Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, Mike, I appreciate your time. We're both vendors here at the OHCE conference, talking to other RV park owners and networking as well. So thanks for coming over here, and I think folks would like to hear about what Wild Energy has to offer and what you got going on. So thanks again for coming and tell us about your business and who you are and everything.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is a new industry for me. I've been in lots of different ones, but love this industry. Since I've gotten into it about five years ago, it's been. I was on. I was on the other side of the fence, so to speak. I was the camper who would pull into campgrounds, plug in, and.
And I couldn't understand why they were giving me all these free utilities. Like, I can't go into the campground store and get a candy bar or bag of ice. They're going to charge me for that.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: But here they are. They'll let me run my air conditioner, give me $15 with the free electricity, and. Yeah. So I, you know, just set out to solve that with technology because I love technology, and that's how the idea was born.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: And we've certainly learned a lot being in the industry.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: So Wild Energy came from. From like, your thought and just going to campground saying, hey, I think I want to. I want to provide and solve a solution.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's. How do you run the business better?
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: So the constraint was labor. You can't keep running out and reading meters. You know, especially transient or different days, people are checking in, checking out. It's a labor problem. So you solve that with technology.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And you can control things, like, because the big topic has got to be, like, people bringing in their Teslas or something and double dip it on there.
And you could have. So I'm pretty sure you guys. I haven't worked with you guys yet. We're about to. But you can monitor it to where you're like, hey, you can create red flags. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you just stepped into a whole bunch of topics there, but you're absolutely right. You know, as we were building the business, the whole EV boom took off, and we started seeing more and more of those, and owners were freaking out a little bit about, hey, how many of these things are coming to my park?
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't want to get taken advantage of.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah, right, right. And now that we have data, it's interesting what we see. We can see when an EV plugs in because we the meter gives us what's called a high load alert. So it'll spike up and say, hey,
[00:02:08] Speaker A: you're running this, you know, so it will, it will know that versus a big camper. Just turn 3ac and it's on the same time.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Well, we, we can get fooled. We have been fooled before with big class A's. Right. So a big, you know, they've got the full size appliances, the induction.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Come on. And they turn the microwave on the dryer. Right.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Full size dryer. That thing's a right energy hog.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: So we've seen some of that with some of those classes, and they're pulling just as hard as an ev, which nobody was worried about. Class A's.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Right.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: But guess what? They're pulling just as hard as the EVs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Well, that's very important. If you're trying to control your cost and, and if somebody's got a class A and they're using $10 more for freaking night or whatever it is, and then. Yeah, I would think the next natural step would be to pass on those fees a little bit more because there are completely different class of uses.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Well, as an operator, though, you think about your margin and revenue per site. Right.
If you have a big class A in there, they're eating your margin. If you're not recovering. If you're not recovering that utility cost, they're just eating your margin. You're the one that's making less money. So if you can control that operating expense, drop that to the bottom line. Now it is a margin game, you know. Yeah. How much margin can I make per site?
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Because if you have a park that has a lot of diesel pushers and the bigger guys, then you can just say, hey, it's 50 bucks a night. But if you use a lot more than the average RV does, we have to charge you a little bit more.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Or just start charging utilities. It's rate plus utilities. That's the right strategy.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Even nightly.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We have some parks that do it nightly.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: And it's all about setting expectations.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Monthly, for sure. I've seen a lot, like after a week, then. Then it's charging, you know, nightly, not so much. But you certainly could.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Especially if it was controlled and you could just tack it on or have it automated into your booking software.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that works if you're, if your property's in demand, obviously. Obviously. If you're struggling with occupancy, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to go down that path. But if you have good demand, you're in good location, it's not a problem. It is mostly the owner operators that are afraid to change how they do things.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: But we've had new guys come out of the dirt, you know, with new properties, starting with utilities, day one. Yeah. They get no pushback.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm about first time we're going to work together is here in a few weeks in Oklahoma. I'm helping a guy that just bought a park and he's paid us to, to expand it and so he said just get metered pedestals and he's putting your wild energy stuff in there. So I haven't worked with you guys yet, but we're about to. We already have the pedestals there.
