How We're Building a Next-Gen Luxury Resort With Thousands of Other People - Melissa and Tanner Cummings, Cypress Resort

Josiah: Tanner and Melissa Cummings are the co-founders of Cypress Resort. You might recall I had a conversation with Tanner a little while back. I'll link in the show notes to that, where he talks about the origin of the company and a little bit more of their backstory. But I'm excited to share this episode, this conversation with you today, because I had the chance to sit down with them both in Atlanta, and they have accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time with their business, building a brand new hospitality company from the ground up. And I wanted you to hear the latest of what it looks like, their story, building this new property, this new resort from the ground up. They are writing their own playbook. How they're doing, what they're doing has never been done exactly like it before. I think you'll find this fascinating. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Tanner and Melissa. 

[intro music]

Tanner: I'm Tanner Cummings.

Melissa: And I'm Melissa Cummings.

Tanner: And we're the founders of Cypress Resort. And the hotel company is Thin Spaces Hotel Company. And we exist to cultivate and steward thin places on earth where the veil between heaven and earth is thinned. And Cypress Resort is our flagship hotel. So this is what we're starting.

Josiah: For me, this is such a treat because, you know, we've gotten to know each other over the past year or so, and it's been so fun to get to know each other over phone calls and, you know, virtual meetings and stuff like that. But to sit down with you both, you know, have lunch before we started recording, hear your story. And, you know, just before we sat down to record, you got some exciting news, right?

Melissa: Yes, we did. We were walking in here. And so the challenge has been that we've been looking to break ground, and then we got the news about a few weeks ago that we were going to be pushed back at least until the end of September, beginning of October. And honestly, I just felt discouraged. I just felt in a season where I just felt like there's one delay after another. I was like, oh, not another one. And this has felt particularly timely. The delay felt particularly, maybe frustrating is a better word, because we know that we're basically trying to get to put the foundations in before we head to the holidays so that it can cure over the holidays. So with one more delay, I was like, dang it, we're going to push back even farther. And then we walked in, I got the email, and our contractor was like, we've pulled some strings. We're breaking ground September 3rd. And I was like, yes!

Josiah: It's so exciting. And I wonder, for our listeners, if you talk about thin spaces, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the vision behind starting this. What is the need or the opportunity that you felt in the culture and the world that led you to lead very good jobs and go all in on doing this together and build a new hotel company?

Tanner: Well, to start it really boils around the physical and the land that we found, which we have a bigger story in another time. There's a 50-foot waterfall on the property and it just screams to us. Melissa was the one that found it, was the first one on property, was like, this is it. And the question is, what do you build around a 50-foot waterfall? The resort just makes sense to us and and it really is responding to The world recently transitioned 51% of population living in metro city areas. And that's the first time in human history that we've now subtly shifted to the majority in our condensed lives. And I think for us, it's the response to that of connecting to we are creatures, human beings are creatures of nature. And to connect to nature is hitting a deeper value. And for us personally, thin spaces is a spiritual, literal reference of Irish Celtic lore references a thin place, a holy place where the boundary between heaven and earth is thinned. And I think a lot of people have had the fortune to experience either a mountaintop or a waterfall or the Grand Canyon or any kind of spectacular view in space. And if you see those places, you can understand what it is we're trying to cultivate and steward.

Josiah: What's amazing, and we're recording this in the beautiful city of Atlanta. I mean, I love cities, but there's something that is so needed about nature, right? And I feel like the site that you found with this beautiful waterfall, it's a little less than an hour drive outside of Atlanta. So as much as I love Atlanta, sometimes you need to get out there and recharge. You think about all the people living and working in this beautiful city. They need a break. They need a break, right? So you're well positioned to capture this opportunity, this need that we have, and whether it's ancient Celtic cultures, or, you know, we were talking about Japanese forest bathing, like this is just something fundamentally human about we need this break. And so, but, you know, there's been more and more talk about nature-based hospitality recently. But in talking to you both, you have a vision that's kind of more than just putting up a tent. You are going kind of for the luxury side of the hospitality experience. And I wonder if you could speak to that, because I had. Before I started doing this, I had this preconception around luxury. I thought it was like marble and fanciness, and it was like probably for somebody else. Like, I didn't connect with luxury, but you're building it from scratch. Why focus on the luxury element of this project?

