The Story of The Glamping Insider

I  think I’m on the cusp of something great.

After years of grinding with little reward, I’m almost there.

In a matter of weeks, my business will open 5 stunning mirror cabins on a beautiful property in the Canadian Rockies. We’re set to crack $100k in bookings before the first guest arrives. 

And we’re two weeks from wrapping up a year-long, roller coaster ride of a community raise, with $564k raised from 141 wonderful backers (13 days to go).

Things are looking really good.

But the road here was a long one. Really long.

It was paved with stress, toil, and a whole load of setbacks.

It’s time to tell my story in full. From the beginning to April 2025, the most important month of my life.

Let’s go back to the start, shall we?

The Glamping Insider, reporting for duty.

Baby Insider

I had a great childhood.

Born in the middle of England, three months before the millennium, I wouldn’t change a thing. My early days were mostly spent on the football pitch (the real kind of football), reading books, and playing on my Playstation 2.

I got lucky with my parents. They shaped the belief that I could do anything. If I set a goal, as long as I was prepared to work for it, they would support me no matter what.

Initially, that goal was to become a footballer (still not over that dream dying). Then it was attending a great university (that one was more realistic).

I was never made to feel silly, or overly-ambitious, for chasing an aspirational target. They let me walk, run, and sometimes fall, on my own. 

Without knowing it, they were preparing me for the bumpy ride that would follow. 

Student Insider

I picked up decent grades at school, and got accepted to study Law at The University of Manchester.

On a sunny day in September 2018, 18-year-old me arrived in my dorm room, ready for a new adventure.

Uni was everything I thought it would be. New friends, nights out, and sweet, sweet freedom (I love my parents but I was really ready to move out).

The studying was less fun. At first, I thought it was because law didn’t agree with me. But I came to realize the subject wasn’t the issue. 

I’d caught the entrepreneurial bug.

I’d been consuming entrepreneurial books and podcasts. I was seduced by the idea of taking matters into my own hands. About 6 months into first year, I knew I didn’t want to get a corporate job straight out of uni.

This isn’t some Bill Gates-esque story, though. I wasn’t clever or brave enough to drop out and build a world-beating startup. I stayed the course and finished the 4-year degree. 

But in the meantime, I started looking for opportunities.

Into the Glamping World

I found one close to home right in the middle of the pandemic. I knew a guy called Ste who owned a small business called Made Of Bits, which sold timber frames for these weird contraptions called “glamping pods”.

Glamping was a term I’d heard before, but never paid attention to. Turns out, it was a thriving little industry in the UK, that Covid had accelerated. Glamping pod makers were popping up like nobody’s business, and Ste was trying to reach them.

So, like the little hustler I was, I offered to help him out in my spare time. I had no clue what I was doing, but I started contacting manufacturers and got a couple of decent leads.

Then I got speaking to a guy called Calum MacLeod. Calum was the founder of Glampitect, a UK-based consultancy helping prospective glamping operators get into business. 

Calum was making waves in the UK industry. He was switched on, marketing savvy, and growing the business quickly. Crucially, he was the kind of guy who gave opportunities to people like me.

So I hopped on board.

I was soon working across multiple departments. Feasibility studies, site design, sales, you name it. 

It was the perfect glamping education.

After a year of working part-time for Glampitect, I attended my first UK Glamping Show in 2021. I was part of a team selling feasibility studies to attendees, and the whole weekend was a resounding success.

One thing the Glampitect guys knew how to do was party when things went well.

So, after the show finished, we hit the town. Many beers were consumed, and as we were walking down the street to the next bar, I said to Calum:

“Let me crack America for you.”

It was to be a defining moment in my story.

A few weeks later, we were hatching plans for what became Glampitect North America. We had 9 months until I graduated university, so I started consuming every bit of info I could find on the North American glamping industry.

It meant learning all about zoning rules, unit types, and even the geography of the US and Canada (my knowledge was woefully lacking at the time). All while completing my degree and preparing to say goodbye to the friends I’d made over the course of four wonderful years.

There was just one hiccup. It was practically impossible to get a US visa to bootstrap a brand new startup. So Glampitect North America (GNA) would have to be launched from the UK.

I knew I’d need to be laser-focused to get GNA off the ground properly. I also knew I didn’t want to move back in with my parents (sorry Mum and Dad).

So I moved to a random town called Leicester, where I knew absolutely nobody, with the express aim of working like a dog to give the new business the best possible chance of success.

And so, on Thursday July 7th 2022, I launched Glampitect North America from my little studio apartment in Leicester.

A Year of Grind

That year was a bit extreme. I lived the exact same day over and over again. Wake up at 8am, head to the gym, get back to the apartment, and work relentlessly.

Of course, I was 5-8 hours ahead of my potential clients. So I wouldn’t turn off the laptop until at least midnight, with calls often running into the early hours of the morning.

At first, the clients weren’t coming. I worked and worked and worked, called and called and called, and got nothing.

But finally, a month and two days after opening for business, a hero by the name of Louis Timberlake paid me $250 for a zoning report. The next day, I got two more clients.

From there, things got a little easier.

One of the best things I did that year was go all-in on writing blogs. The aim was to rank at the top of Google for search terms like “zoning for glamping” and “how to start a glamping business”. It took a while, but the blogs really began to perform. The blogs I wrote in those early days are still a huge source of leads, investors and partners today.

Above all, I began to build some kind of reputation in the industry, particularly through my podcast. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to attract the attention of a guy called Kevin O’Brien, a serial entrepreneur who was keen to get into the glamping space. 

Kevin had been working on a revenue share business model, where he’d deploy glamping units to landowners and take a split of the accommodation revenue. I loved the idea, and it seemed like the ticket to doing developments of my own.

This was, of course, the beginning of Posh Outdoors. 

But this was spring 2023. There’s still two more years of the story left to tell.

What followed was a rollercoaster ride of emotion: excitement, disappointment, a dramatic exit, a return, and a year of intense capital-raising.

That story needs a whole dispatch of its own. And you can read it next week.

End of Part 1.