So You Think You Want to be a B&B Owner… This is a guest blog, written by Deborah Mendelsohn, the co-owner of the Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona Every inn owner’s experience is different from the next. I can speak only from my own experience in this realm. I’ve visited several other B&Bs over the years. There is not much overlap beyond the obvious differences between a B&B and a hotel, or motel. I never thought about owning an inn, until I fell in love with a historic hotel building, the tiny Southwestern town around it, and the river and mountains that framed the town. But once I happened upon that building, and that place, and began to contemplate the possibilities, I recognized that I had character traits and skills that I was going to need. I was not risk-averse. I loved old buildings and the challenges of renovating them. I had what I thought was enough money, from the sale of my last home, to finish the renovation. (I turned out to be about $100K short, due to the collapse of the sewer tie-in system, the need to replace almost all of the electrical and plumbing, and the expense of having an innovative heat exchange system devised and installed for heating and cooling. I emptied out my IRA, and went deep into credit card debt.) I understood basic bookkeeping. I had good interpersonal skills. I knew how to do market research, and I could write well. I had design training, and software, and could create all my own marketing materials. Most of all, I knew from my own life experience that people in the cities with disposable income were often looking for just the kind of place I was moving to: a tiny, charming town in a beautiful place that no one seemed to know about, only a three- or four-hour drive on a scenic highway. I believed that I would be able to build a reputation for my place because of that. I was right. Here are some of the insights that others might glean from my 17 years in the business. Should It Be a B&B or an Inn? First, do you really want to run a classic B&B, where breakfast is included in the room rate? Or would you be more comfortable running an inn, with breakfast as an add-on? Until I decided to drop the B&B label and become an inn, I viewed the breakfasts as a “loss leader” – something that I could not make money on, but that would increase traffic to my business. There really is no way to profit from serving breakfast in a small B&B unless you are able to charge handsome room rates. At low volume, grocery costs are high (you’re not going to serve cheap foods or run-of-the-mill coffee to B&B guests). You will never make enough money to cover the time you spend cooking, setting the table, serving, and cleaning up. So it’s useful to get clear on this from the start. When I brought my husband (whom I met when he walked in the hotel door) into the business, he took over the cooking right about the time I would have burned out beyond recovery. For a few years we continued as a B&B. And then we took down the sign and rebranded our business as an inn. We eventually decided to go all-vegetarian and as organic as possible on the breakfasts, and we put a hefty price tag on them. We’ve had far more takers than we were expecting. Who Do You Really Want as Guests? Second, how well do you understand the demographics of your potential market? Unless you are taking over a business that someone else has already put on the map, this is a very key question. Since I had no experience in hospitality, I started out trying to be all things to all people. I was most interested in attracting those city dwellers that I described above, but I was open to anyone who called or booked through our online reservations service (which at the time cost about $100 a month). A series of ghastly experiences with guests and then the trials of Covid changed all of that. Now we screen all potential guests by phone or email. We profile, but our profiling is not what most people think of when they hear that word. It is very important to us to have only guests who understand what our place is like, and who are comfortable with a “boutique” hotel with no TVs, and a policy of requiring vaccinations against Covid. In our situation, having hotel guests is the same as inviting someone into our home, and having them under the same roof with us. And that’s how we treat it. Once Covid slowed down, we thought and thought about what we could say on our website that would have the same sort of screening effect as our vaccination policy. We sought a different approach that would have more or less the same results in shaping our guest demographics. To date we have not been able to come up with a different approach, so we have kept the policy, making occasional exceptions. We have found that our place is now invariably peaceful. There are no more problem guests. Everyone is happy with their stay. We don’t have to work as hard. No one leaves a mess. No one brings in a semiautomatic weapon, against our wishes. No one drinks too much, and vomits on the bed. No gay guest, no guest of color, or of another nationality, or minority religious identity, has to worry about being comfortable at the breakfast table. It all just works better. We raised our rates. And, because we are the owners, we can cut whatever sort of deals we want to accommodate some guests. Engaging With the Local Community This leads to my last area of observation and reflection: to run a successful B&B or inn or hotel, how important is it to be part of the community in which you operate? From the start, I envisioned my inn with a double identity, as both a hotel, and a center for lectures, music performances, and community meetings. Those community-oriented events were a pleasure to plan and host, and the town would turn out for them. But here, again, Covid changed everything. As we lost one good friend after another to the plague, and kept adding to our tally of the dead all across our town, the great majority hardened into their