We caught up with the brilliant and insightful John Deane a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

John, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

My wife, Natasha and I were living in Nashville and had challenging careers and needed a weekend retreat to decompress. She was a cancer research scientist at a top academic medical center and I was a management consultant working at the intersection of the hospital/physician relationship, flying around the country 100,000 miles/year.

In 1999 we had recently sold our 50′ houseboat and were looking for a place to build a second home somewhere beautiful and within 90 minutes drive of Nashville when we discovered Granville, Tennessee, a former riverboat town with a population at the time of 75 people that fell on hard times. The community was picking it up by its bootstraps to revive this hidden gem.

The very first Granville Heritage Day Festival was held on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend that year and attracted our family along with 2,000 other visitors with a bluegrass competition, antique car and tractor show, local artisans and a remarkable authentic 1890 country store that was like walking back in time to visit. We noticed an advertisement posted on a bulletin board about a cabin for sale a half a mile from town and called the builder who invited us to let ourselves in. With my wife and my 75 year old mother along with our two daughters, ages five and nine, we went up to investigate.

While standing on the porch a dramatic rain storm approached along the river toward us that came and went within a few minutes and left behind a beautiful full on rainbow. It was a sign.

Two weeks later we saw an ad in the Nashville paper that said, “Mountaintop For Sale” in Granville, Tennessee. We bought the 10 acres for $45,000 and built a 1,000 square foot second home on the property and bought a pontoon boat that we kept in the local marina. Most of our weekends were spent in Granville. It was a magical place with wonderful people and a lot of history that reminded you of what yesteryear must have been like.

Fast forward 18 years later as Natasha and I were about to retire from our respective careers, Granville had grown to over 250 people and was attracting a lot of visitors who were curious to see the country store that by this time had a live bluegrass band performance every Saturday night 52 weeks/year. These live bluegrass performances were broadcast on 50+ AM radio stations throughout the 50 states and dozens of foreign countries.

Our friends and neighbors, the Jones’, were restaurant owners and had a sublease for the small scale restaurant at Granville Marina and Resort, a shabby but quaint 16 acre property with 120 boat slips, 4 rustic two-bedroom cabins, 5 hotel style lodge rooms and a 16 spot RV campground. The Jones’ had an appetite to own and operate the Marina and we thought it would be a good idea to help them from an investment capital perspective, so we purchased the Marina and Resort with the Jones’ as minority partner but with them serving as general manager and chef.

Our friends and neighbors were very excited that we had partnered with the Jones’ and all chipped in to help wherever they could. One Saturday, there were 67 volunteers working all day to pick up trash along the water’s edge. Over the next few years, those volunteers collected over 10,000 pounds of garbage from the river bank. What a difference that made!

We went to work to fix the place up, first renovating the hotel style lodge and the former manager’s cabin into a small cafe, swag shop and lodging check-in counter. We re-branded the enterprise, “Wildwood Resort & Marina” to give it a fresh, new identity. Our daughter, Alexandra designed and developed the new logo that remains our identity today. The name, “Wildwood,” came from a beloved tune my wife played on her Tennessee Mountain Duclimer named “Wildwood Flower” by Mabel Carter, the mother of June Carter Cash.

It was not long until we realized that the enterprise needed to scale up in order to be financially sustainable, so we hired an architect and began designing and planning a boutique destination resort that would be capable of hosting not only weekend getaway visitors but also weddings, family reunions and corporate retreats. At the end of the day, we had expanded to 39 “keys” representing 43 bedrooms in 7 modes of lodging ranging from 4-star quality, hotel-style inn and lodge rooms to three floating harbor cottage houseboats with no motor, six one room cabins surrounding an artisan fire pit, six vintage Airstream trailers tricked out with linens, coffee service and fire pits with Adirondack chairs and three luxury one-bedroom lake homes, all available for overnight rental. Motorized tri-toon motor boats were added to our fleet that also included kayaks, canoes and stand up paddle boards.

Needless to say, these were heady times for the Deane’s and the Jones’!

John, 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?

Natasha and I had no experience managing a hospitality enterprise. Our primary qualification was that we have been a guest at hundreds of hotels and resorts around the world and were boat owners most of our adult life. Our early partners, the Jones’, were experienced restauranteurs which was incredibly helpful, but after we expanded they decided to unwind their equity arrangement with us so they could concentrate on their other restaurant operation. Another one of our neighbors had stepped in to managing our lodging operations, Karen, and a few years later she served as General Manager until she retired in 2024.

There is a famous researcher, storyteller and podcaster named Brene Brown who coined the concept of the FFT. FFT is the acronym for that awkward, uncomfortable and very often anxious-driven feeling that we experience every time we do something for the first time. Our first three to four years at Wildwood were characterized by one FFT after the other. Through this experience, we learned how to respond to any problem that may arise. Thank God, while we still experience the occasional FFT today, they are now very few and far between.

Our vision for the Wildwood business has been that we wanted to create an approachable luxury experience for our guests where expectations were exceeded for everything from the food and beverage operation, the overnight lodging and the quality of our boat rentals and other activities. For our family reunions and weddings, we want to create experiences worth remembering for a lifetime. For corporate retreats, we want to provide a venue where executives can explore the possibilities for their own businesses out of the office, over a good meal, in their dreams sleeping in our beds after spending time with their colleagues beside the fire pit with bourbon and s’mores.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

At Wildwood we have invested nearly $1 million in advertising, promotion and marketing over the past seven years. We have held a presence on multiple sales channels including television, commercial and non-commercial radio, print and, of course, social media.

One of the most important lessons we have learned through our marketing journey is to pay attention to the quality of our creative content. We would not, for example, choose to advertise on television (it’s very expensive) except for the fact that we have developed a 30-second video that is compelling and captures the essence of what Wildwood is all about and communicates both visually and through the spoken word. This can be very powerful. For example, our typical Sunday morning website traffic at 9 a.m. might be 80 visitors, but just 10 minutes after our ad appears on CBS Sunday Morning in middle Tennessee, our web site traffic spikes to over 500 visitors.

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

Wildwood started out as a boutique destination resort for weekend visitors, offering the quintessential weekend getaway experience. But what about the rest of the week, from Sunday evening through Friday morning?

Early on in our design efforts, we made the critical decision to equip the business to serve corporate retreats during the work week. Our archite came up with the idea to design our primary dining room for the restaurant on weekends, to also serve as a corporate retreat venue during the week. Everything from the placement of power plugs throughout the walls and flooring, the two 85″ television monitors on the wall, the ability to adjust the window shades both manually and electronically, the incorporation of audiovisual technology that would allow for clients to Zoom participants into the meeting room with speakers suspended from the ceilings and microphones on the tables all came into play. The result is we hosted 50 corporate retreats last year and are set up to do more this year.

Another pivot we made had to do with the former RV campground that was part of the initial purchase. The campground came to represent 2% of our revenue and 20% of our headaches and was limited in its ability to expand beyond 16 sites, so we shut it down and replaced it with a concept we call “The Woods” which includes vintage Airstreams set up for overnight rental, one-room cabins surrounding an artisan fire pit, luxury lake homes, along with a bocce ball court and horse shoe court, a two-room massage suite and a boardroom for small scale corporate retreats.

In conclusion, we had a blast developing Wildwood and it gives us immense satisfaction to hear from our guests that they love the property and return again and again.

Contact Info:

• Website: VisitWildwood.com
• Instagram: WildwoodResortTN
• Facebook: WildwoodResortTN