Blake Dailey is not the kind of person who backs into a business. He builds toward it, deliberately, with his wife Nicole beside him and a clear picture of what boutique hospitality can look like when the right operator is running the show.
Blake is the founder of Stayvest, a hospitality investment and operations company focused on boutique resorts in secondary and tertiary travel markets. The current portfolio includes Tremont Lodge, a 130-unit property at the gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and two resort developments actively underway in Blue Ridge, Georgia. He also leads Hotel Launch, an education and consulting company that helps investors make the leap from short-term rentals to boutique hotel ownership.
Before any of this came the Air Force. That chapter shapes how Blake runs everything: the team structure, the investor communication, the willingness to push through the unglamorous middle of a project without losing focus. He comes back often to a military saying that stuck with him: mission first, people always.
“You can’t get there without a great team,” Blake says. “Our success as a company is really the success of the people in it.”
Nicole is central to that team. She runs the wedding and events operation, anchors the team’s culture, and brings warmth to guests, which has made the events side of the business a real and recurring revenue channel. Blake describes her as his wise counselor, someone who sees problems from a different angle and keeps things steady when he is pushing hard in several directions at once.
The properties themselves reflect who they are as a couple. Both Blake and Nicole grew up taking family vacations to the Smokies. Finding Tremont Lodge felt less like a transaction and more like a homecoming. That personal tie to the guest experience is something Blake leans into on purpose. They are, in many ways, the guests they are designing for: people who want to step away, get outside, eat well, and come back feeling like themselves again.
Tremont Lodge recently finished a renovation spanning 8 buildings and 68,000 square feet. Since reopening, the property has cleared its revenue projections every single month. Now the team is deep in construction administration for two Blue Ridge properties simultaneously, working through permits, soil testing, contractor coordination, and budget management in parallel. Blake compares the phase to football two-a-days: not the part anyone looks forward to, but the part that earns you the season.
Hotel Launch has grown into a community of more than 60 investors who have collectively closed on over 30 boutique hotel deals across the country. Blake started it because there was no clear roadmap when he bought his first hotel. He worked through it by trial and error and then built the resource he wished had existed. The community now runs live workshops, a growing library of practical guidance, and an annual conference called Boutique Hotel Con, hosted each year at Tremont.
With six acquisitions behind them, two properties in development, and a stabilized resort already outperforming projections, Blake and Nicole are building something with real staying power. The work is hard, the process is messy, and Blake will tell you that is exactly how it is supposed to feel before it all comes together.
