Living The Red Life - From Bankrupt to Mountain Empire Builder

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

After losing everything and going bankrupt, Spencer Christensen rebuilds from zero and creates a business empire in one of the harshest environments imaginable. In this episode of Living the Red Life, a mountain lodge owner reveals how systems, relentless work ethic, and unconventional thinking turned failure into opportunity. From door-to-door sales to scaling a pest control company and acquiring a 130-year-old lodge, he shares the mindset behind building multiple revenue streams and operating in extreme conditions. This conversation dives into entrepreneurship, systems, and creating experiences that attract high-level clients seeking clarity, growth, and connection beyond the noise of modern life.Key Takeaways• Systems and SOPs are the foundation of scalable businesses• Environment and culture shape performance and success• Failure is often the fastest path to clarity and opportunity• High-level clients pay for experiences, not just services• Simplicity and checklists prevent costly mistakes in businessNotable Quotes• “Systems is everything.” • “If you forget one thing, it could be the one thing you needed.” • “The world we live in is so artificial.” • “People have a deep need to connect with nature.” • “We need to prioritize the most critical things and ignore the rest.”Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

The world that we live in, oh yeah. Is so artificial. Oh, yeah. In every way, imaginable. Oh, for sure. I mean, your relationships with other people, artificial. Yeah. A lot of the content that you see, and even more so now with AI, right?

And I think that our brains as humans aren't really designed to function like that, right? I think that we're designed to have real connections with real people, not online. and certainly not AI for connections. It's really deep, intrinsic, embedded need that people have to connect with nature. One thing that really, really would help with entrepreneur, if you're trying to build any sort of business. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast,

and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the Red Life, ditch the Blue Pill, take the Red Pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Welcome back to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast. The Legacy Maker's edition, also 10X Red Life Edition. For Insight Success, I am Regiottierrez.

Now that we've got all of our brands and IPs out of the way. Let's see. Let me look at my notes here. Who do we have next here? Spencer Christensen, my friend, how are you, buddy? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. You come with a vision I've heard of a lodge.

Tell me about this kingdom that you are building and we'll call it a lodge. Yeah, so it's a lodge in, uh, western Colorado. It's on a mountain called Grand Mesa. The lodge itself is called Grand Mesa Lodge. It's about 15, 16 cabins and a main lodge. And I think that we're the highest lodge in the continental United States that operates here around. Very cool. So we're about two miles above sea level.

Right on. 5,500 feet. I'm eager to know more about this lodge because I come from the video game world. And boy, have I solved a lot of murder mysteries and lodges, and so as my partner, Lauren. Tell me about the mystique about this lodge, especially out of the Colorado. What have he built, sir? The mountains are really interesting and the lodge is very unique. The lodge was actually started not by me. It's existed since the 19th century. It was started in 1897, I think. And in the early days, it was just a fishing lodge where people would ride their horses up and stay for a couple months

in the summertime. It has obviously traded a hand several times. And when I came upon it, it was, the main lodge was in, was really nice and was new. But the buildings were very old and run down. And I was like, this is a really cool place. It would be awesome to have somebody that could run it and could build it and could like bring it forth in like all of its glory.

The mountains really, it's kind of tough to run a lodge in those situations. The reason I mentioned earlier that it was the highest lodge in the continental United States that's open year round is the difficulty of running a lodge in an area that gets so much snow. Oh, for sure. So we get, on average, about 400 inches of snowfall per year. There's like 30 to 40 feet of accumulation. And obviously very cold. and so there's just a lot of operational challenges.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you have that much snow that, I mean, six months out of the year, it's just snow, snow, snow, snow, snow. And we run year-round. So when folks visit the lodge, they're getting 20% of the experience, while 80% of it's really maintenance operations, things that are happening behind the scenes?

That's not, yeah, that's probably a very good way to express it. I mean, just to show up, just the amount of snow removal and the amount of other maintenance that needs to go into the operational, whether it's, you know, keeping the cabins unfrozen, whether it's, you know, keeping power to them, and all the other things that go along with running in a very, basically a very inhospitable place. Wow.

I mean, that much snow, very cold. You've got other issues, too. I mean, that high we get a lot of thunderstorms. A couple of years ago, we were in the main lodge, and it sounded like artillery fire outside. lightning struck the lodge and also struck a tree right next to it. And the tree was huge. I mean, at the base is probably four feet.