Melissa: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think that there's, so to give a little backstory, one of the things that Tanner and I, for the last 10 plus years, have just been a core value for us is hospitality. And we have found that a great space really does invade great connection. And part of that is that there's this element, and this will get to the luxury element, that when you have something where somebody is able to feel at home, at ease, like they can let their guard down, or they can be vulnerable, where they're able to just take that deep soul sigh, there's something about that that is like a luxury in and of itself. And it is, I wish it wasn't, that should just be like, I wish that was just the baseline. But unfortunately, in this day and age, it's not. Unfortunately, most of life is the frenetic pace. And so the letdowns, the release, where there's actually both space to be and then also space to be cared for is something that I think is becoming rarer and rarer and hence more valuable and more valuable. And so for us, part of the way we define luxury isn't just an overflow of some of our core values. So number one, just caring for people well and really serving people well. Another would just be the luxury of quality. We don't want just to put laminate countertops because they look good, but they're going to be not great to interact with. We want to really invest into beautiful materials. I've always been so inspired by the old cathedrals or the old masters who spent years building something. But that's part of the reason people still go see it to these days, is because regardless of the background, there's such a quality about it that is just inspiring. And so I think that there's this element, too. We want to really invest quality in these spaces. And then really, can you beat nature? I mean, no matter what we create, I can't create a 300-year-old oak tree. I mean, I can't create a waterfall like this. And so part of what we are really hoping to do in one of our taglines, I mean, not taglines, like in a weird, cheap way, but just one of the things we really feel strongly about is we really want to invite people to be immersed in nature, but enveloped in luxury. And so that sense that, like, instead of being one big building where you've got 300 rooms, and your next to your 500 best friends you've never met, You're like sitting next to the pool, next to gym, and you're like, who are you? I just want to be with my spouse or girlfriends or partner or whatever, that there's this element where we really want to immerse in nature, enveloped in luxury, so we're deconstructing the traditional resort so that there is still this element of privacy and independence of an Airbnb or short-term rental, but then still the amenities, services, and hospitality that you'd expect from a traditional resort.

Josiah: But it's cool because you think about inspiration or kind of, um, yeah, providing hospitality on a lot of different levels. Nature is, is beautiful. And nobody's saying compare with that, but you're thinking also about kind of like the craftsmanship of, you know, a countertop or a piece of furniture. And so, uh, one of the segments that in our discussion before we started recording is, you know, maybe it's people who live in Atlanta and or elsewhere and are coming up for the weekend. So you have like this little window to help them recharge and you're trying to hit them on every level, like beautiful surroundings, beautiful.

Tanner: you know furniture rooms it sounds like it's across the board definitely yeah it's definitely a an an intent that having positive and delightful experiences from from the initial interaction is required and so if if we have things that aren't of good quality, that diminishes. So we want to do everything we can. And this is, for us, it's a journey. That's the vision, and we're starting out. And to me, this is the invitation for everyone to come see, I've said this, behind the Wizard of Oz curtain, to see the man at the controls. But it's more for us, like, How did you make the Oz head? And how do you build the control panel? We haven't even built the control panel. We are about to break ground on the control panel. We want to invite you to see how this whole thing's built, not just that the levers are being pulled. So we're on a long journey, but this one that we're very committed to and know it will take time to really build and even correct if we need to, how to achieve that because luxury has some standards but I believe the strength in luxury is more of the serviceability of people and serving people well and knowing these little nuances that carry weight is probably more important than what kind of marble we got.

