Heads In Beds Show - Build Your Growth Engines For Homeowner And Guest Marketing Success

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul break down when your vacation rental business is actually ready for different marketing channels and why jumping into more ads, SEO, email, or direct mail isn’t always the answer.They walk through the before, during, and after of both guest and homeowner marketing, from finding your niche and crafting the right message to converting leads, delivering a great experience, driving referrals, tracking the right KPIs, and a lot MORE!Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bed Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All my kids are back in school as of yesterday, and the house is a lot more quiet. My daughter starts tomorrow, so that will be starting tomorrow at about 8.30 a.m. I'm going to look around, and I'm going to see that little puppy that I showed you earlier, and I'm going to see a baby, and that's it in my house. So it's going to be, like, very similar silence compared to a typical morning here. How much more time is left on your sentence?

What's going on? See, it's if our podcast recording software didn't show both of our videos during like all the clips now, I would have given you a nice, really little gesture there. I have three weeks left until school starts that time of recording. I am really jealous of you. That's all we'll say. I love my children to death. And if they listen to this at the end of the summer, good on you.

Oh, we made it. It is. It's summer gets long sometimes. I forget about that. And as the children get older and they get wiser, I know less. So I'm just going to try to make it these final three weeks and see if I can learn a little more during school or something. I don't know. No, it's so true.

I think learning is an important skill, isn't it Paul? And some lessons we have to learn the hard way, both in our life and with parenting and also with building a business. So we've got an interesting topic today. I don't even know how we're going to title this, to be honest with you. Title is actually going to be written after this episode is over, so we rarely do that, but we're doing that this time. So this is a loose idea that I'm going to come up with a little while ago. And it's, by the way, credit to the idea here, because the idea is based on a book called One Page Marketing Plan by Alan Dibs. And it's a very generalist book, by the way, that's kind of meant for any type of small business.

And the premise is, can I put my marketing plan on, like the title describes, one eight and a half by 11 sheet of printer paper. Could I write down my marketing plan at a high level there? And in the book, he kind of walks you through how it is. But how to do that. So I've thought, okay, what can I, I reread kind of the concepts of that book recently. I didn't reread the exact book itself. It's pretty short, by the time. But I was thinking back to it a little bit of, I feel like this is what some people struggle

with. We get sewed down the weeds. People always ask me, and sometimes on sales calls to really narrow, hyper-specific questions. Should we use this image or this video type when we're advertising our properties on Facebook or whatever? And I try to answer the best of my ability, but I'm like, we have to zoom way back for just a second, just a moment, and think another idea, which I think we're going to cover in the future, which is like, are you ready for that thing?

Should you be doing that thing? And also, have we set up the right foundation? everyone always says that. I feel like that's a common marketing speak or thing that we say all the time. Oh, we have to step the right foundation. We never actually define what that is. We're just like, oh, it needs to have a strong foundation. What is that? So the attempt today is to talk through two different concepts that we believe, which is this building a one page marketing plan or a foundation for your homeowner marketing and your guest marketing. If we have time to get through both, we can do that based on kind of these three different concepts. So one is attraction, one is

conversion. And then one is basically experience and referral, actually consuming the stay or consuming being in management with you and then going on from there. So the way that I think about this is that there's kind of these two pipelines. There's a guest one and a home winner one. If that is your model, by the way, that may not be your model, in which case we can talk about that throughout the episode. And there's just two or three things you need to think about in each of those different concepts before, during after or consumption, that sort of thing, that I think can get you this strong foundation that all these marketing people like to talk about. So that's what we're going to attempt to do today in a compressed amount of time. Have I been up more than we can chew here,

Paul, or do we think we can punch through this one? I think we got enough. I think we can run through this stuff. Truly, I think this is stuff that we've talked about a lot. And I think we do talk about foundational things quite often. But again, because so many people have entered this space in so many different ways, there are. There's varying degrees of how much your business is developed in or in what phase of the business we'd say you're in. I think that's always been that you've been able to be a little more selective with the clients you've taken on, the customers you've worked with. I didn't have that luxury during your business. I didn't have that luxury the early part, most of the bulk of my career. So I did. I got to see a lot of people at a lot of

varying levels of these phases. And you could identify, I think it is, once you saw enough, you started to identify where people were in the phase and tried to steer them in the direction. Like I said, are we ready for something like this or can we pivot to do something that makes a little more sense for where we are? So I think that this is, again, we've all seen people at different phases of this. And I think this is a course correct to be able to say, okay, let's focus on really what's going to help you move the needle and help you get to whatever phase of the business you really want to be at. Yeah. It's almost, I think maybe what you were hinting towards there, but I'll say and correct me if you feel differently. It's like patterns. Like you notice patterns

