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[00:00:05] Sarah: Hello. Welcome back to another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:00:09] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:00:11] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:12] Sarah: Let’s start this episode like we do each and every week, and that’s sharing one of you, our incredible listeners, who’s using our hashtag, but also more importantly, going to strshare.com sending us all the info on your property so that we can share it here on the podcast, on our Instagram, to our entire email list. Annette, who are we sharing this week?

[00:00:32] Annette: This week we’re sharing @thecliffs_hockinghills. Again, that’s @thecliffs, C-L-I-F-F-S, _hockinghills. And the reason we’re sharing The Cliffs is, number one, we are friends with them, and they’re wonderful. But number two, they’re some of our largest competition in the market that we are building our project in.

[00:01:00] You should all do competitor research, but we love looking at them because they are, hold onto your seats, 100% direct booking. Everyone, we have so much to learn from them right now. I want you to actually go to their social media, go to their website, and you will see they use that to funnel guests into their reservation, into their booking.

[00:01:31] So they do have a very large Instagram following. So I don’t want you to just see that and count yourself out because this can be done on any scale. What they’ve done really well is enticing people through their social media to book with them, but then also letting people know that if they had a cancellation, that the way that they can get on their list because they are sold out very far in advance is to be on their email list.

[00:02:01] So they have made an incentive for people to exchange their email with them for those last-minute cancellations, but also they also get an alert when their calendar opens up first. So repeat guests, it’s a way, hey, if you want to come back, you’ll be one of the first to know when our calendars opened up, when someone’s following along.

[00:02:24] They are very clear, when you exchange your email with them, they are going to hopefully give you that value back of first bookings, letting people know if there’s cancellations, and being first in the loop before their social media. So yes, there’s this large following, but they keep their email list even closer to them, letting them know they’ll be the first to know.

[00:02:46] So I really want you to take a peek. Number one, their social media is great, and they have some great photos, really well done infusing lifestyle posts, letting influencers come, and just sharing all the seasons there that they have. But I really want you to see the way that they do this collection of email addresses.

[00:03:09] And collecting email addresses of people that haven’t stayed yet too. Because I think we all understand we should be collecting the email addresses, especially of our guests that have stayed, but this is a way for us to get ahead of it and get those future guests to book. So well done @thecliffs_hockinghills. We are taking copious notes and hoping to have a strong direct booking for our property also.

[00:03:34] Sarah: And on that note, this episode is a little land update for all of you, a peek behind the curtain, or I guess we could tear the entire curtain down and share exactly what’s going on behind Annette and my latest investment, which is 134 acres in the Hocking Hills area that we purchased this February.

[00:03:56] If you want to get caught up on this project because we are talking the good, the bad, the ugly, you can listen to those episodes, and they date back to, let me see here. Episode 349 is when we introduce you to Mike Navarro, one of our partners. He’s also our builder on our team, but he really drove home acquiring this property, and he worked on that deal for well over a year just working with the seller and negotiating back and forth.

[00:04:27] We lost it at one point and gave up on the whole thing and then it came back around. So if you’re interested in what it’s like for someone else when acquiring a deal, that episode might be right for you. 361, we talk about how we dug into our competitor analysis. Like Annette just said, we did an entire deep dive into a lot of the operators in the Hocking Hills area, what they do well, what they miss out on, and how we can fill in gaps.

[00:04:52] Episode 373, we reveal the properties that we’re going to be putting on our land. And just to give you a little spoiler alert, we’re working with OOD and the mirror houses. We’re bringing two onto our property. If you want to listen to that episode and how we acquired those, we have creative financing, we can say, on those two properties there.

[00:05:18] And then today we want to talk about so many things, the biggest being how we told the construction team to just stop. We had to call it quits on the construction team, and we want to give you a little insight as to why that is. And then also we have to raise some money. And so we’re going to talk to you about what we’re planning so that we can approach private money lenders fully prepared.

[00:05:48] Annette: Let’s do it. Stop.

[00:05:50] Sarah: Stop. We said stop.

[00:05:51] Annette: We stopped completely, like, leave–

[00:05:55] Sarah: The site.

[00:05:57] Annette: Well, clean up. First let’s clean up and stop. So we were rehabbing our small cabin that is on the land, roughly 700-ish square feet.