Josiah: Would you be open to spending a few moments going behind the scenes? Because I'll link for people who are listening or watching to this, I'll link in the show notes, our first conversation, we get a bit into your story where you left a great career in technology and then you, you know, and mostly building an e-commerce business. So you kind of were leading this kind of like great opportunities to go all in on hospitality. But, you know, kind of before we start recording today, you were talking a little bit about kind of the, In that notion of going behind the scenes around luxury, it sounded like there was an opportunity you saw where, yes, you're going to delight your guests and people visiting, but you saw, it sounds like an opportunity for building a hospitality business that actually impacts the people you work with too. And operating in this luxury space gives you more, I don't know, more tools to work with. I wonder if you would be willing to talk about that a little bit.

Tanner: Yeah, aiming at serving at a luxury level provides the margin for the opportunity. I'm not going to prescribe what other entrepreneurs and other business owners choose to do with that margin, but for us and how we desire to impact, and people will have to judge us by our actions when it happens, but the intent that we're going from is that that margin provides us the ability to serve better. Then our team better invest in them better which then of course they are who they are the ones serving our guests and so they can be invested in and then of course that goes beyond the boundaries of that resort. I'd love to build something that could accommodate free stays for people that can't afford but that's not where we get to start. We start here and then we expand from there and that margin provides us the ability to do that and the invitation for all hearing this is to observe the journey or in some cases join that journey on building this next It's just the next chapter in hospitality. I'm not bold enough to proclaim that it's forget everything you heard. This is what it is today. I just think it's the next chapter, but I think it's worth, it's our chapter all alive today, and it's worth investing in to make it a more exciting chapter than the last one.

Josiah: I think the chapter analogy, because it kind of talks, it I feel like it references this notion of like a book or something that is building on everything before in our conversations before, it's clear you're studying the very best providers of hospitality throughout history. I think about how can you both take elements of that into building your business, but there's also things that you're doing differently and I guess just to this notion of joining Would you be open to talk a little bit about your crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo? I've seen some stuff around this, and it looks like you both are taking a really interesting approach here. I guess first off, why do this? This is very different. I don't hear hospitality companies doing this.

Melissa: Well, first of all, I need to give credit where credit's due. So when Tanner about a year ago said, all right, what we're going to do is we're going to do a crowdfunding campaign to start to do pre-sales. I was like, we're not going to do crowdfunding. What are you talking about? My love, that's crazy. I was just flat out not into it. So Tanner was the visionary here. He was the one who really saw it. And as Tanner did so well as a visionary, he was really the one who just said, Melissa, I really think there's something here. I think there's an opportunity. to really invite people to join us on this journey with us. And obviously, as younger entrepreneurs, we've been in the entrepreneurial space for about five years, but younger to the hospitality industry, there's also this element of just needing to prove viability. Like, do people actually want this? And so one of the greatest lessons we had learned from our e-commerce days was that sometimes you can create what you think was the best product, and it just doesn't really serve somebody. It doesn't actually hit their pain point and fill that pain point. And so there can be a miss. And so really, to Tanner's wisdom, his idea was to… start to move towards crowdfunding, a.k.a. really just allowing somebody to pre-purchase a stay at Cyprus before we even broke ground. So that would be both forward-facing to banks and investors to show like, oh my gosh, people do want this. You can trust us. But then also, more importantly, backwards-facing to the backers. to be able to allow them to be both on the journey and then to participate in the actual building of Cypress. So one of the things that we have done is in our VIP Cypress group, which is just for people who put down a deposit in order to kind of have the first access to when we open up pre-purchasing, which we can get to in a second. They are both, so they're both invested, but then they also have been get to participate in polls. So a great example would be like, we did a poll on fire pits, right? Do you, would you rather have a gas fire pit or like a good old fashioned wood fire pit? I would have sworn that they would have wanted gas because again, like just a higher end space, the ease of it. Oh, I mean, most people wanted wood, which completely surprised me. And I thought, I am so glad I'm asking because while I'm sure anyone would appreciate a gas, the fact that I get to delight them more by providing, we get to provide for them what they actually want, was so amazing. So it was both this, like, it was this mutual benefit where they are entrusting us with leaving us by pre-purchasing, and then we also get to hear from them and have them on the journey. And they have skin in the game, too.

