company, and in 2003, we opened Moab Adventure Center, a storefront on Main Street. It’s out of there that we sell all the day trips we operate out of Moab. And we entered into agreements with other outfitters in town who provide activities that we don’t, so we tried to become sort of a one-stop shop for whatever adventure you’d like to do while in Moab. Rafting, off-road, and Arches National Park tours are all with our guides. Everything else, like horseback, mountain biking, hot air ballooning, is provided by other outfitters. That was an idea my wife and I first started hatching as soon as we started working for Western. We started dreaming about this adventure center concept. It took a decade before we finally got everybody’s buy-in, and
that really expanded our daytrip operations in Moab. We went from 3,000 to 4,000 one-day raft trips on the Colorado River per year to somewhere around 12,000 to 13,000. We run close to 40,000 day trips through the adventure center every year.
How did you end up developing Resmark Systems and WaiverSign?
In 2006, we decided to create our own tour operator software, called Resmark Systems. We had an idea of what was needed in market at that time, so we created it ourselves, grew it, and then sold it to other people in the industry. For example, Sandals Beaches and Resorts use our software, so if you’re staying at one of the resorts and want to book an activity, you book it through our software.
Did software seem like a foreign area to you?
Yes, very foreign. We hired our own in-house developers and salespeople, and
we got up to over 100 clients all over the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. Then we added a feature for online digital liability releases, WaiverSign. It’s an add-on to Resmark, but it also gets used separately—by clients like schools and health clubs that need people to sign liability releases.
Diversifying the way we have, that’s been a blessing and a curse, particularly with the software. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t do it. It’s a great product that is very important to us as a business—I just wish somebody else had developed it. There’s a danger of diversifying to the point where you’re doing things that you’re not good at. While we’ve gotten good at it, it’s come at a price.
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