Heads In Beds Show - Foundational Planning For Vacation Rental Business Success

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, Paul and Conrad cover all things Foundational Planning for a vacation rental management company to thrive and grow.  We cover:Strategy & Foundational Planning • Mission, Vision & Values statements • Company origin story • Unique Value Proposition (UVP) — guests & owners • Geographic focus / service‑territory map • Ideal guest personas • Ideal property‑owner personas • SMART business goals & high‑level KPIs • SWOT & competitive analysis report • Growth & expansion strategy + market‑entry playbook • Succession / leadership‑transition plan • Service scope & business‑model definition • Market‑research repository (demand, seasonality, ADR benchmarks)⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. Oh, good morning. How's it going? What's happening? level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. Oh, good morning. How's it going? What's happening?

It's another happy Monday. I think some people you know, some people may not know you Mondays, we do Thursdays, we do a little bit here, we do a little bit there. But it's a good it's a good start to the week. I said, you know, my inbox was a little on the full side of things this morning. But we're recording this kind of in the middle of May. And we know in most markets that we're working in, if you're not in a mountain market, you're starting to pick up. And if you weren't, you probably hear something. I think we're just hitting seasonality. So how are you doing, sir? That's a funny observation, which is that the people that are most able to listen to the people

that need us the most, that are not able to listen from May to let's call it August 18th, somewhere in that range. Those are the people that probably don't need us as much. So it's somewhat self-selecting if you're listening, maybe you need some marketing advice. But yeah, I've been pretty good on my side, no complaints that I can think of for the most part here. Although we've had a run of great weather the past month or so, it's just been amazing. Like every day it's like sunshine and minimal clouds and not too hot and a little breeze and everything. And we're now gonna get a week straight of rain.

So it's like, here's your penance, for your month of good weather, we're gonna rain on you for a week straight. It's gonna disrupt some of my outdoor activity plans, shall we say, which is a bit of a bummer. So we'll see how that all shakes out obviously. Sometimes these forecasts aren't always exactly correct, but it looks like it'll turn that way.

So that's how it goes sometimes, right? If you have too many good weeks in a row, you just know something's going to come up in the side of the head and smack you and cause you a little headache and worry as it were. We certainly see the ups and downs, the ins and outs of weather in Minnesota here. But as we've also been in the 90s, like the last couple of days, it's going to be 80s. Wow. I know we got more up there than it is down here.

I know we can't get too excited because you know at the end of the week it'll be 50 in a little rain and all something like that but yeah as a gardener as someone who's gonna be doing some outside stuff here in the next few weeks it feels like it's about time. I mean like this is this the signal is not just about signaling you know the outdoor stuff but it feels right. This is this is the time of year. I don't know. Maybe it's the vitamin D something's happening, but it's good stuff right now. You know, gardening is a fun analogy. Maybe we can play with that one as we get going here because today's podcast title talks about laying the groundwork, but maybe it's almost

like planning to grow something, planning to grow amazing company and amazing behavioral company. And that's kind of like gardening in a way where you have to get all the all the details right, you've got to get the soil right, you've got to get the seed right, you've got to get the water right, the sun sign the weather. And then we take it for granted when we like the pepper is like a dollar more than we're used to it. We're like, ah, come on, you're trying to grow pepper yourself, but like actually have a taste of it. That's like a massive pain in

the tail. I would encourage anyone I did this during COVID. It was like a fun little outdoor activity. My wife got very tired of it very quickly. I enjoyed it actually doing the garden. Like I really thought I got a lot of value by of that as a person. And then when you pick that one strawberry off and my daughter would eat the strawberry in like two seconds, I'm like, that took us three weeks to get it done. It just gets consumed in like a tenth of a second. It actually makes you really appreciate the fact that a grocery store exists and you can go give it $5 and they just give you the stuff that you don't have to go grow yourself. Actually kind of amazing,

but not really exactly again the topic of today. But no, this idea was one that we came up with on our last planning session. And I think this stems from a little bit of a spinoff, maybe from an episode that we did a while ago, talking about kind of like, what are the... I think we've covered this concept before. If not, then maybe we can kind of bring it apart here live. But this idea of, I've called it before, like, prerequisites, that it's like any great company that we've worked with

almost has like some base level of work already done. And then when they come to us and they say, hey, with this, what we're doing, here's how it's working, who wants to work better? That person has a very different experience, I think, with us or a very different set of outcomes, maybe I should say it that way. And the person who's like, I've done nothing,

here, I'm starting from round zero, let's get started. And to be clear, we will help those people, but like, obviously, person one is going to be significantly faster getting growth going than person two, who's needing to do a lot of groundwork. So maybe what I haven't done well, a good job before, historically speaking, on my side, is defining what does that actually mean? What is the groundwork? And you be very specific about what it includes or what it doesn't include. So we have both guests and owner stuff here, but I'm sure maybe you've felt this way before. I know we've talked about this at length offline before before of someone having the groundwork done.

What does that mean to you in the past when you've done like any type of marketing, audits or reviews, whether it's homeowner or guest focus, what's been your experience there? You know, I think that we look at a company that has a website or something like our direct booking website and like, oh, they've got everything they need for success. But I think that there are so many people who put some of the pieces that at face value seem to make sense, seem to be important to your business. But there are some of these foundational concepts, you know, mission, vision statements, value statements, things like that, that I think are really important and critical in defining your business. You can have a business, but these are the things

that are going to help define your business and set some type of standard for your business. And I do, I think that that's, if you don't have that to fall back, I think this is something we've talked about often. If you don't have that strong foundation, that bedrock to fall back on, every decision you make gets a little wishy-washy. You can't really say, okay, this is what's driving my decision making. ROI is what's driving my decision making. First of all, that's probably not the right way to do it, but that's besides the point. But I do, I think that when you have all of these items, and again, we're going to go pretty deep here, you are going to have more success because it's a matter of, in a lot of cases,

we're talking about working with vendors. We're talking about working with some type of third party that is not an expert in your business like you are. But if you are giving them all of these pieces, if you have all these things lined up or laid out or whatever it is, you are. You're going to be able to communicate more effectively with this vendor. You're going to be able to, as far as like we have deliverables, there's going to be shorter turnaround times on those deliverables because there's not as much back and forth going on. There's a certain holistic, I don't know, come up as that happens when you've got some of these things in place. Do you need all of these things? Maybe not, you know, in explicit detail detail like we're going to lay out here, but you have to have thought about these concepts.