over and over again. Ah, you're struggling with this. Maybe even you can articulate it, Mr. Owner, Mr. Marketing Manager, or Mrs. Market Manager, Mrs. Owner. But that's where you're at right now. And I feel like I can help you because luckily, not because I'm some genius, but just because I've seen this before. And as a result, I can hopefully guide you a little bit more in this direction. And I feel like that's, that is the one thing that, in my opinion, like hopefully if and when we do get replaced by the AI, one would hope that AI actually gets to that stage where it identifies you and diagnoses you better. But I think one thing that AI does a generally poor job of when I see clients using it is it has so little context into you and your business and what you're trying to accomplish that it gives you, it spits out very general recommendations, broadly speaking, right? go into your favorite AI tool of choice, for example, and just like, throw on your website, it just said, what should I be working on right now?

And it knows so little about you in that scenario. You have to work on a lot of steps of these things. So let me run through, I'll run through the bullet points first, maybe, and then we can go back and go phase one, phase two, phase three. Should we start with guest or homeowner? What do you think? Guest is more universal problem. Let's go guest, because we can be a little more universal.

That will drop in homeowner when you can. Okay, I like that. All right. So guest, basically, think of it this way. The first objective is to find out what audience I'm going to serve, and why am I the right person to serve that audience, by the way, which I think is a very underrated piece of this puzzle. There's a lot of examples going in my head right now. We just had Bob on from first-chair destinations, our art of hospitality, excuse me, and their niche, for example, is ski-friendly

vacation rentals. Perfectly. Makes sense. I think that's a good way to go about it. Now, your niche might just be location-based. It should be we're serving people who are coming to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We're serving people who are coming to this particular area, and we're offering this type of experience, this type of stay in our actual home. Think about a destination and like hotel chains, for example, Ashley Ching talks about this a lot. They have chain scale. We are attracting a luxury buyer. We're attracting this, this buyer that's looking for this type of home. We're attracting the people don't want to say this, but it's true. There's a lot of demand for the economy scale of short-term rentals. Very common here at Myrtle Beach, by the way. One of my largest clients

is one that offers a very affordable, relatively speaking, compared to other options, small ocean-front condo rentals. And there's a ton of demand for it here because a lot of people want to come here and they want to stay in the ocean, and they don't want to pay a lot of money. So anyways, there's your niche. What's your message? And then what platforms are we going to use to get in front of these people? If we think about it from a high level, that's all it is. That's the building of your company from a who we're going to go after and how are we going to reach them perspective.

For example, ski-friendly vacations, our messages that we have the best ski-friendly homes because of these seven reasons. You could talk about those reasons. They're always within X distance to the lift. We have discounted tickets that we can offer you, blah, blah, whatever those things are. And we're going to reach them through both OTA channels, Airbnbbuking.com, verbo, maybe, for example. And we're going to run ads on Google to get more huge. people there. We're going to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and we're going to build a website that people can book on directly and save a little bit of money on their stay. So there's a lot of

new ones once you get to those stages, as we talked about, but from a high level, that is one way to think about it. Maybe you have a booking channel that maybe a lot of people don't have. Maybe you're on Marriott Hums and Villas, and some people aren't on that. Maybe you have a chamber that runs ads to your direct booking website, and a lot of people don't have that. So there's other channels. There might be some nuance there, but that's a very common way to think about it. So that's kind of phase one. Phase two is, all right, how they actually, the mechanics of you actually marketing on those channels. So it's, I'm going to get guests to book on Airbnb by having awesome photography, by having really good descriptions, by having really good

pricing that's competitive that offers the guests a great value for their stay. Those are all somewhat subjective, but you could figure out how a guest would feel like it's a good value or not feel like it's a good value based on your booking pacing, based on how you're doing compared to the competition of similar units, that sort of thing. We're going to nurture people who look but don't book, so we're going to have outbound communication through email. We're going to have people follow our pages on social media. We're going to run SMS campaigns, marketing campaigns, get them come back. And then we're going to have a really, to the best of our ability, sales conversion, built on our site so people can easily click and book out and check out on our website by putting in their

card card card checking a box and hitting pay and we're going to make sure all the back head works there so that's that phase two how do we actually get them to give us the money essentially and book and then finally phase three is we have to deliver great experience so all the first six steps are just getting them to that front door where they punch in the code and walk in the front door but man we better nail that because if we don't nail that the next two aren't going to work very well so we need to offer them a great experience that is a more of a property operations thing that pal and i are probably not the best person give you advice on but we could talk about at a high level at least then i need to think about how can I increase the value of them during their stay?

