Photo provided by Mountain Harbor Resort and Spa
Against All Odds — Bill Barnes’ history in business an incredible tale of perseverance
It takes an awful lot to scare Bill Barnes. The erstwhile owner of Mountain Harbor Resort & Spa in Mount Ida has weathered just about everything the universe has to throw at a person. Over nearly 60 years on the job, he has worked under a roster of unwanted and unwelcome business partners in the form of staggering debt, damaging storms, the Internal Revenue Service and cancer, only to buy them all out in the end.
In fact, about the only thing Barnes fears is inactivity, a slowing of the gears that have meshed and ground during a remarkable life, both personal and professional. He fears it so much that even today, the 78-year-old shows up to work every single day, radiating his trademark servant’s spirit and unrelenting optimism.
“God so blessed me because he wired me to do this, to serve people, and he put me in an environment where I get to do it,” he said. “That was God’s option, and to this day, I love making people smile. I love this job; I mean, I don’t love every minute of every day, you know? I don’t want to sound like everything is just roses all the time, but I just love what I do.”
The tale of Barnes’ family business, started by his father, Hal, during the 1950s, is something few today can comprehend. Just for starters, Lake Ouachita was new, created by Blakely Dam on the Ouachita River, and outdoor recreation as an industry was barely in its infancy in Arkansas, both of which are nearly incomprehensible today.
“Water recreation, as we know it, didn’t exist back then,” he said. “We had a dirt road to four boat stalls, a gas pump, a fish-cleaning house, a little tackle shop and a hundred fishing boats.”
The rustic conditions meant a limited clientele, mainly hardcore fishermen. Initially, the Barnes family was living in Colorado while Hal’s business partner ran the place on-site, but it wasn’t long before they, too, would make their home in central Arkansas.
“Dad’s best friend was running the place, and it just wasn’t working,” Barnes said. “I still remember we lived in a little 8-by-28 trailer, and my mother had multiple sclerosis before I was born, so my brother and I helped her walk out to a log out by the trailer. John and I and Mom sat on the log while Dad met with his friend, who said Dad just had to take it over.
“The Small Business Administration told Dad that they would loan him the money to bail him out, but because he was the one signing the notes and taking over the place, he had to move to Arkansas.”
Barnes was 10 when he first reported for duty washing dishes. By age 12 he was at work before dawn to open the boat dock at 4 a.m. to customers who rented fishing boats for the day. To say things were lean is an understatement as massive as Lake Ouachita itself, and Hal found himself in ever more dire financial straits.
“Dad graduated from the University of Arkansas [in Fayetteville] with a degree in law, and he tried to practice law during the Depression. He ended up selling shoes until the attack at Pearl Harbor,” Barnes said. “After the war, Dad knew he didn’t want to be a lawyer, so he went to Casper, Wyoming, and got a job there as the attorney for a mineral leasing company.
“Dad was a wonderful, wonderful dreamer and real, real smart, and I love him with all my heart, but I would tell him this to his face: He wasn’t real good at operations.”
So it was that when Barnes was just dipping his toes into a college education — alternating fall semesters studying at the University of Arkansas and spring and summer working at the business — he was called back home for good with the news that the Internal Revenue Service was about to seize the property right out from under them.
Largely because he did not know what else to do, Barnes threw the ultimate Hail Mary pass in an attempt to save the family business, packing up and heading to the IRS’ St. Louis office.
“I didn’t have enough sense to not ask,” he said. “I mean, I was 22, 23 years old, scared to death. I had no plan. I didn’t even have any idea where the federal building was. I had no business plan, didn’t have any kind of accounting numbers. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
“I just went in there to the office and sat down with them and said, ‘I am back from college. I am going to be at work every day. I will answer the phone every day, and if you will give me a chance, I will pay you.’”
At that, he went quiet except for a remnant chuckle that underscored his disbelief in what happened next, even to this day.
“They said, ‘What do you need?’ I said, ‘I need seven years,’” he said finally. “They waived the interest and the penalties and set me up on seven years. I don’t think from a regulatory standpoint they could even do that today. That was really all there was to it.”
Barnes did not have time or reason for a victory dance because what the feds had actually given him was a chance to go home and face local creditors who were not only owed money, as well, but were close enough in proximity to have run the place into the ground if they wanted to. Barnes did the only thing he could do, which was screw up his courage and face things head on.
“I don’t remember how many people who were owed, but there were over 100,” he said. “When I got back, I called them all and said, ‘I’m back, and if you’ll give me a chance, I will pay you.’ A couple of them were hateful, but almost to a person they agreed. Some of them, I paid $5 a week, every week. Some said, ‘You know, Bill, just take a year or two, but don’t forget us, and pay us then,’ and I did that.”
Asked what he thought made creditors willing to extend him such leeway instead of taking what they were owed in court, Barnes said he had a couple of factors to thank for his reprieve.
“It was a different time in our country. I think people liked the fact that this kid who didn’t know any better just walked in and just told them the truth,” he said. “I also think [creditors] looked at us at that point and thought, ‘What the hell are we going to do with a resort on a brand-new lake that didn’t, at that point, have a paved road to it?’ Whatever it was, many people were very kind to me.”
One quirk in his comeback strategy that ran somewhat counterintuitive, given the business’ financial state, was Barnes’ recognition that to boost revenue, he had to expand and improve the property. Thus did he find his way to a local bank to borrow even more money to put the plan in motion.