[00:06:10] Sarah: Mm-hmm. Small.

[00:06:11] Annette: Adding on a deck. And we have since completely halted any sort of work. So the demo was done. All of the demo was done. Some of the deck was being built. Some more interior work was starting to be done.

[00:06:34] Sarah: The roof was worked on a little bit, and so here’s what happened. It’s summer, and I want to just preface this with Mike Navarro and his wife Ingrid have built new homes abundant in downtown Columbus. They have rehabbed countless. My husband and I have rehabbed countless homes, flipped countless homes.

[00:06:58] We have experience here, and it was a summer time, and we didn’t do a very good job on communicating despite that being something that I pride myself on, so does Annette. So does our entire team. Everyone had vacations, and we didn’t do a good job of passing the torch.

[00:07:14] Annette: And even despite meeting twice a week, even sometimes while we were on vacation.

[00:07:19] Sarah: Yeah. We would tune in while on vacation. And we let these contractors– we had plans. We have architectural plans that my husband’s team drew up, and despite having these plans of exactly what we want them to do, there was miscommunication.

[00:07:34] Annette: And meeting them there, though. Meeting the teams there. Again, just for reference, the property is about 50 minutes door to door from each of us, 50 to 55 minutes, because we all live within a few miles of each other. And all of you can understand what it’s like working with just contractors in general and then being far away and then intermixing that with every single one of us at different points during this. There is a multitude of things.

[00:08:07] Memorial Day happened, then the 4th of July happened. The Navarros actually went out of the country with their entire family. I went on vacation to the beach with my family. Nick and Sarah went on their summer vacation, and none of us did that at the same exact time, so that was a lot of vacationing, which all of us should do, and so should you.

[00:08:33] And also, what Sarah mentioned there is, yes, I was here while, like, Nick and Sarah were gone and Mike and Ingrid were gone, but my second set of eyes, if you will, me being boots on the ground, I have to confess, isn’t very helpful when it comes to GC-ing a deck or any construction. I could have been a second set of eyes, but I could not tell, I wouldn’t be able to point out any structural or– I would have just been able to check the box that yes, they were here working today. So it wasn’t a question of if they were working. They were absolutely working. It was the quality of the work being done.

[00:09:14] Sarah: Right. They had a different idea of what should be executed, and it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t what was on the plans. And so what we did was, first of all, I want to share that our strength is the fact that we have a team, and we all have different things to bring to the table.

[00:09:29] But I also now realize that’s also going to be our biggest challenge, which often your biggest strengths and your superpowers are also your biggest challenges. The fact that we have three different people, we all are leaders. We’re all business owners of different businesses and enterprises, and that it’s going to be a strong suit for us, but it’s also going to be this thing where we had to figure out how do we communicate and effectively pass the torch clearly so that we don’t waste time and we don’t have to pause or go back.

[00:09:58] None of us are happy about this, but I do also commend us for there wasn’t any drama and it was a very quick decision, like let’s stop. We have some disconnect in our communication. Let’s say we did push through. When we finish this cabin in September, we’re going to start construction because we bought these mirror houses, we bought the shells, so we get to do our own interior work.

[00:10:22] Plus we have to build the decks and all that kind of good stuff, and we have to develop the roads leading to them. It’s going to be a loud situation, and you do have to pass by the cabin to get these mirror houses done. So what kind of getaway will our guests have in the cabin when they hear hammering in the distance?

[00:10:40] Could we just pause construction the weekends? But as you all know, sometimes contractors show up anyway. And so we were like, what if we just actually stop and we batch work with these three properties and we all get it done at once?

[00:10:57] Plus we were starting to calculate more and efficiently how much money is going to cost us to get these mirror houses finished and up and running. We have some money to raise. Unless we want to put in our own funds, which we don’t want to put any more of our own funds in, we have some money to raise.

[00:11:13] And so we got very quick to work finding someone, and here’s what we want to take away from this episode today, to help us with some different financial models of what that money raising looks like if it is the two mirror houses, if it is the two mirror houses and our cabin, if it is at this occupancy rate, if we don’t start making money until January of 2025. If we need this much money, when can we pay this person back? When would they be paid off? What interest rate, and how does that affect the whole thing?

