry actually in my twenties and early thirties. Pivoted into the family business when I was 33 and felt like I had a bit of a knack for that and started to grow in large part thanks to your books and learning. Coming out of Bible college, they did not teach marketing, so I had to learn it from John Jansch, and I learned step by step course by course, book by book, pieced it together. Eventually grew to five locations. So we went from doing about $250,000 a year in revenue to doing over $12 million a year in revenue and private equity. Came knocking on my door, wasn't interested. They told me their number. I was interested, and that shifted quickly. So I thought I was going to retire. I was 50 51 at the time and thought, this is it. I'm going to kind of cash you out and do a lot of fishing.
(02:25): And quickly realized that I was not made for retirement. So my kids came to me and said, Hey, let's do something different. Let's do something else. I said, what do you want to do? They said, why don't we start by developing these 50 acres we've owned for at that point, 18 years in zoo, Kentucky, and here we are, we're building it out. We have 10, sorry, 11 rentable structures on the property. Now after a couple years, we've been doing a short-term rental business, and we're pivoting now into more of a retreat business. So it's been 80% short-term rental, 20% retreats. We're just going to try to flip the script on that and go 80% retreats, 20% short-term rental starting in 2025.
John Jantsch (03:05): Well, first off, maybe what was your inspiration? I mean, what made you think, other than this is a what I want to do next or a business opportunity, was there any sort of driving, I'm envisioning the ministry playing a part, maybe even in just the retreats. I mean, was there any drive towards we want to have this place where people can gather?
Kevin Rains (03:24): Yeah, definitely. It's not connected to any religious tradition. Our retreat center is not, but as a pastor, I would take retreats. I'd go to different, I went to monastery for a week at a time, at least twice a year, and that would fill me up and fill the pipeline with ideas and things that I could teach on to the church and all that. And it's just always been a part of my personal formation as a person and how I've lived my life. And one of the things we talked about as a family is we have a high value for hospitality. So we said, what can we do to open this property up? We had really protected it for almost 20 years, 18 years, just for our family. And then we thought through the gift of hospitality, what would it look like to really open this up, use some of the resources we had gotten from the sale of our businesses and put those to work in a setting where we could invite more people onto this property. So I think that was the inspiration was kind of like my early formation going on retreats and then our family deciding together, we want to use our gift of hospitality and open it wide up.
John Jantsch (04:26): So what challenges did you run into turning a private resident, zoning, crazy neighbors, whatever it might be, and just even construction, large scale construction. What did you learn? What were the challenges? How hard was it?
Kevin Rains (04:43): So when we started this in 21, we didn't have any utilities on the property. So my family would go there. We would basically be, at first, we would just literally camp and over time we'd get a trailer, but we didn't have any running water, so we'd have to carry our water in. There was no place to really prepare foods. We had to learn to cook over the open fire. We eventually built a yurts on a cliff edge on one side of the property that became the foundation for a cabin that we built. It was kind of an off-grid cabin for all that time. So the earliest challenges were actually not zoning, believe it or not, that part of the world, central Kentucky, they don't care what you build, as long as it's like, honestly, I can't think of it. We went to the building department and said, please give us any warning or restriction because we want to do this, right? They said, honey, it's your property. You all do what you want. And we're like, okay, well, we did. And cooling all those utilities on was probably the biggest challenging. So we wanted to bury the utilities. So we have, there's no electrical lines running on the property, so everything's in the ground, the water, the electric internet, everything is run under our driveway now. And then we branch out from there to the various structures.
John Jantsch (05:52): And then most of the buildings then outbuildings were built from scratch. Well, then
Kevin Rains (05:58): That's correct. Yeah. We had a contractor come in and they started drilling posts in the ground and we built decks and then we put tents on top of those. Now we're building a 2000 square foot, we call it the rookery, which is a place where birds gather because all of our tents are named after birds because they're elevated in the canopy, so they're kind of in the tree, like tree house type places. So we're calling it the rookery, and it's going to be a couple thousand square feet with a 2000 square foot deck. So great place for retreats to gather in that space.
John Jantsch (06:29): So I think we were chatting a little bit before we jumped on the air, and you said that to date, it's been a lot of short-term rental, Airbnb kind of thing, but you are now really trying to move towards people having retreats, maybe coming in, reserving the whole facility. Are you just kind of learning what you have to offer for that kind of thing, ways to, whether they're activities or adventures that you need to add? What's that going to look like, you think?
Kevin Rains (06:55): Yeah, great question. So the area is really well known and it balloons in population on the weekends and in certain seasons. So there's an underground kayaking area, there's canoeing, there's rock climbing all around us. There's guided hikes and climbing. So there's all kinds of, it is an outdoor enthusiast dream because of the way the cliffs are constructed. And we have great hiking on our property and we have access to Daniel Boone National Forest coming off of our property. So we've hiked, I think we hiked seven miles one direction with no trail in the national forest, just to see how far we could get and if we ran into anything, saw nothing. So we have this beautiful playground and we're just introducing people to it. There's a 200 foot waterfall that cascades off of our property into the national forest. People can hike down there. So we're trying to think of some things we could do maybe eventually like a ropes course or some other things on property. But the area is so rich with opportunity. We feel like our main role is really to host people and create a very comfortable place for them to be as a base of operations for their own adventures.
