Heads In Beds Show - Here's ALL You Need To Know About Hiring A Marketing Team For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we replay a webinar between Conrad and Steve Trover - CEO of Better Talent - of all things hiring, agency vs freelancer, marketing teams, margins of your business and more. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101YouTube Webinar Replay VideoBetter Talent🔗 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.

Hey everybody, Conrad here, going to take you into a webinar recording that we did recently with Steve Trover of Better Talent. Thought this would be a good thing to drop into the podcast feed in case you missed it. We recorded this a little while ago and we talked all about hiring, what it's like to hire the right team for marketing for your business. Maybe it's an agency, maybe it's a freelancer, maybe it's a contractor, maybe it's a full-time person, maybe it's some combination of all those things, depending on the size of your company and where you're looking to go with them.

And we did a really deep dive and Steve has really just so much knowledge. I mean, he's seen as a reference in the webinar here, the recording you're about to listen to, I think he mentioned that he's seen 1,500 different P and L's of vacation rental companies and seeing kind of what they need to invest in more, what they're not investing enough of companies that have been very successful and have sold for millions of dollars and companies that don't make it, you know, marketing's obviously key, key part of that process to building success.

So, um, enjoy this webinar recording, audio recording. I'll drop a link in the description, by the way, if you do want to watch the video, there are some slides and things like that, but really this was candidly more so of a conversation and less of a visual presentation. So I think you'll get just as much out of it listening here to the audio. So we're going to go ahead and take you over there right now. Well, cool. We've given folks a few minutes, um, Steve to kind of get in here. And I think we've got a good discussion, you know, on Locke. So we will get to go ahead and take you over there right now. Well, cool. We've given folks a few minutes, Steve, to kind of get in here.

And I think we've got a good discussion on Locke. So we will get started here today. So welcome, everybody. If you're attending live, or if you're watching the recording later on, appreciate having you here with us today. I was able to secure Steve, I think, really high profile guest for us in the webinar series. So I appreciate Steve and him lending some of his time.

It's quite valuable to talk today about, I think, a pretty solid topic. And one that I think is something that I get asked a lot, but I've never actually done like a focused session or topic or anything like that on this exact thing. So title of today's talk is webinar is how to build your marketing team for success. And really the context of today's conversation is really all about what it is like

to bring a marketing team in, whether it's a freelancer, whether it's a agency, whether it's actually hiring someone on your team full-time. There's all these combinations, Lego blocks, if you will, maybe that makes sense. So Steve, I imagine some people listening or kind of tuning in later maybe don't know you. I can't imagine it's a lot, but if you wouldn't mind, maybe just a minute or two, your background,

what you do at Better Talent and kind of your history in the space. Sure. I started in the industry in 1997 as a vacation rental manager of one property, like most people, started with one. Grew that to 400 properties over the course of two decades. Was in the Orlando market to start.

Went into Captiva Island, kind of southwest Florida. Ultimately bought a company in San Diego and then opened up in Sun Valley, Idaho. At peak had 100 employees. Also had a real estate company that was focused on short-term rentals, a development company called Purpose Built. So we would design, spec and build purpose-built vacation homes. And then to your design company, we would furnish those vacation rentals and then sell them through the real estate company

and then ultimately manage them. So it was kind of a vertically integrated group of companies. And then also built a proprietary PMS platform to run that business, started building that about 1999, 2000. That grew as a company into a company, I should say, and that ultimately became LiveRes, which many will know of today. It's owned by Inhabit IQ. I'm the former shareholder and chief strategy officer.

It kind of was a part-time job. And then I've been involved in a lot of the different trade associations in the industry, going back to the Central Florida Property Managers Association, the favor now, I was vice president of it, and then vice president president of VRMA, going back about a decade ago.

I'm currently on the ambassador committee for Verma and the co-chair of the growth board for VR Nation. So still very involved in trade associations, launched Better Talent five years ago, almost to the day, April 2020, right about the time when nobody was getting hired. Everybody was getting laid off because of the pandemic, which was kind of scary at the beginning, but it actually was pretty good timing for once out of 16 companies that I've started. And it was because everybody got rehired, right? And so it allowed us to use our unique methodology to help with people in

the right seats as they were building their team back up. And so that was a good time to launch. Today, we work with close to 400 companies, mostly in the vacation rental industry, mostly operators, vacation rental management companies, short-term rental operators. But we also work with a lot of the suppliers in the vacation rental industry, mostly operators, vacation rental management companies, short-term rental operators, but we also work with a lot of the suppliers in the tech community as well as service providers. So that's it.

