Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Beebe.
Hi Dana, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My wife and I moved to Central Oregon in 2018 from Houston after I semi-retired from 40+ years in the Deepwater Sector of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry. The last 20 years I founded and owned a Deepwater Technology Company but closed it during the Offshore downturn in 2015. In 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooded our house with 6.5 ft of water for 2-weeks. We lost most everything we had, 2 cars, most of our furniture and many possessions. We ended up selling the house for less than 50 cents on the dollar. I started to look at what we were going to do next to recover.
In 2012 I had invested in a startup company in the Northwest called Samson Motors which was developing a “Flying Sports Car” called the “Switchblade”. Already being a pilot, a rusty one however, I was fascinated with it and decided to invest by pre-buying a vehicle at a discount. Then in late 2017 I called the founder up and said: I am an Engineer, I am a pilot, I’ve owned two businesses. I’ve already invested in your company, I want to come work for you until I get my Switchblade. I’ll do anything from sweep the floor to engineering to sit on your Board. We made a trip to Central Oregon (Bend/Redmond) and met with the Founder/CEO and agreed on a deal for us to move to Oregon and Consult full time for them.
Once we were here, we really knew no one other than those few I worked with. So we started looking for a way to meet people. We came across a Patriotic group of people that were working towards protecting, promoting and learning about the US Constitution. Monthly dinner meetings of upwards of 200+ people with various programs and speakers at a local golf course restaurant gave us a way to meet some like minded people and make some new friends.
In 2013 this group started looking for a different venue to possibly call home rather than just a golf course restaurant. Ultimately a group of about 80 families bought shares in and formed Lone Pine Legacy LLC to purchase a property. I was then elected as Chairman of the Board for the LLC. In October of 2023 the LLC purchased an old dormant rural elementary school property about 15 minutes drive outside of Redmond OR. Our intent was/is to clean up the property and reconstitute it into a place for our group to meet and have events, but also to open it up to the Community as an event center for things like weddings, Quinceanera’s, birthday and company parties, rummage sales, festivals, holiday events, and even possibly another school, etc. The long term goal is to build/promote a Legacy company/property not only for generations of our own families, but for the Community as well.
The property is about 2.75 acres and has three building on it. The main building is the old school house with a large “Great Room” which was originally a full basketball court size gym, a kitchen, bathrooms, and another smaller meeting room which was two classrooms made into one. The Great Room can hold groups up to 260 people and the smaller room can hold up to 150. Each is now equipped with full video equipment and large screens. In addition there is a single story 2-bedroom apartment which was the old library for the school and then there is a more modern 2-story duplex of two apartments. All three of those apartments are rented out long term, which helps us pay the mortgage and keeps people on the property full time.
As an event venue it is very unique in that you can rent the whole property and plan for instance an outdoor wedding on the manicured grounds and if the weather turns bad you can take it all inside and still have your wedding. Or you can use the whole property in and outside for events like festivals.
Since we purchased the property we have steadily improved it inside and outside and continue to do so. While our third party rentals started out very slowly, this summer (our 3rd), we have been booked for events every weekend except for about 3 or 4 from May through to October. We are now starting to see more bookings even for the more difficult months (weather wise) from October to April. We continue to grow and improve the facilities and recruit additional shareholders from the surround communities.
This is really my second job here in Central Oregon as I am a full time employee of a small group (Samson Sky) that are developing a “Flying Sports Car”, the “Switchblade”. More about this later.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We have been fortunate since we purchased the property from the neighbor property owner. In the beginning, we negotiated a private, owner financed sale from them at some reasonable terms that we thought we could afford. Six months into the ownership our finances were looking very tight. Again we were fortunate that one of our members had sufficient funds that we could take a loan from them and buy out the previous owners and ended up with much better terms and full ownership of the property with no third party involvement.
When we started the LLC and bought the property, we also had a group of members that started a small rural church that leased the smaller room from us for their use on Sunday’s. This also provided a long term steady income with hopes of the church growing along with the LLC. By the end of the first year the Church Elders decide that they needed to move into Redmond as we were just too far out for the elderly congregation to continue making the drive, especially in the winter/inclement weather. So, we parted ways with the Church and lost that revenue. That put a lot of pressure on us to quickly try to book more external events and somewhat forced us into the refinance situation.
The other ongoing difficulty, given an older membership, and a volunteer organization/work force, is getting members involved in the maintenance, improvement and operations of the facilities. As with any volunteer organization (I’ve been a Scoutmaster involved in Boy Scouts for some 30 years) take a group of say 100 people and only about 10-15% of them will do 90% of the work to be done. Our challenge is to attract younger members who are willing to participate in building the longer term Legacy.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Well, I started out growing up on the north side of Chicago, in Kenilworth, which was/is on of the most affluent towns in the country. I was very fortunate to grow up there as my parents were not wealthy at all but I had some wealthy Grandparents living there. I went to New Trier High School, which is one of the best public High Schools in the country as well. After High School I was fortunate due to my Grandparents gift of paying for College for all their grandchildren, to be able to go to Purdue University of Engineering school.