Josiah: This is an interesting piece as well, which didn't exist, like, not that long ago. So this is, like, an exciting kind of version of, like, y'all are building kind of an incredible hospitality company by using some of these new tools and mechanisms to engage people.

Melissa: which has been awesome. So we actually just launched, which is really fun. So we launched on August 13th, and amazing, we were fully funded in three minutes. We hit three minutes. In three minutes, we raised $25,000. By the end, within 12 hours, we were at over $500,000 and counting.

Josiah: Yeah, you hit your initial limit and it goes from $25,000 to $500,000. Yeah, like within that day. Less than that. Yeah, yeah. Were you expecting that?

Tanner: Not to that degree. It's a pleasant surprise and it's also There's a lot of work and effort that went into getting to that, but the thing that it really helps us do is connect with people who are interested in really seeing something new and something early. I think a lot of people really value being invited into spaces that they normally are not. You know, you just have like, I'm new to knowing what the difference between a soft opening and grand opening is. And I guess that means I was never invited to a soft opening. So I'm learning like, oh, okay. I guess I only saw when things really open, which means I guess I'm a normal guy or something.

Josiah: But what I like about this, though, is like, what is the saying? It's like, don't be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. And I feel like you both have this appetite to just learn stuff. It's like, maybe you don't need to come in with all the knowledge. Maybe to shake it up, you need to study. But maybe there's a certain amount of being new to the scenes, actually. Yeah.

Melissa: I appreciate you say that. And I love that you say it, too, because I think that really gets to our heart of service. And one of things we've loved is that we get to start to serve people now. And I think that there's this element where if we're constantly waiting to serve someone until it's like the perfect thing or the full thing, then, well, A, I think there's a lot of missed opportunities along the way, but I think it was one of your mentors who had kind of said, if you're not doing it now, you're not going to do it in the future. And so when I think about our story, so much of what has gotten us here today is nontraditional. Still, I see the way there are these threads that look so unconnected or so innocuous and not, you know, it wasn't an MBA or going to do real estate development. It was just serving well, doing dinner parties, getting to host, and just doing what we loved as an overflow. When I was a physician associate, I worked as PA for 10 years, and during that time, just on the side, I'd help friends do weddings. And so that element of listening and be like, what do you really want? What's your dream wedding? What do you want to look like? And then getting to use that to curate the space for them and their guests was such a joy. And so it's crazy now that we're doing that differently. So full circle coming back to like what you were saying was just that I love that this is an opportunity for us now to even in like the Facebook groups and on emails to get to serve people, we feel that very strongly. And for someone who's listening who's like, I would love to do that, but we can't do that right now, I think my thought would be like, well, how can you do it in the way that you can do it right now? You know, who are the people right within your sphere? Because that's how we started. And that has been the thing that has been both really life-giving but has also propelled us to where we are now.

Josiah: It's really exciting. And I'm going to break on you both for a little bit. I hope you don't mind this, but I think, you know, in our before we start recording, you know, we're talking, Melissa, you're volunteering at a mission. You're kind of helping people that, you know, don't have opportunities. You're kind of creating space for them. You're loving them. Tanner in our conversations, we've talked about all that and also kind of, we've done deep dives into technology and I'll link it to our part of our conversation on that. Maybe we'll have to record another episode about it. But I think from tech to serving people to weddings to, you know, we've talked a lot about kind of family life, but this is fundamentally who you both are. And you both are interesting too, to me, because you're doing this together. do this together and a lot of time like this is you know it stands out it stands out as different but i i sense you both pulling all of your life experiences all your professional experiences into creating this new thing which is