[00:11:44] So while we can do a really simple proforma of one property, when it comes to– we have to do some road work so that we can get the mirror houses to where they’re going to go. Three different projects all at once. Annette and I knew that we needed the help of someone much more capable of building out a financial model for us and different ways to look at the financial model as well.

[00:12:08] And he’s going to put together for us a investment teaser. So then we do have meetings with our colleagues and friends and family and see who wants to put their money to work with us, they can clearly see our plan and our budget so that they can be informed investors on our project.

[00:12:30] Annette: And I want to rewind to what you said, Sarah, and just pause on the guest experience. We were so focused on let’s get a cabin up and running and cash flowing that that kind of for a second, I don’t want to say clouded judgment, but it was like, hey, let’s get some cashflow positive coming in. And we thought if we could get one cabin open, that that would be really helpful on our note on the land and just helping us not just every month have only money going out, not any money coming in.

[00:13:06] So that was a difficult decision because it wasn’t just a decision to halt construction. It was a decision to forego any income for at least the next four months where like Sarah said, we could have maybe– I mean, we absolutely could have gotten it open and had to just communicate with the guests that there’s going to be other work going on.

[00:13:31] Just like a hotel. I’m sure everyone here has stayed at a hotel that was “under construction.” And there was a lot of conversations, a lot of signage during your stay. And I’m sure you were underwhelmed or upset, to say the least, but that was a big decision to halt that.

[00:13:51] And we did run some numbers. I want to prelude into finding the person to help us with our forecasting. We did. I did a very, very basic forecast of what it would take cashflow to just get us to the end of 2024 without any income. Without any construction happening, what is baseline?

[00:14:16] We are making sure the land is paid for. The cabin is paid for, all utilities are paid for. Our insurance is paid for, our mirror houses, which are ours now. We have payments on those. What do we need baseline if we don’t do any more construction and we don’t find anyone to be an investor alongside of us?

[00:14:35] So I wanted us to know, hey, for the rest of the year, what do we need to know bottom line, what we need to cover? So it also gives us a little breathing room, if you will, to, a, know those exact numbers, and then, b, be prepared as we are reaching out to investors, how much runway we have to really get the deal signed with them and then also continue on with the project.

[00:15:01] So, of course, we want to get everything moving ahead of time, but also, if you know, Sarah and I well enough, we always have three– it’s like, what’s best case, what’s realistic, and then what’s worst case? So we were prepping ourselves like, best case we’re open before January 1. Actually, best case would be opening up right now. Realistic is January 1, and then worst case is a little bit after January 1.

[00:15:28] Sarah: Yeah. And am I being honest in whether I feel disappointed in myself? And my husband and I talk about this at home when our partners aren’t around of, we should have gone out there more. We should have just been more proactive, but at the end of the day, I also think that this crew was just the wrong crew for our project.

[00:15:49] We probably should have recognized that a little bit more earlier on and done more due diligence with them. But I can proudly say that our team has already put some additional SOPs in place, and these might sound really basic, but I’m hoping all of you can understand and put your stamp– put yourself at our shoes, but this will feel familiar to you where it’s like, why is it like pulling teeth to get a contractor to give you a written quote with detail of what is going to be done in exchange for that amount. And this isn’t just those contractors. Since then, we have been interviewing other contract and contract labor.

[00:16:29] Annette: For road, septics, all the things. And they’re happy to verbally give you a quote when they meet you for this said appointment, but getting the actual physical quote after is like–

[00:16:41] Sarah: It’s like it’s a new idea, a new–

[00:16:45] Annette: I’ll share some history with you guys, my past careers. I actually was part of the house painting company. We did multiple seven figures in multiple cities per year, and I know exactly why we did that. Because we showed up when they scheduled the quote. We wrote the quote. We did not leave their home without giving them the cost of the job. And then the magic that happened after that is we would actually follow up.

[00:17:19] So those three things, we just crushed our competition because we literally showed up when we said we were, gave them a quote before we left the property, and followed up. And we understand these jobs are a little bit bigger than painting a house, but still, it’s your profession.

