One of the more interesting entrepreneurs to recently enter the campground business is 42-year-old Dirk van Reenen, who had his share of highs and lows in the business world before opening an adventure park in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle three years ago.
MERUS Adventure Park is not a typical private park. It not only offers RV and tents and cabin rentals but boondocking sites as well as opportunities for world-class off-roading, overlanding, hiking, mountain biking and caving on 5,500 acres of some of the most pristine land in Texas, 12 miles east of Palo Duro Canyon State Park and 40 miles west of Caprock Canyons State Park and Trailway.
But even though MERUS Adventure Park is an off-road paradise, no motorcycles, RZRs, side-by-sides, giant horsepower rock crawlers or ATVs are permitted on its 55 miles of dirt roads, which are designed solely for regular passenger vehicles with four-wheel drive capabilities.
“Our motto is low noise, low speed,” van Reenen said. MERUS itself is a Latin word meaning “pure” or “undiluted.” Van Reenen is determined to protect his and the experience, which reminds him of overlanding with his parents in South Africa, where he lived as a child.
Of course, like many entrepreneurs in the private park business, Van Reenen didn’t feel the desire to develop his own private park until after he had spent two decades working his way through several different careers, each of which offered its own unique experiences and opportunities for growth.
“I could write a book about everything I’ve learned,” he said, noting he suffered several particularly hard knocks during his formative years in the business world.
Van Reenen grew up working on his father’s farm in Bethlehem, South Africa, raising a variety of crops, including wheat, corn, hay and milo, as well as cattle and sheep. His family also thoroughly enjoyed camping, taking him on frequent trips to scenic areas in South Africa, such as the Drakensberg Mountains and the Western Cape Coast, as well as to scenic destinations in neighboring Botswana, Zambia and Angola.
“My family has been in South Africa for 15 generations,” he said.
But in 1996, when van Reenen was 14, his parents decided to immigrate to the United States after Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa.
“During that time, there was a big political shift in South Africa and that shift has continued to play out,” van Reenen told Woodall’s Campground Magazine, adding, “My father had the foresight to see there would be a decline in the country and in the opportunities for us children. So, they decided to leave everything behind and start fresh to give us kids the chance to live our best lives. We were among the first Anglo South Africans to begin immigrating out of the country, but since then, millions have left and have settled in many countries across the world.”
Van Reenen’s family settled in Crowell, Texas, a tiny agricultural community roughly halfway between Dallas and Amarillo, where his father, Dirk, grew dry land wheat and managed farming operations for other growers.
“From the time I was 14, I did farming and ranching work with my dad,” van Reenen recalled.
He studied agribusiness at West Texas A&M University in Amarillo before changing to a general business major. He spent his college years working at a ski shop in Amarillo, catering to downhill ski enthusiasts bound for destinations in New Mexico and Colorado, which are just a few hours away.
“Amarillo is a big thoroughfare for skiing and snowboarding,” van Reenen said.
The Panhandle city is not only traversed by Interstate 40, which roughly tracks famed Route 66 but U.S. Highway 287, the second longest U.S. highway in the country, which carries traffic from Louisiana and the Texas Gulf Coast, Houston and Austin northeastward to Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
Van Reenen did so well working at the ski shop that the owner sold him the business when he retired, providing him with seller financing to help him get started. Van Reenen was only 21.
Initially, things worked out exceedingly well. He got married at 26 and started planning his future.
“The first four years of running the ski shop were pretty cut and dry,” he said. “The shop was only open five and a half to six months a year. In summer, I did farming and ranching.”
The bigger life lessons — and lessons in business — happened when van Reenen decided to upgrade his ski shop
“We were a free-standing location. It was a C location,” he explained. “I wanted to go to an A location. We went into a building at the entrance to a mall. We doubled the size of our retail floor. At this rate, I couldn’t have a seasonal business anymore. We had to go year-round.”
Van Reenen expanded his product line as well, adding kite surfing equipment and skateboards to his product lineup.
“I took on a lot of debt to make the move,” he said.
But Van Reenen made these moves solely relying on his gut instincts and soon found himself in financial trouble.
“I didn’t do market research. I didn’t use data to drive my decisions. I just did what I thought would work,” he said. “I didn’t have mentors. I wasn’t connected to business people. I didn’t read.”
Van Reenen started falling behind in his rent. He hit bottom in 2008, four months before his son, Jackson, was born.
“My landlord showed up and locked me out of my own business,” he said.
Looking back, Van Reenen described the failure of his ski shop as a “slow bleed.”
“You know there’s a crash coming,” he said, “but you don’t know what to do.”
Nothing he learned in college could help him out of his predicament.
“For me, the whole college experience was more social than learning,” he said. “The real learning started when my business failed.”
Van Reenen took a job with an auction company and started learning about real estate. He eventually obtained his real estate license, which enabled him to sell both commercial and residential property. He eventually started his own auction and real estate business.
By 2012, when his daughter, Kate, was born, van Reenen started reading books about business and personal development. He also hired a personal coach at $1,500 a month.
“Even college wasn’t that expensive!” he said. “But I got to a place where I was super hungry (for information). I went through a five-year period where I was failing. I wanted to learn how to be smarter in business.”
