AGA Member Spotlight: Ansh & Bela Singh, Quaint Glamping
Ansh is a Mechanical Engineer & MBA by Education, a Program Manager in an Aviation firm by profession, an innovator by passion & outdoors lover at heart. Bela is a business analyst by profession, a great cook, and a home maker. We both hail from small towns in India, except Bela is from the beautiful mountains of India.
Q: Tell us a bit more about why you started a company in the glamping industry.
My love of the outdoors got defeated by Bela's fear of outdoors and we got constrained to stay in our home through the entire pandemic. My desire to stay out convinced Bela to try camping again. To our surprise, we couldnt find availability of either a campsite or any RV to go camping at the campgrounds of our liking during the pandemic. Inadvertently, we started to look for outdoor unique accommodations to celebrate milestones of our lives. Thats when we learned about 'glamping'. As much as we learned about it, we fell more and more in love with the overall concept. Obviously I had to hold my horses because Bela has some reservations when it comes to outdoors. So we settled at a happy medium of our definition of Glamping and this is where the story started to take shape.
Hunt: We learned that we have to try to find a location within a triangle where each corner is either a major city, a major destination, or a major national or state park. We both immediately knew that CT wouldn't be a good market for this to start. We decided to start our glamping expedition at a touristy location - New Hampshire. We looked at a LOT of lands anywhere from 5 acres to 136 acres, developed, undeveloped and everything in between. We learned in the very beginning that it has to be in the right zoning. However, we learned what it really means when we presented our concise business plan to several towns in NH. At one point we were settled to lease a 100 acre property which had 360 deg mountain views. The owner flipped and raised his lease fee by 7x once he saw our business plan. So we had to take a U-turn and restart our efforts. In our second near-miss deal, we made an offer on a land in VT and (being nice) went to see the owner with our business plan. I got the site plan made and spoke to a lot of vendors on work quotes. The owner rejected the offer 2 days before the town hearing. This just pushed us to dig deeper and we zoomed-in our focus to very specific areas.
Q: Tell us a bit about where your glamping business is today? Where do you see your business in the future?
We dont have unlimited funds, so our family came to the rescue and we acquired a 56 acre property on a hill approximately 15-45 mins away from all the action in NH. Be it hiking, mountain biking, ski resorts, waterfalls, state parks, breweries and restaurants everything is close-by. Major cities like Boston are 2.5hrs away. Best part is, it is not too far from the interstate, it’s located on a state highway, abuts the national forest and provides rolling mountain views. We started to fine tune our business plan to suit the location, geography, and infrastructure of this new found treasure. We didn’t waste any time in putting together the right team to help us make our dream a reality.
With advice from industry experts, we were able to put together a detailed site plan and even more refined business plan with financial projections in place. With a lot of hurdles along the way, we were able to obtain town's planing board's approval on June 1st for phase-1 of our construction. Our team went to present our site plan to the planning board. There were several concerns from the abutters, the police chief and fire chief. We coudnt be happier coming out of there because the planning board chair was speaking in our favor and ended the session by saying, 'thanks for choosing our town for this cool project'.
Q: What are you most excited about within the glamping industry moving forward?
The most exciting part is that no two glamping resorts are going to be the same. With some degree of uniqueness comes personalization. Even if another glamping resort opens up next door, we both would have the potential to thrive independently.
Q: Do you have any advice for those that are just starting out?
We can give lots of advice to help minimize the pain of searching for the right property, but the most important one is: talk to your town about your project ahead of time. Talk to them frequently, get acquainted with important folks in your town like the fire marshal, police chief, building inspector etc. Get them to agree on your project before your final approval day. Then things will flow like a breeze.
Learn more about Quaint Glamping on their website.
