Crossroads

Next March marks (2027) 15 years since Rohan and I bought Halls Gap Lakeside Tourist Park, time flies!

Not long after the bushfires, Discovery Parks did us a serious offer for buying Lakeside. I personally was in a most vulnerable space and after the years we had just come through, it gave Rohan and me reason to stop and have some incredibly honest conversations.

It wasn’t something we had been actively planning, but it was certainly something we couldn’t ignore.

Did we want to sell?

What would life look like if we did?

Perhaps the biggest thing the offer did was make me realise that, in our early fifties, we had arrived at another kind of crossroads. There comes a point when you start thinking less about what you could do next and more about how you actually want to spend the years ahead. What do we want work to look like? What do we want to keep building? What do we want more time for? And what might we be ready to leave behind?

For the first time in a long time, we allowed ourselves to properly consider another path. We had many raw, honest and open conversations. Honestly beautiful I must say!

In the end, we decided not to sell, for many different reasons. Personally, it would have felt like walking away with my tail between my legs. And besides that, I knew that by staying, it would help me get out of the hollow; you beautiful guests are what lights me up!

But the conversation had already done something.

It had made us stop and look at the business differently.

Looking at Lakeside with fresh eyes!

Not long afterwards, my office manager Pauline and I started talking about how we wanted to move forward.

Always looking for opportunities, we decided to approach Lakeside’s 15th anniversary next March almost as though we had just bought the business.

If we were taking over Lakeside today, what would we review?

And the answer was pretty much everything.

Software. Integrations. Procedures. Marketing. Social media. Apps. Communication. The guest journey. Efficiency. Structures. Staffing. The things we pay for. The things that take too much time. The processes we have simply accepted because they have always been there.

Some things needed changing.

Others reminded us exactly why Lakeside is what it is!

And we are loving the process!

After nearly 15 years, familiarity is an enormous strength, but it can also create blind spots.

Technology is moving quickly, and I actually see enormous opportunity in that. Not to replace human interaction, but to make more room for it. Better systems can take care of the repetitive stuff, leaving us more time for what we value most: talking to people, listening, helping and creating genuine connection. Better systems. More room to be human.

If software talks properly to software, if information is where it should be, if processes are clear and unnecessary steps disappear, then we spend less time chasing things behind the scenes.

And that gives us more time for the part I value most.

YOU!

If better systems can increase efficiency, make communication clearer and help things run more smoothly behind the scenes, then perhaps they also give us more time to do the things technology cannot do particularly well. To notice people. To listen. To understand. To connect. And to guide you in the right direction!

There is a certain irony in what happened next.

Discovery Parks went on to purchase two Breeze parks in Halls Gap, which means there are now four G’day Parks in our area. I’d be lying if I said having a large corporate operator expand in our little patch of the Grampians didn’t feel confronting.

We are independent and owner-operated. We don’t have the budgets, systems or scale of a national network.

But strangely, going through this review has made me feel more confident rather than less.

Because trying to become a smaller version of a corporate operator would make absolutely no sense.

Of course we need good systems. We need good marketing. We need to understand AI, booking behaviour, technology and the way people are finding and choosing accommodation today. Being owner-operated is not an excuse to stand still.

But being owner-operated also gives us something valuable.

We can change something quickly when it doesn’t feel right. We can listen to what our guests are telling us and act on it. We can know our region deeply, recommend businesses because we genuinely know them, notice the little things and make decisions without everything having to travel through layers of an organisation.

Most importantly, we can still be human.

And I think that is something worth protecting.

Looking back, Discovery’s approach didn’t make us fall back in love with Lakeside because we had never fallen out of love with it.

What it did was interrupt us. We stopped, we connected, we listened and we decided!

Excited, for times to come and we would LOVE you to be part of it!