Love In The Wild West

They went across the ground and into the main annex of the hotel. From there, they walked straight past the front desk, with the attendant saluting Kurt and him laughing and waving back, and walked into a quieter watering hole. It was a very quaint place, with upright logs instead of stools and a bar that looked a lot rougher than the one that was in the night club. Lila was surprised by the look of this place.

“Now you see this?” she said, gesturing around herself. “This is more like it. This is the sort of thing that I would want when I come to a ranch. This is the sort of place that I would want to drink at.”

Kurt smiled at Lila and said, “I had a feeling that you were going to like this place. It’s a very beautiful set up, do not you think? I designed it myself. It’s a pet project, you could say, something that I did more for myself than the guests of the hotel.”

“Why didn’t you make more places like this in the hotel?” asked Lila as they settled down on the logs. “I mean, I am sure that people would appreciate a place like this a lot more than they would appreciate a place like that nightclub. People that come here want a sort of… cowboy experience you know what I mean? They would want to come to a place where they can sit on logs and enjoy this ambiance.”

“You are absolutely right,” said Kurt. “This was honestly the way I used to think as well, until my investors came along. You see, building a series of ranches and resorts is not cheap. I was able to build the first one myself, but when I started to expand I had to bring other people into it. This was not bad at first. The investment was spread around, which meant that if I lost money on the venture it would not end up being a great deal of money. I lost a fair bit of control of the businesses, though, and I did not realize it until now. I grew up a cowboy, you see, a real cowboy. My family has always been rich, but at the same time we have been able to stay close to our roots. This is something that I have clearly failed to do. I used to be aware of what I was doing and how I was supposed to behave, but at the same time I had to think about my business. When investor’s started coming into it, I could not help but focus a lot more of my times and energy into making these places more appealing for the general masses.”

“I understand,” said Lila. “That was what I assumed as well, that you were trying to make this place palatable for a wider audience. However, you have to admit that calling this place a ranch is little more than pretense. This may have been a ranch many years ago, but now it is nothing more than a fancy hotel, something that people would come to in order to spend a lot of money, not enjoy the rustic life of a cowboy.”

“You are absolutely right,” said Kurt, “and I realize this now. I wish that I had realized this before. You know, I have earned a great deal of money over the past years. I am not bragging, it’s just a fact. I was born into a rich family and I got my first job at my father’s company, but then I saved up my salary and started this for myself. This whole empire, seven ranches and counting, is something that I have made for myself, and it is something that I am ridiculously proud of. I hope to expand this a lot more. However, when I started out I wanted to be different from the standard hotelier. I wanted to provide an experience that was more fulfilling, something that I could look back on when I die and be proud of. I wanted to give people the kind of experience that they would not be able to get anywhere else. I started to fail miserably when I started to think of this place in a more business oriented fashion. You see, I started to look at this place in a different way. I started to worry about attracting customers, adapting to what a customer would want, instead of making customers adapt to what I offer. It’s not a far fetched thing to have an operation like this and earn a great deal of money, after all, you just need to get your customer used to the idea of this place. This can most certainly be done, and I would go so far as to say that it can most certainly be done well. But I stopped thinking that way, I started thinking that if I offered customers something that they would not be able to digest, I would lose money. That is where I lost myself, I think, when I started giving importance to the money over everything else. This place was never about earning money. It was about doing something different.”

“So now that you have realized this, what are you going to do?” asked Lila.

“I do not know,” said Kurt. “I mean, I have had an epiphany but I honestly do not know how to turn this around. When I proposed to my investors that I wanted to create a bar like this, they were hesitant to move forward with it. I guess that they were worried about what people would think. I do not really blame them. After all, this is the sort of thing that you would not expect to be able to pull off, especially if you are running a hotel that is attempting to reach a mass customer base. At the end of the day, it all becomes about pleasing the investors, because if they are not happy then I probably would not be able to run my business.”

“I do not know if that is true,” said Lila. “You will be able to run your business, you just will not be able to expand it. And I think it is fair for you to be thinking about that. After all, you need to expand your business, that is how business works. However, right now I do not see anything special about this place at all. No, I see a hotel that is using the cowboy image to try to provide something new and fail miserably. You have cowboy themed parties at the nightclub, this is not really the kind of thing that would attract people. It’s awkward and embarrassing, in fact. And now that I think about it, there are a lot of things here that most people would not really enjoy, such as the horses. What is the purpose of them? They are not riding horses, they are too expensive for that. What do you even use those horses for?”

Kurt laughed and said, “My investors agreed that we should have horses here, but when I started to buy horses they were worried that because the horses were ugly it would scare people away from the hotel. These are the sort of people I have to deal with, can you believe it? So in the end we ended up spending close to six million dollars on these horses, and we did not really get anything in return. So now they just sit or stand out there, they are grazed and walked and that is pretty much it because they are too expensive to allow people to ride.”

“These are the kinds of things that you really need to start tackling,” said Lila. “If you want to create a brand for yourself, doing new things is important. This place is nice, but it can be a lot better. You can make sure that people are able to get a unique experience out of this, and wouldn’t that be something worth doing?”