This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brent Phillips, 47, a software engineer who started renting out units on his guest ranch in Burton, Texas, to help pay bills. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been a software engineer my whole career.
I had built a couple of companies and worked for some companies, always doing software engineering.
I’m originally from South Africa, but my brother got recruited to play rugby in Aspen, Colorado, so that’s how I came to live in America.
His daughter had a stroke several years later, and we moved to Houston to be by the medical center. My brother and I ended up starting a company together to help people with complex medical cases — I was the software engineer behind it, and he was the business mind. It ended up doing really well, and we sold it to a public company. I became a multimillionaire.
I got the idea to buy a ranch after we had that huge freeze in 2021 in Texas that shut everything down.
I had this awakening that I was useless in society because once electricity went out, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how to fix a water pipe. I didn’t know how to grow my own food. I didn’t know anything. And now I’ve taught that to my kids.
The whole premise behind buying a farm was for us to learn how to actually take care of ourselves. We were pure consumers, and I wanted us to learn how to produce. I wanted to teach my kids gratefulness. I wanted us to become better people, because all I knew was Uber Eats. And if Uber Eats wasn’t working, I was in trouble.
In April 2021, I found a 54-acre ranch and bought the land. It had sat on the market for over a year. Nobody wanted it because it was in such disarray, but I just loved the land.
It had a house, but the house was destroyed during that freeze in Texas. The pipes burst, and the house flooded. The only thing there was a barn, which is still here today.
Everything needed work — every fence post, every building, everything.
The ranch was supposed to be just for my family, but I started renting it out for extra cash
When I moved my family here, I literally moved them into the barn. My wife was sleeping on a blow-up mattress, my kids in hammocks across the horse stalls, and I would sneak out at night and sleep in my Tesla because I could put dog mode on and at least have some air conditioning through the lot.
About four months in, we ended up buying a three-bedroom, two-bathroom mobile home so we didn’t have to stay in the barn.
But living in the barn was a great reset. Everything after that was an upgrade, and we were grateful.
Eventually, I had built myself a house. I had built my mother a house, and I had built my brother and sister-in-law a house, and that was all the houses that the ranch was going to have, because it was just a little family thing. And then we had this six-car garage for all of us who lived on the property to park our cars.
At the time that I bought the ranch, I never had to work again. We were building these buildings, and I didn’t have to worry about anything.
Everything that I was basing my future on was still in public shares from this company in a lockup period.
It’s like having money in the bank, so you make certain decisions. Except I went to sleep a multimillionaire and woke up one day and it was gone. The stock price dropped from $55 a share to $5 a share. I’d leveraged other trades, and I’d leveraged other things off that. So when that crashed in 2022, I lost it all.
I tried a bunch of things to make money. I went back into software engineering, but some of those doors had closed.
The only thing I had as a way to make money was the potential to put this thing on Airbnb. So in September 2022, I put our attic above the garage on Airbnb in a Hail Mary attempt to save the farm.
I was embarrassed but desperate, and people booked it.
Every bit of money that came in, I just kept reinvesting and reinvesting.
In January of 2023, I put the mobile home up for rent. Then, in June, I’d taken the money and built three casitas.
That year, we earned over $300,000 in bookings by the end of the year — just enough to pay off all our debts.
Then my wife had a huge car accident in 2024 that wiped us out financially again.
During that time, we stopped all marketing, and people still booked the ranch for a year and a half into the future.
That was the moment when I was like, “This is something real. People actually want this.”
Up until then, I was still thinking, “I need to go back into tech, I’m just trying to pay some bills with this short-term rental thing.”
After nursing my wife back to health, I was like, “I’ve been given an opportunity here, and I need to grab it with both hands.”
I still can’t believe all the success
Now we’ve got 40 units, sleeping 150 people total.
We have casitas — the first unit I built is now called “The Origin,” and it did so well that we built a second attic. We have a tree house, and more.
We’ve been renting the ranch going on four years now, and every time a guest shows up — even today — there’s a part of me that’s still like, “You wanted to come here? You could have gone anywhere in America, and you wanted to come to Milk & Honey Ranch?”
I often have people come to me and say, “You must be living your dream.”
I’m like, “This was never my dream.” I was deep in the tech world. All I’m trying to do is pay the bills.
I would never have chosen this path. It was nothing I ever dreamed about. I got shoved into it, just trying to provide for my family.
Even after we added three casitas, I still didn’t think this was actually going to be a business. I was just trying to balance out the expenses with the income.
In the past 12 months, I’ve hosted over 8,000 guests.
I have to have a reason to get up in the morning and do something big, not just be idle.
This business is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I discovered something about myself: The best version of myself is when I need to take care of my family. That’s the most unselfish and unwavering I am. I’ll push through all the barriers needed to take care of my family.
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