What I got wrong at the start

Last week I wrote about building our own operating system. Owning the stack instead of renting fifteen tools that don't talk to each other. I still believe every word of it.

What I left out is that a system doesn't run a resort. People do.

Let me walk you through what's happened before a single shovel goes in the ground.

Finding the land, then buying it. Working through the county and the state to confirm we can actually build the kind of stays we're after, because a lot of places will tell you no before you ever get to a drawing. Conversations with the Daniel Boone National Forest office, since our property sits directly against land they manage. Geotechnical engineers out on the rock, evaluating the strength and integrity of the shelters we want to build into. Site planning. Finding developers and architects who've done something like this before, which is a shorter list than you'd think. Chasing bids from every utility partner. Building lending relationships from nothing, with people who've never heard of me. Financing conversations. Legal coordination. Building a brand from a blank page. Then telling the story, week after week, to people who have no reason to care yet.

And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

I also have a full-time job. The work on Cavara happens after 8pm. A lot of nights I look up and it's 1am, and that's a weekday. Weekends look different, but they still have Cavara in them.

I'm also 11 hours from the property.

Which is why I'll say this plainly. Jess, my business partner, is our eyes and ears on the ground, and she executes at a level I couldn't come close to from this far away. There's no version of this project that works without her on site.

Then the shovel goes in and the real work starts. Staying on schedule. Staying on budget. Managing a crew that lives on site for the length of the build. And at the same time, building enough of an audience that people know Cavara before the first guest ever checks in. An audience takes as long to build as a treehouse does, and you can't start it the month you open.

Then operations, which never ends. Guest experience. Maintenance calls. Cleaning teams. Turnovers. Every small thing that decides whether someone leaves a review that means something or a review that's fine.

When you add it up, it's a lot. And that's only the things we know about. Twists, turns, problems that need solving on a Tuesday with no warning. Those are coming. They always do.

The honest math is that running this to the standard we want is too much for two people. If we put everything into operations, the marketing slips and nobody hears about us. If we put everything into marketing, operations slip, and the guest feels it. There's no arrangement of two people where all of it gets done well. I've tried to draw it up on paper more than once and it never works out.

We want 100% direct bookings. We want our own operating system running the business instead of renting someone else's. Very few operators get to either one, and I'm not interested in getting most of the way there.

So the answer isn't a better system. It's the right people around the system.

Next week I'm introducing a few new team members. Between them we have real depth across every part of this business, which means we can dial in operations and still be producing reels on Instagram. Everything running at once instead of taking turns.

I said at the start that I'd be honest with you as I go, including the parts that don't flatter me. The thing I was most wrong about was thinking I could do this myself. That I could be a solo operator and still build something nobody else could copy. Dead wrong. Not at the level we're trying to execute.

More next week, when I introduce them.

Jeremy