You have to, like your origin story. You can't just say, well, I just, you know, I built a site. I got home. That's it. There's got to be more to that because again, I think part of our unique hospitality travel space, it is experiential. People are looking for experiential travel, part of that experience is learning more about you,

your company, what you stand for, why you are better than others. And I think, again, all of this leads into some of the other discussions and conversations we have when we're building out campaigns and we're doing things like that. So the people who have some semblance of this are going to be partially

successful. People who have this all built out are going to be very successful in any of the partnerships and relationships they undertake in this space. Well, and I'll add one more thing, and I think I'm guilty of the same thing we're looking at this from our perspective as being an outside agency or an outside consultant. And we're saying, hey, here's what we want to be successful. But I think to be clear, going through this process is so critical when you're hiring a team member of any kind, of any role in your company. So if you're hiring a reservationist, well, they need to be on the same page as far as like,

yeah, what is your origin story? How'd you get started? What are we trying to do? What type of person are we looking for? What type of person are we not looking for? If that were a homeowner discussion. Certainly when you hire like a business development person for a homeowner, you really need to be super clear with them

about what you're looking for and not looking for and everything. I would say even like, you know, it's a contractor for housekeeping. If you can like tell them a little bit about kind of what you're after, if you define a process for them, that's going to be more successful than just like, hey, you know, Mrs. Jones, I need one, two, three Main Street cleaned, you know, go ahead and clean it, right? That's fine. Like that'll get you some level of outcome.

But if you care, like presumably you care and you're trying to grow and get better, you should have kind of your standards, even though you're holding external vendors accountable to, and for sure ones that you're holding your team accountable to, as far as here that we're after. So we have a list. So the premise of kind of today's episodes, we have a list of actually, I have these in bullet points. I don't know the exact number here. Let me see if I can count them very quickly. But it's somewhere around a dozen, somewhere in that neighborhood around dozen ideas of like, these are accommodation things, they're documents, maybe, they are pages on your website, they are resources of some kind, or they're maybe just crystallized ideas of what foundational planning actually looks

like. So maybe what I'll do is I'll read them off relatively quickly. And again, if you're listening to a recording, don't worry, we're going through each one, or at least group some of these ideas together at a high level, but just to kind of see where we're thinking, this is what we're thinking. So number one, mission and value statements. Number two, company origin story. Number three, UVP or I think Paul, you would call it USP, which is unique value proposition or unique selling proposition. Number four, geographic focus or what services or territory that you focus on.

Number five and six is ideal guest persona. Who am I going after? Ideal property owner persona. Who do I want to manage for? The next ones are smart business goals or having some level of high level KPIs or targets of some kind, what am I actually trying to achieve? Swap or a competitive analysis report, a growth strategy or a market entry playbook, a succession or leadership transition plan, a service scope and business model definition, how do I make money? And then finally market research repository. So that would be understanding things like your demand, your seasonality, your ADR, you know, what are those numbers going to look like? So again,

that was a lot at once. Don't worry, we'll go through each one kind of piece by piece here. But I wanted to get that out there as like, the best companies to your point have at least some of these, the more the better, you know, but if you have none of these things, you're probably not in the best space that you could be as far as like planning for your future team members, planning for external contractors or vendors, and actually building, you know, the company that you're trying to build from like a growth perspective company that you're trying to build from a growth perspective. You're building on top of,

as the analogy goes over and over again, but it's a fair one, a shaky foundation. And you don't really wanna be doing that, anyone in this space. So anything you think I missed as we were putting together our outline there, or do you think that's a decent starting point, at least for defining foundation?

Oh my goodness. If they have, again, if they have all of those pieces, they have a very strong foundation that I would love to work with any of those companies. Yeah, right. If you have all this, please email us. Whether we're working with you or not, we just want to admire it, right? We just want to look and be like, almost like a painting or like, you know, my wife and

I went to the Sistine Chapel last year. You just want to look and be like, oh my gosh, like you've actually thought of everything. Such a rare opportunity. So maybe we'll start a mission, vision, value statement. Because if there's one that I would say like, I wouldn't want to skip, there's a few here that I'm like, if I could only have a few, which ones would I have? We debated just for the benefit of the listener, leading off a succession or leadership transition plan.

That's more of a, hey, almost an end state thing. So we kind of discussed like, is that really critical? I would say, no, it's not critical, you know, but not knowing what your mission, your vision and your values are, like how you operate, I think is, I mean, it's really tough. And defining what those are, when you actually act in that way, I think is so critical.

I was looking back at past LinkedIn posts that I did last year, and I was reminded of a clip that I posted from Jason Fried, and they talked about culture, which I think is another relatively, you know, what comes from mission vision values, comes from what does that actually look like in practice, comes out in the idea of culture. And what he said was culture would show me, don't tell me, which I think is such a beautiful way to describe it. But I do like when you can tell someone, here's what we value, here's what our goal is.

We want a guest to have a great experience. Well, let's define what a great experience looks like. And then you actually live to that idea that you've written your vision, vision, value statements, that sort of things in the real world. So like a guest checked in and their AC was busted and we did everything possible to try to fix it. We couldn't fix it.

I took out of my own pocket and I put the guests into a nicer unit at no additional cost to them. That is, I want the guests to have a good experience in actual culture and an actual mission and vision values by going and like burning your commission for a stay in order to get someone in a nicer place so that they don't leave you a one-star review and they've had a good vacation experience, right?