anti-vaccine and anti-mask positions. I sat on the town council at that time. I could not persuade most of the public to do what they could to prevent spreading of the virus. So we closed the hotel, and I resigned from public service. A year and a half later, we reopened our business. But I have not returned to public life. I’ve learned that we don’t need the lectures and concerts and meetings to make our business flourish. Maybe one day we will do that again, if and when people return to the respect and kindness that were generally afforded in all directions when I first arrived in our little town. In the first years, I would have answered emphatically that engaging the local community was one of the keys to success. Now, I would certainly say that it is preferable at the start. But there are stages of life, I have found. Now I am an older innkeeper, one who prefers quiet, and a life of retreat from the busyness of the world. That sells too, though it is not something I market, but rather something that guests find when they come to stay. Deborah Mendelsohn Deborah Mendelsohn grew up in downtown Boston and rural western Maine as the daughter of civil rights activists. She dropped out of school at 15 and traveled the country, eventually earning a Master’s in comparative religions, while working on psych wards and for Planned Parenthood. She married twice and raised two daughters while working in music, film and television in San Francisco, and then Los Angeles. After learning how to be a TV-film producer at the major studios, she switched tracks and worked for years in broadcast news media development in Russia, Ukraine and other places. Eventually California got too crowded and expensive. She chose a tiny town in a deeply rural part of Arizona, mostly because of a meditation retreat center nearby, and partly because the verdant agricultural valley reawakened her deep love of her roots in Maine. There in tiny Duncan, Arizona, she fell in love with a dilapidated old hotel building and, a few years after she had renovated and opened the hotel, with a man who walked through the front door. Clayton Jarvis, now co-owner of The Simpson Hotel, is an artist and art collector who says he is creating the hotel as a rebellion against the suicidal ignorance of the human condition. Although he has a very interesting past, he reserves stories about that for conversations with friends and hotel guests. He brought his huge art collection into The Simpson, and began a transformation of the hotel’s dirt and chain-link fenced lot into a dreamscape of lofty shade trees, flowering vines, ponds, fountains, statuary and micro-habitats for wildlife. Deborah and Clayton are interested now in what it means to stay put in such a place, as age brings its inevitable questions. There are physical rigors of maintaining the inside and outside of the hotel. And there is the joy of breathing the fresh air of the rural river valley, drinking the water pumped from that valley, growing organic fruits and vegetables year-round, and taking regular walks along the river and the lip of the overhanging mesa. This all adds up to a profoundly salutary way of life. Doctors are an hour away at least, but some aspects of life may be more important in older age than proximity to hospitals. This is an ongoing topic of reflection! ![]() Join us for our Online Oct. 18-20, 2024 Financial Freedom Retreat. Email [email protected] or call 310-430-2397 to learn more. Register by June 22, 2024 to receive the best price and a 50-minute private, prosperity coaching session (value $400). Click for testimonials, pricing, hours & details. ![]() Join us for our Restormel Royal Immersive Adventure Retreat. March 7-14, 2025. Email [email protected] to learn more. Click for testimonials, pricing, hours & details. There is very limited availability. Register early to ensure that you get the exact room you want. This retreat includes an all-access pass to all of our online training for a full year for two, and three 50-minute private, prosperity coaching sessions. Much more affordable than you might think. Email [email protected] to learn more. ![]() Natalie Wynne Pace is an Advocate for Sustainability, Financial Literacy & Women's Empowerment. Natalie is the bestselling author of The Power of 8 Billion: It's Up to Us and is the co-creator of the Earth Gratitude Project. She has been ranked as a No. 1 stock picker, above over 835 A-list pundits, by an independent tracking agency (TipsTraders). Her book The ABCs of Money remained at or near the #1 Investing Basics e-book on Amazon for over 3 years (in its vertical), with over 120,000 downloads and a mean 5-star ranking. The 5th edition of The ABCs of Money and the 2nd edition of Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is are the most recent releases of these books. Follow her on Instagram. Natalie Pace's easy as a pie chart nest egg strategies earned gains in the last two recessions and have outperformed the bull markets in between. That is why her Investor Educational Retreats, books and private coaching are enthusiastically recommended by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary S. Becker, TD AMERITRADE chairman Joe Moglia, Kay Koplovitz and many Main Street investors who have transformed their lives using her Thrive Budget and investing strategies. Click to view a video testimonial from Nilo Bolden. 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AuthorNatalie Pace is the co-creator of the Earth Gratitude Project and the author of The Power of 8 Billion: It's Up to Us, The ABCs of Money, The ABCs of Money for College, The Gratitude Game and Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is. She is a repeat guest & speaker on national news shows and stages. She has been ranked the No. 1 stock picker, above over 830 A-list pundits, by an independent tracking agency, and has been saving homes and nest eggs since 1999. Archives
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