Could I upsell them? Could I get them to add nights? Can I get them to add experiences? Could I get them to come back and book again, of course? And can I get them to leave me a good review and then recommend me to their friends and family? So that's the last step in that journey one might call out from a guest perspective, which is that I live to five-star review and either I will come back in the future or I'm going to say, hey, if you're going to Breckham Ridge, if you're going to North Myrtle Beach,

if you're going to Destin, Florida, if you're going to San Diego, if you're going to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, whatever it is, you need to go and book with these guys because they do a great job. You've now done the job of orchestrating a referral. Everything we do, and we talk about now for several hundred episodes, obviously falls into those things. But I bet very few people listening have actually thought about it in that way of those three blocks of time. And they probably have things in that list that are incongruent, which is the word I often use, with the strategy that they should have versus what they've actually chosen to put out there in the marketplace. Or there's pieces that aren't aligned there.

And when those aren't aligned, that's where problems occur. So that was a lot to cover in a short period of time. But your thoughts on those three concepts and then let's dive into them. I think it is. I think this is looking at it from the homeowner side of things. a lot of it does parallel very similarly. I think it is. You identified that niche item of,

I think some people do get sucked into either being, thinking about the traveler persona or the destination there. But I think there are those levels of quality of the property themselves. And certainly I think that's something that more people who are a little more established will think about. When they're thinking about your homeowner side, thinking about your niche, it is. Am I only going for luxury five-bedroom homes?

Am I only going for Oceanfront? Am I only doing condos? Am I only doing this, that? I think it is. It's maybe hopefully you're considering who your prospective travelers would be when you're thinking about building out that portfolio because I think that certainly would play a role in, excuse me, helping to define how you're seeing what that inventory is going to look like.

Again, if you have multi-family, multi-generational family, and you have one and two bedroom condos, there's a little bit of a mismatch there. So I think those two really go hand in helping to create a better ecosystem within your own business there. Crafting that message, your unique selling proposition is going to be different than, hopefully, is going to be different than the local manager or the big national manager that's right next door. So I think that's something that people have had to have those conversations on the sales

side, maybe, to get people through the door. Now, if you are just a single homeowner and you have just started your business and you haven't done that sales side of things, then you do. You want to consider what is going to differentiate you from the crowd. I think that's where we get to these different levels. And maybe as a single homeowner or one person managing two or three homes, maybe you don't have that message. So you start to just focus on that niche and maybe the message comes later. I think then you start to look at for the traveler side of things. We're trying to reach people through social media, through SEO, through all these efforts. Same thing on the owner's side of things. We're just doing it a little differently there. In some cases, it is the postcards,

well, it's not our digital world. It's still something that's super effective on that side of things. Creating microsites. That's something that a lot of people, we've gone from the single landing page that barely had any information about your business to these nice, broad micro sites that really give a better understanding of your message if you've got that in place. So I think that using Google ads and using meta ads and using some retargeting, certainly we're going to try to do similar channels that we do on the traveler side. Again, I think for every market, it's a little different on which channels are effective. That's no different than the guest side of things.

You've got to go with the channels that resonate and the messaging that actually is going to matter there. So I think when we compare travelers and homeowners on phase one, it's reasonably similar. I just think it is. I add different parts. And again, if your business is more defined is a little further along, then you maybe have some better ideas on, or you can maybe fill in phase one a little more fully. thinking about the during phase of as we're doing the marketing, you do have to, you have to offer something. I think that's something that even if it's perceived value, if it's true value,

something that's going to make sure that they understand. I think in a lot of cases, that perceived value is going to be some type of rental estimation. That's going to help you to at least give them that peace of mind that certainly you've got, you understand what it's going to take to get the most out of their home. Nurturing leads, I think that's something that on the homeowner side of things, we do have to nurture those leads a little more. There's a little more whining and dining that has to take place because while high ticket bookings are certainly very expensive, we're talking about, as we've talked about many times before, putting a million dollar, two million dollar, three million dollar home in someone's hands to get the most out of your return or to

take the best care of it, whatever that is. So really being able to continually market to those people, SMS and text, SMS marketing, doing a little more, I would say, personalized. This is not, you are going to do some, I would say you're going to do some more broadcast emails, but when you get down to nurturing the leads, those have to be one-to-one communications. And I think if you, I mean, I think if you're getting the most out of the traveler side, it's got to be closer to one-to-one communications or at least customized communications matching what that desire is for the traveler as well. And then sale at this conversion side of things.

