Why We Built a "Systems-Driven" Safari
When people hear we're building safari lodges in Tanzania, they almost always assume it was a romantic escape from the corporate world, which is nice. They picture us trading spreadsheets for sunsets, finally finding peace under a baobab tree.
The reality? Much less poetic, and honestly, much more interesting.
We didn't leave the world of complex systems behind — in fact, that feels like our competitive advantage. We systematize almost everything we do, to a degree where even we as founders and management could be replaced by another operator.
For the start, building in the Serengeti is a masterclass in what I've come to call "The Reality of the Bush", that humbling moment when the neat lines of a financial model meet the truth of African geography.
The $15,000 Pothole
On our very first delivery to the construction site, the truck's steering failed. It veered off a gravel road and tipped over. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, but that single moment cost us $15,000 in repairs and a week of delays before we'd even broken ground properly.
Then I understood that we won’t be able to be just an investor out here. You have to be an operator. You have to understand fuel consumption, spare parts availability, and the very specific physics of a mud-slicked road at 6am.
For someone coming from finance, it was my first real lesson and the spreadsheet, I can tell you, does not account for the terrain. 😀
The "Always On" Philosophy
We are building spaces where people can switch off, but that means the opposite for our operations. One of the questions I get asked most often is why we stay open year-round. Most camps in Tanzania, especially in the north and south of the Serengeti, shut down for several months during the "off-season."
Janis, Simon and I never bought into that model.
My co-founder Janis came from Amazon, and he brought with him a philosophy that reshaped how we think about operations: consistency is the byproduct of continuous operation. Stop a machine, and it's twice as hard to get it running again.
We apply that same logic to our lodges. Staying open means we maintain everything on a rolling basis:
a roof gets fixed when it needs fixing, not during a frantic three-month catch-up.
Our team stays sharp.
Our infrastructure stays solid.
And the guest who visits in April gets exactly the same standard of experience as the guest who visits in August.
We do not want that to be a happy accident. That's the whole point.
Matching Capital with Impact
The bigger ambition behind Conserve Safari is to establish the safari properties as a genuine, distinct asset class, one that has historically been a closed club, accessible only to family offices or institutional players with larger pots of capital to commit.
By creating a disciplined, systems-driven investment framework, we've been able to reduce the variables that make this asset class feel risky from the outside: diversified revenue streams, rolling maintenance that prevents costly surprises, and year-round operations that keep cash flow predictable rather than seasonal.
The same logic extends to how we've structured the investor experience itself. Standardized legal frameworks mean there's no ambiguity about what you own or how it's protected. A clear, straightforward onboarding process means you're not navigating complexity just to get in. And a transparent capital repatriation and disbursement process means you always know how and when your returns flow back to you. We've taken the unpredictability of the bush and left it where it belongs.
The result is a structure that lets a much wider group of investors access the returns that were once reserved for the few, through smaller ticket sizes and proper legal architecture, including Delaware corporations for our US-based partners. Your capital works harder here than it would sitting in an index fund, and it does so within a framework built to manage the complexity of the bush, not ignore it.
But here's what keeps us going beyond any of that: the Ripple Effect.
The Serengeti is not a backdrop. It's a living, breathing ecosystem that has existed for millions of years, and it only survives if the people living alongside it have a real reason to protect it. Not because they're told to. Not because a policy says so. But because their children go to school, their families are fed, and their communities have a future that's tied to the health of the land around them.
When a lodge thrives, a ranger keeps his job. A local guide builds a career. A family stays. And the wilderness, the thing that makes all of this possible in the first place, gets another generation of people who will fight for it.
