Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dan Thiem. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Dan, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Dan spent his childhood participating in Boy Scout camping trips and got a taste of the Colorado outdoors. Erin spent summers river rafting throughout California and beyond with her family. We met at Colorado College and, after graduating, spent a summer driving to Alaska in our 1981 VW Van, affectionately named “Nora”. Our quest for adventure continued, including five years living in New Zealand exploring the country with our two Kiwi born sons. This sense of adventure is the backdrop for creating and building Inn Town Campground.

Just before we returned to California to take over the family motel business, we embarked on a 2 1/2 month RV road trip around New Zealand. During that trip, we visited many of the country’s serviced campgrounds, called “Holiday Parks”; these were the inspiration for the Inn Town Campground. The holiday parks always had family-friendly features, a variety of accommodation types from tent pads to little motel units. There were communal kitchens, pools, playgrounds and close proximity to whatever town we were visiting. The sense of community, hospitality and ease of travel that the holiday parks provide is such a welcome feel for travelers that we felt it would be a perfect fit for Nevada City and a great compliment to the motel we had just taken over (called the Outside Inn).

In short, the Inn Town Campground was born from our love of camping, community, hospitality, and the outdoors. Many of the park’s details were inspired by our personal experiences, like our open-air showers that sit beneath our towering pine trees, or our uniquely decorated Glamping tents that offer a fun break from the homogeny of daily life and ordinary accommodations. We have built indoor and outdoor spaces for people to gather to meet friends and to experience the community of stewardship that comes with enjoying our property’s intrinsic beauty. The campground is a reflection of our love of outdoor spaces and fun, natural areas for everyone to explore.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Obviously, the older we both get, the more experience we have to add to the mosaic of things we can draw on to run and grow our business. However, it all started when we met in college at Colorado College. After graduating with a B.A. in Classics (yes, Greek and Roman history, language and literature!), Dan moved to Crested Butte, CO and worked in construction for a winter while skiing. Erin moved to Monterey, CA with her degree in English and began working for a new media startup – think YouTube before YouTube was around.

Always drawn to the outdoors, mountains and skiing, we soon moved to Lake Tahoe and worked at Alpine Meadows ski resort and enjoying the ski bum life. Erin eventually took over management of her mother’s motel in Nevada City, CA and her career in hospitality began. Dan continued managing at Alpine Meadows for three more winters, community back and forth to Nevada City. Eventually Dan realized that he needed more training in business management and how to better run a business. To that end, we moved to Dunedin, New Zealand where Dan completed his MBA at Otago University. Eventually we moved to Wanaka, a beautiful mountain town in the South Island of New Zealand with a beautiful lake and skiing. Dan worked as a finance manager for a building supply company called PlaceMakers and Erin was at home raising our two young boys.

After four years, we had the opportunity to take over the family motel, the Outside Inn, in Nevada City and we moved back to California. Dan became the stay-at-home parent and Erin launched into her career as a business owner and hospitality manager. She immersed herself not only in the operations, but also in building the Outside Inn brand online through a local blog, budding social media sites and old fashioned community engagement. The way customers found the motel was changing quickly and she is a native social media user, so she capitalized on that trend from the beginning. The flexibility of being at home, allowed Dan to volunteer in the community, including the Nevada City Planning Commission, which handles all of the land use applications in our local town. Our intention had always been to find a property and develop it into a holiday park like we enjoyed in New Zealand.

Between Dan’s experience in estimating, finance and city planning and Erin’s knowledge of marketing, social media and hospitality, we felt like we had a great foundation for tackling the campground project. Our skill sets are very complimentary. As we went through the process of finding land and applying for use permits, Dan’s skills allowed him to anticipate the issues that the regulatory agencies would focus on, while Erin knew how to create the visual story we needed to sell a product we hadn’t built yet. In some ways, our vision was born from Erin’s ability to conceptualize and stage the photos while Dan figured out how to get it built. Even more than ten years later, we still work in a similar way. Dan builds something new and different and Erin captures it in videos and photos to share with the world – If Dan builds it, Erin makes sure they will come.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We build our campground from the ground up, so our opportunity to nurture and grow our social media presence happened organically. Since we already owned another local business, we had a great platform to announce and share our new campground, so when we got the permit to build it, we began our journey to share the process. One of the best things we did was early on in the development stage we hired a professional photographer to capture a staged set up. We owned the property, but hadn’t built it, but with a little creative work, we were able to bring our vision to life and then share what we were building.