[00:17:36] You’re the expert. You should be able to take the notes that you need and gather a quote, or at least tell us, hey, it’s going to take me X, Y, Z, to get this quote back to you. But it’s been really fun to ease back into that contracting world that I’ve been out of for a while. We’re the client, so it’s like, what are our expectations that we are expecting from them?

[00:18:02] Sarah: Yeah. Because when you succumb to the way they operate, which is not providing written quotes, we have found that that is where there is misunderstanding of, oh, I thought this investment would get us this far, or, hey, you didn’t follow the plan, so therefore we don’t need to submit payment because this thing isn’t done, but we didn’t sign anything.

[00:18:20] There was no signature of a contract or quote or an estimate for that matter. And so, yes, it’s our bad because you have to claim full ownership, but then immediately as a team, we have to say, we do not work with anyone unless there’s a quote in hand. And if that slows down our work, it slows down our work, but at least– I think it’s going to slow us down a lot less than if we get involved with someone–

[00:18:42] Annette: Yeah. And I know everybody’s probably like shaking their heads like, what? First of all, y’all know you’ve done it too. But I’m going to say this too, there is some miscommunication on our team also of us thinking that said crew, said contractor, had a long history, which they did, but it was one of those things I’ll have to share that I thought that these things were actually happening and they weren’t.

[00:19:10] Because I’m not as much a part as the actual construction. So I can share that too, as it’s not like Sarah and I were meeting out there and not seeing these things. It’s like there were some other things going on behind the scenes that we’re just learning to work with our partners too and what that looks like.

[00:19:27] Sarah: For example, Annette does all the financials of paying people, and so we’ve had to hone that too in. When someone sends us like, hey, via text, you owe me 150 for lawn care, well, we need an invoice then. And so this is something that we can gift all of you of don’t feel pressured just because someone sent you a text.

[00:19:52] If you want to create a system for how we pay things, then you can. So we got a text about the lawn care and Annette got on the phone with the lawn care provider who maybe wasn’t used to it. I’m not sure, but it took very little work for her to say, hey, if we’re going to pay you, you have to send us an invoice.

[00:20:12] And that helps us with our W-9s at the end of the year and keeping our taxes in line and making sure that our books are clean from the beginning. And so while we didn’t know what’s happening in the contractor conversation, we have to be because if we don’t have a quote, then we can’t put it into our forecast or to our budgeting to then help our team members with that aspect of the project. So we’ve definitely experienced some growing pains and some team communication.

[00:20:44] Annette: And I have to share we are in a different location, a more rural area, so I’m just going to say it, there’s different standards of a handshake and I say, I’m going to come on this day and get it done.

[00:21:00] Sarah: It happens downtown too.

[00:21:01] Annette: No, I know it does, but it’s like, but you also don’t make– and this is for everyone that I know. I just talked to three different hosts last week that have certain cleaners that don’t want to be on any technology and they want to be paid cash or they want to be paid the Venmo, whatever it may be.

[00:21:17] So I get that because sometimes you need to get the work done. Believe me, I understand that. But there does become this, like, do you want to work together long-term? I feel like even in different things in the past week or so, I’ve had to be coaching people on how to run their said businesses.

[00:21:40] That part of just saying stop, we did it, we’ve got our number, and we can share that too of like, every time we think we have some sort of numbers dialed in, we don’t. So I want to be very clear with that too because Sarah and I talk a lot like, know your numbers. Know your numbers, but we also want to say, even in your short-term rental that’s up and running, things are fluid. Numbers change. Obviously your ADR changes. Your occupancy changes. Your capital expenditures change. Your taxes change. So things are always so fluid, but understanding that at least having a guide and then say, oh, that was way off there, I was high or low here, is super, super helpful.

[00:22:22] Sarah: It was just wonderful working with this financial modeler that we hired. And by the way, we found them in Upwork. What I did was I put a job description up on Upwork on what I was looking for and who the perfect fit would be.

[00:22:33] And we wanted to work with someone who had real estate experience, and we found someone who actually had glamping experience in doing a pro forma and some financial modeling. So he was the perfect fit, and it was awesome. When he was building out our financial model, I were on Zoom with him, and he was asking us for some of these numbers and some of them, even if we hesitated for five seconds, he’d like, no, whatever. I’ll just put 15%. And he does big financial models for big corporations. And it’s not about being specific. It is about getting something on paper and having a general idea.