I can see you're a tree hugger. I recognize a good tree hugger. Well, the lightning bolt definitely wasn't. It totally destroyed the tree. That was technically you from a different dimension coming down saying, it's your time. It's your time to go. There's tons of trees up there, so

it's just the one. It's still a beautiful place. But yeah, there's just a lot of a ton of challenges running a lodge in a pretty remote place in, you know, that high up in the mountains. I got to ask, who the hell goes to a remote place where it sounds very challenging to relax? Like, who is your clientele? What happens in this lodge? So we have two different kinds of clientele. The first type of person that we have is the scenic.

Byway Traveler, and this is summertime mostly. Oh, we're done. So we're a little off of I-70, which obviously is a major corridor. And then we're on a scenic byway. It's called Highway 65. And we're about 30 to 45 minutes off of I-70. But the scenic byway, Highway 65, is marked on maps, well-known. It's labeled and marketed and known.

is this beautiful scenic bypass, right? So we get a lot of people in the summertime that are just passing through. And we're right off that main road. It's not a highway, it's not a freeway, but it's a highway. And so we get a lot of people that are just walking, and this is in the summertime, they just walk into our store, our restaurants.

Sure. We have a bar, grill, a little convenience store. They walk in and they're just passing through. So that's one kind of person that is there. Those people usually are just there for a day or so and then they move on. I guess there's two other kinds. There's people in the summer that are there because they're fishing or they're camping or they spend a little bit of time.

Totally disconnected from the world. Typically up on the mesa you don't have connection. And you do at our lodge, but if you go anywhere outside of that, we have Starlink and so we have internet there. But people go in camp and stay in the cabins and it's just a way to go camp. camp and get away. Right on. So you've got that.

And then you have the winter clientele, which is totally different than your summer clientele. In the wintertime, we don't really get by just scenic by traffic or people just passing through. It's almost all destination. And it's mostly snowmobillers coming to ride. The Mesa is a really interesting place, the mountain upon which the lodge sits. the locals call it the highest flat top mountain in the world. It's like I said, it's about 10, 11,000 feet. And it's relatively flat on top.

And so it offers endless amount of rideable snowmobile terrain. Whereas a lot of other mountains, you know, if you've got a mountain like this, there's a lot of terrain that's inaccessible to country, whether it's snowbilling or backcountry skiing. And so the terrain of the mesa kind of offers this really unique place to ride snowbills. And so we get a lot of people that come in from all over the United States, especially the Midwest, obviously people in Colorado, and they're there to tear up our snow, you know, shred the mountain. I like these folks that are the explorers that are just the wanderers.

How many of them are entrepreneurs trying to look for a purpose? Like, how many eccentric folks do you see? I think a lot of people that go to the mountain, whether they're entrepreneurs or whether they're just looking for clarity in life, I think a lot of people retreat to the solitude of the mountain because they're looking for clarity in their life. And a lot of times it's business related. I think a lot of people, they are, you know, maybe their company that they're building. I think the snowm billers in the wintertime, I think that group of people, probably most of them are business owners.

Right on. Snowmobiling is a very expensive sport. I didn't think what snow is expensive. Yeah, the snow bills especially. I mean, they're, it, snowmills are far more expensive than dirt bikes or four-wheelers. I saw a meme a little while ago that said, my parents, when I was a kid, taught me how to snow bill. And now I have $6.43 in my bank accounts. So it's like, it's kind of an expensive hobby. And so therefore, I think most people that are in that sport are business owners that can afford it. And so I would say that in my observation, probably, 70 or 80% of my snowmilling clientele are also business owners, entrepreneurs, business managers, with the majority of them, probably being entrepreneurs. So when you expect this clientele, these folks that are running towards something or running away from something, do you kind of pivot your establishment? Do you kind of like lean into servicing these folks with more of a, what you call it, a white glove connoisseur service?

Or are you just kind of like battleships already? this is our SOPs, we operate, we operate. The goal is to elevate the lodge. I've had the lodge. I bought it about four or five years ago. Wow. And I bought it. I have another company, but I bought the lodge because I felt like I had the bandwidth

to elevate that place. The lodge has been there for 125 years, 130 years. Wow. it's going to be there in 130 years after me. So it's certainly something that there is a legacy there. Yeah, yeah. My goal with the lodge was to elevate it from mostly a rundown and an establishment that most of the cabins have been built. Some of them have built 100 years ago.