The personal coaching paid off, along with his voracious reading of business and self-help books. By 2013, Keller Williams, the largest real estate franchise company in the nation, hired van Reenen as an agent at its real estate office in Amarillo.
Van Reenen’s career advanced quickly with Keller Williams. He was eventually transferred to the company’s Houston office, where he grew Keller Williams’ brokerage business, expanding its Houston workforce from 180 to 240 agents.
Keller Williams eventually assigned van Reenen to run its brokerage in Columbia, Md., one of its largest in the country. From 2015-2017, he helped grow Keller Williams’ Columbia brokerage from 400 to 480 agents with $800 million in sales.
Eventually, van Reenen started feeling a little burned out, but he found a new calling. He left Keller Williams, moved back to Texas, settling in Friendswood, a Houston suburb, and started a new company in 2017 called Bergflow, which provided education to entrepreneurs and business operators.
“I wanted to teach other people what I had learned that completely changed my life,” van Reenen said. “We started working with small, service-based companies. The company grew quickly. Within four years, we were working with over 300 clients.”
Van Reenen’s constant push for success in the business world was driven, he said, by painful memories of the really tough years following the failure of his ski shop and the birth of his first child.
“For five years, my wife and I were scraping and clawing just to get by, just to keep a roof over our heads,” he recalled.
By 2019, however, after van Reenen had enjoyed seven years of success in real estate and with his business education company, he and his wife felt they needed to reconnect their family with nature.
“We had traveled a lot to cities and resorts. But by 2019 we felt like we needed to get our kids into nature,” he said.
They bought a Jeep in 2019, which rekindled van Keenen’s childhood memories of off-roading with his family in South Africa. They had so much fun exploring America’s backroads that Van Reenen moved his business to a virtual format and they started homeschooling their children — all just months before the COVID pandemic swept the country.
“The timing was impeccable,” van Reenen said. “Everything just lined up.”
One night, they camped at Dos Rios RV Park in the Texas Hill Country, and van Reenen got an idea.
“I just felt like God was saying, ‘Hey, it’s time to open the park,’” he noted.
Van Reenen envisioned a place where people could hike and bike and off-road together.
By 2020, van Reenen’s father had become a real estate broker, focusing on farm and ranch sales. One day, his father suggested he check out a property in the Texas Panhandle in Palo Duro Canyon.
The property was being marketed for cattle ranching and Van Reenen didn’t think it was the right fit. But within 30 minutes of arriving on site, van Reenen realized his dad was right.
The property, a 5,500-acre spread in Palo Duro Canyon features wide open grasslands as well as many areas with dense stands of cedar, mesquite and scrub oak trees.
Palo Duro Canyon is the second largest canyon area in the U.S. after the Grand Canyon. But only a fraction of Palo Duro Canyon is contained inside Palo Duro Canyon and Caprock Canyons state parks. The rest of the Palo Duro Canyon is a wild, undeveloped area, which van Reenen believes could eventually become “the next Moab” because of its recreational potential.
Van Reenen has lightly developed the property with 75 primitive campsites for tenting, 10 full hookup RV sites and 20 boondocking sites with a stunning view of Palo Duro Canyon. The park also has five 600-square-foot, site-built cabins with full kitchens and bathrooms, each of which can sleep six. Van Reenen has further developed the property with 55 miles of dirt roads for gentle off-roading and overlanding adventures and 15 miles of dedicated mountain biking trails, although mountain biking enthusiasts are also able to bike along the park’s other dirt roads.
Word is quickly spreading about the unique recreation opportunities that are available at MERUS Adventure Park.
“We have people who are driving as much as 15 to 18 hours one way to camp here,” he said.
Van Reenen is continuing to seek mentors in the campground business as he continues to develop MERUS Adventure Park. But he also has several words to the wise for both current and aspiring private park operators gleaned from his decades of experience in the business world.
For current park operators, van Reenen offers the following recommendations:
Learn how to find and hire the right people to help you run your campground. Van Reenen said his own company, BERGflow, offers this type of training.
Create detailed job descriptions that include checklists of tasks to be completed. This not only makes it easier to find the right people to help run your campground and to assess their performance but also helps ensure consistency in campground operations.
Hire an outside bookkeeper. They can give you a monthly profile and loss report and help you identify where you are bleeding money or losing opportunities for revenue.
Really dive into your numbers. Get savvy with your profit and loss statement. Look for ways to create new revenue streams.
Figure out what kind of customer service you want to deliver. “What level of experience do you want to create? Be purposeful about that and make it a big focus of your team,” van Reenen said.
For entrepreneurs or career changers who are considering a move into the private park business, van Reenen offers the following advice:
Think long and hard about why you want to get into the campground business. Unless you come from the hospitality industry, many people have no idea how demanding the hospitality industry can be. “It’s not something you can turn off,” van Reenen said.
He added that while many people assume a move into the campground business could give them more freedom and free time in their lives, the demands of owning and operating a campground are more likely to reduce the amount of free time they have available.
Be mindful of the fact that it’s easier to take over an existing campground than to build one from scratch. “Unless you have a great development team, you have to be willing to see your campground start-up through completion, even in the bad times,” van Reenen said.
Be thorough in your market research. “If you don’t do market research,” van Reenen warns, “you may learn some hard lessons after you have already invested your money.”