This may be the biggest hiccup along the way for the best homeowner marketing efforts is you get all these leads coming in or you get good leads coming in, but we just can't get that sale through. We can't get them across the finish line and get them in the inventory. So maybe in this during phase on the homeowner side, you are looking at potentially having a BV person or having. having a salesperson or making sure that your sales process, your sales script, whatever that is being evaluated and optimized, enhanced, wherever that is, because the worst thing you want to do is

get through those top five phases and then have everything fall apart at six. Then again, after you get them on the program, then that is when the marketing just starts, because then you really want to talk to talk about how you're delivering a world-class experience for those travelers while maintaining their home at utmost levels. So I think that this is where you really, and then I think this is where as an industry, we've got to get better. We have to get better at proactively communicating to our homeowners as opposed to reactively communicating to them when conditions change,

when weather patterns change, when travel intent changes, when macroeconomics change. There's a lot of different things you can be educating your homeowners on. When you're maintenance, you change a new maintenance person. You've got all these different things. There's a lot of different touch points along the way that we just assume someone may not want to know about or we don't always want to deliver bad news in some cases. And that's part of, I think, effective marketing makes those messages land in a way that it doesn't feel negative.

It feels like a learning opportunity that we're all, you know, we're all getting better on that after phases. side of things. Increasing the lifetime value is a little different there. We're probably not going to anticipate that someone's going to buy a new home, but think about someone who's purchased a new home, purchased a home that maybe is 10 years, 15 years removed from a recent renovation, adding amenities, adding specific things that are going to ultimately grow the lifetime value of that individual property. You could turn a $50,000 gross booking revenue property into a $100,000 gross booking revenue property if we're adding the right amenities and doing things like that. So I do think that there's opportunities to, again, educate and market to those people along the way, automate some of

those communications to say, hey, all of our homes at the swimming pool are actually up 27% over what we are year over year. Some of these stats like that. Because when we do have happy homeowners, obviously we get to that last side of things where those referrals are going to come in. And in a lot of cases, this is how people have grown the business. They've built it off of referrals. It's my cousin, my sister, my coworker, their friend. I have 12 rentals now that I have, and I think they didn't have to do anything. After a while, you have to push more for those referrals. And I think that is something that when it's passive at the start, you just assume that's the way the business is going to run. And then we get to an actual phase three where you're sending out

communications to your homeowners, hey, don't forget if anybody's new is moving into the complex, make sure they know that we're an on-site manager and we're happy to help out as well. So I think it's a similar path. I think it again, it's maybe a little different communication style, but ultimately we're taking people through those different phases. And on the traveler side, I think it's a little more direct. On the homeowner side, there's, there's areas where you need to be a little more prepared to be effective in some of those spaces. But what do you think? I was saying we both went through the whole laundry list there. So what do you think about that there? No, I love it. Actually, what I was thinking about, too,

as we were going through both those concepts is that what's awesome about this, the way, this way thinking, this kind of nine box theory of like before, during after and the sub pieces they went through on guests and homeowner. We can attach a KPI to all these things. So if I go back to the beginning, select your niche, it could be like, how big is that? How many people are how many homeowners are there in North Myrtle Beach that have short to rentals? And you go in there today and you look and actually don't know. Maybe I should know considering it's my boat and backyard. But let's say it's 1,200, something like that.

I don't even know what the number is. But 1,200 properties. Okay. And we only want homes. Okay, there's 875 that are homes. Again, these numbers would not be accurate at all. I'm just giving an example. Okay, 75 homes.

Okay, great. We want stuff that's walkable to the beach or on the beachfront. Okay, now we're down to 423. Okay, cool. So that's our niche. That's our market. What's our message? We're going to help you in these five ways, like we talked about.

that one there's a KPI in it because you can once you run your marketing actual creative there's things actually live in the internet or live in people's inboxes from a direct mail perspective and you have four different messages you can see which one gets the best response rate so if you talk most about revenue does that lead to the most responses and also are the type of homeowners that you want to work with you could talk about property care and does that lead to a the most responses or again kind of be your sub a the type of homer you want to work with you could talk about what you offer the homeowner and how your your value proposition is you said earlier your value proposition And I will say, way easier to say than to do, right?