[00:23:07] Annette: He said his job is to progress the project forward. And so he sees people that get analysis paralysis and then they put nothing and then it either halts the project or they’re so under it. So he’s like, my goal is to progress this forward, so we’re going to put something here, and we’re going to go higher than what we think. And that was his goal. And I’m sure that that expertise that he brought to us, we’re going to be really thankful for.

[00:23:33] Sarah: Yeah. You know how it is. You think like, my experience is buying single family homes. The biggest property I’ve purchased is a fourplex. And so this is a much bigger project than I’ve ever been a part of, and to hire someone who has been there, done that, and for them to say, just progress forward and to overestimate a little bit– now, did we go back since then and actually try to fine tune it more? Yeah, we did.

[00:23:59] Annette: We added–

[00:24:01] Sarah: We did add some stuff.

[00:24:04] Annette: Probably at least 20% to the project.

[00:24:07] Sarah: Well, yeah, we added 20% to how much we want to raise, but then we also honed in our occupancy and our ADR more specifically to what actually is happening in the Hocking Hills area for products like ours. So we got more detailed on that end too, which felt great. I felt like I had the space mentally now that the big work was done to do that.

[00:24:29] Annette: And we want to share the amount of time because again, there’s always multiple things. Either there’s a time investment or a money investment in both, and even with this financial modeler this is what I want to share with you.

[00:24:42] This is not give him some information and then you just sit back and relax. We had to, a, put up the listing. That took time. B, we actually interviewed three different people. So we did 20-minute calls with all of them. So there’s another 30 minutes trying to coordinate that.

[00:25:03] That’s two hours on the phone talking. Then Sarah and I, we had a conversation after. So you can say there was almost three or four hours ahead of time before we even choose this person. And that’s times two because Sarah and I are both on the calls, both talking about it.

[00:25:19] And then there was a good deal of homework that we had to do ahead of time to get him those starting numbers because, again, he can only do so much. So we had to give him so much information about purchasing the land, information about purchasing the mirror homes and any quotes, estimates, things that we do have forecasted.

[00:25:40] So again, a lot of homework ahead of time. But what was great there is, again, Sarah and I really familiarizing ourselves with all of our loan documents, and there was some like, oh, okay. Here’s some stuff that I wasn’t aware of before. I need to make sure that’s in there. Very eye-opening.

[00:25:58] And just like our cap table, that was very important for him to understand that. So again, just going through that exercise. And then when we did hire him, what we did with him was a sprint day. So he spent an entire eight hours working on this. And Sarah and myself needed to be available during that said eight hours.

[00:26:24] Once we had our relationship and the contract sign, he, that day of, would text me, ask me like– if there was a random one-off question, he would text me, but then he would say, hey, I’m ready to jump on a call. I want you to see the first section of what I’ve got done.

[00:26:37] And so Sarah and I would jump on a call with them, review some of the work to make sure he was headed down the right path. I think we had three phone calls with them that day. And we would just zoom with them, see what he’s got, move forward. And we can share with you, we had Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 for him to work on.

[00:27:00] Actually, we had Phase 1, Phase 1.5, Phase 2, and it was getting very confusing, so we’re like, okay, we are only working on Phase 1 right now. So we can also share that we got really aggressive. We thought in the beginning to do all three phases, but once we started really honing in on all of the line items, we had to peel it back to just Phase 1 because we quickly realized we weren’t ready to go to Phase 2 or Phase 3 yet. Maybe that was a little bit of a bummer. We thought we were going to get a lot more clarity, but we’re so happy with the clarity that we did get on day one.

[00:27:39] Sarah: Sometimes you have to focus on the thing right in front of you. This is my biggest fault. I need to the whole thing or I’m like, why even start? And that is my rain cloud, because now it’s like he built it out so I can see when we do find someone who wants to put their money to work and their trust in us and this project, we have 2025 mapped out, 2026 mapped out, 2027 mapped out with these three properties. Best-case scenario, we get into 2025 and things are going well and we are ready to start phase two. But if not, it’s okay because we know what this looks like being incredibly conservative with our partner’s money or lender’s money.