After graduating from Purdue in 1972 with an BSME degree I did not know what I wanted to do, but I knew I did not want to go to work for the various large corporations (like Ford, GM, Cummins Diesel, etc.) that most of my classmates were going to. As a “water rat” (competitive swimmer in grade school, High School and College) and having gotten my Scuba certificate while in High School, I decided to go to Commercial (Deepsea) Diving School in California. This was a six-month course that trained you to work as a Commercial Deepsea Diver primarily aimed at the Offshore Oil & Gas Industry around the world. That particular school was owned by the largest commercial diving company in the world at the time which was based in Houston TX. I figured that this would be an interesting way to spend some time trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life and maybe I would get to travel and see the world.
About halfway through the course a Project Manager from the company in Houston asked the School Director if they had anyone that was also an Engineer that might come to Houston for 3-4 months to work on the design of their first 1,000 ft diving system for an offshore job in the North Sea. The Director knew I was an Engineer and pulled me out of class to talk to the Project Manager – Friday mid-day. The deal he offered me was to bring me to Houston, put me up in a company apartment, work as a Project Engineer (the only one) on teh design for 3-4 months, pay me an Engineer’s salary, and when the job was completed send me back to finish the diving course and then hire me as a diver to go to the North Sea. Well, by Monday I was on my way to Houston.
While I was working on the Diving System design I figured out what I really wanted to do for my career. The people I was working for that were “designing” the diving system were divers who knew what they needed and wanted teh system to do/be but they did not have the skills (engineering wise) to get it all designed properly and I did not know how they would use the equipment as I had never been offshore yet. So I saw and opportunity to go to work first as a diver and learn the jobs and the equipment and then combine that with my engineering skills and make a career from that.
So, for about the next 8-years I worked as a deepsea saturation diver/supervisor around the world. Learning the various jobs and equipment that was being used. I then started a consulting engineering business designing, building, installing and operating diving systems and associated subsea equipment for various companies, US based and overseas based. In 1982 I was recruited by Gulf Oil in Houston to work for them in their specialized Offshore & Frontier Development group as their resident Diving/Subsea expert. I had gotten married and our first child was on its way and I wanted to settle down a bit, not travel as much, and see what Corporate life would be like instead of always be a Contractor working for the large Corporate companies.
In 1985 or so, Chevron bought Gulf and was moving everyone to California. I did not want to go to California so my Gulf boss and I started our own Consulting Engineering company do similar work as we had done at Gulf. We were soon bought out by a larger UK Consulting Company that offices in London and San Francisco. We became their Houston office with my boss/partner becoming the President of the US operations and I became the General Manager of the Houston office. A bit later a very large Norwegian company bought our parent UK company with all of us being part of the deal. Within a year the Norwegian company decided that all the subsea work would be moved to Norway and not done in the US. Time to look for something else.
Fortunately, right then another Houston based subsea company approached me to come to work for them and build an Engineering group. They has just be purchase by a very large Italian conglomerate based in Milan who wanted them to be their subsea group to go with their Drilling, Pipelay, Heavy Lift, Structures, Facilities and Operations groups. This would give them all the various disciplines for total offshore field development. Again, I was the General Manager of this new engineering group and built it up from the 6 people we started with to over 100 in about 6-9 months time. Within that period we bid on and won the largest equipment/operation order the company ever had which double the revenue of the total company which we were a small part of.
As we became successful, I promoted and succeeded in convincing the Italian Board to put together a small group of individuals from each of the sector groups to work together in bidding these very large ($1 billion +) offshore field developments and base it in London to be centrally located time zone wise to the rest of the world. I was the representative from the Subsea sector and moved my family to London. Once there we went to work bidding a very large job in SE Asia for Shell Oil. It was to be a huge subsea development with pipelines, structures and facilities. We were in the lead position to win the job and at the very last minute the Italian Board would not let us turn in our final bid. They felt it di not use enough of their expensive vessels (heavy lift, pipeline, drilling, etc.) and was too much weighted towards the subsea equipment even though it was worth nearly $1 billion. Well, that told me that they would never truly support the subsea part of the group so I started looking for my next adventure.
Two colleagues of mine back in Houston were just starting a consulting subsea engineering/development company and asked me to come and be a partner as CEO of the company. So, I moved my family back to Houston and we started DTC International as a Deepwater Technology Company to design, engineer and build advanced Deepwater Subsea Technology. As stated earlier, I co-founded and ran as CEO, DTC for nearly 20 years until the deepwater sector downturn.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Well, I think I will first say that – you make your own luck! I was “lucky” in my decision not to go to work for a big company right out of College. I was “lucky” in going to Diving School and getting the engineering job in Houston. I was “lucky” in getting to work as a Deepwater Saturation Diver and travel the world and learn a career. I was “lucky” in getting to go to London with my family and introducing them to life outside the US. I was “lucky” in having colleagues that wanted me to join them to co-found and run DTC. And, I have been very “lucky” in my early investment (2012) in a futuristic “Flying Sports Car” business which has allowed me to re-invent myself into the aviation business here in Central Oregon. Finally, due to my “luck” in moving to Central Oregon, my wife and I have been “lucky” to find a group of like minded patriots to make new friends from and for myself to be their Chairman.
So, again, I think you make your own luck by the choices you make along your path through live, never really knowing what those choice will bring you to later on in life.
Pricing:
- Go to www.samsonsky.com for information and pricing on the Switchblade
- Go to www.lonepineevents.com for information on the event center.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lonepine events.com and www.samsonsky.com