Like, it's easy to say, hey, we offer XYZ, but do those claims hold up under scrutiny? Like, if I injected you a truth serum and put you up in a court and the lawyers cross-examining you, who's your competition or whatever, could you actually verify and prove what you claim on a postcard or what you claim on your homeowner page or whatever? And the truth is, very few can. That's why very few homeowners companies actually get a lot of inbound homeowner leads because they're actually delivering on what they say they're going to deliver on, right? It's the minority, not the majority of homeowners that actually management companies that actually deliver for their homeowners.

But again, that could be a KPI. Prospects. Okay, so when we're running Facebook ads, how many people saw the ads, how many clicked on the ad, how many filled out the form? Again, how many of those were qualified? Those are all metrics, numbers that you can tie into. So I don't even go through every single one. You get the point. But each kind of individual piece of this journey that we just talked about before, during and after, has a number you can attach to it.

And if you are a scorecard person or if you're just a spreadsheet of, I want to track these four or five metrics for each of these different kind of engines, my growth engine on guest marketing. my growth engine on homeowner marketing. What's good about is, once you collect the data for a little while, you can see where the problem is. Wait a second. We got 27 homeowner leads in July of this year. We got 27 last year. And I closed two of them this year.

And I closed eight of them last year. That's way off. What's going on with that? But if you have the data and you're collecting it, you can actually look at it. When you and I used to talk about this a lot offline. So I'll say, now that we're recording something. But it always used to be the funniest thing when we collaborate together on projects in the past on the homeowner marketing side.

And someone would say, I have currently have, we'll make it a round number. And it's simple. I have 50 homes. I want to be at 100 homes. Great. How long have you been in business? I've been in business since 2018. Great. So you're at 2018. Here we are in 2026. You have 50 homes. So basically on average, you grow by, what is that? Seven, eight years. You grow an average by five, six homes a year or something like that. Again, do you have data showing me like how many homes you've added per year? Like probably not. Now you want to go from 50 to 100. Okay, at your current trajectory,

that's going to basically take you another five or seven years, like somewhere in that zone, depending on how fast you go, right? Yeah. Okay. So how long do you want that to occur? Oh, I want that happened in 12 months. It's like, okay, if you want to grow 5x faster or 10x faster, which is what you're talking about there, you better be prepared to put in 10x the effort. You might need to spend 10x amount of money on advertising. You might have to run 10 times more postcards, which if you're signing one every other month or one every quarter or something, that's possible. You could send a postcard every month.

But what you may also learn in this whole journey and this whole process is that each channel, each kind of tactic with it we're talking about here has essentially, I always think about it like a pool and the pool is only so deep. So you can only spend so much money on Google ads and continue to get home and or leads. And guess bookings, by the way, every market has a ceiling and how much you can spend. And some of our largest clients run into this problem where it's like, okay, we're already at 90% impression share of this keyword. We can't spend any more on Google ads.

Like it's profitable, but we really can't spend a lot more because we're already showing up almost all the time where people are searching. But doing something stupid, like of expanding the audience to do a market that we don't actually get conversions from. Sure, there's anything can be gained. Right. What is it? There's lies. There's damn lies and there's statistics. Right. So anything can be gamed. But anyways, to go back to it, I think what helps me understand is if you're willing to do the work of like going through each of these concepts on your homeowner side and you're on your guest side of understanding, where your weaknesses are, boy, does that make your plan so much more actionable? Because you can

hire the right people for the job. And I said before you record, Paul is not a company builder. Conrad's not a company builder for your vacational company, nor is any service or platform or whatever the case may be. What we are is like specialists or this mercenary kind of work for hire type person who's going to help you maybe with a somewhat broad, like a T-shaped set of problems. And then we're going to go deep into one area. So we're going to help you with guest marketing or homeowner marketing. And then we go really deep. Let's go like down into the most bottom level stuff on SEO, paid surge. Met ads, email marketing, SMS.

Those are all fun things to dive into. Paul's extensive knowledge of direct mail, these kind of things. But if you don't actually have a real unique value proposition, if you're just saying it, then like the ads that Paul run for you aren't going to convert amazingly well. The ads I run for you on the guest side, if you don't offer a good price for your rentals compared to your competition, aren't going to convert that good. Like there's, you need to think about each step of this process as what we always talked about. The chains, you know, links in a chain, excuse me, to where it's one weakness there,

you go to pull on it and it'll fall apart. So you have to have each chain be strong, and it's hard to do that. And we're not sitting here and disputing it. But I think in small business, and I'm guilty of this too, so I'm raising my hand. We often work on the wrong thing, don't we? We often work on the thing that we're comfortable with, that we're good at, the things that we're probably already in strong shape on. And then we ignore the things that we're actually weak at that we need to work on. So we don't actually have the real true unique value proposition because it's like, what's uncomfortable to go do the things that would make us actually have a USP that's real.

