The Rise Above Podcast EP 4: Chance Ott

Owner/Operator of Algonquin Pines Campground Chance Ott joins Bram Bains on this episode of The Rise Above Podcast. Chance talks about leaving a Corporate Job to start his own business and shares some business insights on how to accumulate wealth. 

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Interview Transcript

[00:35] Bram: Welcome everybody to the rise above podcast. Today we've got a very special episode. I'm being joined here by Chance Ott. Chance is a father. He's a former insurance broker turned entrepreneur. Chance is the owner and operator of Algonquin Pines Campground. How are you doing today Chance? 

[00:56] Chance: I'm doing well Bram, thanks for having me on. 

[00:59] Bram: You're very welcome. I'm happy that you're here. We're going to talk about your story, your campground, your business, and all kinds of fun stuff. Before we get into it. I bought some icebreakers here for you. Some quick questions. Floor is all yours. Okay?

[01:14] Chance: Okay. Let's get into it. 

[01:15] Bram: Let's get into it. What is your favorite movie? 

[01:20] Chance: I'd say my favorite movie is Goodfellas, Goodfellas or Casino. Classics. 

[01:22] Bram: What is your favorite book?

[01:24] Chance: I've been reading the millionaire next door, really enjoying it. I think it's good advice about staying humble and creating wealth. 

[01:33] Bram: Who is your favorite actor?

[01:37] Chance: I don't get caught up in celebrities to be honest. I probably don't have a favorite actor. I like all the raunchy comedies. But I guess if I had to pick a favorite actor, I'd say Leo.

[01:49] Bram: What is your favorite place to travel? 

[01:51] Chance: Malta. My wife and I booked a trip to Malta. We were going to Italy. We wanted to do a multi coast. But we figured we'd add another trip. Like make it like a 10, 14-day kind of trip. There was a cheap flight to Malta. I didn't know much about it. It's awesome. Anybody who hasn't been there, you should go. It's cheap. Everybody speaks English. The food is a great mix of African and Mediterranean and Italian. It's a really cool spot and you don't need to be there long. You can see everything in a short period of time.

[02:23] Bram: Who has been a mentor figure for you?

[02:28] Chance: My father. Pretty cliche answer, but my father was a career entrepreneur. He started and sold businesses. Built up businesses, kind of brought them back from the grave. Growing up with parents who are running their own business, it was always my goal to be an entrepreneur. I'll say my mother didn't get enough credit for it. She did all the books and the administrative stuff on the back end and really was the brains and the glue. Probably didn't get the credit that she deserved. Everybody looks at it and give credit to my father. So, my parents.

[03:05] Bram: What has been your favorite item that you've purchased during this pandemic?

[03:10] Chance: Patagonia rain gear? I would like to spend a lot of time outside. We were on a campground. I like to go fishing, hiking anything in the woods. I didn't have solid rain gear. Patagonia, rain gear. I treated myself. 

[03:23] Bram: What is something that you've tried and you would never try again. 

[03:28] Chance: I'm pretty open to trying new foods. I guess some of the crazier seafoods I'm not into. Like anything I need to pick out of a shell with a weird device, I'd say it would be something like that.

[03:42] Bram: If you were to sail around the world, what would be the name of your boat?

[03:49] Chance: I wouldn't name it. I wouldn't be sailing, so I wouldn't have a boat.

[03:55] Bram: If you're in the Olympics, winter or summer, what is it that you're going to be winning gold for? 

[04:03] Chance: I'm not winning gold for anything. I'll say it's going to be summer and it's going to be speed walking. 

[04:09] Bram: Okay. If you could hang out with any cartoon character, who would it be and why?

[04:16] Chance: I think I would grab a beer with Peter Griffin or maybe Rick and Morty. 

[04:25] Bram: All right. Chance let's get into the story a little bit. I mean, you mentioned that your parents were entrepreneurs growing up, that your father was in the business of building businesses, bringing them back from the grave and so forth. What kind of businesses was he working with? 

