Unveiling Stark Caverns’ Marketing Magic: Matt Naughton’s Insights as a Tour Operator in 2025

Audio Transcription

Mark Lamberth:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Travel Grow Show. My name is Mark. I’m your host, and today I had this pleasure of speaking with Matt Notten over at Stark Caverns in Eldon, Missouri. Matt, thank you for being with us today.

Matt Naughton:
Oh, thank you, mark. It’s our pleasure.

Mark Lamberth:
Fantastic. So we saw that you guys did a lot of research on Start Caverns, see that you guys have been doing this for a long time. It looks like you’ve got just a ton of happy customers who come through tour guests. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the history of the business and what you guys are up to today.

Matt Naughton:
Okay. Stark Caverns is actually a 75-year-old showcase, May 11th will celebrate our 75th year of operation. Missouri is the cave state, so we’re one of a number of show caves in Missouri. We opened up as a show cave in 75 years ago, 1950,
And basically have just been operating as a showcase. We took over operations, this ownership group in 2000 and our 2017 and have been operating at this 2017, saw an opportunity here to come in here and grow the amount of business that the cave was doing and have proceeded to do that. But like I say, being a 75-year-old show cave, there’s lots stuff out there. Some of the challenges that we’ve had is some of the rebranding. It wasn’t always known as Start Caverns. The caves had several different names under its history, but we’ve gone back and reverted back to the original name and have grown with that. So that’s kind of what we’re doing here, kind of the start of our business.

Mark Lamberth:
Fantastic, amazing. And then what’s the size the team that you guys have these days? Come again? What’s the size of the team? I mean, how many folks, two operators and folks do you have on staff there?

Matt Naughton:
We have a total of roughly in season we’ll have up to 22 people on staff, roughly might go up to 25, might go down to 20. We like to keep it at 22. That’s three full-time employees, basically general manager, an operations manager, and a marketing person. We keep a maintenance man busy in the summertime and then all of the other positions are filled by what we call tour guides, seasonal employees, they’re all part-time employees.

Mark Lamberth:
Amazing. So I saw that you guys have got three different types of tours as well as a lot of outdoor activities that you guys offer. Would you be willing to unpack that a little bit? I mean, what’s your product mix of the different tours you guys operate?

Matt Naughton:
Yeah, we do, 95% of our tours are what we call regular daytime tours. That is what I call a historical tour. We’ve had people living in the cave the last 3000 years that we can document, and so we talk about that in the daytime tour. We go over the geology of the cave, how caves were formed. No cave tour would be complete without the discussion on sag tights and sag mites go through it and show the cave formations. We do a blacklight tour, which is a little bit more of a scientific tour. We do that at night. Again, we have to close the cave and shut off all the lights basically to start the blacklight tour. So we do it at the end of the day, go in with black lights and we provide everybody a helmet because now we’ve got ’em walking through a cave in the dark.
So we put a helmet on their head and we give ’em a blacklight flashlight, 365 UV to go in and explore the rocks. And I call that a scientific, again, we talk about calcite and the chemical formulas behind Calcite and we fill the cave with what we call Easter eggs, which are a variety of fluorescent minerals throughout the cave. They’re not native to Missouri. Missouri has very few fluorescent minerals, but we’ve put them in there so that you can see what you would see if you were in a cave in Russia or you were in a cave in South America, or you were in a cave in Mexico. I mean, all of these minerals are brought in so that you have an opportunity to experience what these minerals look like in their natural state. Third and foremost is our escape room is the other tour that we offer and we are the only cave in America where you escape out of the cave. It has a bootleggers theme with it, but that goes back to our historical tour of what people were doing in our cave in the 1920s when it was a speakeasy and the moonshiners occupied it. So we use that as part of the late night evening experience for guests to come in and take a crack at trying to escape out of the cave. Very few people have, we had to leave in there overnight.

Mark Lamberth:
I’ll bet. Amazing. You might have to get in there and provided an assist unless you don’t have any overnight stays. That’s correct. I love it.

Matt Naughton:
We also have what I call seasonal opportunities here too with Boy Scouts and camping on the weekends. We do let Boy Scouts camp in the cave. There are a couple caves throughout the United States that will allow scouts to camp in them overnight. And then in the schools, obviously it’s a field trip, so people are coming in for educational purposes and we have the field trips available basically, typically at the beginning of the school year and at the end of the school year are when we were most busy with the field trips for school kids.

Mark Lamberth:
Wow, amazing. So when you got into this, just curious about the business and how you got involved here with started caverns. I mean, it sounds like you have helped with some other businesses maybe turn them around or have got some experience with that. You came into this and was it 2017? Did you have a relationship with the owners of the cave or is this something that just kind of came across your radar with your group and you decided this was a good opportunity?