But I think that's just one specific example. There's so many things that I think that could be defined by because maybe your mission is to run a very profitable company and run very leanly. I see clients like that or they're really focused on profitability. They don't want to be massive. You know, I have someone I've worked with

for a long time now in Florida. He's like 40 or so units, no full-time team members. It's him and then really an army of contractors doing work. And he does a great job. People like working with him. But he's obviously not trying to take over the world. He's not trying to take over Florida. He's not trying to be the next, you know, Steve Schwab,

I guess maybe as it were, and run a thousand franchise locations. He's trying to dominate his little corner of Florida, do it really well, make a lot of money profitably, have great guest relationships, have a great owner relationships. That's awesome, I think. I also work with clients that are trying to take home

the markets, it feels like, right? They're doing really aggressive guest marketing, homeowner marketing. Their mission is like, I want to manage the best inventory in this entire region, in this entire portion of the state, whatever the case may be. And then they map to that. So I think knowing where you're trying to go is so helpful for anyone to look at and be like, oh, okay, I see what you're trying to achieve. And then I can help almost make my decisions more

fluidly or like more concretely, maybe I should say, if I know what you're trying to achieve. If I don't know what you're trying to achieve, then it's really hard for me to be like, well, I can give you kind of general advice, but I want to tailor it to what you're actually trying to go after. So that's what I struggle with. I don't know how you perceive that battle with clients as well. This is, I mean, this is something where I read a pretty common business book, but Simon Sinek start with why. And I think that a lot of this like builds into like, if you read that book, you're going to get a much better understanding of why you should be starting with your mission and your vision and your value statements because it is the right starting point from where you kind of

build and define everything through that lens. It is so much about the why. There's a lot of questions to ask when you're going through all of this because it is. Nothing's like a concrete, one-sentence answer for all of it. Maybe it is. Maybe it's laid out that way, but it takes on so much more, I think. So yeah, I mean, I think you've hit the nail on the head. And the same thing. I mean, same thing with that company origin story. Certainly, the mission, the vision, the value statements, those are how you're going to define how you move forward. But telling people how it all began is important too, because I think there is more of an origin story with a lot of short-term rentals, vacation rentals, stuff like that,

that isn't there in a lot of the other hospitality space. Yeah, there's some niche boutique hotels and inns and stuff like that. But the origin story of a vacation rental company is usually pretty unique. It may be, hey, a buddy of mine said, hey, can you manage your home? And then I said, oh, this is cool. And then I grew my business and then I did this and then I did that. But there's a lot of homeowners out there that can identify with that story certainly. And it does, it brings you closer to them to start that relationship. And it is, that's what it is. You have traveler guest relationships as well. And I think the better guest relationships, you have more retention,

you're going to have long-term all that. But on the homeowner side of things, it is, it is a much more personal selling experience of we've talked about it, putting the trust of a million dollar, half a million dollar, whatever it is, a huge asset in the hands of someone. You want to know, dollar, whatever it is, a huge asset in the hands of someone, you want to know how did they start? What is it that brought them here? And I think that company origin story can be kind of one of your biggest USP's if we keep going down the list for a homeowner to say, this is why, this defines what separates me from everybody else and all these other pieces of the pie that kind of contribute to that. It's, I mean, Fila, you've said foundation, bedrock, and every other variation of it, but it is this. I mean, everything is so important here because if you don't have it,

you can't go back and get some of these things. You can't go back and, you know, you can put a mission, vision, value statement in after the fact. You can put a company origin story in after the fact, but it's not a part of how you've defined the business. It truly isn't a part of it, I don't think there. So certainly these are things that cannot be overlooked. And if you haven't considered them as an exercise, think about these things. Yeah. Well, I think so two things I want wanna touch on there. One is the company origin story. You'd be shocked, maybe you wouldn't be shocked because you've looked at as many sites as I have.

How many people have a vacation rental website that they place on the internet and they're hoping to get people to put in their credit card numbers and that purchase may be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 or more and they have no picture of them. They have no about us page sharing anything about it. They've got property and they've got, you know, a logo slapped on the homepage.

Right. And it's just like, we frequently have to go back and tell clients like, no, like we should have an about us page. We should have your picture on there. We have clients that are like opposed to that idea. I'm like, all right, we can say Paul M. You know, maybe if you want to hold it back a little bit, right. Like I understand maybe we're coming from there, but the idea that like you're going to be this anonymous person and someone's going to be like, yeah, sure. Here's 10 grand for my family vacation or for this vacation over two weeks.

Yeah, those things don't track. There's a lot of people who post on LinkedIn about trust, which I agree trust is valuable. This is how you build trust. That's one example of how you build trust. You share your story, you share yourself a little bit, your family, your background, how you got started. And then those are little building blocks

that we can put in place towards trust. And same with what you're talking about here with EVP. So I think EVP or like USB, if you want to call it that, that's fine too. It is hard to define because sometimes the answer I think a lot of my clients may have, even the successful ones would be like, we do what the other guys say they do.

I had someone say that to me one time, I thought that was brilliant. It was like, no, we actually do all the revenue management. Like look at our spreadsheet, look at our process. No, we actually do the inspection of the clean, look at all of our inspection clean new reports. They say they do those things, but they don't actually do them.

And I'm like, how do you, that's the problem in this space. I think that's why the homeowner marketing piece is so hard, which, you know, you and I have talked about at length before, which is homeowner marketing is hard because everyone makes the same claims. Everyone says they do rate management. Everyone says they do awesome cleans. Everyone says they do excellent property care. Who actually does that is where the credibility can break down for people.

So I think it's, again, kind of like I was saying earlier with culture, it's show, not tell. If you can show more of what your UVP is or your SP is, that's helpful in my mind more than just like a checklist. Like I think the marketing version of it is like, hey, the marketing team went to us and we put on the page, the checklist of like, we do XYZ. I think the real like actual fabric being version of that

is like, no, we actually do those things and here's proof of it. Meet Joe, our inspector. Hey Joe, how many properties have you expected this year? 4,274 turns I've looked at. Like, holy crap, Joe, that's crazy. Tell that story on your site. Tell that story in a blog post, right?