[04:44] Chance: My father was a tradesman initially. I remember when I was a young child, maybe five, something like that he sat down with my sister and myself, and kind of told us that he was thinking about buying us a snowmobile and ATV dealership and asked us what we thought, which was interesting. My parents used to do that with us, kind of include the kids in adult conversations, which I think is a good practice. So the first business that he started, I guess he did some sawmills stuff just on the side before that, but he bought an ATV and snowmobile dealership. They built it to be one of the largest in Canada for the brands they were selling. 

We're very successful with that. They sold the business. Then they started like a tractor dealership, lawn tractors and some are commercial grade tractors. Right now his business is teaching, the hunting and firearms course. If you wanted to get your gun or your hunting license. He had some gyms. There was a number of things. He did real estate as well. A lot of different businesses there. 

[06:00] Bram: It sounds like you were always exposed to that entrepreneurial and business mindset. Did you know as well growing up, that you wanted to follow in your father's footsteps and be a business owner and an entrepreneur as well? Or did that kind of just fall into place? 

[06:16] Chance: No, I knew that from a relatively young age. I'd say I went from, the typical kid answer of, I want to be a firetruck or something like that to, I want to be an entrepreneur because I think that's pretty natural. You see what your parents do and, if your dad's a dentist, you're probably more likely to be a dentist than the next guy. From a relatively young age, I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I saw the lifestyle and it was familiar to me. I didn't like school, if I'm being honest. I wasn't I wasn't terrible at school, but my mindset was, I'll go to post-secondary cause I know I have to, but I went for a two-year college business marketing program. 

Really, I learned a bit, but not that much, it was more so just an exercise to get the diploma. But from there I figured sales is where I would start. I mean, you and I were selling insurance together, back at gray power. I've always had interpersonal skills. I've been able to talk to people pretty easily for most of my life. But my wife and I we've been together for over 10 years. Got tagged, got married at a young age. We always knew that we wanted to run a business together. We liked the idea of working together building something together, spending a lot of time together outside of home life. I think that probably wouldn't work for a number of couples, but for us it does.

Then as for the actual business that we ended up in, it didn't just happen. It was our goal to run something nature related. We had talked about maybe like a cottage rental resort. There's a lot of those in this area, or a campground or like an outfit or fishing guide kind of thing. I was interested in this beforehand. After I worked with you at grey power, I went to a different insurance brokerage. I worked there as an employee for a year and a half and then got a producer contract. That was my first step at kind of being self-employed. They gave me a fair amount of leeway, make my own hours work from home if I wanted to. I had my own business that I did own. 

That was nice, but it didn't really feel like I was working for myself. I mean it did and it didn't. I didn't feel like I was working a nine to five, but I was still going into the office. I had to keep good relations with the brokerage and it didn't fully feel like I was self-employed. But one thing I was passionate about was this type of business, a campground, a resort, a fishing guide, a hunting guide, something like that. I targeted those businesses because it was something that I was passionate about interested in and had identified a need and it was pretty successful.

My first year of being a producer, I went from having a salary and a steady pay to no salary and you get paid commission and you might make $300 in a month. That was a big risk. I would say that would be the first time that I kind of took the plunge. We had a mortgage and plans of having a kid, which now we have two of them. We did have a lot of responsibility, but my wife had a good job and supported me. I took that plunge. As I started to ensure these places, the campgrounds, the cabin rentals, the resorts, it became pretty clear to me pretty quickly that the campground was a good business model and maybe more so than the cottage rental places, because Airbnb was taking a good chunk out of that business model.

Then I was starting to really not like the industry and my job. I just didn't enjoy it anymore. It was stressing me out. It was making me anxious and my business partner at this place now who happens to be, my cousin had said to me, one day when I was kind of venting about my role, he said, well, let me ask you two questions. One, what do you think you're best at? And two, what do you think would be a good business? I said, what I'm best at is talking to people. I was in sales before that. I can easily strike up conversations. Then I said, I think that glamping is an interesting business. Glamping for those listening, that don't camp would be glamorous camping. 