John Jantsch (08:04): I'm curious, how are you running this as a family business then? The kids are all, everybody's involved. So I'm curious, how has moving to hospitality business in a way changed any impacted your family dynamic at all? Because obviously that's different than going to work and working on the cars now we're hosts. What has that done to the family dynamic? I'm curious.
Kevin Rains (08:25): It's been interesting. So it was a chance for my kids to kind of elevate into, because at the time they were coming into my business, we were already three, four shops at that time, ended up with five. So they kind got slotted as customer service reps or helping me manage the part room or something kind of simple. My daughter helped me organize my office and create an operations manual for our office team at the time. She was 17, believe it or not. But I did put 'em into some roles. It may have been a little bit outside to give them a chance to spread their wings, but now it feels like they're really kind of at the top of an organization that's going to grow over time. So we're starting fairly small. We've invested a few million dollars at this point. So it's definitely starting to be built out.
(09:12): We're not seeing a big return on that. So they're having to think through how do we do marketing? How do we sell retreats? How do we handle HR for this size of organization? So they're learning the resource constraints that I had early on as a business owner. I'm letting them experience that as we go. And the secret for me is like I don't care if it turns money for the next couple years, but at some point it's going to need to so I can be patient even though I watch them kind of freak out about trying to get the break even.
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(10:51): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. I'm curious, you talked about a lot of people that really love outdoors experiences. It's not just the doing, it's actually the being in a relationship with land. I'm curious if bringing guests onto that, if that's going to, are you going to be able to impart that same sort of feeling or ambiance, and I'm making some assumptions that you have for the land itself now that you're bringing in guests that are going to be there very temporarily. How do you get them to experience that?
Kevin Rains (11:29): Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that initially a lot of the retreats that we're running are people that we know love and trust to use your language. So we're being very selective about some of the early days of people that we do bring on to the property. They share many of our values. They understand how important this space is to our family. Now through the short-term rental, there's been a lot of people on the property that we don't really know,
(11:55): But it's been an opportunity to get to know other people and to bring them into the fold. So I travel down as often as I can. My son travels down very regularly and we have an onsite property manager as well who welcomes people onto the property. So I think having eyes on the property is helping us feel a little level of comfort about, it's just not come one come all. We have a gate at the front and we're kind of making it a secure environment for people to feel safe and to have an experience that their family can enjoy. And we make it clear that this is really for families
John Jantsch (12:30): Just because a lot of my listeners expect me to talk about business and entrepreneurial ventures. Have you had business retreats? And if so, what have you learned from doing those? Because I'm sure they run a little differently. And again, I'll stop there and just ask one question at a time. What have you learned from hosting some business retreats and how they kind of differ from say, the family reunion?
Kevin Rains (12:54): Yeah, great. It's interesting. One of the things I found that I actually love is when you get men in particular around a fire, sometimes there's an adult beverage and a cigar involved in that as well. But the fire, the adult beverage is cigar. The relaxed environment, it really tends to open people up, especially men who may not be as open with their feelings or how they're really doing or peeling that onion or not trying to posture or position. So I've taken several retreats that led several retreats there with small business owners from my area who want to scale, who want to leave a legacy, who want to do what my family's been able to do and enjoy that space with them and get them into an environment where they can start to open up. So I love getting around that fire. Sometimes there's tears, there's always laughter.
(13:42): It's a place of transparency. Transparency. The other thing that we do along those lines is we have side-by-side, kind of those off-road vehicles. And I don't know, I'd have to do a little more research on where this came from, but I've heard that women tend to talk to each other, face-to-face. Men like to be facing the same direction. It feels safer for them to share more openly. So having these two seater UTVs going off road and we're driving together and there's an adventure element, once again, it allows some of those walls to fall. So retreats for me are really about helping business owners lower their defenses and get real and honest about what's really going on in their life and their business.
John Jantsch (14:27): So on that vein, have you seen a lot of times, I do a lot of events and we some struggle with how much downtime or playtime versus say, working on whatever it is. Ostensibly we came there to work on have you seen some mixes or best practices or even ways in which people have incorporated those two
Kevin Rains (14:51): Of the opinion? And it may not be the majority opinion that whatever needs to be talked about will get talked about. So I go very low on the curriculum side for my retreats, and I trust my own facilitation skills in that moment to kind of pull the group together to talk about what we need to talk about. Sometimes it is a business topic and I'm more than comfortable talking through those topics as well as family or personal challenges that they may be facing. So we're not trying to pigeonhole people and say, come to a retreat, and you end up crying and sharing your heart and going through all the layers, and it'll be like therapy. That's not the point. It's just the point is to let them be the curriculum so the content comes out of whatever they bring into the retreat versus me having a script or a pre-packaged. I love teaching, I love content, I love books. But I also think there's, the wonderful thing about retreats is it's kind of open-ended, and I can bring some of those things I've learned to bear on their real call 'em live animals, whatever live animals they come with, we wrestle with those
John Jantsch (15:59): Well, and even people that go to conferences constantly comment on, I heard some good things in the meeting rooms or in the keynote, but it was the three or four conversations I had at break that really made the difference. And you hear that all the time, and I do think there's a real feeling by event organizers still like, let's pack a whole bunch in. But sometimes you just bring people together around an idea and just see what happens.
