A Toaster Oven and Five Items: Rachel Smalling on Two Motels, a Speakeasy, and Running on Constraint

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Rachel Smalling did not plan any of this. She moved to Cookeville in 2010 for Tennessee Tech, stayed, and spent nearly a decade as executive director of the Bryan Symphony. Today she runs two motels on Dale Hollow Lake and the town’s first speakeasy. Host Jeremy Rivera gets the whole arc — including the parts most operators leave out of the story.

“I think my parents don’t understand at all what I do. And you wouldn’t, unless you were totally immersed in small business or a small business owner yourself.” — Rachel Smalling

The motel they bought as a running joke

September 2020. Working from home, spending every spare hour outdoors because indoors was closed, Smalling and her partner Alex kept driving past a sad little motel on the road to Dale Hollow Lake that had shut down a year earlier.

“We just kept joking about it all summer. We were like, we should buy that. We should buy that. Well, then the next thing I know, we’re looking into the asking price and then we’ve made an offer and then now we have a motel.” They closed that September and reopened it, renovated, in April 2021 as the Lakeside Inn at Dale Hollow — formerly the Obey River Inn.

For anyone outside the area: Dale Hollow sits about 25 miles north of Cookeville, past Livingston, one of the cleanest lakes in Tennessee and tucked into the mountains. It’s also administered by the Army Corps of Engineers, which means no private docks and no true lakefront property outside a handful of grandfathered parcels — a constraint worth knowing if you’re ever tempted to buy there. The Lakeside sits about three quarters of a mile from Sunset Marina.

The gap she filled was a price gap. The lake is full of large cabins, which pencil out only if you arrive with a crowd. “If you’re just coming down as a couple or a single or a family with one or two children, I really think that we’re the most affordable option close.”

The second motel was a defensive buy

The Sportsman’s Lodge at Dale Hollow came in April 2022, and the logic was blunt: “either we buy it or somebody else buys it and they become our competition.” Owning the only two non-cabin, non-marina properties in that stretch means the two businesses feed each other rather than fight.

Smalling is unusually candid about how it got financed. Alex’s parents came in as effectively silent investing partners, and Alex’s contracting and building-trades skills let them do most of the work themselves.

“I like to be really transparent about that — essentially we wouldn’t have been able to buy that second property without Alex’s parents investing with us… Looking at it from the position of somebody who wants to start a small business, knowing that having help and having those resources is essential.” — Rachel Smalling

The property itself is a 1986 fisherman’s lodge, and she’s affectionate about it: “if you love the show Schitt’s Creek, you would love that motel property.” The carpet is gone, the rooms are nicer, and the clientele is exactly who you’d expect — anglers, and people driving through at midnight who need a classic motel room.

“You’re pretty much always on”

Asked for the most surprising thing about ownership, Smalling doesn’t pick a business problem.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s two in the morning, it doesn’t matter if it’s your weekend, it doesn’t matter if you’re abroad in another country — the buck stops with you. So that mental aspect can be kind of exhausting when it’s 24/7.” — Rachel Smalling

Her two answers are a good team and a personality adjustment. “I’m a very type A personality that likes to have everything done and put in neat little boxes. And so I had to do a lot of work on myself to let certain things go — yes, they need to be done, but they don’t need to be done today.” Day to day she runs on triage: what’s on fire.

The illustrative disaster, for anyone romanticizing hospitality: the main septic line snapped in half over Labor Day weekend, on the first weekend the bar was open, with a full motel. Alex spent it knee-deep, phoning every septic company in the region.

The digital marketing confession

Sitting across from an SEO, Smalling gets ahead of it: “if you’ve looked up my digital footprint for the Sportsman’s Lodge, I’m so, so sorry. It’s a hot mess.”

When they bought it, the entire operation ran on a paper calendar at the front desk. No online booking at all. “I thought, this is crazy. There’s no way we’re going to be able to run a profit margin with just, you call and you book a room. No one’s going to do that.”

They were slammed. “If you had told me that, I would have laughed you out of the room — that we were going to be that busy with a paper book.” The lodge coasted on decades of local notoriety.

The Lakeside, being a fresh brand, had no such inheritance and runs through Airbnb and VRBO. Smalling knows exactly what that costs her: “that probably leaves money on the table… if we had our private bookings through our own website, that might attract more people that don’t want to set up an Airbnb account or aren’t super tech savvy.” It’s a stated growth goal — just not one that fits in a week where she’s already spread across three businesses.

Jeremy’s response is worth quoting for every small operator carrying guilt about this: the fracturing is real. Facebook is its own ecosystem, then Threads, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn — and for an owner, every hour spent choosing between them competes directly with an actual clogged toilet.

1854: a year of market research, then two months to a lease

The third business is 1854 Cocktail Bar and Lounge, a speakeasy on the Cookeville square, and it’s the one Smalling calls her baby.