[00:28:23] Annette: We could share, this particular gentleman that we hired, Sarah and I are huge fans of him.

[00:28:31] Sarah: Oh my God, he’s so fun to work with too.

[00:28:33] Annette: We’re with going to see if he can be on the show. What’s so awesome is it’s actually refreshing to have someone that doesn’t have any skin in the game that is an expert in modeling, and is just so– looking at the data, looking at the numbers. And when we had first given him stuff, he’s like, this is an anemic business.

[00:28:55] I had to look it up. I was like, I know what anemic is about. What does that mean? So he was essentially saying like, you guys aren’t going to make any money. He didn’t understand occupancy or ADR, and some of the numbers were askew, but he was concerned. I’m just going to put that out there.

[00:29:12] Sarah: Well, that’s not concern. He was just honest.

[00:29:15] Annette: He was honest, but the numbers weren’t right either. So, there were some things that were off, but it was refreshing, though, because also he wasn’t scared to say this business is anemic. And I was like, oh. And that was our very first call, which actually was very refreshing because you also don’t want somebody that’s going to candy coat things for you.

[00:29:41] Sarah: Or not be afraid to even speak up and give his opinion.

[00:29:43] Annette: Oh yeah. He was not scared of that. So we flushed all that out, got some ADR and occupancy included in that. Everything was a little bit. Again, there was a couple of zeros, a couple of commas, that type of stuff that needed to be rearranged. I’m not going to lie to you there.

[00:29:58] But that day wrapped up and we felt already– we had a closeout call and we all went through the model together. We see what sections we can plug and play, what we can mess with, and we can share that we started fine tuning some of the numbers, and we started massaging the ADR, massaging the occupancy rates, fine tuning expenses, and we didn’t need to go back to him because we semi broke the formulas.

[00:30:36] Sarah: We did break it. I broke the spreadsheet.

[00:30:38] Annette: We broke the spreadsheet. So we had to go back to him, which was great, open communication. He’s like, hey, you start to plug and play your numbers. You got to familiarize yourself with the spreadsheet and then get back with me. And Sarah and I did, and we thought we broke the said spreadsheet.

[00:30:53] We did not break it. So our goal when we gave him this also was that we were looking for private money at a couple of different percentage rates and a certain loan amount. Well, we had adjusted the loan amount. We had adjusted the interest rates, and he had kept the loan payoff very, very tight, in 36 months.

[00:31:15] So that was the issue. There wasn’t anything wrong with the math. There was an issue with the amount of time he gave us at the most expensive interest rate to pay it off, and it was only 36 months. So we needed him with our addition of the loan amount, with using the highest interest rate and adjusting our ADR and occupancy to be our “lowest.” It pushed out the loan payout. So we just needed to have some extension on the months.

[00:31:43] Sarah: Because here’s the thing. When you go to private money lenders, I’ve asked people for what, 50, 60K on a flip, gap funding between the hard money and just getting the deal done. That’s very different than having three cabins on 134 acres. We’re asking for a lot more money. So we are really excited to have this clarity, to have the specificity now. It took us a little longer, but that’s okay. It’s our first project like this.

[00:32:18] Annette: Another thing I want to share, and it’s very, very apparent, this is not our only focus. And so whenever something is not your only focus, we talk about a buffer of finances. You have to also put a buffer of time. Because our timelines were very aggressive, thinking about, this is not each of our partners’ focus. And so you have to also take account for that, that other things are going to take precedence because we have other things that need to help pay for said project. And that’s where we are going to lose time because it isn’t our singular focus.

[00:32:53] Sarah: So we just interviewed Isaac French, who found a much smaller chunk of land. He was Episode 385, but we are interviewing Isaac, and he put up how many houses, seven, eight?

[00:33:07] Annette: No, I think it was five,

[00:33:09] Sarah: Five? Whatever. Five houses.

[00:33:11] Annette: It was five houses on five acres.

[00:33:13] Sarah: Five houses on five acres in 11 months, open, ready for business. And immediately I was like, I need to step it up. We need to step it up because, again, I thought, well, we have all these people on our team. We’re going to crush this even though we all have full-time jobs and are business owners. It’s not the case. And so that was a big wake up call for me. So for anyone out there right now who needs to hear that, I’m not saying don’t do it.