Kevin Rains (16:23): That's it. I think it could
John Jantsch (16:24): Feel scary, but yeah. So let's go over the numbers. How many people could come to an event? Is it get catered? I mean, what are the logistics?
Kevin Rains (16:37): Yeah, so if you could imagine that the 10 rentable structures, each of the tents are set up very well appointed hotel rooms. We have large like queen size or even king size mattresses, Tempur-Pedic, wonderful pillows. They're beautifully designed. They're probably a few hundred square foot. I think they're 310 square feet each. So it's a big space of big room. So you could put one person. So when I do men's retreats, one guy in each tent, so they have solitude. If we do a couple's retreat, then it's like obviously two per tent. So if it's a couple's retreat, easily 25 people. And then we work with a local barbecue joint. There's a kind of a grass fed beef that does hamburgers and tacos. Also in our area, we partner with local restaurants to bring food on. The rookery that we're building is going to have a nearly almost like commercial grade kitchen in it. And our dream is to bring chefs down for certain retreats so that there can be meals prepared on site that are healthy, beautiful, and delicious. So that's the dream. But I'd say our retreats tend to be anywhere from five to six people all the way up to 25, even 30 once the rry is completed.
John Jantsch (17:56): And any plans for making it a hundred person place or is this kind of the intimate sort of scope that you want?
Kevin Rains (18:04): Yeah, so I have a partner in that area and we've bought up more property down there. So we have about 500 acres in that area, and we're currently using seven acres. So yeah, the long-term answer is yes, we plan to go bigger, but we want to get really good at those five to 25 retreats before we start thinking about more conference level type stuff.
John Jantsch (18:31): So any advice that you would give now? I don't know that there's going to be a lot of people listening to say, I'm going to build a retreat center myself. But to majorly pivot, whole different industry, whole different skillset, whole different customer based, different vibe, everything. Is there any advice or something you've learned along the way to somebody, a family or an individual that was contemplating their next thing?
Kevin Rains (18:55): I would say that I've learned most of what I've gained over the last 20 years of being in business applies to what I'm doing now. So there's not a huge disconnect. It's still we want to do great customer service now we call them guests. Previously, I called them customers. But really it's the same idea. We're dealing with people that need to be cared for and given an effortless experience and done, they need to be communicated with in a way that's meaningful and helpful to them. So a lot of those skills are highly transferable, I would say if somebody's considering a big pivot to feel like you're not starting over, you're just taking what you've learned and you're applying it in a different context. And for us, it's like any fears that I had around, could we do this or not? Over the last two years have been completely set aside. Our confidence is very high that we can make this happen, drawing on the skills we've learned in our previous enterprises.
John Jantsch (19:55): So how would you describe where Z Kentucky is?
Kevin Rains (19:59): It is in central Kentucky, so it's probably about an hour east of Lexington, so it's not easy to get to. It's a couple hours from Cincinnati, an hour from Lexington, a couple hours from Louisville. So some of those major metropolitan areas, like three hours from Nashville. So it's not always easy to get to the payoff is the cliff edges. We could have bought property a lot closer, but to have these 200 foot soaring cliffs on one whole side of our property, you can't get that within an hour of Cincinnati. So we feel very lucky to have what we have.
John Jantsch (20:34): Yeah, I spent some time, what's the national park in Kentucky? Down in Southern. It's a cave, wind cave or something like that. Right?
Kevin Rains (20:41): Mass
John Jantsch (20:42): Cave. Mass cave. There we go. So I'm envisioning some of that same limestone.
Kevin Rains (20:46): It's a lot of limestone, some sandstone, Mitch, which makes it really good for climbers. I don't know a lot about climbing. I'm not built for climbing. I'm more built for podcasts. But the climbers tell me the way the rock formed down there, it's just ideal. So it's a world-class. It shows up in almost every climbing magazine every month
John Jantsch (21:03): Somehow. Oh wow. Wow. Awesome. Well, Kevin, again, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Where would people connect with you or certainly find out about a facility, which I don't even think we've mentioned. The name Dappled Light, is that right?
Kevin Rains (21:17): Yeah, that's right. Dappledlightadventures.com. So dappledlightadventures.com, everything's there. You could see our facilities, you could reach out. If you email us there, you'll get to my son Isaac. But would love to have any dialogue with people who are interested either in retreats, talking about a business pivot or want to talk about the hospitality industry. Things that we've learned in our first two years. I'm an open book.
John Jantsch (21:40): Alright, awesome. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you soon. One of these days out there on the road.
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