The idea came from sitting in the Raines Law Room at the William in New York, looking around, and thinking Cookeville needed one. What followed was a year of genuine research — talking to local restaurant owners, sitting at cocktail bars, watching how they ran.

Then she mentioned it in passing to her then-landlord at a symphony event, framing it as a wish list: here’s the kind of space I’d need, you probably don’t have anything, text me if something opens up. She expected to hear back in six months or a year.

“He texted me the next day.” Two months later they signed a lease.

The space was his own storage workshop — a blank slate on the back of the building, a few steps up from street level. They built everything except the bar countertops. The centerpiece, the carved bar back, is an early-1800s French or Italian hand-carved piece the landlord gifted them. Smalling designed the entire room around it.

It seats 42, on purpose. “People kind of wander around and they’re like, is this it? Where’s the rest of it? It’s intentionally small because I didn’t want to totally lose my mind and do a massive restaurant — and part of the appeal is the intimacy.”

Constraint as strategy: a toaster oven and five items

This is the operational lesson of the episode. Smalling had never worked in a restaurant or bar before opening one. So she deliberately refused to open a restaurant at all.

“Your mind is like, if I can’t offer everything to everyone, then people are going to be disappointed. And you can’t approach it with that aspect. You have to go in with what you know and what you’re passionate about.” — Rachel Smalling

The kitchen is a 10×10 room with a toaster oven, an espresso maker, and a fridge. The menu is five food items. When guests ask why there isn’t dinner, the answer is that quality doesn’t survive a menu the room can’t support.

She built the operation around people who did have the expertise she lacked: Trey Taylor, her head bartender and creative partner on the cocktail program, hired through a mutual friend and there since day one; and her friend Lauren Swift, formerly of the Swiftwich food truck, who built the recipes and trained staff on doing high-quality food in a tiny footprint.

They also opened slowly on purpose — ticketed releases at first, so they knew exactly who was coming and could manage the room, preceded by ten months of social media teasing to build the brand before the doors opened.

The Valentine’s Day three-course dinner is the exception that proves the rule: 77–78 covers, everything cooked at home, with a strict filter on every dish — is this going to be really good in a crock pot, and if not, can it go in the toaster oven for five minutes on the way out?

Defending the price of a $14 drink

Smalling gets the occasional social media grumble about cost, and her answer is a small-business pricing argument worth borrowing:

“Yeah, but your tequila doesn’t have any additives in it. Your juice was fresh squeezed this morning. You’re using organic cane sugar. One, it’s going to taste better. Two, you’re not going to feel like crap the next morning after you’ve had two drinks.” — Rachel Smalling

“The dedication to quality is something that’s really hard to stick to, because you look at that profit margin and you’re like, I hope this pays off in two years.” Her proof point is local: Soulcraft Coffee, whose house-made syrups make their latte six or seven dollars instead of four — and who are now growing.

The network is the moat

The liquor licensing process was, in her words, arduous, and she got through it on frantic Facebook messages to other Cookeville operators — Jay Albrecht at Seven Senses and Chad Combs at the Putnam Room. She found The Biz Foundry and various chamber and board groups only after opening.

“I don’t think that I would have had the courage or been brave enough to do this in a place other than Cookeville, because we truly do have such a great small business network and a sense of camaraderie. It really is like I want to support everyone and see everyone thrive — and it feels that way both ways.” — Rachel Smalling

Her comparison: Nashville’s cocktail scene is cohesive but necessarily more cutthroat, because there are a million bars. Being first in Cookeville was, relatively speaking, the safer bet — with the caveat that “restaurants and bars are never a safe bet or a safe investment. You have to have a little bit of a plan A, B, C, D and E.”

Her advice for anyone about to do something crazy

1. Interrogate where the idea comes from. “Is it coming from your own passion to want to share and create? Is it authentic?”

2. Check the market you’re actually standing in. “If you’re in Cookeville right now and you’re like, I’m going to open this kick-ass Mexican restaurant — there’s a lot of competition for that. So you better have something that really sets you apart.”

3. Say yes to everything you have capacity for, for years before you need it. From 18 or 19 onward Smalling took every opportunity — stage crew at a random concert, four years running operations for a summer music festival in Sewanee, boards of directors, the Arts Council.

“The point of always say yes, as long as you have the capacity, is that I built such a vast network of people with different skills and people with different knowledge… having that village or those touch points, or even just those acquaintances, really helps you build that brand.” — Rachel Smalling

Visit

Rachel Smalling’s businesses: Lakeside Inn at Dale Hollow and Sportsman’s Lodge at Dale Hollow, both minutes from Sunset Marina, and 1854 Cocktail Bar and Lounge on the square in Cookeville — reservations recommended.

One resource mentioned in the show notes for anyone weighing the economics of a commercial kitchen: Save Fry Oil, which works with restaurants on cutting fry-oil costs.