Weekend Favs July 27

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.

John Jantsch (09:46): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at