Tell that story in a video or put that out on social, that sort of thing. That's gonna build more trust than saying in a checklist that you do a property inspection or saying that you do rate management. It's actually posting a case study of, here's this property and how much rate or revenue we drove for it versus the property manager

that had it before. Those are things are more tangible. So anything to button up on that before we go to the geo focused on. I mean, I think you really hit the nail on the head. I think the one thing that you can do to differentiate your USP, UVP is having your actual guests or owners say it like that's it like if they're saying it, that's that's the difference. That's truly what makes you stand up because you're right, everything in it gets lost in the in the echo chamber of we do this, we do that we will make we we we we we

Yes. And we first is good. That's fine. But we we we all the way home is not the way we want to have it here. So yeah, I just think that that's something that the most powerful homeowner usps and UDPs definitely came through someone getting on camera for 90 seconds and saying, they're great. This is why they're great. I have no concerns. I have ultimate peace of mind.

I'm happy with what I'm making and that's it. There are very few things that sell better than that third party validation guest or owner side of things. So yeah. It's so true. I think that's because ultimately that's what you want. And we've I just did a video case study for for buildup about two weeks ago and getting on there. And the person is typically our client success manager do that interview with the client because they work with them a little bit more closely. And I'm not always as tuned into it. But I did this one because the client success manager couldn't. She had traveled, he booked in, this was the only time that could work because like, all right,

let me do this one. And it's so validating. It was honestly like the best part of that day was talking to this client who I knew was like happy and things were going well. But I'll be honest, like you don't always celebrate the wins. But to like talk with this person for 25 minutes and be like, hear all the good things that my team is doing was like honestly the most enthusiastic I felt in like a long time in that call. And we were recording it with the client's permission we'll post on the website soon, but just to be able to like hear him say positive things. And I know that's going to go a lot further from someone you know, trusting us in this case to market like a $3 million, you know, villa, that's going to trust oh yeah, we'll look at this

person they even better if they look and sound like the people that are considering signing up with you, right? Oh, this person, I could see myself looking in this person's shoes and being in their shoes and having a vacation rental in the outer banks or Colorado or Florida and trusting this manager. That's so critical. I'm going to go to this next one, geographic focus or what we call the idea of a service territory map. Paul probably has more PTSD on this one than I do. In our qualifying criteria system for buildup, we talked about this before in the previous episode, Paul, that is a red flag for us or at least a yellow flag for us.

It doesn't mean that we won't work with a client. I don't mean it that way. So if you're listening in your multiple locations, it doesn't mean that we don't want to work with you at all. But it's a red flag for us because it's like, how can you possibly be the best or very good in multiple destinations when there's someone who's in that destination, who wakes up all day or every day, and they say, I'm going to be the best property manager in whatever,

Destin or Miami or Breckenridge, Colorado, whatever. Pick your destination, doesn't matter, that's not my point. But to say, I'm gonna be the best in this location, and then I'm also gonna be the best in this other location, I think can be done, but it's really hard. You almost have to basically be building two separate companies simultaneously, and some people can do that, right?

I'm sure Elon Musk could do that, or Jeff Bezos could do that, but maybe you can't, and most data would tell me that most people can't do that. They can't build multiple focuses at the same time. So even if that is your focus, I'll say it this way to kind of bring us to a close here, at least on my thoughts, I want to hear your thoughts on it too. At least define what that is. Don't just say, I'll take any home,

that is a four bedroom and up, right? Say like, here's our service value, here's what we offer, here's what we do, here's what we don't do. Because I will say, there's people that have obviously been successful. Evolve is a fair case study of this, where Evolve says we do rates basically in marketing of your listing, get it connected to all the things. We basically are like a channel manager plus like a lightweight marketing kind of offering. We're charging much lower percentage, but we're not trying to do boots on the ground in 10,000 locations. That's on you. So they know what their USB is, or their UVP is to be fair.

They can then focus more broadly geography-wise, but what you can't do is you can't say, I'm going to be the best at this area. I'm going to do full service property management, and then I'm going to do it in four other places. And you're going to have four units in four different places. I think that's a recipe for not much success in the marketing side. And that's why for us, it's a bit of a red flag. But again, at least to find that here's what I'm after. Here's the type of destination I'm looking for. Don't just pick stuff at random. Oh, I'm in the Poconos and then I'm in Arizona and then I'm in Cape Cod and then I'm in Seattle. Like those things just don't make any sense in my

experience from a marketing standpoint. But what's your experience here? Ah, thank you. How much time do we have? I was gonna say we're gonna run out on this one. No, I think it's a very interesting exploration that we're gonna see Casago try to do over the next period of time. I think it's defining the scope. That's what so many people have problems with.

I think you're okay going to multi-market. That's fine. You have to have a plan for going into multi-market. You can't just be buying data from six markets that are some of the top performing markets in the space and then say, I'm going to be in all these markets. I'm going to be in Gulf Shores. I'm going to be in Myrtle Beach. I'm going to be in, let's go Hocking Hills, Ohio.

Why not? I'm going to be in the Finger Lakes. I'm going to be in some of these, you know, it's let's, let's, let's go to some of these spots. And these are great markets, great vacation rental markets with a lot of great companies that are already in those great markets. And I think that is that that's some of those things where if you're starting to market all these different places, let's go up to that where we were before. What are the goals? What are the what's the vision?

