Here’s a remote way to kill RV parks

Taped on the wall next to my desk where I do my writing is a handwritten list of owners of multiple campgrounds and RV parks. Three years ago, such a list would have been exceedingly short. Today there are nearly a score of names, and I’m sure the list is incomplete, since I’ve made no calculated effort to keep it up-to-date and add to it only when I stumble across a new name. Some have only a handful of properties; others, many dozens. All, I must confess, baffle me.

Several weeks ago, OHI—that’s the Outdoor Hospital Industry—sponsored an on-line chat with Adam Lendi, self-styled “real estate guru” and owner of one of those rapidly growing RV park chains, Beyonder Campgrounds. Lendi was a deputy sheriff in Colorado’s Arapahoe County until 2019, when he apparently realized there was a lot more money to be made in real estate, and the following year he plunged into the campground business. Today his Beyonder name tag has been slapped onto seven RV parks and he’s on the prowl for more. None, it should be noted, are actually operated by Lendi himself, who unabashedly asserts that he’s modeling a remote management style best suited “for people who want a life outside of their campground.”

“Freedom!” he adds, like a modern-day Braveheart. It’s all about freedom.

The thing about my list of group campground owners that baffles me is precisely that necessary reliance on a remote management style. And the thing about Lendi that baffles me—aside from his supernaturally rapid ascent to “guru” status in less than four years—is his ready acknowledgment of all the risks incurred by this approach. It’s not that he doesn’t see the problems. It’s that he thinks, with only limited evidence, that he’s got them beat.

Conceding that “nobody’s going to care about the business as much as you do,” Lendi’s chat included a rapid-fire series of pitfalls that await absentee owners: the property is neglected, no one answers the phone, employees steal stuff or time, guests get mistreated, bills don’t get paid. All of which should be enough to dissuade anyone from handing over the keys to the kingdom, but Lendi is undeterred. His magic formula? Cut through his biz school mumbo-jumbo—create a plan, follow the plan, inspect what you expect, etc.—and it all comes down to just one thing: “Hire the right manager.”

Wow. How’s that for guru wisdom?

There’s no arguing that choosing the right manager is a make-or-break proposition, and it’s possible that Lendi may have a knack for doing just that. But in the world of rapid RV park turnover and the exodus of seasoned campground owners, the reality is that the pool of competent campground managers is extraordinarily shallow. This is not a new problem. The guy who sold us our campground, in 2013, had known he was burnt out a couple of years earlier but couldn’t quite bring himself to let go of a decade-and-a-half of pouring his heart and soul into the business. Maybe, he reasoned, he could have someone else do the heavy lifting while he kicked back and reaped the rewards.

That illusion lasted just two years and two campground managers before he threw in the towel, listing the park for sale before it became any more run-down.

Past is prologue. In the three years since we sold that same campground, after owning and operating it for eight years, the new—remote—owners have gone through four managers and are now on their fifth. Two of the managers are single and three were couples, although one 26-year marriage ended in a split and subsequent divorce after just six months on the job. Running a campground is hell on relationships! A second management couple should have rung alarm bells when it never moved out of its fifth wheel—and abruptly pulled out mid-season after just seven months, so the wife could become general manager of a luxury RV resort in Florida; her only prior management experience had been seven months as an assistant manger at a lodge in the Tetons. That’s how thin the pickings are.

Such a revolving door has consequences even more dire than those mentioned by Lendi. New leadership every camping season means a loss of institutional memory, forcing management to relearn a property’s quirks and to reestablish links with community resources and vendors. New management invariably means new campground rules and procedures, jeopardizing regular campers’ expectations and threatening the loss of repeat business. And new managers, whether out of ambition or ignorance, have been known to take on expensive property improvements with little or no understanding of zoning or environmental limitations or of the actual time and financial costs involved, disrupting campground routines, burning through the budget and courting regulatory sanctions.

But the most debilitating effect of revolving management is on employees. Buffeted by ever-changing management styles and expectations and poorly paid under the best of circumstances, campground workers end up scattering; not a single employee who worked at our campground is still there, and most were gone within the first year. Subsequent workforce turnover has been just as rapid. Worse yet, as word about working conditions gets around in rural communities, recruiting new workers becomes increasingly difficult—and those who do respond increasingly come from the bottom of the labor pool. The result? Poor work, or none at all, and a diminishing workforce.

That leaves the unfortunate campground manager with just two choices, neither of which will end well: let the work slide, or step into the breach and do what needs to be done. The first choice causes the kinds of woes Lendi described, as the property gets neglected and guests get mistreated. One clue as to whether a campground falls into this category is to take note of its office hours: when the office is open only 35 or 40 hours a week, you know that the manager has decided, “Hey, it’s only a job, not a religious calling.”

The second choice, however, is a sure-fire prescription for burn-out. Owner-operators may shoulder 70 or 80-hour workweeks when necessary because they have a lot at stake, but even the most conscientious hired hand will flame out long before someone who has skin in the game. Lendi seemed to acknowledge as much in his chat, asserting that a manager has to have a sense of ownership “so it’s not just a job.” Unfortunately, he never did say how that sense can be created. And with most campground managers paid in the mid-five figures, even with free housing and other perks thrown in, working for a remote owner will always be . . . just a job. And a demanding, stressful one at that.

Looking at my growing list of remotely managed RV parks and campgrounds, I thought about the diaspora of family-run Chinese restaurants throughout the United States—the Great Walls and Jade Gardens and Golden Dragons that serve pretty much the same menus everywhere. Almost all are family owned, with the parents toiling in the kitchen and their kids, some as young as ten, taking telephone orders and running the cash register; homework gets done between orders on one of a handful of usually unoccupied tables, since most business is carry-out. Open 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, they are the kind of foot-in-the-door enterprises that take all your time, labor and care in exchange for some measure of economic independence and self-sufficiency.

Adam Lendi is not beating down their doors to create an empire of remote-managed Chinese restaurants. Why would he think campgrounds are any different?