“I had a banker in Mount Ida who was this old man everybody was afraid of, including me,” he said. “He believed in me, and he would loan me the money to build, but he always said the same thing: ‘Now William, can you fill these 10 boat stalls?’ ‘Yes, sir, I can. I’ve got a list of people right here.’ ‘OK. Don’t come see me again if they’re not full.’ I filled those 10 stalls, and I’d go back and see him, and that’s how we built the marina, 6, 8, 10 stalls at a time.
“Every resort on the lake had a maximum number of trailer spaces they could put in per the Corps of Engineers, and we were way below our limit there, too, so I put in a trailer space or two, and I’d get folks to pay me a couple of years’ rent to pay for the pad and the utilities to go in.”
Barnes was emboldened in his strategy because his investments in expansion were rooted in what he directly heard from customers, such as adding cottages. More often than not, acting on those suggestions resulted in amenities that already had demand built in. He also took notice of what the competition was doing and was never too proud to model after their success.
“I would look at these other places, owned by people who knew what they were doing,” he said. “Some of them became wonderful mentors of mine. They would put up with me and guide me.”
Not all of Barnes’ changes, however necessary, were warmly welcomed. When he took over the operation, he found rates had not been adjusted for more than a decade. Addressing that gave Barnes a taste of the public’s wrath
“We had to have more budgetable, dependable income, and the only demand we had was mobile home spots and boat slips,” he said. “We would rent them only by the year, and I still remember when I came back full time, Dad hadn’t raised slip rents in, like, 11 years and hadn’t raised trailer park rents in seven. I raised everybody $50 a year, and God, I thought I was going to be crucified. I mean, people were so mad at me because Dad just hadn’t done it. A few people left, but I rented their spaces immediately.”
Make no mistake about it – for all of Barnes’ industriousness, courage and good ideas, there was an unrelenting pressure to his work, knowing the existential financial crisis he was under. Life does not always play fair either, as with the ice storm that destroyed much of the marina about five years into his tenure and the non-Hodgkin lymphoma that knocked him for a loop in 2000. Both, he said, took the fight out of him for a moment, but overcoming them has only reinforced that he is doing what he was born to do in the way it was meant to be done.
“I was so guilty of this when I was in my 30s, you know, which was my worst decade. I thought I was 10 feet tall, bulletproof and really, really smart,” he said. “I look back on that and think, ‘Barnes, you idiot.’ Fortunately, I didn’t do anything that caused me to lose Mountain Harbor, but I lived in fear of that all the time. That’s why I went to work every day, seven days a week, because I promised everybody I would do that. As my dad used to say, you need to dance with the girl that brung you.”
Last summer, Mountain Harbor, the self-proclaimed “largest family-owned resort in Arkansas” celebrated its 70th year in business, a milestone that hardly seemed possible to the skinny college kid who took the reins and worked and hoped for the best. Generations of villagers, as regulars call themselves, have watched the 900-acre development expand to include a full-service marina with boat storage, lodge guest rooms, cottages and condos for rent, a restaurant, Turtle Cove Spa, houseboat and personal watercraft rentals, a horseback riding stable, and a dive shop.
For all that is new, the one thing all guests look forward to are the things that have not changed: the stunning lake views, the peaceful ambiance, and their sprightly host filling cups of coffee, shaking hands and doing what he does best — serving people.
“We are serving our fourth generation of customers, and to walk into the dining room and see three generations, which I saw several of this weekend, sitting at tables, it makes everything worth it,” he said. “It’s not me; it’s the entire team, most of whom have been together with me for 30 years or longer. They make all the difference in the world.”
BILL BARNES ON CUSTOMER SERVICE
“The bottom line is we’ll never be fancy, but we care tremendously for our customers. We are also very, very human. We make mistakes every day, and we are accountable when we screw up. That’s a very, very important part of business. You don’t try to worm out of something you’ve done wrong. You belly up to the bar and say, ‘We did it. We’ll fix it.’ I think one thing our customers love about us is they know if we screw it up, which we do on a regular basis, we will absolutely stand behind everything and fix it.”
BILL BARNES ON SACRIFICE
“Young people need to hear that success doesn’t happen all at once. The evolution of Mountain Harbor, the little village that we are now, I never thought would evolve into this. It was always a dream to just pay off the note and be out of debt and be able to build a few boat stalls. Just to do that, there were many times when I didn’t get paid. There were times when I couldn’t make payroll and pay the IRS, and I was lucky to have staff who said, ‘Pay us later,’ and that’s how we did it. Mountain Harbor started in 1955, and it wasn’t until 1998, 1999 before I was able to cover all my expenses. I still wasn’t able to put any money in savings, but I was able to operate without sweating every payroll. We did it a little bit at a time.”
BILL BARNES ON SUPPORT OF OTHERS
“I am successful only because a whole bunch of people were patient with me, mentored me, my staff who stuck with me even when I couldn’t make payroll. I have always been so lucky to have folks that guided me and coached me and told me when I was really, really stupid. Now they wouldn’t loan me a bunch of money or do anything like that, but they would encourage me and that made a big difference.”
BILL BARNES ON TENACITY
“Every time I would just be totally disgusted, ready to give up, what I would make myself do is look back six months and then look back a year. Every time I did that, things were better — maybe not much, but they were better. That really helped me to be able to recognize when it seems like the world is against you and you’ve made the wrong decisions, if you can see where you’ve eked out a little bit more, if you’ve inched ahead a little, that always made a big difference to me.”
SEE THE ARTICLE IN OUR JUNE 2026 AMP MAGAZINE AND BELOW.
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