What I meant specifically by that was places that would set up yurts or kind of like canvas fixed to tents that would stay up for a full season. They're outfitted with, a nice memory foam mattress and lights and heat and carpet and all that stuff. So my idea there was, get people who don't have camping gear. Who've maybe never camped before, try to encourage people from the city who are interested in it, but not exposed to it to come out camping with us. I guess that was in 2019. We started having those conversations and then we started looking at potentially buying a chunk of land, getting it rezoned and building out a glamping campground. 

Full stop glamping not camping, like not like trailer camping or anything like that. We realized the risks associated with that pretty quickly, if you buy property and you can't get it rezoned. At that point we kind of switched gears and started looking at existing campgrounds that we could kind of mold to fit our business model. This campground had been for sale for a while and it was on my radar. I had camped here a couple of times in the past. Probably 16 years ago, something like that. We decided to come up and take a peek at it and anybody who's ever taken a big risk like this, whether it's buying a house or something like that, you start to explore, what it might look like and what the steps are. 

As you start taking more and more steps, it gains momentum that gets more and more real. Then one day you wake up and we're doing this thing. That was a long form answer to your question.

[12:25] Bram: No, that was a great answer. I think you kind of touched on multiple different areas there that we'll jump into a little bit further to dissect a little bit, because I'd love to hear more about that. I mean, it definitely seems like you're definitely passionate about this, which is amazing, most people kind of lose sight of that, but you rounded yourself amongst that type of industry. Even while you were an insurance broker, you decided to serve that type of demographic in that industry and kind of stay around it, which I'm sure helped lead you towards this path, which is great. 

Speaking about the insurance piece while you were working as a commercial broker, and these were your clients, what was it that caught your eye when you were talking about like the business model and kind of like looking at the financials and then starting to look at it more so from that lens? What caught your attention? 

[13:22] Chance: Well, so a couple of things, one thing is most of these businesses are mismanaged. I think that still rings true today. I think it is changing, but a lot of the businesses like this, whether it's a cottage rental resort, a small resort even like motels campgrounds, a lot of them are mom and pop operations. I think that was confirmed in our first season. We had our first season last summer. I would talk to a number of the campers and most of our clientele are mostly either retirees or young families. Everybody says, this is my retirement, this is what I want to do when I retire. In fairness, that's what my wife and I said, as well. We said, down the road, it would be nice when we're ready to start slowing down to buy something like this and have the passive investment.

Well, it's not passive at all. It's a lot of work. I think that a lot of these businesses are exactly that, retirees who decide, this is a nice lifestyle move for us. Then the campers come in and somebody is having a bachelor party at one of the sites and you need to go out and tell them to put the bonfire out or whatever it is. You start to realize how much work goes into it. It's not just tinkering around with a water pump or a chainsaw or something like that. There's a lot more, it's a serious time demand. Last summer was our first season. We only hired on two staff, which was really skinny. But the way we looked at it, we said, we don't know all of the steps.

We don't know all of the processes that should be in place. We don't know how to do everything. We need to figure that out. We can't really hire on staff and tell them to go do something that we haven't figured out how we feel it should be done. We went crazy last summer. Like, I mean, everybody said to us, one of the previous owners of this property, not the guy, we bought it off the guy before he came by on one of our first weekends. He said, don't burn yourself out in June. I know that in June of last season we had, this is a moment that stuck with me. You asked who my mentor was my father. Like I said, he texted me on maybe 11:30 at night on a Saturday night, one of our early weekends, maybe our third weekend of our first season.

He said, how's it going, buddy? I said, it's a grind. I worked 18 and a half hours yesterday, 18 and a half hours today. I'm just shutting it down. I got a full day tomorrow and he texted me back and he said, what, buddy, the only thing more stressful than being busy is being slow. I think that's really good advice for entrepreneurs because it is easy, when things are going good, it's easy to complain about how busy you are. I mean, that's a good problem to have for an entrepreneur. It might feel like you're struggling to keep your head above water, but that's better than having your head under water. 