What are we doing? Well, we're going to just buy a whole bunch of that and hope for the best. No, you have to have some type of whether it's a geographical plan, whether it's boots on the ground ahead of time, you have to have something in place. I'm not saying people can't expand to different service areas. Do it logically, as I would say. If you're in Gulf shores, move down the panhandle a little ways. If you're in Myrtle Beach, go down the shore. I mean, go down to the low country. You know, there's, there's some areas that you can expand regionally before you try to go nationally. I think that when looking at growth, those people in those companies who have done that, who've taken it more local and then gone regional and then tried to go to more of a national level,

those are the companies that are successful because they do understand the unique demand patterns. They understand that regulation plays more of a key than a whole lot of other stuff does. And guest expectations change from market to market. So I do, I think that that's something that you may have all these things set up, you know, guest personas and owner personas and all those things for each of your markets, but then you have to adjust your marketing, adjust your sales and adjust your experience. So if you are a more developed company, if you're a more developed operation, maybe that's something that you can grow into over time. But if you're small, if you're small operationally, small unit wise, small anything, stay small,

put some of these foundational items into place, and then look at where you can start to define an extended service area or something like that. Because, yeah, that mean the painful part is we've had a whole lot of people who started and said, okay, their first five rentals were in Florida, and Washington, and New York, and South Carolina, and there's very little way to scale that you may be able to. You're just starting over every time. Right. That's what you're doing. Yeah so it is. I just have thoughts but that's kind of the summary. The cliff nose version of it. Yeah there we go. Yeah I mean I think so to put a bow on kind of what Paul's saying there it's so so hard to do that. I think I think if it were to be done well you're basically dedicating like a full-time person to just that, that area. So basically it's not you taking your time and splitting it five ways and saying, I'm going to go, you know, into five different markets. It's, I'm

hiring someone to lead growth efforts in Malibu. And then I'm hiring someone to lead growth efforts in Austin, Texas. And I'm hiring someone to lead growth, you know, and then that's the way that it might work. And even then, like you're in for a heck of a fight, that's for sure. All right. So the fun way your service areas are, you know, you now know Paul's from my points of view on most people try to expand too quickly, too soon, you know, broadly speaking, I think you're better off narrowing in and being more specific, but you do you, you may not agree with us and that's fine as well.

But I think knowing again, knowing what it is that you are focused on is so much better than, you know, at any moment, someone may go in a different direction and say, yeah, I'm going to go now to Washington State or whatever the case may be. All right. So we can probably smash these next two together reasonably fairly. Ideal guest personas, ideal property owner personas. Who are you actually trying to serve? Who are the people that you're actually trying to serve? So for each market, you're going to have your own desirable, you know, guest demands, where are people coming from? Where do they drive in from? This helps a lot, by the way, when you're starting to work in an agency or you're starting to run in an agency or you're starting

to run ads of any kind. And you can tell me or articulate to me where people are coming from, what your data says. And then I can do some research and only target ads, for example, in that area. So for example, you know, even here in the Myrtle Beach area, to give like a local example, a good chunk of our travelers are coming from upstate South Carolina and North Carolina. Like in fact, some of we have clients in this region where half their guests come from like a within North Carolina and the upstate part of South Carolina. In fact, we have clients in this region where half their guests come from within North Carolina and the upstate part of South Carolina. So it's like, yes, there's a lot of other people that come to Myrtle Beach, including in the Northeast, where I'm

originally from, and people from Ohio and those sorts of areas as well. Very common that they would come here. But for some destinations, for some vacational companies, I should say, maybe less than half of their guests are coming from 12 states and then half their guests are coming from one state or two two states if you want to consider that way. So it's like, that's all valuable information to know. Again, when you're going to do marketing advertising, when you're thinking about your brand,

who am I actually appealing to? What sort of messaging or media might be appealing to them? It's good to know where your big pockets are coming from. And I know a lot of clients that we work with are like, I really do get a bookings from very diverse sources. Like we were talking to our client yesterday in Hawaii, or not yesterday, on Friday in Hawaii. And he was like, well, I get people coming from all over, including Japan, internationally, people mostly come from the West Coast to the US. That's my

biggest chunk of people. But people come from the East Coast. And I like guests from the East Coast because they stay longer. So if they come, they typically book 10 days versus three or four days because they're coming from a longer distance. So it's like understanding those little nuances, like this person been doing it for a while. So that helps because he knows what he's after, make a big difference. So I'll defer more to you on the homeowner side of things, but it's the same idea, which is that who we're trying to manage more and why, but anything else you want to touch on there with homeowner personas. I think it's difficult because you're

kind of defining a homeowner you want to work with, but you're really defining the property type you want to work with. I think there's kind of a... you have to balance both of those in there, but I think the one thing that people don't think about is seasonality. There's true seasonality from a property manager's side. I think homeowners understand. They see the ups and downs of what's happening. But there is a true seasonality for signing season, for shoulder season, for all those things. And if you're not reaching these people, you should be reaching them consistently. Yes, yes, yes. But if you're not reaching people at the right time with the right messaging,

you're not gonna see too many people come on there. So that is kind of the balancing act of figuring out is it more important to have the big fancy home and someone who may not be a great fit on the personality side, or is it better to have an average home, we'll say, with someone that you have a really great working relationship with with that you can kind of have a, you know, it is.

I think that's, again, goes into the core mission vision of the top there, but a lot of that is going to be, you know, defining how are you measuring the success of the business there? Is it about the money making? Is it about the, you know, everybody being happy little kumbaya moment? That's that's really a big thing there But I do I think owners are are a little tricky to decide because you do you kind of have to balance I've heard a lot of property managers say I'll put up with a headache for the right home

And that's just one of those thing again Do you wanna do you want to be negotiating internally like that all the time? Do you want to set that as your standard or do you want to say, oh, yeah, we'll take it further. I don't know. Yeah, well, that's probably not worthy of this block as far as like how much detail we can go into it on but I would say my experience with it is just like to your point, what are you allowing? Because you're either you're either poaching it or you're encouraging it or you're allowing it to happen. That's it. So if an owner is overstepping their bounds constantly and they're nonstop having issues with you for every little thing that you do, you're either allowing that to happen or you're coaching them on how to not do that anymore or be more fair with you. Hey,

you know what, Paul? You want to know how your property is doing? Totally fair. It's a million dollar home. I think it's reasonable that you want to know the performance of it and what we're doing. Let's meet every two weeks on Thursday at 4 p.m. and we'll have a 30-minute chat and any issues you have, just bring them to that call and we'll get things sorted unless it's urgent. Hey, if something's urgent, obviously, if there's an actual issue, you know, that requires our more immediate attention, we're happy to do it. Otherwise, let's collect your thoughts, separate the week, chat on Thursday. We could tell you how everything's going on the property,