So typically, Steve, you have a very short to-do list, not much on it, not really much going on most days for you, I imagine just very relaxing at the beach and such. Just hanging out by the pool. Yeah, just saying, of course. But no, it's impressive, Steve, and like I said, I know your time is super valuable, so I appreciate you hopping on, and hopefully people listening will understand that you've seen it all. Yeah, of course. I've seen a lot. I I guess I realized my when I started build up, my son was like this little tiny five, six pound newborn baby. And now he's in third grade about to leave that and go off to the next thing.

So I guess it does make sense, but it doesn't feel that way from time to time. Anywho, a year and a half ago, I wrote a book called Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing, which puts all the marketing techniques, tactics, strategies that we've learned working with 200 plus global clients over the past nine years into a bite size package that you can go and check out. We got some more stuff on the end about the book. If you want to copy, stick around. I'll have the opportunity for you to check that out. And yeah, we focus on search, social and email marketing for our vacation rental clients.

And just over the last 12 months, we can show $50 million of direct bookings that have been driven from our campaigns and the lovely clients we've been able to work for. We don't deserve all the credit, but again, we've seen a few things. So we kind of know what has worked well and things that we can continue to improve and build off of as we get going.

So kind of six focus areas today for today's discussion. And it's going to be a little bit more of a conversation. We got some reference points on the screen that people, you know, attending to check out and look out so they understand kind of what's going on here. When to hire and who to hire, understanding the costs of hiring. You know, there's definitely costs in hiring, whether it's internal costs or actual payments that you're making out to a recruiting firm or talent agency, obviously like better talent margins talking about margins.

Steve has a lot of, when we were putting our slides together here for this presentation, Steve had a lot of thoughts about margins and understanding costs of marketing and how important it is, but also you got to pay for it. So we're going to talk about the margin side of this a little bit. Pros and cons of each hiring decision. So again, who you hire matters, obviously. And then what are the benefits of working with an agency?

What are the drawbacks of working with an agency? And I'm an agency owner, so I can try to be as honest as I can about kind of the way it does work and the way it doesn't work. Same thing with an agency. I'm an agency owner, so I can try to be as honest as I can about the way it does work and the way it doesn't work. Same thing with a full-time person versus a contractor, that sort of thing. What is your pathway? What is your people stack? As Steve referenced in our slides here,

and how do you build marketing people stack, how do you build other things as we get going? Is that a fair summary, hopefully, Steve? A little agenda to keep us on track here? That is perfect. All right, awesome. So I'll get us kind of started here with, I think scaling marketing is hard. Like this is hard stuff to do. I think the main reason that I feel this way, having now done this or seen this happen, you know, at hundreds of different companies, vacation on companies over the past almost

10 years, is that there's not always like a playbook that you could just copy and run and that always works that way. Like I think on the operation side, I imagine people who are more focused on that side, they kind of know their inputs and their outputs a little bit more clearly. It's kind of like step A, go in here, train this housekeeper, get this person trained up, and then they're in good shape,

and maybe they don't need to feel like there's a lot of creativity involved in that. We train someone else, we get them in good shape, we're onto the next thing. Marketing can be challenging because we could try something on the marketing side, something creative that we think might work, and it might fall flat on our face,

or it might work really well might fall flat on our face or might work really well. We don't know. So I think scaling marketing is hard because sometimes what you're doing stops working. That's a common thing. I was on an email thread with a client this morning who may even be attending with us here today. And they were saying that, hey, our Facebook ad click-through rate is down a little bit month over month and it's kind of going in the wrong direction. And it's the ads that we had that were once working are unfortunately no longer working.

The audience has a little bit of ad fatigue. They've seen the same ad over and over again. So now we gotta go in and refresh all the ads, which is obviously something that we're happy to do for the client, but it does make it challenging, right? When we have something that's working, it's kind of almost like a spinning plate type thing.