[16:18] Bram: Most definitely. What is glamping for those of us that don't know. I've never been camping before. Give me an idea, walk me through what's the experience. 

[16:27] Chance: Okay. There's a few different tiers of glamping. Actually, this is one of the things that led us to the style of glamping that we've adopted here. If you go Googling glamping in Ontario, you're going to find a handful of places that are offering it. A lot of them are very expensive. It might be, four or five, 600 bucks a night, and maybe you show up your tent and there's a bottle of champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries and all of this stuff. That would be like the high-level glamping. There's only so many people who are going to pay for that kind of experience. It's not overly accessible for your average person to spend a thousand dollars on two nights and camping essentially.

I figured that there was a market somewhere in between. There was a cheaper version of glamping. Our glamping tents, they're on a deck. We have two person tents and four person tents. They're canvas. They're circular. They kind of look like, a circus tent, but prettier than that. They have an awning with string lights and it's really quite a nice scene. Folks listening can check out our Instagram page @algonquinpines for a little plug there. But, yeah, so you walk into the tent, it has carpet, double bed memory foam. Our four-person tent will have two beds in it. It has a lamp, a side table, a heater. Every glamping site will have a fire pit and a picnic table.

So, you get the experience of camping. You have your fire, you can have your smores and all that, but when it's time to retire back to the tent, it's dry, it's warm and it's a mattress. And you don't need to bring anything. The other thing that we offer is, you can purchase linens just like you would at a Airbnb and same with like a camping cookware kit. You'd have everything you need to make all your meals on like a camp stove. Because again, people who are just trying camping, aren't going to have a Coleman stove and folding chairs and all of these things. It can be pretty expensive to get into. Once you're into camping and you have the gear. You take care of it. It really is a cheap hobby to do, with the family a lot cheaper than a weekend in Niagara or something like that. But why go out and buy all that stuff if you don't know if you're into interested in camping.

This is kind of a nice way to bring people along. The glamping we're doing is cheaper. It's 135 bucks for the night for our four-person tent or 115 bucks a night for our two person. They've been really popular and just on the business side of things, we get really good customers that come to our glamping tents. You know, generally they're really respectful young couples from the city. 

[19:30] Bram: Nice. Okay. No wild parties, stag parties, and that kind of stuff.

[19:34] Chance: Not in the glamping tents. But we've seen a lot of crazy stuff for only one season.  95% of people are great, but there's always one group.

[19:49] Bram: Now regarding the business. you said that you, you run the business, it's you and your wife, and then you had a team of two staff last year. What does your day-to-day look like? 

[19:59] Chance: Okay. This season, we have a newborn baby, six weeks old. This season we can't do what we did last year. We knew it was unsustainable last year, but it especially stacks another kid on there and a two year old who's much busier this season than she was last season. We hired on three more people. We have five staff members for this coming season, but last year, starting a business in a pandemic, we were pretty skinny. We were careful with every dollar. Last season, our days started at five 30 in the morning on weekends, six in the morning every other day. My wife and I would go over and clean the washrooms. Then we come get our daughter up, get her breakfast, then come over to the store, we'd open the store at nine. But we'd have to be over here, maybe 8:15 clean the washrooms again. Open up the store. Do emails. Get ready for all of our check-ins for the day, go around inspect sites where people have checked out. Cleaning up garbage. Frequently selling things like firewood, where we deliver that out to people's sites. 

A lot of in and out there, and then depending on the day of the week, there's certain things that need to be done on certain days. We might have a delivery, like a firewood delivery on one day. We need to be out there unloading it and stacking it. All of that. I guess I want to say every day was different, but it really, it wasn't, it was the interactions that were different. So, you kind of follow the same cycle every week. The weekends were crazy busy. Then the weekdays were slower. What my wife and I did last season is, we'd have Sunday afternoons off and Thursday afternoons off. Sunday afternoons, we'd go into Huntsville, which is the nearest town to us. We'd sit on a patio; we'd have a drink. That felt like a day off. Just having an afternoon off. Then Thursday afternoons, we would take off and we would do things like grocery shopping, hair, cut. All of the stuff that you just need to do to keep the house in order. 

