North American Gamebird Association Spotlight on Romeo Bravo Software, Interview with Paul Robertson, President
Romeo Bravo Software is a hospitality tech company offering premium software platforms for the management of high-end sporting lodges, guest ranches, outfitting and guiding operations. Our mission is to provide our partners with technology that results in increased sales and profitability. Presently, we have over 150 customers across the U.S. and Canada.
Tell us about the origins of Romeo Bravo Software, and how you got started?
After 20 years of successful software entrepreneurship in the oil & gas business, our founder, Glenn Turner, was ready for a new challenge and recognized an opportunity to bring enhanced technology to the sporting lodge and outfitting industry. With that, Romeo Bravo Software was launched in January of 2020 with the acquisition of Lodge-ical, the first of four software programs now in our product portfolio. Developed 25 years ago by Paul and Kristin Williamson in Livingston, Montana, Lodge-ical is the original property management system (PMS) specifically designed to support the unique needs of those in the business of hunting and fishing. Additionally, because Lodge-ical was particularly popular with lodges in the Orvis endorsed network, it was a perfect fit with our goal of becoming the leading provider of software to the sporting lodge, hunt club, and outfitter industry.
Over the next two years, we made two more key product acquisitions and brought Guide Pointer and Ranch Bookings into the fold, and this had the important result of bringing in even more reputable lodging and outfitting business professionals into the community of Romeo Bravo customers. Meanwhile on a simultaneous track, our in-house product development team worked diligently for three years to create our most sophisticated web-based software to date, Yellowstone. Yellowstone is a PMS, enterprise resource planner (ERP), and guest resource manager (GRM), with fintech capabilities designed to support our customers for the next 25 years and beyond.
Give us some background on the RBS team? How are you structured and tell us about your company culture?
Our team is unique in that we have thoughtfully brought together a combination of talented individuals with vast hands-on experience in the sectors that are critically important to our customers, lodge operations, hospitality management and software development.
Glenn Turner set about building our team by first bringing in Lodge-ical founder Kristin Williamson, as well as Atul Venkatasubramani, Programmer and Business Analyst, to drive product management. Concurrently, I joined as President to run our day-to-day ops, with a focus on Sales & Marketing, and I work closely with my colleagues, Colt Christopherson, Wingshooting and Shooting Sports Product Manager, Ed Stein, Sales and Implementations, Jodey Dance, Director of Support, and Will Darby, Customer Success Manager.
Our company culture is one of continuous improvement and constant development. We know our customers personally and we are avid about collecting feedback from the users of our software, both for the purpose of optimizing our products and planning future enhancements. In short, the crux of every conversation we have is about clearly understanding our customers’ goals and objectives, what challenges exist, and which solutions we believe can be applied, to facilitate positive change and growth in their operation.
Lastly, it goes without saying our entire team has a passion for the sporting lodge, outfitting and guide industry. We love to hunt and fish in our free time, and whether it is an Executive Chef, Lodge Manager, Accountant or a Guide, we have great respect for all the hard-working professionals with whom we work.
Now that you’ve been in business a few years, what opportunities specifically do you see on the road ahead?
For one, both in the near-term future and for the long-term, we are dedicated to working with the NAGA members on making more and better software tools available specifically to wingshooting lodges and hunting clubs. It was after our first NAGA convention in ‘21 that we began to feel the gamebird industry has been relatively underserved by the software industry at-large. The tools that were available, while workmanlike and practical, all seemed somewhat dated. Likewise, there was a void at the software service provider level, so we elected to step up and be the company that would design the tools the gamebird industry was lacking.
Whether it is for the purpose of booking a hunt, or paying for one, a growing number of customers have higher levels of expectations for using technology in their lodge and hunt club experience. To this end, we recently added digital payment processing to our software. This has been a great boon to our customers who are generally seeing happier customers, more efficient transactions (less human error), and in many cases they’ve lowered their credit card processing fees.
This is just one small example of a feature we recently published that is now available to our customers. Another one that we received a lot of requests for was the ability to integrate with QuickBooks Online and we were excited to activate that feature earlier this year. In the coming months we plan to release a suite of features that will give our customers the ability to allow their clientele to book hunts on-line.
We also currently have a mobile hunt application called Project Zenith, that integrates with Yellowstone, and is currently in testing by guides in the field. Project Zenith will optimize communications between your operations team and your hunting guides, making critical information about every detail of the hunt and the client readily available and giving our lodge and hunt club customers the opportunity to create a more seamless customer experience.
As we move forward with our company mission, this is just the beginning of the technology we will make available to the lodges and hunt clubs, and as the industry and our company continues to evolve together, we will identify and develop the next wave of future enhancements to keep our customers on the forefront.
That’s really exciting! One last final question, Romeo Bravo Software has a unique ring to it, a lot of NAGA members have asked, what is the meaning behind the name?
We get that question a lot so I’m glad you asked! Our founder is also a pilot, and he is familiar with the phonetic alphabet and using aviator terminology. Like a lot of young businesses these days, it was important for us to have a name with a unique ring to it and a web address that’s easy to remember. I wish there was more to it, but that was the inception!
Our mission is to provide software that increases sales and profitability
for businesses that focus on adventure travel and outdoor recreation.
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