Or yeah, I don't, like, I had a call today where someone was like, I don't really want to call my owners. Like once they're in my program, I don't want to really chat with them and reach out to them too much. And I'm like, terrible idea, by the way. If you want to lose your homeowners, then I guess do that. But it would be a lot better if we like reach out to them monthly, quarterly. Could we send them a note? Could we personalize a video and send it out to their performance? Maybe those are all ideas.

But if you're not willing to do that work, instead you're just going to go back and tweak your price lab's algorithm or whatever you're using on pricing algorithm because you're good at that and you like doing that, that's fine. But don't be surprised when they churn because you don't reach out to them. So anyways, all these things have like layers underneath them. And I think that's the fun part about this is that the quality of the output that you're get from your marketing and advertising and just kind of brand building ideas in general is directly proportional to these kind of nine ideas that you're thinking about in your business on homeowner and guest and the people that figured out and do well are the ones that grow and the ones that don't

and it's like the only thing that you the gap in your knowledge between where you are today and where you want to be is that right it's like picking the right thing to work on I would argue it's not doing anything at all like I think that's actually less common that I think I think people just spend way too much time perfecting something that's in good shape and they're ignoring the thing constantly in front of them that they could be better at that they don't want to do and again I'm guilty of is it anybody, so I'm not sitting here preaching. I'm saying I've done this 10 times more than anyone listening probably. It is. It's hard not. But I think you knew, I think you did a really good job of tying everything into KPI's because we can KPI all of this stuff. But when we focus on KPI's,

let's just call the spade, we focus on the KPI's in one phase. It's phase two. Phase two is where a lot of the focus just ends up being because it's the most demonstrable of what we're doing. But it's bring people into the website, getting them to close, getting them to ultimately book, getting them to ultimately sign on with you. We can put a lot of great numbers around phase two. We can put numbers around phase one, but they're more conceptual numbers. And I think it's something where I think the more work you put into phase one and phase three and try to measure phase one and phase three, that's where you do get more effectiveness in your marketing. But we do put such a big focus on phase two because those are the numbers that we feel are drivers of the business.

But in reality, they may be more lagging indicators of phase three inadequacies of phase one and phase three efforts. And that's something that, again, we've talked about often the, we may not be the biggest Facebook fans, but unfortunately, the time you realize when your Facebook marketing was effective was when you turn it off. And that's just a really bad spot to be in. So I do. I think that when we focus on these phase two KPIs about what our conversion rate is and how many leads we're capturing and how many people were driving to the website, we do. We start to forget about, hey, remember all they really got to the website is they were reading all these great five-star reviews.

And now we're getting referrals because we're focusing more of our efforts on X, Y, and Z and getting traffic. Or we're focusing on different messaging. We've crafted a different message that's just not resonating with our niche or some of these other things. That's going to show up in your phase two KPIs in six months or in eight months or in 12 months when you're evaluating year-over-year performance and you're realizing, whoopsies, we may have made a mistake there. What do you think? I'd chew on that a little bit because what do you think about that or do you see that being part of the flaw when people are looking at some of these things? I think that's always the flaw, right?

It's like you have the ability to see in front of you, but you don't have the ability to see multiple steps ahead. But a lot of your marketing growth, it's, okay, let's go back for a second. People always say this. I hear this more than anything. And I heard it again the other day. And I had to stop them and be like, okay, here's how to think about it. But it's, man, how are we ever going to compete with Airbnb?

How are we ever going to compete at? How are we ever going to compete at Book.com? And I've said it out nauseam, but that's not your job because that's not, first of all, it's not your business model. Again, going back to the model piece of the conversation. your job is to fill your homes profitably and effectively to a satisfactory level of occupancy that your homeowner stick with you at the very least. But ideally, they're happy with you.

And in a perfect world, they're super happy with you, right? That's where referrals come from, going back to our other, from a second ago. But there's like you're getting a grade all the time from your guests and your homeowners. And your job is basically, at the very least, it would be above average. That's how you can just survive and get to the next month or the next quarter. I'm assuming if you're listening, you don't want to just be average or barely above average. I'm assuming you want to be way above average. So you have a really outsized income and outcome, I should say, right, from both ends of your business.