And my job was to elevate that and to bring it up to more of a... I don't know if I'd say a white glove, but definitely a four-star, five-star kind of expertise. For sure, as opposed to, you know, one or a two-star, which is probably realistic of what it was when I found. Right on. So, yeah, that's great that you literally saw the brick and mortar

of the establishment, this lodge, and turned it around. And it's got to be rewarding. And I'm sure it's always a fun dopamine high where you're literally on what you've built. Talk about what you're doing with experiences. I immediately thought, gosh, I really hope he converts these lodges into haunted house experiences

for Halloween and charge your premium. I'm like, where are you, you know, experimenting, like almost being on legacy makers? Where are you experimenting with your marketing and how are you making the lodge experience so unique? Yeah, so we have several things. The lodge itself, obviously you have

the cabins and so you have a, in that sense, it's a lot like a hotel, a place to stay. We are doing several things in this, I'll talk about the winter specifically. We've developed this back country experience where it's a skills clinic, where we teach people how to ride a snow bill and all the skills that they would need for people who want to get

into it. I've written a book. It's called Ride the Wild, and it's marketed as the most comprehensive book ever written on Backcountry Snowball Writing. And in that book, it goes over a huge range of different stuff that you would. need to know in order to ride a snowbill in the backcountry. So avalanche safety skills. Like how avalanche went first before safety. Yeah. Avalanches, yeah, right now, like riding in the back country, avalanches is a very large

component. I mean, you have to understand avalanches and how they work in order to be safe. Skills clinics, like how to ride wilderness survival, how to get a sled out of back country. we go over checklists, all kinds of things. A lot of these things, actually the book itself was written

about backcountry riding, but there's kind of a second element to the book, which is how to use the same concepts that we learn in backcountry snowmbell riding and how to apply those to business. So that's what Ride the Wild is. That's awesome.

So for example, we talk about, with snowmilling, one of the things that I go over is a checklist. And the book talks about this a lot. So you've got, before you ride,

you've got a thousand things, it seems like, that you need to bring with you. It's a little different than going to the beach. You get your towel. You get your shorts and sunglasses and sunscreen in your set, right? And confidence. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. You need that too, especially in Miami.

Continue to carry on. You definitely need that as well with snowmilling. You know, snowmilling. It's such an inhospitable place that you're riding in. So you've got your helmet, your goggles, your gloves, your monos, your boots, all your surviving gear. your avi pack, your beacon, your trance, your radio, just all kinds of stuff. That's like what, 5K in already? Yeah, probably, probably at least that.

You could even go more wild on. You still haven't even stepped on to the damn thing. You're ready 5K in. All right, continue carry on. Not including the sled. Boy, if I only had a lodge to put all this stuff in. Carry out, mama. So one thing that we train people with on snow billing is right before you leave,

there's what we call the ride final checklist. For sure. We do that here. Do you really? So for like for video making? Yeah, launching a studio like to check off audio everything and then boom Yeah, because if you forget one thing right That is it due to your video All a lot, yeah, it's gone like you have to redo everything

I mean audio here if you forget to turn on the audio Yeah, or you forget. But we have backups here So we have different order we have backups here but if that backup goes down it's happened Yeah, it happens so because sorry to interrupt No, no not at all So the same way of snow building and you forget one thing. For example, when you ride snow bill is the same way with backcountry skiing. You have a device is called a transceiver and it sends out a beep of your location so that if

God forbid you ever get buried in an avalanche, somebody else with the transceiver can come and find and it increases the speed at which they can dig you out. That only works if you turn on the device and there have been people that have been killed in avalanches and they've been, they've found them with the transceiver in the off. It's just one little thing. And that's just a one little thing. And that's just one thing. I mean, there's several things that you need to do before you go, you know, checking fuel. Like in my book, actually, I talked about a story where when I first got the lodge, I've got a billion things going on, right? Like, everybody's coming to me. Dude, you own a lodge. I own a lodge. We got hit with this major storm. I think we got like three or four feet. And I had

a friend called me up and he was like, hey, Spencer, do you want to go ride? And I was like, yeah, I'll ride tomorrow. You know, the snow's going to be good. He got there. He was already and I'm still run around getting everything ready to go because I'm unfortunately I want to go play but also I'm kind of there running a business yeah yeah and uh spence in his lodge good old spence right short we we when I finally am like okay I got to go I jump on the sled we book it down the trail like five minutes and five miles down the trail I looked down at my snow bill and realized that I'd forgotten to fuel up oh geez so you forgot your SD card my SD card that's that's equivalent to not putting an SD card in your camera.

