A Warm Hotel That Started on Ice

By Sara Plott, Fadooger.com

COMMUNITY BANK PROVIDES FIRM FOOTING

For such warm people, their business owes a lot to ice. Coloradans Bobby, Brooke, and Nate became friends in 2009 while hosting other outdoorsy companions for an annual ice climbing pilgrimage to Ouray, Colorado. On the drive, Bobby and Nate bantered about starting a business together.

Fast-forward seven years, Bobby and Brooke Mikulas and Nate Grimm, and his fiancée Jenna, and a few other friends enjoyed a 10-day adventure to Iceland. They reveled in the exhilarating outdoors, local food, and hospitality of the down-to-earth Icelanders.

In one small coastal village, the Americans met a gregarious local woman in a coffee shop. That chat led to her gift of hand-knit Icelandic sweaters and a fishing outing until the sun came up at 1 a.m.

“That experience really inspired us to create that type of local experience for others, whether they are new to Colorado Springs, a business traveler, or a tourist,” Nate explains.

The Iceland trip came at the end of Bobby and Brooke’s yearlong quest to engage in the lifestyles of people abroad. “When we got engaged, we started saving for this trip around the world we had planned to take before we had children,” Bobby explains. “We split meals, we did cheap date nights — we saved our pennies for years.”

Those saved pennies and a plan for “outrageous hospitality” paid off for our community. From those discussions, climbing ice, meeting Icelanders, and a little help from a community bank, they opened Kinship Landing, their 40-room hotel in downtown Colorado Springs in March 2021.

But there were some slick spots before the dream became a reality. In 2017, Bobby and Brooke reached out to Nate who was managing a Denver hotel.

Kinship Landing, Colorado

Nate recalls, “So, it’s the beginning of June 2017. Jenna and I are on our honeymoon in this amazing treehouse in the middle of the forest in Hawaii and we get a call from Brooke and Bobby saying, ‘We need your hospitality expertise. Will you please reconsider?’”

During that phone call, Jenna took one look at Nate and said, “You’ll never know unless you try it.” With that, the partnership was sealed.

construction overages and meeting with a bank that would collaborate with a startup that was also a hospitality venture. Fortunately, the local Small Business Development Center recommended First National Bank Colorado and their SBA 504 small business loan.

Plus, it turned out that First National Bank Colorado knew Bobby and Brooke from their first bank accounts with First National Bank of Monument as youth. Brooke recounted a trip after high school to Africa, where cyber criminals used a camera during an ATM withdrawal to steal her PIN number and all $1,600 from her account.

“When I let the bank know what happened, they immediately replaced the $1,600 as a gesture of kindness,” Brooke explains. “So now, working with First National Bank is full circle for me. The same kind of character that First National had then translates to now.”

Kinship Landing’s owners appreciate that the bank didn’t tell them how to manage their investor team or how to balance their budget.

“They trusted us to run the operations of our business,” Bobby explains. “That trust goes a really long way.”

“I think banking has gone increasingly corporate and increasingly impersonal. First National Bank Colorado is totally capable, responsive, and timely, but we also feel like we are part of their family. We value the hometown banking feel with a level of expertise that we didn’t see in some of the other community banks.”

First National Bank Colorado | 768 North Gate Blvd. COS, CO 80921 | 719.955.5577 | www.firstnationalbankcolorado.com

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