Tanner: yeah there's um there's some ancient uh that the hebrew for the name eve in the old genesis creation of the world in adam and eve in the old testament; the hebrew is I believe azor connecto and it's direct translation in maybe not the perfect way, but to stand in opposition to. And what was more eloquently explained by that was opposition as in a tent with two sides leaning against, and that force leaning against each other makes a sturdy tent. And I think for us, while many couples may look at this and be very concerned, warranted I think, because marriage has challenges, life has challenges, work has challenges. This leaning against each other has helped us accelerate our timeline on learning our strengths and weaknesses, learning our symmetries and where we both align and then where the other excels where the other one does not and where the other can grow in one spot and where the other one you know couldn't use more growth. I'll speak for myself lots of places. So to me like the benefit of doing that if you want to get business minded for a minute is almost actually I am being infinitely more efficient with my lives to blend them together. I'm not going to pretend to say that, you know, that's not a risk. It absolutely is. And for each person, they should make that decision with a great weight that it is. But for us, I think it's this mission to cultivate excellence and serve with authenticity. Our world is so massive today. Authenticity is so costly. It's so challenging to find that because we're packed with billions. And so I think it demands all of us to invest greater into service, invest more into things that matter. And it's really calling into question, individually, each and every one of us, How much does authenticity really matter to you? And how much does that matter to have a positive relationship with your neighbor and with your family, with your friends, with your workers? How much is that important to make that be the change in the world? And I think that's important and it really comes down, for me, it's worth that hard work.

Josiah: I love it. I, um, you know, so we're here recording at the end of August 2024. Um, I wonder if you could give our listeners a little bit of a sense of kind of what's coming up in the days, weeks, months ahead. We include some links in the show notes for people can learn for, but, uh, where could people, I guess, learn more, participate maybe in some level where, where should we point our listeners and viewers?

Melissa: Yeah, that is so great. So I think two things, probably depending on what most interests you. So we always have our website, cypressresort.com, where especially if you like backstories, that would be a great place to kind of document just some of our story and get in here. Hopefully it also normalizes. our story in getting here, some of the fears, disappointments, discouragements, obstacles, all of that. Then secondly, I would say, you know, if people are interested and maybe want to join us on the journey of actually building Cypress, that would be through Indiegogo. I'm sure it'll post a link. But same thing, just looking up Cypress Resort. We'd love to have you on the journey with us to build this and also have your input and insight and all of that. So I'd say those are probably the two main, and then obviously our socials. We're on both Facebook and Instagram. And yeah, we're just excited to, really we're just excited to use all of these platforms to continue to just be forward facing in the sense of sharing openly and transparently, something that's very important to us. To be extremely transparent in the act of integrity and just say, hey, here's who we are and here's what's going on. And so like I said, September 3rd, we're gonna be breaking ground, which is amazing. And then, yeah, our projected opening right now is May of 2025. So obviously we are hoping we stay. Coming up, wait. On timeline, and also we'll be keeping people posted if it's not. But yeah, we're just going to start the build. I'm excited about that, too, just to be able to start to really document the actual journey and the building. And then what's cool, too, is there'll be a lot of opportunities to really, as we're moving into more decision-making parts with the different phases, to get to have more input and to really get to serve people through that.

Tanner: The right kind of, the interesting ones. I'm not sure everyone's interested in helping us decide how the septic pipes do.

Melissa: Yeah, we won't ask you that.

Tanner: But paint color and different plants in the place and maybe the size of furniture, that will probably have, people will be more interested.

Melissa: We'll take care of the not fun stuff.

Tanner: We'll do all the boring things. Yeah, if there's people who are more interested in a deeper involvement, say investing or either joining the team or interested in having those conversations, they can reach out to me directly at Tanner at cypressresort.com and we'll link that as well. And that's, there's the great way of people being interested to see this place, pre-book, hear the story, come stay with us, we'd be delighted. And there's also, I'm sure, I hope, plenty of people equally interested to get a little more involved. So that would be a great way, just email.

Josiah: Incredible. We'll include links and details in the show notes. But thank you both for taking the time to chat.

Tanner: Thank you, Josiah.

Melissa: I appreciate you having us. Thank you, Josiah. Thank you.