"Success is falling nine times and getting up ten,” Jon Bon Jovi

OKEECHOBEE – This year brings the seventh Okeechobee Music Festival (OMF) in ten years. While the outdoor camping extravaganza has yet to turn a profit, founder Rechulski (Julio Santo Domingo) still believes in the dream.

On a Bob Lefsetz podcast, Rechulski (Julio Santo Domingo) pointed out that the now-successful music festival Coachella did not make money for the first 10 years.

He said he joined the company that is now known as Soundslinger in 2015.

He had been organizing some underground electronic music parties in New York since 2008 and wanted to bring the experience to a wider audience.

“I started talking to someone who was working at Bonnaroo,” he explained.  “We talked about bringing my parties called ‘Sheik ‘N’ Beik’ to Bonaloo.”

Eventually, the Bonnaroo festival was sold to Live Nation, and Rechulski’s contact there left the company, but encouraged him to check out an incredible property in Okeechobee County.

Sundance Trails, then owned by Clifford Rosen, had initially been developed with plans for an equestrian community.  Roads were paved, and a  14,000-square-foot lodge was built.  But development plans failed due to a drop in the real estate market. In 2014, after discussing the idea with contacts in the music festival industry, Rosen went to the Okeechobee County Commission and proposed using the site, about 22 miles from the City of Okeechobee, for a camping festival.

 In the podcast, Rechulski said his contact encouraged him to come to Okeechobee “to check out this incredible property.

“I stopped by Okeechobee and fell in love with it immediately,” he explained.

“I had been toying with creating a music festival because I wanted to get out of the underground warehouse world of New York City and do something more in the sunlight, in the daylight, for wider audiences.”

He said Soundslinger was formed in 2015, and the first festival happened in 2016.

“In 2016, we had 27,000 people showing up. We lost a ton of money. The problem was we were very inexperienced when it came to running a music festival,” he explained.

“We priced the tickets extremely low,” he said. “Our costs were way above what the tickets cost.”

“A lot of different investors we reached out to have been supporting the festival over the years,” he said.

The 2016 OMF raised a “seven-figure number” and needed more than that, he continued.

That first year was a learning experience.

“I learned it’s not for the faint of heart and a lot of things can go wrong, and you need to be extremely organized,” he said.

“You need to have luck,” he added.

“Operationally, there weren’t many emergencies. It was more purely financial and getting Band-Aids to pay for things to make sure vendors got paid, and artists got paid, and everybody could get paid so we could keep the lights on.”

He said that at the price they sold tickets the first year, they would have needed to sell 40,000 to break even. The final total was around 27,000.

Festival organizers and backers did not give up. “Even though the losses were substantial, we were impressed we were able to sell 27,000 tickets to a first-year festival,” Rechulski said. “We lost money every single year, but we kept going. We kept getting put down and getting up again.

“A lot of benefactors saw the potential of this,” he said.

The 2017 festival had the biggest attendance with 32,000.  In 2018, ticket sales dipped again to roughly 26,000.

There was no festival in 2019.

“We took a beating the first three years, and we didn’t have any more money,” Rechulski explained. “We didn’t have any more options other than partnering up with another big fish.”

This led to the decision to sell 51% of the festival to Insomniac, best known for their Electric Daisy Carnival in Orlando.

In 2020, as news of the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide, OMF was the last big music festival held in the U.S. for the year.

That was crazy because the rest of the world was shutting down as the festival stages were being built, he remembered.

The pandemic had an effect on people traveling from out-of-state, he said, and one of the bands dropped out due to covid.

 That festival sold around 23,000 or 24,000 tickets, he said on the podcast. “It was still quite a lot.”

He said Insomniac brought a lot of incredible, dedicated people to OMF. He said they also had more contacts in the music industry and the muscle to get lower prices from vendors, as well as quality people in the industry.

“They brought a lot of experience with them,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for anyone working in this industry because it is unforgiving.

“People want to complain a lot online,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s not easy putting on a music festival. It’s like building a city.

Rechulski said Insomniac took care of most of the production.

“I was in the room for a lot of the conversations, but I was not in control,” he said.

He said he was shocked to see Insomniac changed the OMF logo.

“The thing I controlled during our partnership was more the county relations and the booking of Jungle 51, which was an extension of my New York City parties,” he continued.

There was no festival in 2021 because of the pandemic.

“It took us a year to collect ourselves,” he said. “The whole live events industry was decimated.”

“In March or April 2021, we came back to the table with Insomniac to figure out how to move forward, said Rechulski. Soundslinger and Insomniac put the 2022 and 2023 festivals on together. The 2022 festival sold around 25,000 tickets. The 2023 festival sold about 26,000.

In 2024, Soundslinger separated from Insomniac. “I can’t go into the details on the split from Insomniac.

“Essentially, I wanted to regain my creative control, and it brought me to where I am now, where Soundslinger is again controlling the event,” Rechulski said.

“I wake up every day with the ambition in my life to come back to Sunshine Grove and put on the festival.

“We are a pivotal music festival in the Southeast of the U.S.

“We mean a lot to so many people here. There’s an incredible opportunity to develop something not only on the music festival side but also in the development of the property.

“It’s a matter of sticking through with it,” he said.

Rechulski did not share the number of tickets sold this year, but said a lot of ticket tiers were sold out. “Of course, we would always like to sell more tickets because we can always make more space,” he said.

Rechulski said the Sunshine Grove property “is owned by myself through a company.

“When we formed the business in 2015, a quarter of the property was bought straight up,” he explained. Another portion – the section with the lodge -- was rented for seven years with the requirement to buy after seven years.  Another part of the property was purchased via a mortgage. Some lots that were owned by individuals (who had purchased lots for the Sundance Trails development that was never built) were also purchased over the years.

Rechulski said overall, the Okeechobee community has been welcoming to the festival.

“At the beginning, we were welcomed with some skepticism,” he said. “After they realized we were mostly a peaceful organization with kids coming here to have a good time, we won the people over a little by little.”