So it's like, how do I reach a level of performance that's really high? You have to look at all the mistakes that all the other people make and then not repeat them. And then you've got to come up with new ideas that people need. And some of the things you come up with are you spend time on them. They don't really move the needle that much. And sometimes you spend time on something where it's like, wow, I'm the only one doing this. And now I have all the people coming to me for this idea or this concept. Simple.

This AI messaging that's overtaken our short-term rental industry. Now it's like pretty much if you imagine if you're booking with any professional property manager today, there's a really high likelihood that you're going to get a lot of AI messaging from them as you're reaching back out and sending the messages. I think that's okay in the surface, but I think underneath that is you better be damn sure that it's working to your level of, to the level of satisfaction where a guest is not just please, not just happy, but over the moon, receiving these AI messages. Because I think what's more likely to happen with a lot of these AI messages is you're actually pissing off the guests or they're not really getting a great experience, but it's not bad enough where they're not going to complain about it or leave you a three-star review or two-star review on Airbnb. It's not rising to that level or falling to that level, maybe I should say, but it's enough where it's like, I wouldn't book with them again, what was personal about that experience. There was nothing there that was really that great.

It was like, I walked in. The property is what I expected. It was just fine. I'll go ahead and leave my good review. But if I'm coming back, I don't really need to come back and stay with that. I can stay with anybody. I'll just go on an Airbnb or I'll go on their site and I'll just look for the best price. I'm not that loyal to it.

So that's the hard thing in our space, right? How do you maintain that efficiency and also maintain that level of that was far better than I expected to where the words you want coming out of a guest mouth are if I were to come back, I would only stay with you. Because I've heard or I've seen or I've experienced much worse situations of this one or much worse stays in this one and you've over delivered on what you thought. And I'm happy with that. And I want to come back and stay with you specifically again.

Again, much easier said than done. But that's the kind of execution I think that we think about on the guest side. Same logical wise to hellowner as well. I think it is. It's like nobody is using a, we're talking about AI for, we've got to. It's AI. It's still the AI world. Nobody's using AI to deliver a six out of five experience.

Right. Remember Chesky talking about that. What would it take to get a six out of five? That's what it's, I think we are using AI to try to get us to five out of five. But again, if we're doing some of these things more effectively and seeing some of these phases along the way, or maybe using AI to supplement or complement some of these phases, maybe that'll help. But that's when I think we'll really have an idea of when AI has crossed the chasm and is actually helping to deliver and delight is when you are. You're seeing as a result of the communication, or either the style pattern of communication,

the experience you get on site, all of these things, then we will see a higher. overall guest rating, you'll see higher satisfaction scores. You'll see the ability to probably charge a higher rate because people know that you are delivering a higher level of experience and they're willing to pay for something like that. I think that's something that we're using it to get to a standard level and go back to that. Again, getting to that standards and things like that. We are trying to get to a standard. Let's create that standard and exceed that standard. That's where we're still, again, that's a, that is a, you've got all three phases in place. Now, what else can we do?

There are very few businesses. There might not be any businesses truly in the space that have all three phases, all nine levels here, completely locked down. They're making it happen, making it rain. And if they are, hey, love to talk to you. I've got some really big questions that I think could help the rest of the industry. Well, and you and I've been in the room with very large companies that are doing tens of million dollars a year in gross booking revenue. And they'll gladly tell you out loud or sit in a

meeting with them for 20 minutes. And I've been in these meetings before where they go, wow, like our home owner marketing is driving no leads right now. Or we have, we have these four properties get delisted from Airbnb the other day. So this crap is super hard. Don't make it, don't mistake anything we've said today to be easy. I think there's a way to make things straightforward, but that does not mean they're easy. As the listener might know at this point, like Paul and I are big golfers. And there was this thread on Twitter the other day. And it was talking about the average distance that a, that you hit a driver. I don't know if you saw this by age, basically. And it was like to be in the ninth percentile, you have to hit it this far. I think it was

292 if you're in your 20s. And I think it was 22 if you're in your 30s. I'm in my 30s. And I was like, do you know how much effort I've had to put in to get into that 90th percentile? I've had to speed train three times a week for three years to get there. So it's like at no point. It was very straight. It was very simple. You take this weighted thing. You swing it over and over again. And then you measure a fast it goes. And then you wait two days and do it again. And you just do that for three straight years. And then you're in the ninth percentile. Right. So it's not, it's not hard. If you have access to a space you can swing the weighted stick at and you have a little radar, which is a hundred bucks, you can do it. Anyone can do it and get faster, probably get close to the 90 percent

top. But can you do it every other day for three years and take very few breaks for sick illness and travel or whatever the case may be, as I've done. And it's like, if you can, then awesome, then you deserve it and you earn it. But if you're not a golfer, you're probably listening at what the hell is you talking about. What these guys talking about? Yeah, what the fuck are these guys talking about? But to go back, it's the same logic, right? If you want to be the best, If you want to get the most homeowner referrals, are you willing to reach out to a referral source every other day or every day or Monday through Friday or whatever for three straight years and continue to get homeowner referrals? If you're not and you're putting in the minimum effort, why in the world would you expect a better than minimal or better than base level outcome? Right. So that's kind of where I land on it.