We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.

We sold the family motel, the Outside Inn, in 2022. The process took over two years and was very stressful. Some of the biggest takeaways from that process are these:
* Be careful how the sale process will affect your employees. Selling a business, especially a small family-run business, brings a lot of uncertainty to employees. The main management structure and personnel will change when a small business is sold, which makes any remaining employees unclear what their roles will be and how they will fit in. We tried everything and anything to alleviate their concerns and make them feel secure in their future. In the end, we didn’t have a lot of say over what would happen when we finally closed the deal.
* Don’t get too excited too early. A lot of deals fell through before we actually sold the business, which was stressful and emotionally draining. By the end, we were so unsure of potential buyers that we didn’t tell anyone until very late in the process, including staff. That caused us a lot of headaches, but it didn’t seem fair to keep telling the staff a deal was on, only for it to fall through a few weeks later.
* Understand the value of your business, but understand that the true value is what someone is willing to pay for it. We had a real estate heavy asset (a motel), so there are basic cap rate calculations we use to value the entity. The buyer wants a higher cap rate and we want a lower one. Know your bottom line, but don’t be afraid to negotiate, especially if you have other uses for the capital that are more beneficial for your goals. For us, we wanted to pay down debt on our campground and reduce the challenges of running two hospitality businesses so getting an extra couple hundred grand wasn’t worth it to way – this was especially true as interest rates were rising quickly and driving down prices.
* Practice letting go of your brand and its identity to you. We had several people in our small town tell us how disappointed they were with us for selling the Outside Inn. Erin especially was the face of the business and her success at that role meant that people in the community were sad to see her go. Ultimately, it’s our life, so we can’t put too much stock in those sorts of comments, but it did make us realize that de-coupling ourselves from our brands is tricky because we like to be so heavily involved the operations.
* Come to peace with not controlling the future of the business. We live three doors from the Outside Inn, so we see it every day. It’s not run the way we used to run it, not better or worse, just different. We’ve had to accept that the 20 years that Erin and her mother spent building the brand is no longer in our control. If it isn’t the same, or turns out worse, we feel bad for our long-time guests, but we can’t control that outcome.
* Talk to your attorneys and tax advisors before you sell. There will be various strategies they want you to implement before selling to minimize tax and legal exposure. These are important to know before negotiations begin.
* Have a plan with what to do with the money when it comes in. In our case, we had a lot of capital gains so we used a 1031 exchange to defer those gains and transferred into a DST with a modest return but no work. Even a modest return was still better than trying to claw back hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital gains.
*Sell before you’re ready to. By the time we realized we wanted to sell, it was another 2 1/2 years before we were out of the business. By then we were “past our use by date” and a little disgruntled. If and when we sell our campground, we will start the process when we have a strong inkling of wanting to sell, not when we’re “ready”. It’s better to be a little sad about selling than over joyed to kick it to the curb.
*Have a plan for the Monday after. What’s it going to be like when you wake up the Monday after your business is not yours? In some cases the deal will include consulting or some sort of continued work that will help with the transition. Sometimes it doesn’t and your will find yourself unemployed, hopefully wealthier, but definitely without direction. For us, we had the campground so we had a plan and purpose. In fact, 15 minutes after the deal closed, our night host called in sick with COVID so Dan had to work the campground day and night shift over the 4th of July weekend. When we sell the campground we most likely won’t have that sort of backstop, so we discuss the Monday after a lot.
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Contact Info:

• Website: https://inntowncampground.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inntowncampground
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inntowncampground/
• Twitter: https://x.com/InnTownCamp
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/inn-town-campground-nevada-city