buying campground

valhalla360 wrote:

2012Coleman wrote:

valhalla360 wrote:

2012Coleman wrote:

westernrvparkowner wrote:
Supporting any business idea simply because it is someone's dream is irresponsible. Most of the responses here have been pretty spot on.

Really?? Ya think so???

Here is the original question.

jkhorner wrote:
I am looking to buy a campground that has closed. Having a hard time finding them. Any suggestions?

The OP wants to know where to look for CGs for sale. He didn't ask for your advice on running a business or a validation of his idea. He also didn't ask if buying a closed park is a good idea. None of these respondants knows the OP's financial situation or business experience - again, his question had nothing to do with that. Later in the thread, he states that he wants to start from scratch. Who are you to tell him if that makes sense or not?

He's not asking you to support his business idea - he's coming to a place to where a simple question shoul dbe able to be answered.

So no - most of the responses have not been spot on.

Seriously - get over yourselves.

When you open yourself up to ask for advice, people give advice. If you are asking the wrong question, it is perfectly acceptable and appropriate to clarify that.

To blindly urge them off the edge of a cliff may technically be answering thier question, it's certainly not helpful.

If he really knows what he's doing, it is highly unlikely he would be asking a question the way he did. If we were getting it wrong, a reasonable presumption is he would come back and correct any misconceptions.

So somehow you know what his question should be?

If you tell him where to find closed RV parks for sale, he buys one based of that advice and then fails miserably, your saying its your fault for pushing him twoard it?

So what/who else in the world are you responsible for?

What better place to research CG's for sale than a forum about RV's? Well, maybe he just picked the wrong one. I'm sure he has gone elsewhere where people aren't as presumptious.

Yes, I can read between the lines. He thinks he will get a screaming bargain by buying a failed campground. That is a poor assumption. Just because he didn't explicitly state that doesn't mean an intelligent person won't see that (and as I stated, if that wasn't the case, he would have came back and corrected the assumption)

When people ask for my advice and I choose to respond, yes, I have an obligation to advise them to the best of my ability.

He did choose a good place to research and it appears that the vast majority have given him good advice to rethink the idea. The only ones supporting it are seem to be in the everyone should get an award group. That's great in elementary school. Not so good if your life savings is on the line.

I am right there with you. When people are looking to go into the RV Park business, I think I can offer some information from my experience. I am pretty much a "rising tide lifts all boats" kind of person. If the whole industry gets better, that will bring more people into RVing and that is good for me. I Guess I could take the "sink enough boats, and yours will become the only option" approach and give the OP exactly what they want and nothing more. That would almost assuredly eliminate one more potential competitor from the market.
I really get a kick out of the "they have a dream, so support it no matter how flawed that dream is" crowd. I wonder if they take that tact in their own lives. Do they tell their 6'5" 275LB Junior in high school it is perfectly OK to drop out of school and pursue their dream of becoming a horse racing jockey? Even the worst schemes will have someone the dream promoters can point to and say "see it works". The dream promoters are quick to point to Bill Gates dropping out of college to found Microsoft and Ross Perot quitting his job at IBM and investing his last $10,000 to start EDS (pretty much a false stories, by the way) but for every outlier story like those, there are thousands upon thousands of stories where people wish they had better information and advice and had approached their dreams a whole lot differently.