how many bookings have occurred since the last chat, that sort of thing. No, no, no, that's okay. Then yeah, maybe that person thought a good fit for you, right? Like that's that may be the case. Or maybe to your point, it's a big enough home where I'm sure there's big enough homes and portfolios where you go, you know what, I'm hiring Jane, Jane's going to be your homeowner liaison. And if someone's giving you, you know, 100, 200, $300,000 a year commission, that might actually be very profitable for you to say, Jane, you wake up every day and your job is

the deal. Paul, Paul's our owner and all stuff to deal with. But you know what, you're going to be on top of it. You're going to send a report, you're going to about what's going on, and that's gonna potentially provide a very solid thing. I have a client that has a relationship not completely dissimilar from that. It's not this person's only job, but it's this person's job to maintain this investor relationship they have. They have 30 units as part of this investor relationship,

and then basically they require pretty much weekly or twice-weekly updates, so they kind of block time in their calendar, block time in their day, to be going through and looking at this 30-unit portfolio, how it's doing, send updates, that sort of thing. A lot of managers, and they just try to fit that into their existing workflow and try to put that on some owner relations person who has a hundred other owners, it might fall apart and not work.

It does for this person because they've thought about that manager. Now, this is more of a financial reporting, I would say, than a personality clash, but those things can certainly occur. And I know many clients who are dealing with that as far as personality clash goes. But I think I'll end on this idea, which is that you have to be able to walk away from both. And it's not the right home or the right owner. Unfortunately, there are two lines that have to be pointed in the green direction. You can't have one be right and then the other not be right. You may like the person a lot. Maybe it's your best friend, maybe it's your mom. But if she tries to give you a home that

doesn't fit your brand, you have to say no to that too. And then vice versa. Maybe you like the home and you dislike the person. I think that's just the recipe for disaster as well. So that's kind of my thought process as well. But probably you can't build your guest owner personas. I would say this, or sorry, property personas. You can build guest personas a little bit easier until you've dealt with some of those people. And then you're like, oh, now I know what I really hate. This type of person who's not going to be a good fit. Like it's actually my belief, to be honest with you, before I close that idea out, that these solely investor return focused people are actually not happy with those property managers because most

property managers do not provide them the most yield on their investment. So if you're going in there with spreadsheet, I call them like the spreadsheet bros and you're going and saying, Hey, I'm going to manage an X percent yield off this property based on my purchase price based on this based on that, that person can be tough to deal with because it doesn't meet their numbers to them. It's a failure, you know, so that only lens they're viewing it as is financial. And so they're always going to view every single interaction with you based on that financial lens.

That's probably not a good fit for most property managers, to be honest with you. There's some people I'm sure that fit that bucket, but a lot of people don't. I think you want someone who wants the property to be maintained well, that thinks of it more like an asset that's maybe over a longer period of time, not I need to make a X percent return this year or I made a bad decision. That's a really, really hard thing to do.

And frankly, a lot of it's outside of your control. If you're a property manager, you can market, you can do a good job there. If the destination gets, go down in popularity, then you're, then you're left holding the bag and the owner's going to be upset. So it's really tough. So, yeah. So a few more things, but up here before we bring this one to a close. Again, these are kind of similar in my mind.

So smart business goals. If you don't know smart, we've done previous podcasts where we talk about smart, but it's basically building a goal that has more specificity to it. So specific, measurable, achievable, realistic time bound. Those are kind of the smart goals. Like there's a lot again, so much better to have someone coming in for us and say, I want to reach 30% direct bookings by the end of 2025. I'm willing to spend $25,000 per quarter on marketing to make it happen. Here's kind of where I'm at before. Like someone who's thought through that and is like,

here's how I'm gonna get there. So much better than like, yeah, like just trying to grow, man. Like that's okay. Like if you grow 1%, are you happy? Do you wanna grow 100%? Like so much more nuance than that one. And then SWOT and competitive analysis for, same kind of thing where I think where it's like,

have you researched your competition? Do you know what they're doing well? It does surprise me from time to time, you talked about this earlier, how often people will go pretty far in this process. And like, they've never never looked at their competitors' reviews on the guest side of things. They've never gone on Airbnb and seen the way that they write property descriptions

or how they do photos. And again, I'm not saying you need to be overly focused on your competitors. I think there's people that you and I met in our careers that are overly focused on competitors and they get terrified of competition. I don't think that's the answer either, but it's got to be something. You've got to spend maybe once a quarter, you should be sitting down and just being like, you know what, what are they doing? We should be aware of what they're doing

because your homeowner and your guests will look at your competition and they'll decide if they wanna book with them or list with them. So you should be at least somewhat aware. Doesn't mean you copy or just copy what they're doing and do it your own way. That's not necessarily the case.

But I think some level awareness is a good idea. And I think you should run a SWOT somewhat regularly. But anyways, beat those two ideas up. Business goals, like creating a target. And then, yeah, running some kind of SWAT analysis or competitor review. What's your thoughts there? I think for a lot of leaders, it feels like maybe busy work or it feels like something that maybe isn't going to move the needle

like a report or something like this. I think this is this is something that is really, really important to do regularly. And the frequency, I don't think, you know, I think I've seen some people do them quarterly. I've seen some people do them semi-annually. I've seen some people do them annually. I think as long as you're doing them consistently, that's the key. Because I mean, the other side of this is that obviously you start to understand there is an opportunity. There is a, you don't want a threat to linger and be something that ultimately takes you down in the long run. So I do. I think the competitive analysis, that doesn't just mean that if you do a search for the keyword that you're both bidding for and you see them ahead of you, that's calling.