But other than that, we work from probably, probably April 15th last year until thanksgiving weekend, we didn't take any days off and we were allowed to open June 12th, but it was leading up to that. We had a lot of work to do to get the campground in order being new owners. Then you're always on. There's always people on your property. The phone rings at 1:30 in the morning, somebody needs or maybe it's a noise complaint or somebody needs their breaker reset at their site. You're always on, but come thanksgiving on weekend or season ends, we had, the whole winter off. You take the good with the bad, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I think if there wasn't a light at the end of the tunnel, it would be a train. 

Then this year we have more staff. This year we'll be able to focus more on just kind of keeping the business running as it should and doing some stuff that maybe got left behind last year, because we were running so skinny on the staff front. Whether it's, fresh coat of paint here or fix something up there, whatever it is. Yeah, this year, maybe we'll get a day off this summer, I guess, is what I'm saying. 

[23:30] Bram: How's your experience been through the pandemic being that it's a campsite? How did that impact you guys? 

[23:48] Chance: Last year we weren't allowed to open up at the start of our season. We were planning on opening May 1st, last year, we weren't allowed to open until June 12th. We lost almost a month and a half of our season. With that said, we almost took that as a blessing in disguise because there was more work to do. Then we knew we had a lot of work to do, but there was more than we than we had thought the previous owner had just kind of run it like a hobby. He would never rent out maybe more than 10 campsites. We ramped up the business quite a bit. There was a lot of work to do so that extra month and a half was pretty helpful. We realized that sometimes the snow is not gone by May 1st. If the snow is not gone, we can't really open up the campground. 

It was almost a blessing there, but at the same time, by June 12th, we were ready to start having some money coming in because we were pretty tight, having spent a bunch of money to get the place, and then not having money coming in when the bills are going out. Then as for the season, last season, it was actually the demand was up for camping. We benefited from that. You know, people couldn't travel to the states, so they couldn't go to Europe. We had a lot of people camping with us who wouldn't otherwise camp, because it was something that you could do. For that, I was thankful. As for like government support in the skinnier months at the start, we weren't eligible for it. So, we really were on our own and there's reasons for that. We were a new business. A lot of those government programs would look previous revenue on the books. We just kind of fell through all the cracks there. 

What I will say is our community stepped up and actually provided us with some support. The district of Muskoka, which was, amazing. I think that small businesses should play a significant role in their community. It's nice to see the community support small businesses. This year, we changed our opening date from May 1st to May 2 for weekend. Not this coming weekend, but next. Right now, the stay-at-home order is supposed to lift on the 20th. The 21st is actually our first date. As it stands right now, we're not going to lose any of our season, but we'll see what happens. I wouldn't be surprised if we lost a couple of weeks again, and it is what it is. I mean, we'll be resilient. 

[25:57] Bram: Let's talk a little bit about that book that you mentioned the millionaire next door. What are some of the takeaways, the lessons overall, what you've learned from that book. 

[26:09] Chance: The big takeaway is being careful with your expenditures, being careful with your money, not spending money on a BMW, because you figured that's what your clients want to see you driving or the big extravagant house. I think really something he drives home in it is the millionaire next door is a profile that he's created. It's not, your Elon Musk, right? It's not the guys who everybody knows they're rich. It's the person who's living in a neighborhood with middle-class homes, driving it and your old vehicle.

But they've been an excellent creator of wealth because they're being careful with their money. They actually, like, I don't want to mention specific industries because he does call out specific industries as being poor wealth accumulators. But some that surprised me anyways on overachieving wealth accumulators where people like auctioneer's specifically, he mentioned, actually I'm remembering this, one of the things he mentioned in I think the second chapter, is he mentioned two really good businesses off the top of his head are dry cleaners and campgrounds, which is funny. I'm reading the book now, so it didn't influence our decision, but yeah, I mean the book, the angle of the book is to be careful with your money, invest it, be smart with it. Don't spend money you don't have. Don't spend money to try and impress other people. 

