Kalahari owner brings diverse work history to resort business
Wisconsin Dells — At 14, Todd Nelson was a Sauk County farm kid and an auctioneer with the family auction business — antiques, cattle, horses, stuff they scarfed up cruising garage sales in Madison.
At 18, he was trucking Christmas trees to Florida. At 19, he bought into a popular Wisconsin Dells tavern. Then came a pizza place. A convenience store. A ski hill. A jewelry store. A card shop ...
Now, at 53, Nelson, whose work history also includes stints as a beer truck driver and a laborer replacing ties on the old Milwaukee Road tracks across western Wisconsin, is among the most successful entrepreneurs in the Dells.
With his wife, Shari (they started dating when they were in driver's ed class at Wisconsin Dells High School), and their five children, Nelson owns the growing Kalahari Resorts group.
The Kalahari here features 760 rooms, 100,000 square feet of conference space and a 125,000-square-foot indoor waterpark. The Kalahari in Sandusky, Ohio, is even bigger — more than twice as much meeting space, 890 guest rooms and 173,000 square feet of waterpark under roof.
Last fall, Nelson broke ground on a third Kalahari, in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. He'll have some familiar neighbors. Great Wolf Lodge, which started in the Dells, has one of its waterpark resorts there. And owners of the Wilderness, another big Dells property, are partners in a 453-room waterpark resort now under construction in the area.
The Pennsylvania Kalahari is expected to open in June 2015, with 457 rooms and a 100,000-square-foot indoor waterpark. But as Nelson sees it, that's just the beginning. Sitting in the Ivory Coast Restaurant at his Dells property, he talked about his early ventures, his plans and the challenges of running big waterparks.
Q. How much is it costing to build the resort in Pennsylvania?
A. $235 million on phase one. (And) we'll want to be kicking phase two off just as quickly as humanly possible. We'll be adding another 500 units and another 100,000 feet of indoor waterpark space. That market is very underserved. It's gigantic. There are 44 million people within a four-hour driving radius.
Q. How are you financing this first phase?
A. It's shocking to most people — the Bank of Wisconsin Dells, our small little bank, put together a consortium of 40 community banks, most of those being from Wisconsin. Small community banks. Isn't that amazing?
Q. In the Dells, how do you see the Kalahari positioned relative to the other big parks, Great Wolf, the Wilderness, whatever?
A. Well, my competitors aren't going to want to hear this but I view us as No. 1. I always have. I think that we're the highest quality. There's a clear pecking order in town, and everybody knows where they're at. Just a little FYI, Condé Nast just anointed (our Ohio resort) the coolest waterpark in the world. Not in America. In the world.
Q.You built the Kalahari here in 2000 after selling a smaller resort and buying what was woodland along I-90/94. Did you figure that a location beside the interstate would be advantageous?
A. It's a free billboard with 35,000 cars a day going by. I've always run my business by common sense and what my gut told me. And it told me get out there where people can see you.
Q.You started out as a teenage auctioneer, then before hitting 20 you branched into the Christmas-tree business.
A. We'd buy trees up in northern Wisconsin for eight bucks, and we'd take them down to Tampa and we'd sell them for $35. We'd rent an old abandoned gas station for $800 for the month, sell our 3,000 trees, make 20 grand and come home. It was pretty simple. You lived right on the Christmas-tree lot like hobos.
Q.Is it the case that many of the large tourism businesses in the Dells are either owned by people who are from the area or who came here years ago and started small?
A. Yes. Absolutely. Our community is a bunch of entrepreneurs who grew up and got into business because there was opportunity everywhere. We're lucky to have been born here.
Q. But not all of your businesses have been successful.
A. I've got a little sheet in my desk. It's called winners and losers, and the losers' side's just about as big as the winners' side. But the winners were good.
Q. Your Ohio resort is doing well now, but it lost money the first couple of years after opening in 2005. Talk a bit about what happened there.
A. I'll call it penny wise and dollar stupid. We didn't put on top talent. We tried to do it all ourselves. And we opened up without a conference facility, which was just suicide. Right now in Wisconsin Dells, 44% of my occupied rooms in the resort come from the convention center. In Ohio, it's about 35%, easily on its way to 45%. So the two biggest mistakes were lack of talent and opening up without a convention center. That scenario will never happen to me again.
Q. One technical question: How do you keep the water clean? That's got to be really important.
A. It's huge. It's the No. 1 important thing. We use these really great filters, called Neptune-Benson Defender filters. They're not an old sand filter. They take care of everything, and they also eliminate any opportunity for Cryptosporidium. These are computer monitored all day long. They're hand-tested three to four times a day. Everything is tracked. Everything is monitored.
Q. Other projects in development?
A. Oh yes, yes. We just recently hired a great Milwaukee hotelier, (former Marcus Hotels executive) Bill Otto. Bill was put on specifically for growth, so our strategy is we want to build more Kalaharis as quickly as we can.
We're actively searching out contracts to manage other people's hotels. We've already picked up two. They're not quite signed yet so I can't talk about them, but we have two management deals coming up immediately. We're working on multiple different projects.