But can you tell us a little bit about like the setup, like what that looks like if, if somebody's like, hey, I want to use you guys for my park, but what does that look like?
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And one thing you just mentioned, which I highly recommend if you're building a park, if you're doing upgrades, always buy a metered pedestal. You can put a ten dollar briefer meter in that socket. Yeah, but, but you adding that socket later is really expensive.
So always buy.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: I'm having to do that in a park right now.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: I'm not happy about it.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: We have to go back and put a meter on, right? Yeah.
So it's super simple to get the system up running. You plug the meter in. They're like big plugs.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: We have a radio in that meter that's pulling the data and sending it off. And then we have receivers on the property that pick all that up. And it's all real time.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: So we're getting every kilowatt that flips over on that meter.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: Do you have to have strong WI fi at the park?
[00:05:21] Speaker B: None. You don't have to have any.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: So it's like a radio transmitter or something?
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah, we work on a 900 MHz frequency, so it goes very far. And we don't, you know, we don't need many transmitters. You know, we'll, we'll recommend two transmitters or two receivers per, you know, a couple hundred sites.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: So it's not many.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Interesting. So the installation process is very taxing.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: No.
Right. Adding meter socket, that's tax. Yeah. But if you have meters swapping from old analog meters, super simple.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Yeah. You gotta get the conversion kit and you gotta pull the wires over here. After you disconnect, you Gotta go over there. You gotta weather tight it. Ding, ding, ding. And then put your meter back in.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. That's the hard part if you're doing that labor. But I'll tell you what. If you have an unmetered park switching to meter, the return on that investment, even though it's more costly, is still under a year.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Under one year in every case. We've never seen the numbers where it's more than a year if you move a park from unmetered to meter.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting stat.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Because power gets serious. I've looked at, like, analyzed a lot of deals, and you're like, you're spending that much on power.
And so I think a. It's critical to be. Have the. The power to. To control it and look for, you know, people stealing power or something. Like, there's got to be, like, weird cases where if you're billing back for electric and then somebody has their camper. I've seen this before. And they run extension cords over somebody else's pedestal and using that one over there, you know, like, weird stuff.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: It happens. We don't. We actually don't see that very often, and we're catching that more and more with software now. So if we know there's a site that's not occupied or not checked in and there's energy running. Yeah, that's a problem. Have somebody go out and look at that.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Right, right, right. Ding, ding, ding. Here's an alert.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: And we. We've had that happen.
We've seen that.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah. It's RV parks. Whatever weird can happen, it does.
That's what I love about it. It's just the weirdest things. I don't. I. I don't know. I'm sure you've heard plenty of stories.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: It doesn't stop.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. People seek out parks that are unmetered. If they know they're heavy users, they look for them and they do weird things in their RVs, like you said. Yeah.
Everybody's heard me tell the story about bitcoin mining. We found one of those guys. Yeah. Because his power was off the chart. Yeah. He wasn't even staying in the rig. He just parked it there. Yeah. Because it was a mobile data center, basically.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: But, yeah, they get smart about, hey, let's go find free energy. Yeah.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: We saw a class A that had two Tesla powerwalls in it.
So they would come into a park, they would charge up their two Tesla power walls, and then be off grid for a week. Yeah, because they had enough power with them, but they were sucking it out of somebody's property.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Wow. That was unique.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Yeah. No telling how much juice they.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: They were just smart.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
That's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy. Well, cool, Mike. Well, I appreciate your time and coming out here. We were just doing a short little interview, so I hope this event was successful. You got to talk to a lot of park owners like we did.
But I want to thanks again for your time.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Yes. And I'd love to come back anytime, answer questions. You know, if you guys get questions. This topic is I'm passionate about. I love talking about.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: Yeah, me too.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Anytime.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Thank you.