It's not gonna work that way forever in many situations. Even though we've got kind of our stalwarts, like again, we talk about search, which has a paid and organic component, social, which has a paid and organic component, and email marketing. Those three things are still ultimately, you know, there's a lot of variations and changes that need to happen, you know, within those different disciplines which has a paid and organic component, What did you kind of find as you like found these little friction points as you were building some of those? Yeah, you know, back then we were not reliant like most are on the OTA.

So marketing, you had to do it. You had no choice. There wasn't as many eyeballs looking at the channels as there are today. And so early on in my company, we knew we had to have somebody in marketing, ultimately built a full digital ad agency in-house. We had every component of what you just described in-house, which was mind-numbingly difficult to build out. It was a massive investment in people, but also in professional development of those people. So we were constantly going to SEO conferences, SEO mods, and PubCon,

and all the different places that Conrad, I know you've probably been to. We actually spent the money to send them out there and train them on it. And when I look back at it, it definitely, there was an ROI, but was it a better ROI than if we had outsourced some of those components? And we tried outsourcing, there weren't as many companies as there are today in our space that really understand what they're doing and know how to market vacation rentals. There just wasn't professional businesses like yours in those days. So again, it kind of forced us to have to do what we did because we were 100% direct, we had to do marketing and there wasn't strong marketing partners to outsource to. So went

through that and I still to this day know more about SEO and organic SEO, at least I'm pretty outdated, I'm sure, then I want to, right? So because of that time investment and put into it. So yeah, the SEO note, I guess I would say there is that it's funny. There's all these, you know, trendy tactics and new things come in and out. And I believe it kind of comes back to these four areas, right? Technical, what keyword are we going after? Is the content in good shape? And are we building links? Like that worked when I first heard the word SEO,

excuse me, or that terminology in 2012, and that still works well today. So I think it's one of those things where it's like people tend to overcomplicate or we jump on that new trend, if you will, right? But the truth is that it's a struggle there. But Steve, we talked about this in intro, and I know we have a block on it later on

where we'll talk about this in more detail, talking about margins, but you kind of shared this with me in our planning call here. 80% of property about this in the intro, and I know we have a block on it later on where we'll talk about this in more detail, talking about margins, but you kind of shared this with me in our planning call here. 80% of property managers, in your opinion, have too thin margins. Can you define this a little bit better for me? What does too thin margins mean? How do we know if we actually have the budget to invest

in any kind of marketing solution? Yeah, you know, and today, sometimes you see companies where their total take rate, if you will, their commission and any margins on fees is, you know, 15%. That's really, really challenging to take a good portion of that and put it into direct marketing and be successful. And so, you know, understanding exactly what your total effective commission rate is before you kind of put together a marketing budget is imperative. And we, you know, we had at the time, and for the 20 years

that I had the company, and I worked with a lot of companies that have similar rates where they're more like 35, 38, 36, total commission. In those cases, you can take a significant portion of that, put it towards marketing and be successful. So it really comes down to, do I have the margins to be able to put together a marketing budget? And what does that look like? What percentage of that marketing or that margin should I

put towards direct marketing? And it's a challenging thing to figure out today, I would say, simply because unlike, you know, my days, the OTAs are really powerful, really strong, they're expensive, far more expensive than they were in our day. So you have to consider that relative to the investment in marketing. And you know, if you're 100% reliant on OTAs, being able to then, you know, start marketing and getting direct bookings is challenging to kind of navigate and understand inside of the construct of your financials. And so if you don't have a strong understanding of your financial and have good strong financial controls in place, that's where you need to start before you go invest a bunch of money in marketing, in my opinion. Yeah, I think Steve, that's one thing

where just like, as I've gotten older, hopefully I've gotten a little wiser. And I would say that's the version of me understands this a lot better than the version of me that started the company in 2016. Or I'm just like, look, I know how to do marketing. Look, I'm good at it. Like, let me show you the techniques and tactics I'm going to use. And I didn't realize that like, if the foundation, the building is cracked, like, like to your point, the margins aren't there, the cost isn't there. Me pitching them doing SEO or running Google ads or running Facebook ads. I'm just shouting up the wrong tree.