Call someone up and say, hey, someone's ahead of me. No, no, no. We have to do a full comprehensive competitive analysis to understand all of the things that are taken into account of, yeah, is it pricing? Is it what you're offering? Is it just the properties themselves? And I think the key to any SWOT analysis is being honest about it. Like, don't just say, oh yeah, we're great and everything that we do and it's all strengths, there's no weaknesses, there's no opportunities, there's no threats. Everybody's got a weakness. Everybody's got opportunities for improvements. And in most cases, there are probably some threats to your success. So don't just sugarcoat it. If you're going to do a SWOT and you're going to do an competitive analysis report, make sure you're actually taking those findings and actioning something out of them. So I

think that's with anything we do, make sure there's something actionable and you're not just taking the report, taking the audit and just leaving. So yeah, couldn't agree more. I've seen a few of those before really fluffy ones or just ones that go don't go into enough detail. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, right? It's got to be real. Because you can say three or four bullet points about my company, you know, that really cuts the core of what the problem is. And it's like, that's better than a 20 page report to write. Like, I think that's one thing as we as so are the context of today's episode is we're trying to figure out how we can improve our

process of how to help clients with some of these documents. And one thing I'm worried about is like, I don't want to be 30 pages. And it's just kind of saying the same thing. Yeah, they take good photos. Yeah, they take good stuff. I want it to be like actionable, like, okay, here's what they actually are doing well and go off from there. A few more things here that kind of brings to a close and we're coming up against that maybe a little bit time wise. Yeah, growth and expansion strategy. So what is it like for us to grow? What will be required for us to grow in terms of into a new market?

So we talked about it earlier, geographic focus. But if we were to say, let's say we're to do it the smart way and like we're in Myrtle Beach where we're going to expand to Pauleys Island, let's say, for example, like what does that look like? How do we get our first 10 homes in Pauleys Island? We did an interview the other day with Ginger Harrison on the Art of Hospitality podcast. She was on that show pitching, like she's trying to get into Perdido Key. So she was like, hey, if anyone happens to be Perdido Key, reach out to me. Because I think that's

a good idea. Because they admitted on that show, which I'm not saying anything that they didn't say on the show, they were like, we've had a hard time getting into Perdido Key. We're over here in Gulf Shores. We've had a little bit more of a struggle to get more inventory in that market. It's hard. I mean, these are very skilled operators. They've obviously grown a lot in their core market, but for them going into a new state, I guess, technically too, right, or a new area, they've had a little bit more of a struggle to get there. So I think having a playbook of like, what is it going to look like for us to go there? What would success look like? Again, go back to

smart goals from two bullet points ago. So when I get into the new market, it's like 10 properties in the first year is probably a pretty good system if you're building a one by one. If you're going to acquire a company though, think of like that, snap your fingers, and then you pick up 10 contracts or 20 contracts right away, that could be really appealing that you've got home based build off of. So I don't know, again, what's for you might not be

what's for somebody else. I'm not saying you need to exactly know this. And this is where I think to be clear, these last few bullet points are kind of more nice to have as opposed to need to have, but I think it is helpful if you're gonna do that, if you're gonna go spend a lot of time, effort, energy, money into this initiative to grow, defining what that looks like or what success looks like in the front, I think is a really good

idea. Yeah, I mean, I think everybody's got the playbook to having having something where you can that step by step guide for getting a new property into a market or getting getting into a new market, you have to put into place what is the step by step for how you do it in the old market, identify some of those areas where, okay, this isn't going to be the same from golf shorts to burrito, this isn't going to be the same from polys to myrtle, this is really putting into place because I do again, it's the it's the effectiveness of being able to scale, putting all those elements together and saying, okay, well, if I have this onboarding, I think it better helps you define what your growth goal should be. Because if it takes me a month to

onboard this property or takes me two weeks to onboard this property, that means I can onboard approximately two to four per month. It gives you actually a scaling goal or scaling growth goals or things like that that you are. You've defined what it is going to be and hopefully you've identified the potential pitfalls that you can avoid in trying to make sure these things that transition, that growth, whatever it is entering a new market goes as efficiently as possible because just as much as anything else, you want to be able to keep those homeowners on. Well, those first experiences like with any agency,

with any vendor, with anybody you're working with, that first month defines a lot of what the ongoing partnership is. So if you have that playbook that makes onboarding more of a turnkey experience for people, they're gonna say, and that's gonna be the first interaction they have with you outside of when they were being sold,

when they were being wined and diaged, it's a whole different type of experience for them. So I do, I think that as with everything else, sets the foundation for a scalable business, a growable business, and something that is going to keep your homeowners and probably the guests down the line as well happier because they know the entire step-by-step process of what an experience is with your brain. Yeah, good't agree more. We don't have to spend our time on this one.

I think this is just valuable information to have the next bullet point here, which is the idea of a succession plan, and transition could be a GM is going to come in, and I'm going to maybe kind of quasi-retire or retire. I've certainly seen that, and I've seen that work both work well and not work well in my career. Certainly, a lot of our clients and ones people have dealt with in the past, I sort of have this running joke that I could say now that Acosta is basically gone at this point, at least the version of Acosta that was doing this is gone. Acosta took so much money out of my pocket,

you know, in terms of buying clients that I was already working with. And then of course, what they would do is cancel their marketing contract. I can count, I mean, Acosta has to cost me at this point, at least half a million dollars in billings, maybe more, you know, because they bought clients years ago that would have been paying me monthly for the last few years. I'm sure Steve's gonna write that check out for you. Don't worry. Yeah, let me knock on that door and be like,

hey, so about this, no. Obviously, he's got a lot of their liabilities taken on right now. I can't imagine that. But yeah, obviously, when these companies sold, that was part of their plan. They wanted to sell eventually. I have someone that sold,

