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

John, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My wife, Natasha and I, along with our to young daughters, discovered Granville in the mid 1990’s when we owned a houseboat and made The Granville Marina and Resort (Granville Marina) a long weekend destination from our home port of Cedar Creek Yacht Club about a day’s cruise away. In the late 90’s we sold the houseboat and were seeking a second home site in the beautiful Tennessee wilderness.

About a week following the first Heritage Day celebration in 1999, we noticed a “For Sale” advertisement in the Tennessean and, to make a long story short, purchased 10 acres of land on top of Eagle Mountain overlooking the town of Granville, the Granville Marina and the surrounding wilderness. We built a second home there and Granville became our weekend getaway to rest and recover from our active careers and our Nashville lifestyle. We found Granville to be a therapeutic balm from our busy lives. The people were friendly and the area was among the most beautiful spots in nature we had ever found in our extensive travels.

Our good friends and neighbors, Donna and Kevin Jones, owned The Timberloft Restaurant, a Texas style barbecue restaurant in Gordonsville, Tennessee and were leasing the Granville Marina restaurant from its previous owner. Donna hosted a coffee clutch meeting of neighbors and friends out on the Granville Marina patio to generate ideas for building on the success of Historic Granville leveraging the Granville Marina and Resort as a focus of activity. In thinking about Donna’s challenge to find ways of invigorating the primitive Granville Marina and Resort, it seemed obvious that what was needed was someone to purchase the Marina and to invest in it.

The biggest opportunities for the enterprise were to expand the number and type of lodging accommodations and to build out meeting room facilities that would entice corporate retreats Sunday evening through Friday morning and to offer a venue for weddings and family reunions and celebrations during the weekends. To pursue this vision, we chose to re-brand the enterprise “Wildwood Resort & Marina” playing off the June Carter Cash tune, “Wildwood Flower” which seemed to represent the vibe so well.

Donna and Kevin helped immensely getting us off the ground, establishing and training a strong staff and organizing restaurant operations while we commenced planning on a major facility expansion and held a Grand Re-opening on June 12, 2000 with 39 lodging “keys” representing 43 bedrooms and two meeting room venues for corporate retreats and other gatherings, the longest Boardwalk in Tennessee built over the original Marina rock jetty leading to a Sunset Pavilion and an expansive, pier and beam constructed pavilion for larger group functions.

Now in it’s sixth year of operation and the third year with expanded facilities, Wildwood has established itself as a unique boutique destination resort serving folks from Tennessee and surrounding states.

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?

We invested in Wildwood Resort & Marina to provide a weekend getaway boutique destination resort as well as a venue for corporate retreats, family reunions, weddings and other celebrations. The Resort takes full advantage of the surrounding beauty in nature here and offers a broad range of activities from bocce ball, horse shoes and corn hole to hiking and boating and fishing on beautiful Cordell Hull Lake to enjoying either fine dining in The Lakeside Restaurant or more casual fare from the Holston Cafe or The Pontoon food trailer.

Many come to Wildwood to rest and restore while others come in search of connection either with nature, loved ones or work colleagues. In addition to serving as a popular spot for couples to become engaged and or married, extended families find connection with each other here even while during the work week corporate retreat executives explore strategies for their firm’s growth and development.

For example, one CEO whispered to me at breakfast one morning, “We had a real breakthrough at the fire pit last night among our team that will change the company’s trajectory forever in a new direction.”

At the time of Wildwood’s founding, the local county (Jackson County) was listed among the top 10 most economically distressed counties in the nation as well as the State of Tennessee. We are proud to point out that Jackson County is no longer listed as a “distressed county” due in large part to Wildwood attracting tourists that have built up the tax base. Wildwood has driven a number of benefits to Jackson County including raising wages by 40%, providing 69% of the County’s Hotel/Motel tax and meaningfully increasing the sales tax base. Other benefits include over 600 volunteer hours to clean up the Cumberland River shoreline, removing over 10,000 pounds of trash just along the Wildwood shore alone. It feels right that we are doing well by doing good.

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

While I was a successful health care consultant working at the intersection of the hospital/physician relationship in the nation’s preeminent health systems, my wife, Natasha was a cancer research scientist managing a research laboratory focused on finding a cure for colon cancer. Neither of us had experience in managing a hospitality enterprise.

That said, we are well traveled both domestically and internationally and have learned a lot about what makes a great guest experience at a resort. Upon retiring from our health care related careers in 2018, we put our guest experience to work designing the perfect getaway and retreat venue in one of the most beautiful areas on planet earth.

This pivot from health care to hospitality also meant that Natasha and I found ourselves working together daily with the opportunity to learn more about each other’s skill sets which are highly complimentary. Natasha has a research background and she will go a mile deep (and only an inch wide) to get to the bottom of a problem or opportunity while I am more of a generalist, going only an inch deep and a mile wide focusing on strategy, marketing and planning as well as operations.

We have had the good fortune of having a longstanding friendship with Chris Hunsberger, formerly head of North and South America’s operations at The Four Seasons Resorts who is married to a former health care colleague, Amy, who was part of my health care team over 35 years ago. Chris has proven to be a valuable mentor helping to guide us with the long experience of a hospitality insider.

As has been said, “business is business.” While there are unique things to learn about the hospitality business, my experience in building health care companies has proven to be highly applicable to my new career, with a few first time experiences providing additional lessons along the way.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

In re-branding the old Granville Marina as Wildwood Resort & Marina, social media and other forms of advertising and promotion proved critical to our success.

First, we knew it would be essential to establish a well designed, high functioning web site presence for the business. We made early investments here with the help of outside experts and within a short time, were able to recruit a highly talented webmaster to maintain the site. We are often complimented on our site photographs being accurate representations of our offering (no disappointments upon arrival based on expectations created viewing our web site photos).

Next we sought outside assistance with social media and reputation management with a strong, family owned firm nearby. We invested heavily in targeted social media ads, primarily on Facebook and Instagram but also on LinkedIn. We learned that creating great content enhanced the results of our social media investments and were fortunate to have a talented outsource team of photographers videographers who could tell the story of Wildwood both in still photography as well as video.

Over time we were able to insource functions previously performed by our partner firm dramatically reducing costs with minimal diminution in results. We continue to rely on the outside firm to provide fresh video which has been outstanding and plays weekly on 30 second television ads on CBS Sunday Morning and other TV programming.

One of the most successful advertising programs we have developed has been in partnership with non-commercial (public) radio both in Nashville, Murfreesboro and Knoxville. These short ads, repeated 15 times per week on each station, provide brand building awareness and have driven an average of one new corporate retreat lead per day as well as other business.

Contact Info:

• Website: VisitWildwood.com
• Instagram: WildwoodResortTN
• Facebook: WildwoodResortTN
• Linkedin: WildwoodResortTN
• Other: Please check with David Rassmussen to confirm these addresses. Thank you.