And there had to be that guy that went back to my friends like this guy and he was running with three or four other friends. And I was like, hey, I don't know what to tell you guys. I'm a chump. I've got to go back and refuel. So it's just this one little thing. So we train on checklist. One thing that really, really would help with entrepreneur,

if you're trying to build any sort of business, systems is everything, right? Oh, fuck. It's everything. We're currently doing that now here. We're building our SOPs. You've got to have an SOP, a system for everything. And then so what I talk about a lot in the book, and it's applied to snowbuilding, but you can apply it to anything.

You can apply it to your personal life workout. You can apply it to your business. Oh, yeah. If you're trying to build a team, you create a checklist and then you post that in an easy-to-see place where you can run that checklist right before you do whatever you're going to do. So in your case, you know, running cameras, making film. In somebody else's case, let's say somebody's running a service company. Oh, yeah. And they've got their technicians or their service providers that are going out.

There's a checklist that they probably should have written for each technician to do before they leave the office or before would. And I know there's a broad range of entrepreneurs and they have all kinds of different stuff, but whatever you're doing, a checklist is critical. So we use that a lot in snow building. I have a gear checklist before I leave the house checklist. the most important one I think is the ride final. So it's like you're all geared up, you're on your snow bill,

you look down, you run your checklist mentally. You just like five months. It's like 10 items. Sure, sure. Then you turn off down the trail. If you forget any one of those items, maybe nothing will happen, but it also could be, you know,

it could be that one thing that you needed. Yeah, yeah. And it's a domino effect. Like when we started our session, we're transparent. We're now we're behind here. And it's not because we're not bad or good at our job. It's just because we just ran behind.

What affects one studio affects the other studios, especially when we're running a session, hosting and taking photos and doing the good old client relations. Yeah. Talk about how you operate and, like, dude, you own a lodge. Like, what do you, are you filming movies there? What are you doing beyond just having folks check in and check out? So a big, the, the biggest part of what we do is backcountry experience

or just the experience besides stay in there. So we have people come out. They ride, you know, they ride stone bills, but we do training clinics. We teach people how to not dying in avalanche. Yeah. We train people how to ride. We do, that's all in the wintertime. In the summertime, what we're looking at expanding to right now, which is super popular, is I think it'll be very popular.

doing a foraging class for people that want to learn how to forage in the forest. And a big part of it is mushrooms. Like, mushrooms are very popular and becoming more and more popular. Whatever do you mean? They're great on hamburgers. Is that what you're talking about? Great on hamburg.

I think that the psychedelic nature of mushrooms, I think, pulls people off. So this is a family show. But we don't do anything without. We just, just with the NACB. Natural healthy mushrooms that you can harvest and they grow all over on the Grand Mesa. And so that is a, you know, we're looking at doing clinics and things like that to engage people. That's great. Another thing that the lodge is really interesting for, as far as the local community, is it's kind of a hub for activities.

We do live music. Right on. Yeah. We do. There's a lot of community events that we hold there to pull people out. possibilities, yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of possibilities. And I think for the community itself, it provides kind of a community center.

Another thing beyond the lodge is the marketing and the social media reach that we have. When we, in the winter especially, when we get snow, especially the first snow of the year, we have a very loud megaphone. We post those pictures of the first snow, and everybody is interested in it. Oh, for sure. We actually just, so what is it? It's like the middle of September right now, right? Yeah, yeah. September, it's the 17th.

We just got snow about four or five days ago, and we took a short little video of it, and it did three, 400,000 views. Fresh powder, as they like to call it. Yeah, in this case, it wasn't powder. It was just like light flakes that didn't accumulate because of September. But we are, we're building a center, an online platform where we bring people from all over the world, all over the U.S., all over the world. Hell yeah, cool. People that are interested in the outdoors.

So it's a hub for outdoor, the community where people who are interested in the mountains, hiking, fishing, snow billing, camping, you name it. all things outdoors. That's awesome because when I have, hear me out, when I have dinner, I like to enjoy sushi, but I always go for like the chef's course where it's like the premium experience, where I don't ask any questions, I just want to sit down and have a good beer,

and then things just come to me. I'm going to pay the premium. What does a chef want me to experience in his establishment? So what you've established is essentially kind of that where it's like, here's the premium experience and I'm also going to educate you and then ascend you and keep you within my culture because I'm also thinking this experience changes

and modulates during the seasons. So what you do in the winter versus what you do in the spring is very different. But your clients can come back and be like, oh, man, what can I be learning and doing the spring versus the winter? And so on and so forth. And I'm sure you're hosting retreats where folks that are very eccentric and they've got their tribes can come out and rent out your establishment and host a retreat where folks can write their books,

find purpose, ascend, and learn how to make a killer mushroom in the process. Absolutely. We actually had a guy that stayed at our lodge for about nine months. Yeah, yeah. And he was writing a book. Oh, right on. I was the co-founder of Twitter? Okay, cool.

