Our Story
Every great business starts with a plan. Ours started with a fixer-upper, absolutely no plan, and me repeatedly saying, "You know what would be a great idea..." My wife learned to fear those words.
Brody · Carolyn · Ella · Drew·with Molly Mae & Blu
So, you're probably wondering how our little family ended up running a micro-resort on Grand Lake. Truthfully… so are we.
We ask ourselves that more often than you'd think.
It started in 2019 when my wife and I decided we needed a little escape from work, schedules, and adult responsibilities.
There was just one problem: I had never actually been to Grand Lake.
Naturally, the reasonable solution was to buy a house there.
We found a outdated fixer-upper in Duck Creek that "just needed a little work" — which we quickly learned is one of the most expensive sentences in the English language.
So we spent the next few years fixing it up. Project after project, dollar after dollar, until eventually… we were done.
It was beautiful. We loved it. Our family loved it. We finally had the perfect lake house.
So naturally I thought: You know what would be a great idea? Selling it and starting completely over.
My wife was thrilled.
Okay, that part may not be entirely accurate.
In 2023, we bought another property on Monkey Island that most reasonable people probably would have considered a teardown.
We preferred the word "potential."
Then came the renovations. Then more renovations. Then the pool. Hot tub. Fire pit. Putting green. Dock.
And somewhere along the way, someone decided what this whole project really needed was treehouses and geodesic domes.
That someone was me.
Eventually, my wife stopped asking, "Are we done yet?"
She already knew the answer.
And somewhere in all that chaos, Blue Haven — and eventually Heartland Resorts — was born.
There was never some grand hospitality business plan. We simply wanted to create the kind of place we would want to go — where the house is only part of the experience, families reconnect, kids never run out of things to do, and nobody has to ask, "So… what are we doing today?"
We're still building. Still dreaming. And still adding things we probably don't need.
Because Heartland Resorts was never really about creating places to sleep.
It's about creating places worth going to.
— The Blue Haven Family
Blue Haven Resort is professionally managed by Heartland Resorts — a family-owned hospitality company dedicated to creating extraordinary lakeside experiences across Oklahoma and beyond.