I have my five children, four of whom are in the business. They all want to grow and they're willing to do what it takes to grow.
Reported by: JSOnline.com
At 18, he was trucking Christmas trees to Florida. At 19, he bought into a popular Wisconsin Dells tavern. Then came a pizza place. A convenience store. A ski hill. A jewelry store. A card shop ...
Now, at 53, Nelson, whose work history also includes stints as a beer truck driver and a laborer replacing ties on the old Milwaukee Road tracks across western Wisconsin, is among the most successful entrepreneurs in the Dells.
With his wife, Shari (they started dating when they were in driver's ed class at Wisconsin Dells High School), and their five children, Nelson owns the growing Kalahari Resorts group.
The Kalahari here features 760 rooms, 100,000 square feet of conference space and a 125,000-square-foot indoor waterpark. The Kalahari in Sandusky, Ohio, is even bigger — more than twice as much meeting space, 890 guest rooms and 173,000 square feet of waterpark under roof.
Last fall, Nelson broke ground on a third Kalahari, in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. He'll have some familiar neighbors. Great Wolf Lodge, which started in the Dells, has one of its waterpark resorts there. And owners of the Wilderness, another big Dells property, are partners in a 453-room waterpark resort now under construction in the area.
The Pennsylvania Kalahari is expected to open in June 2015, with 457 rooms and a 100,000-square-foot indoor waterpark. But as Nelson sees it, that's just the beginning. Sitting in the Ivory Coast Restaurant at his Dells property, he talked about his early ventures, his plans and the challenges of running big waterparks.
Q. How much is it costing to build the resort in Pennsylvania?
A. $235 million on phase one. (And) we'll want to be kicking phase two off just as quickly as humanly possible. We'll be adding another 500 units and another 100,000 feet of indoor waterpark space. That market is very underserved. It's gigantic. There are 44 million people within a four-hour driving radius.
Q. How are you financing this first phase?
A. It's shocking to most people — the Bank of Wisconsin Dells, our small little bank, put together a consortium of 40 community banks, most of those being from Wisconsin. Small community banks. Isn't that amazing?
Q. In the Dells, how do you see the Kalahari positioned relative to the other big parks, Great Wolf, the Wilderness, whatever?
A. Well, my competitors aren't going to want to hear this but I view us as No. 1. I always have. I think that we're the highest quality. There's a clear pecking order in town, and everybody knows where they're at. Just a little FYI, Condé Nast just anointed (our Ohio resort) the coolest waterpark in the world. Not in America. In the world.
Q.You built the Kalahari here in 2000 after selling a smaller resort and buying what was woodland along I-90/94. Did you figure that a location beside the interstate would be advantageous?
A. It's a free billboard with 35,000 cars a day going by. I've always run my business by common sense and what my gut told me. And it told me get out there where people can see you.
Q.You started out as a teenage auctioneer, then before hitting 20 you branched into the Christmas-tree business.
A. We'd buy trees up in northern Wisconsin for eight bucks, and we'd take them down to Tampa and we'd sell them for $35. We'd rent an old abandoned gas station for $800 for the month, sell our 3,000 trees, make 20 grand and come home. It was pretty simple. You lived right on the Christmas-tree lot like hobos.
Q.Is it the case that many of the large tourism businesses in the Dells are either owned by people who are from the area or who came here years ago and started small?
A. Yes. Absolutely. Our community is a bunch of entrepreneurs who grew up and got into business because there was opportunity everywhere. We're lucky to have been born here.
Q. But not all of your businesses have been successful.
A. I've got a little sheet in my desk. It's called winners and losers, and the losers' side's just about as big as the winners' side. But the winners were good.
Q. Your Ohio resort is doing well now, but it lost money the first couple of years after opening in 2005. Talk a bit about what happened there.
A. I'll call it penny wise and dollar stupid. We didn't put on top talent. We tried to do it all ourselves. And we opened up without a conference facility, which was just suicide. Right now in Wisconsin Dells, 44% of my occupied rooms in the resort come from the convention center. In Ohio, it's about 35%, easily on its way to 45%. So the two biggest mistakes were lack of talent and opening up without a convention center. That scenario will never happen to me again.
Q. One technical question: How do you keep the water clean? That's got to be really important.
A. It's huge. It's the No. 1 important thing. We use these really great filters, called Neptune-Benson Defender filters. They're not an old sand filter. They take care of everything, and they also eliminate any opportunity for Cryptosporidium. These are computer monitored all day long. They're hand-tested three to four times a day. Everything is tracked. Everything is monitored.
Q. Other projects in development?
A. Oh yes, yes. We just recently hired a great Milwaukee hotelier, (former Marcus Hotels executive) Bill Otto. Bill was put on specifically for growth, so our strategy is we want to build more Kalaharis as quickly as we can.
We're actively searching out contracts to manage other people's hotels. We've already picked up two. They're not quite signed yet so I can't talk about them, but we have two management deals coming up immediately. We're working on multiple different projects.
I have my five children, four of whom are in the business. They all want to grow and they're willing to do what it takes to grow.
Reported by: JSOnline.com