No, he wasn't the founder of Twitter. I can't remember what his book was called, but I think it has been published, though. So he sold his house, went up to the lodge, just rented a cabin for, it was about nine months straight. Most authors do this. Yeah. Yeah. Completely break from Twitter X. all the distractions of life.

All the patterns, all noises, all this shit, yeah. That's really, I think, one of the biggest things that the lodge offers. The world that we live in is so artificial. Oh, yeah. In every way, imaginable. Oh, for sure. I mean, your relationships with other people, artificial.

Yeah. A lot of the content that you see, and even more so now with AI, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, how much, now what you see online, how much of it is even real? I mean, it's one thing if it's artificial city. It's just infomercial city.

Everything is so artificial. And I think that our brains as humans aren't really designed to function like that, right? I think that we're designed to have real connections with real people, not online and certainly not AI connections. And I also think that there's a this really deep, intrinsic, embedded, need that people have to connect with nature. Oh, yeah. And nature of all kinds, like, you know, if you're in Florida or you're on the beach, going out and connecting with the Everglades, or the beach or whatever, is if you're in the

mountains, connecting with the mountains, I think that there's something very deeply spiritual, very deeply soothing to the soul to go into nature and break away from artificial, social media, artificial everything. Yeah, concrete jungles. Yeah. Concrete jungle. I just, I don't think that the human condition has been built to survive, to thrive in a concrete jungle.

I think that, yeah, I think that a lot of people live. And that's fine. But I think that it's good every once in a while. If you live in a city every once in a while to break off and to experience more of a disconnected. And this is where Grand Cardone would step into this podcast. be like, well, let me sell you a little timeshare. Yeah. Go ahead, but I was going to wrap us up.

My brother, when he was, this was decades ago, but he got to, he ended up buying a time share. I can't remember the company that he was with. But he could never sell the thing. And it kind of became this financial burden for him. Oh, gosh. And the other thing, which is funny is that my brother wasn't even into traveling. So I don't know why you bought it, but I'm sure time travels is,

shares are great for the right person. For him, it wasn't. So it's time travel as well. All right, my friend, Spence, how can people learn more about you? How can folks discover this amazing property? So we're online at Grand Mesa Lodge.com. So really easy to remember the name of our company. Grand Mesa is the name of the mountain.

It's the largest flat top mountain in the world. If you Google largest flat top mountain in the world, you'll probably find the Grand Mesa. It's on the... Half Life. The western... It's on the western slope of Colorado's Rocky Mountains. Grand Mesa Lodge.com. You can also find this on Facebook.

We post regularly on Facebook. We do a lot of updates. You can see pictures. If it's the kind of thing that you want to come out, obviously come visit us, but if you just want to connect with us, get on Facebook. And every day we post pictures and videos

of the beauty of the mountains. And it's a way for you to connect kind of to that world without actually being there. But obviously going there is the best for sure. If you ever have a moment or, you know, in the crapper, take a moment to Google Half-Life, the PC game. There's a base. It was actually quite randomly mentioned this morning.

There's a base called the Black Mesa, and it's in the Grand Mesa. So you're probably neighbors. I can probably see your villa in the game. That's a nerd joke there. But yes, it's very much a thing. It's called Half-Life? It's called Half Life. It's quite popular.

It's a little bubble. A small company called Valve made it. Google it. You'll thank me later. With that, Bubba, it was such a pleasure. We're actually going to step into that other room and do your interview now for Legacy Makers. What are we going to learn about you?

Give us a preview before we hit record in that room. So I think a big part of that is the kind of the journey that I took in order to get to where I am. Why build the Grand Mesa? what the long-term goal of it is and also what's the what was the journey what were the forces that shape me and what were some of the things

that I learned and some of the things that I've gotten for my childhood that's allowed me to be where I am and to be doing what I'm doing. Right on, man. I'm so eager to learn more and I stoked to hit record in that other room. With that, Bob, I appreciate your time and energy. We're going to do this thing.

Thank you. But we're going to end it here. with our Red Life slash Living Your Legacy podcast. For Inside Success, I am Ray Gutierras.