If you are careful with your money, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish. If I can just add a quote, that's kind of unrelated to this book, but a quote I really like. "People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10." I think that's pretty important. I think about that a lot because it's easy to get caught up in where you're going to be this time next year and set some unrealistic goals, which unrealistic goals can be healthy too.

But to look a little bit higher, a little bit further where am I going to be in a decade? Well, think about where you were 10 years ago. You might be impressed that you're probably kind of surprised where you are today. Even just, something like being a father. Ten 10 years ago, I wasn't thinking about that very much. Now I think about it all day long. 

[28:30] Bram: Nice. I like that. That's a good perspective. 

[28:33] Chance: That was another angle of the book, right? Is that these things take time? I know Warren Buffet always says that. I don't know if this was actually a quote. But I saw on social media that Jeff Bezos asked Warren Buffett, why more people don't follow his advice because it's pretty simple. He said, well, nobody wants to get rich slow.

[28:56] Bram: Everybody wants it now. It's true. Okay. What does your portfolio look like? I'm not asking like, in terms of like dollars and so forth, but like when you're trying to position and map out, how you're going to build your portfolio and different kinds of streams of income, it sounds like you definitely have that type of a mindset with some of the takeaways that you're getting from this type of content. Having like a business that's generating cashflow, what is your philosophy on kind of investing it to cumulate wealth in the long-term?

[29:27] Chance: Being careful with your money. Not spending money that you don't need to spend. You know, my wife always jokes about how cheap I am. She does a grocery shopping. I'm always looking at the receipt being like, you paid how much for grapes? But I would say being careful. Being careful with your money. Thinking about every expenditure. I don't do too much online shopping. My wife can handle that. But as for the portfolio, I really like real estate investing. My wife and I bought our first house when we were pretty young, and it had rental income in the basement. Now that we've moved up here, we've continued to rent it out. I like those passive streams of income. Of course, the stock market. I think that it's a great tool. I don't like mutual funds.

But yeah, real estate investing is what excites me the most. I like doing the deal. I like strategizing on the deal, how can we make our offer more attractive than the next one? How can we structure this in a way, maybe it does the seller want to quit closing or something like that? Real estate investing has been my favorite thing to do so far, but I'm not set in my ways. If I see an opportunity that I like, I'll go pursue it. I'm not set in one lane. 

[30:46] Bram: Chance, how can people book a campsite with you if they're interested in trying out glamping?

[30:54] Chance: The best way to book it is going on our website, you can reserve right through the website. We are working on a new website that's going to be more user-friendly, not to say that the current one isn't, but our new website is going to have pictures of all the campsites on it. Just for the people listening, we're not just glamping. We do have some glamping tents. We also have a small cabin. We have 10 campsites. We have big campsites for large trailers like 40-foot buses and trailers, that kind of thing as well. Yeah, people can go on our website or they can give us a call or they can just pop by and see us.

[31:30] Bram: Awesome. The website algonquinpines.ca and your Instagram is Algonquin Pines campground. Be sure to check it out, give it a try. I know, definitely I will probably try glamping because I'd prefer to sleep on a mattress to be honest. I mean, I appreciate your time Chance, thank you so much. You've given a lot of information and gems and wisdom throughout this podcast. Definitely much appreciated for him. 

[32:01] Chance: Bram it's been great to catch up with you. Congratulations on the launch of the podcast. I've listened to the two episodes you dropped so far, look forward to being along for the ride. I appreciate you thinking of me and having me on.

[32:11] Bram: It's been a pleasure chance, much appreciated. Thank you for those words. I mean, thank you for being part of this roster and part of this journey as well. I mean, I definitely look forward to connecting with you again in the future. I'm sure we could do some follow-up episodes and celebrate the growth and the success. Until next time this was episode number four of the rise above podcast. Please be sure to subscribe, share with a friend that you think may benefit and until next time, have a great day

Thanks for listening to this episode of the rise above podcast. Make sure to subscribe for future episodes, leave a review and share with a friend who would love to hear this episode. This was the rise above podcast.