We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dolev Schreiber. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dolev below.

Alright, Dolev thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

It was a natural progression that I accidentally fell into. I had a side project developing an online interactive travel planning tool for independent travelers – those who want to build their own travel itineraries without going through a tour operator. I knew there was a demand for such a tool since my full-time job at the time was for a tour operator. In 2019, my side hustle became my full-time job, but it wasn’t in the way I expected. My travel platform wasn’t very popular; however, people reached out to me regarding renting camping gear. So I bought some camping gear and offered it up to rent, and this grew into a full-time camping gear rentals business.

Dolev, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Simply put, Basecamp Outdoor Gear is a small business in Las Vegas that rents camping gear. But when you dive deeper into the business model, it’s a lot more than that!
How did I get here? In my early teens, we went on a family road trip to the national parks of the American West, and I developed an obsession with the west. I decided to one day live out here and show people around this wonderful place. Few people realize, but Las Vegas is a perfect base camp for visiting the national parks, which is why I ended up settling down here. Plus, you can’t beat the contrast between the city and the natural spaces that surround it.
I believe that the best way to truly experience the natural sites around here is by sleeping under the stars. It seems that many people share this belief, and opening Basecamp Outdoor Gear is a win-win for those travelers and for the environment as a whole. Travelers don’t have to fly with bulky items or to buy new gear for a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and we get to recycle and reuse gear and leftover goods.
This brings me to my next point about Basecamp Outdoor Gear. We don’t just rent clean and repaired camping gear, but we also encourage a recycling culture, which is truly lacking in the west. We have a large pay-it-forward area where past travelers leave behind gear and goods that they can’t take on the flight home with them, and then future travelers get to take it and use it on their trip. Examples include tin foil, paper towels, toilet paper, sunscreen, bug spray, herbs and spices, olive oil, and even camp fuel! Regarding camp fuel, we are the only place in Las Vegas that properly recycles camp fuel cylinders, and we encourage anyone in the city to drop off their cylinders with us for proper disposal.

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

Basecamp Outdoor Gear was actually started by someone else in late 2017. I reached out to the original owners to partner with them in renting camping gear because I didn’t want to compete with them. My service was providing travel itineraries to customers, and their service was providing the camping gear. In 2020, the original owners decided to sell the business, and they approached me about taking it over. We both had very similar mindsets about nature conservation and love of the outdoors, as well as similar business approaches. So it was a very simple acquisition. We drew up a contract and transferred the assets.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

This is actually the story of how I pivoted into the business model for Basecamp Outdoor Gear. I had a side hustle developing an online interactive travel planner, in which I tried to create a platform for customers to build travel itineraries on their own, without going through a tour operator. However, this endeavor wasn’t very successful. My customers did not want to use the platform themselves, asking me to build itineraries for them as if I was a tour operator, which was very time consuming for me and defeated the purpose of a software as a service business model. By 2020, it no longer made sense to continue developing the online platform. AI was becoming more popular, I was receiving requests for camping gear rentals without itineraries, and the travel bans of 2020 pushed people to go camping rather than stay in hotels. It was only natural to pivot away from software as a service and focus on a small business for camping gear rentals.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.basecampoutdoorgear.com/
• Instagram: @basecampoutdoorgear
• Facebook: @hi.basecamp
• Other: Tiktok: @hi.basecamp