And that that speaks a lot, I think, to this whole AI thing, right, which is that the feature of knowledge work is not going to be, we're in this awkward middle now, I think, with AI knowledge work and using AI to use AI. where you get, you're so much faster than people are not using it because it's like you found a little hack or a secret that other people aren't fully in tune with. And the more effectively you can use AI and the more skilled you are at prompting and building scripts and building on the stuff, you're going to go a lot faster now. Within a few years, that that lead or advantage you might have now, I think goes away completely. And it's like, of course we're using AI to do this. This is just a tool in the same way that someone would be like, of course we're using Microsoft Excel and not a piece of paper to do your taxes or to do this spreadsheet accounting math. Because that would be stupid to use piece paper when we have Excel now. Microsoft Excel is a far superior software for that purpose, right?

We can agree on that. There's no advantage to using Microsoft Excel now to do a spreadsheet compared to when it came out, I'm sure, three decades ago, right? But in this middle time, I think you can make some progress. You can make a lead. But just know, people are going to come for you. They're going to, like, over time, the bar just gets higher and higher. I think when it comes to guest experience, homeowner, experience, sending better rates,

all that kind of stuff. And you just have to kind of keep out it in the same way that you've got to do it every day, five days a week for three years to be in the top 90th percentile. And then when you are, you get to enjoy the, the fruits of your labor, I would say, to some degree. You get to experience that upside of working on that thing for a long time. But there's often not a lot of shortcuts to get there. It's working on the right thing and working on the right thing for an extended period of time that gets you into this top, if you want to think about that way, top 5 percent, top top percent of companies in our

space are the ones that put in that effort for an extended period of time. But I think to go back to it starts with understanding what those growth engines are and then constantly working on those weaknesses. Keeping your strengths strong is the best of your ability. And then it's constantly working on those weaknesses to say, we're bad here. Our close rate sucks. We're going to fix it. We're bad here. We don't get enough homeowner leads. We're going to fix it. Hey, we have a problem with churn. We're going to fix it. When there's big companies in our space who, the old version of Vakasa that were unbelievably skilled assigning inventory and could not keep it. And as a result, it took a $4 billion public company and brought it down to $100 million sold for scraps type of thing,

right? Sold for the pieces of the parts, not the actual company itself. So if Vakasa can burn $3.9 billion of enterprise value through not retaining their homeowners, then we should learn from that and be like, how can we, in our many version of it, maybe for us losing $3 million, not $3.9 billion, but the premise is the same, which is we need to keep our homeowners. We need to get good reviews. We need to do all these things. And there's many steps underneath that actually get you there. So that's it.

That's all I got. What are your thoughts, closing part of thoughts before we put about this one? It is. I think it's hard to go back to basics when maybe you didn't start with the basics here. So I think it is maybe this is just that that pathway for people who can self-identify as, ooh, I went from one to 12 in a week or two weeks. Maybe this is an opportunity to just kind of roll things back, take a look at some of these phases, and really just try to help identify where you, again, identify inefficiency.

Not everybody's perfect. Be able to call yourself out and say, this is what I need to do better, and this is where I think it can help me in the future. One more thing. They need to review where they depart, Paul. They need to review their podcast app. And this podcast specifically on their podcast app, so iTunes, Spotify listeners, you get the most downloads there. Here's what you do. Again, there's tens of thousands of you get to download.

There's not tens of thousands of reviews. to be close. Open your podcast app, click five stars. Leave us a friendly comment. Even leave a mean comment. You might be able to hurt my feelings. It's not that hard to hurt my feelings, but do it just for fun if you want to, just for some S&Gs, as it were. We'll keep it, we'll keep it host friendly here. We appreciate to thank you making it all the way to the end, dear listener. You're an awesome person. Hope you have a phenomenal rest of your day. And I hope you continue to work on these nine areas in each part of your business. We love you. Bye.