I think I've told this story in the podcast before, A client that I worked with for a long time, sold, had about 45 units. And some people are interesting. They sold, they got back into it or they did something else. This guy was like, you know, we can go surfing. Haven't heard from him since. I think he's still surfing wherever once he got his check from Picasso. And you know what? Good for him. Like he worked his tail off and he deserves that one. So obviously people, you know, different goals in life, maybe it depends on your age, your family, what you're looking for. Some people want to give it to their kids. I have a situation like that coming up right now. We're working with a client who is already involved in the business. I think he's going to take it over and eventually maybe we'll deal with the original

client that signed the contract. That's awesome too. I think that you can have different goals, but having some thought about that, I think it's a good idea. I don't know if you have any pieces you want to add in there, but I think it sets up what you're trying to achieve with your business. That's worthy of maybe having that idea somewhere written down or communicated. Yeah, I do. I think that there's a lot of people in this space that these are family businesses, more or less. I mean, they kind of just started off from a very grassroots effort. So as it does become more professional, as it does become larger, yeah, those are conversations just like any life conversations that need to happen. You need to have those conversations earlier as opposed

to later. Otherwise, everybody's angry and everybody's yelling at each other and you don't have a company to stand on at some point along the lines. Yeah, that's tough. Bad story. You know what, avoid the bad stories, foster good stories. That's, that's all you can do. So last thing we have here again, nice to have not need to have, but I think they're valuable is service scope and then business model definition. So those were kind of two pieces there. I, nice to have, not need to have, but I think they're valuable, is ServiceScope and then business model definition. So those are kind of two pieces there.

I would say, well, the last piece we had here was like market data. So that'd be like having your rate data using a platform like AirDNA, key data dashboard, price labs, you know, beyond pricing, whatever you're using for pricing. I think that's an important thing. So I'll kind of leave that off the side for a second. But this last one here, ServiceScope business model definition. Here's my take on this. Most people have a very traditional approach to this.

Hey, I'm going to charge 20% commission. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. But here's what I don't necessarily like about that. They never revisit it. So they open the company and they say, okay, we're going to charge 25% commission. We're going to charge 20% commission, whatever it is. Here's what we're going to do. Here's not what we're going to do. Like for example, I have a client who does a lot to get the properties ready in terms of interior design. So she's intimately involved in like, here's the couch we're going to pick. Here's the lighting for this room. Like she's very involved in that.

I have another client to deal with who like wouldn't touch that stuff with a 10 foot bowl. He's like refers out the work. He'd go talk to this other person over here. They're going to interior design. I'm not giving the property what's ready to go. And then I will rent it. Like that's his mindset. You know, I'm the so within a service scope, he kind of says like what?

Maybe it's also what I like doing, what I don't like doing. But it's like, here's what I'm willing to do, X, Y, Z. Here's what I'm not willing to do, ABC. Now it's better if you give an owner a option for that. Hey, I'm going to refer this out. I'm going to send this to my boss. But yeah, even just saying like, here's things that I want to do, don't want to do.

I think that's valuable. But then back to the business model idea. Again, I have these clients I've worked with that are like, yeah, I'm like, well, how do you know 20% is the right commission? How do you know it's not 18 or 22 or 23 or 30? Like, how do you know unless you ever test that theory? So I'm not one for making your business more complicated for no reason. I'm also not one for setting something up one way and then just

assuming it's going to be that way forever. It's probably worth the investigation. I've encouraged a lot of our clients to add in certain guestbooking fees to make their direct booking website in a way more comparable with pricing from an OTA platform, but it gives them ammo to actually spend on marketing. So for example, if you're charging a five or six or seven percent fee on your website, your book directly as a service fee or a guest fee, no one likes these, I get it. But it's like we have to fund our marketing efforts. So we have to decide, are we going to do that or are you going to go charge the owner a 30% commission? What would you prefer you do? I know which one is going to be easier for the owner to swallow. And

it's an 8% service fee on the website, not an increase in their commission. That's for sure. But it gives you the ammo you need to spend on marketing. So anyways, we could go a thousand different routes down that. But I think one thing I wouldn't like is the idea of never revisiting this from time to time. And maybe that's every other year. Maybe it's not something you do very often, but it's like, are we charging our commissions? Have we crossed, maybe have we secret shopped our competition? Are they charging more? Are they charging less?

What are they doing for their fee? That's such an important question I know on the homeowner side, because you compare a service like a Volvo, which we talked about earlier, to a full service property manager, and it's apples and giraffes. These things have nothing in common. I mean, one person is doing listing and marketing and just kind of putting your listing out there. Another person is going and cleaning toilets, right?

Like those are very, very different things from a people standpoint. Therefore, the commissions and the rates charged might be very different for the services. So I digress there. But anything to add in there in terms of like what we do versus not do and then the business model side before we bring this one to a close. Your business is not monolithic. It shouldn't stay the same from day one until day end. Like they're just these are things that I think hopefully all these things you maybe

you're not doing everything. That's what we started with by saying the not all of these are essential. But a lot of these if you are doing a lot of the things and you're doing them the right way, they are going to set yourself up for success down the road. Yeah. Paul, I think that was the densest episode we've ever done. I think so. It might have been. We had a lot to get through. Obviously, this is a bit of a longer one. We'd love to hear your feedback on this one, which is funny because we didn't plan the last one at all. We'll see how that goes. And this one, we planned the T and there's a lot of stuff in here. So hopefully some people get some value out of it. I'm going to do this, like just to make it easier.

I'm going to take our bullet points from today's discussion. I'm going to put them in the show notes. If you scroll down, if you missed anything, or you weren't sure what the dozen things we talked about work, you know, scroll down, look in the show notes, you'll see all 12 things we talked about. And then obviously it's up to you to kind of build this out for your company in a way that you see fit, maybe some more coming on that down the road in this podcast, so I got some more stuff that working on in that respect, but

um, that's it, um, if you made it all the way to the end, you're a trooper 50 minutes in, you are the best, we appreciate you. One thing, maybe a small little favor for hopefully giving you some value or some ideas on how you can improve your business is giving us a five-star review. I know you're, if you're a host or manager, you love five-star reviews. We do as well, but we don't need them on Airbnb. We don't need them on Verbo. We don't need them on Google.

We don't have those things for this podcast. We need them on Spotify. We need them on iTunes. Those are our platforms of choice. Go there, click five stars, leave a friendly little comment or review. We appreciate that. Then more people listen to the show, and then we can keep on putting out awesome stuff like we did today, I hope. So thank you for your time and attention.

We appreciate it. Have an awesome rest of your day.