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Matt Naughton:
Yeah, the current ownership of the caves have been long time friends of mine. Okay. And when I met Jeff back in the 1990s, Jeff talked about how his favorite job was as a tour guide in the cave, and Jeff’s first job was as a tour guide in the cave. So when the cave became partner of an estate and was available for sale, Jeff stepped up and made the transaction happen and became owners of the cave. I was brought in here in the last couple of years just to help them keep on track with their management and the management of the cave and moving it forward. That’s our goal is to keep and continue to move the cave forward.

Mark Lamberth:
Wow, fantastic. Regarding that, do you guys have any plans coming up here over the next few years for Shark Caverns? Any kind of growth or any kind of new tours you guys you’re thinking about offering?

Matt Naughton:
Obviously growth is the name of the game. I mean, that’s what we want to do. We have aggressive growth goals set for us by ourselves, so we’d like to see us tours increase by a hundred percent in the next couple of years. We think that we’re capable of doing that. Basically we’ve got 300 acres additional to the cave here that we can expand on and whether that might be an RV park or might just be walking trails or biking trails or is to be determined, I think that that will naturally occur based on what people’s usage will be here.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay, fantastic. I love it. And then regarding here, Matt, your typical sales process. So we’re the Travel Grow show. We work with tour operators that are looking to grow their brand, and something I’m always interested in is kind of coaching and helping folks kind of with their sales process. Sounds like you guys have got this really well figured out. We talked a little bit before the show. You said that a lot of your kind of interest or engagement comes from billboards that you guys do. So if someone’s heading down the road, they’re in Elden, Missouri or nearby or in outlying areas and they call you guys, what is the process of getting them into a tour? I mean kind of internally in the office and you guys answer the phones. You guys have any kind of email follow up that happens? Do folks usually come ready to go and you to kind of book them in? Is there anything curious, anything about the sales process?

Matt Naughton:
Yeah, probably better than 50% of our customers right now are what we call walk-in customers. We don’t know when they’re coming. We can’t tell where they’re coming. We also do the marketing online and do have a booking site from our website where you can go online and book and reserve your tour. We’d like to see that number grow. I mean that’s the ultimate goal. Yeah. Right now, where we are located is right in the center of Missouri, right at the beginning of Lake of the Ozark and the lake of the Ozark destination as a region. People that come from the lake of the Ozark either come out of typically St. Louis or Kansas City, and we’re exactly halfway between St. Louis and halfway between Kansas City. So our billboard operations are set up to run that way. When you’re driving either from Kansas City or from St Louis, you will start to see start Cavern Billboards as you approach Lake of the Ozarks.
There are some other caves in Missouri that you start seeing their billboards all the way back into New Mexico if you’re driving across country. So that has kind of been the MO for caves for a number of years. When a customer gets here by car and without an appointment, we know very little about that person and we’ve still to this day know very little about that person and reaching out and returning to them as a return customer, which is why we like the online business. We love the online business because the online business, it’s actually cheaper for us to acquire that customer, or less expensive, I should say, to acquire that customer. And we know more about them before they get here and we know more about their activities as they do. Where did they find us? Did they find us on Facebook? Did they find us from our website?
Was it from a Google search? Was it a number of things that have helped us focus some of that marketing dollar to those neighborhoods? That’s probably, and again, yeah, we will email those customers and follow up with them. Everybody who comes in and comes through from our website, we also will reach out to after the tour, ask them to rate their experience. We’re really good about that. There’s nothing more important to us than a five star rating. We are the top rated cave in Missouri in the competition of cave tours. And that has a lot to do with the people that work for us. Not as much the marketing, but the experience the customer gets once he’s through the door. And we want to make sure that that five star experience is carried through any communication and correspondence we have with them. It’s important from either the first billboard that they learned about Start Caverns or from the first search that they’ve learned about Start Caverns. The experience is top notch from top to the end of the tour.

Mark Lamberth:
I love it. It took great. Matt, it sounds like you guys have just really thought through this and have got a great management team in place. It sounds like a great day when you join the team and have really been shaping things up. It’s fantastic. I love it. Fantastic. Well, Matt, if folks want to get in touch, if they want to learn more about what you guys are up to, certainly if they want to book a tour, what are a couple of the best places to get in touch with you guys?

Matt Naughton:
Best places, www.startcaverns.com, that’s the bread and butter. You can also learn about us on Facebook and Instagram, our social media presidents presence, LinkedIn, also out there in LinkedIn. Those are the main channels that we target. And you can find us through numerous search engines, TripAdvisor, Yelp, all the places where Google, where you’re going to find out and plan vacations.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay, perfect. Fantastic. Well, guys, listeners, I’ve taken a look at Stark Cabin site. It looks beautiful. They’ve got a lot of fun tours, a lot of beautiful photography, and just absolute five star reviews across the board. It looks like it’s just a great day, a great way to spend time with your family, whether you’re heading through an RV or local to the area. So Matt, thank you so much for taking your valuable time. I know you’re really busy and I really appreciate you taking the time today to teach our listeners some great stuff about how to be in the cave and tour business.

Matt Naughton:
Very good. Mark, our pleasure.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay, thank you. Alright, take care.

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