[00:33:34] I am still excited and jazzed about this project. I love what we’re learning. I am leveling up going from small multifamily to this project with more than just my husband, and I am here for it. But we are definitely learning, and I can give us this credit too. We are pivoting fast. We’re making decisions pretty fast, and the whole team has been very good about just being open with communication and being positive with each other in making those changes.

[00:34:04] There hasn’t been any drama or attitudes or anything like that. I don’t think. Everyone’s focused on, yes, this is not working the way we had it working. We need to change a few things and rework this. And I’m excited to see what’s next and see if we can actually put some action behind all that talking.

[00:34:21] Annette: Yes. And so even though the construction has stopped, we are having multiple people out there each week helping quote our roads, landscaping, septic, electric. That stuff is still taking place because, again, we’re trying to figure out exactly what our next steps are and get those quotes to understand the final lending amount. So if anybody has $500,000 laying around, hit me up.

[00:34:52] Sarah: We want to put it to work.

[00:34:52] Annette: Yeah, no, for sure. Okay, but next steps for us are getting all those quotes. Our private funding, we’re going to secure that, do that fundraising, and get the mirror houses delivered is the next step.

[00:35:10] Sarah: Because our roads right now don’t–

[00:35:12] Annette: They support one vehicle coming back. Let’s really quickly share. We’ve had to also Think about phase 2 and phase 3 and not skip over them when we’re thinking about our entrance and our roadways. We are thinking about safety of having emergency medical vehicles come through, many more cars than just the person that had lived there prior, one person coming back and forth that knows the road.

[00:35:46] The road is very windy, so it’s like, what does our lighting look like there? People are going to be coming at night. It is a resort stay. It’s not going to be just pulling up into someone’s driveway. You’re coming home every day. That’s part of the experience, is literally when they see the signage and pull in. And that’s why we’re quoting landscaping, because we still want to potentially get some landscaping planted so it can mature because we know that we need–

[00:36:14] Sarah: Not potentially. We have to.

[00:36:14] Annette: Yeah, we need that time for those things to grow and to mature. So the roads are actually becoming more and more vital. And what’s great is the mirrored cabins push that at a faster pace because we could have gotten away with the current roadway just taking normal size vehicles, but we need to have obviously larger truck deliver them. So our roads need to support that. And there’s a couple of, let’s say, switchbacks. It’s a windy road that need to make sure that they’re solid.

[00:36:48] Sarah: It’s a lot of fun over here in a glamping project 2024. We will be back with more information about what’s up next. But for now, we are in full mode of making– and we’re demanding quotes from all of our contractors. And it’s been a challenge.

[00:37:05] Annette: One other thing I want to say too is we had to up our ante on our insurance. And so that has been a lot of work too, back and forth of making sure the mirror cabins are covered, the transportation of them. That has been something that, again, we’re not experts in.

[00:37:22] We’ve got to slow it down. Shopping that, getting multiple quotes, making sure that we understand those quotes that has been also something that has been very time consuming.

[00:37:33] Sarah: I don’t know whose fault it is, mine or our– we’ve been shopping a few different insurance brokers. And I don’t know whose fault it is. It doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, I have to own it. But I’m going over these quotes and we are talking to them at length, telling them the story of where we bought these from, how many there are, what exists, and I’m getting these quotes, and they’re still incorrect.

[00:37:55] So if you want to have a takeaway from today’s episode and you haven’t got one yet, go review your insurance policy and make sure what you have covered is what you have covered. I’ll just say that because the quote we got back, the way I read it, I was like, oh, we’re good to go, but it only covers one dwelling and we have three on the property.

[00:38:14] And it’s like, where did that mix up come? You know what I mean? I don’t understand how that was confusing at all, but apparently it was because it’s not correct in the document. So I’m just trying to make sure I really understand too, what is getting insured, what happens if worst-case scenario happens?

[00:38:28] I don’t want to be underinsured. We want to be able to continue business and not have this whole thing be an issue for us and our team. So go review your insurance policy today if you haven’t done that in some time. All right. Anything else, Annette? All right. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:38:43] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:38:45] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:38:46] Sarah: Talk to you next time.