Like we need to fix the foundation first before we can build off of it. Right. And if you don't do that, you won't have that customer very long and they won't be happy with you. Right. So that you do that first. So yeah, probably the only recruiter on earth that asks if somebody is doing trust accounting at the first conversation. I feel like that has to be the case. I like to say a lot of hard to disprove things on my side too. Steve, one thing I say just out of kind of out of jazz, but I believe it to be true. No one's looked at more vacation rental search result pages on Google than me, which I can't prove or disprove. No one can prove it. I've done this eight times a day for 10 years. but I believe it to be true. because there's kind of these three options. So this is what I want to go through for a few minutes here, right? There's freelancer, or we could use the word contractor, I'm okay with that,

if you're okay with that terminology, Steve, maybe have different ways that you think about it. There's an agency or some kind of like, more, let's say package together service that you may be able to hire. And then there's an house. So I kind of see these three different, you know, pillars as we go through it. So obviously, I sit in the middle seat, if you will, I'm going to be very biased, you know, I try to remove my bias as much as possible towards, hey, this is a good idea, but it only is a good idea in some situations, some, you know, types of setups. So, you know, I try to remove my bias as much as possible towards, hey, this is a good idea, but it only is a good idea in some situations, some, you know, types of setups. So, you know, your thought process in this, Steve, as you look at these three tiles on the screen, freelancer, agency, in-house, maybe high

level, what are some, you know, maybe explain this a little bit and then we'll talk about who it might be fit for, depending on the business. Yeah, I think early stage companies, it's really hard to have somebody in-house that's not you. And what I mean by that, if you're the founder and you're really strong in marketing, then you're probably maybe doing that as part of what you do early stage. And so it's hard to hire.

It's only when you get to a certain scale and have enough margin to be able to afford and house that it makes sense. So it's either a freelancer, an agency or yourself being that in house person, when the company is smaller, it's getting started, it's less than 50, 100 properties, that type of thing. Which by the way, 80% of our industry has less than 20, right? And so, depending on where you stand and what kind of margins you have, that's really what's going to dictate that. And even if you are a high margin and a more

skilled organization, I know today I will tell you, I would not have a full ad agency in-house like I did back then today. I would use either freelancers or an agency for components of my marketing. I more than likely would have a marketing person on my team. The one thing I think that everybody should have, whether that's you as in a startup scenario,

or ultimately as you bring people in-house, is somebody who can actually be the content producer in the market. Meaning someone that goes out to the houses and does videos, if you're at a beach, does beach videos, that type of thing. That's really hard for agencies and freelancers to do unless the freelancer happens to be in the market. And it certainly should be connected to your brand in a way. So that's something that we certainly advocate for. But I think that's, you know, what do you use? It's probably a combination of these things. And that's probably what I would use even with a scaled organization today. Yeah, I agree. I think that's a really good example. And I always say this with clients, right? There's things that we can do well from afar and there's things that we literally can't do more from afar

So a home tour, you know is exactly you nailed it and it's not that hard I think some people get intimidated by that it hasn't been that hard for us to upskill people You know in some situations locally to get those skills like we'll give someone a gimbal a newer iPhone and like we've already got like a seven out of ten video footage just From that and then if we give them a little bit of coaching or guidance or feedback on like hey Go slow during the interesting parts of the home, the view, the backyard, the fire pit, maybe the kitchen is really nice in some listings,

go slow there and then go faster in the boring parts, the hall between the master bedroom and the whatever the living room, maybe it's not that interesting, you can run through that part, that's fine. And then it may only take seven to 10 videos and then boom, now we're getting much better quality video, then we can edit that from afar, right?

So like we don't need that person necessarily be shooting the video, editing it, an expert in music production, and, you know, how to cut a video. Those are all different things that can be done. But if someone could come in and shoot a handful of properties every single week for us, we actually had a client who trained their inspection kind of, you know, specialists to do this kind of thing. So they'd inspect the property, they'd give it a thumbs up, it was good. They had 10 minutes and they say, all right, I know it's good. I just went through it, I did an inspection, it's in good shape. They did a walkthrough, jumped that file into a Google up, it was good. They had 10 minutes and they say, all right, I know it's good. I just went through it. I did an inspection in some good shape.

They did a walkthrough, jumped that file into a Google Drive, set it off to our team. We can then cut those, edit those and turn those into social posts or ads. So I think that's a good thing, you know, for sure, Steve, which is amid this wasn't in our outline, maybe it's worth asking you about this idea that marketing is kind of almost inherent to a lot of people on the team. Like most most inspection people wouldn't think like, OK, marketing is my job. My job is to inspect the, you know, clean to make sure it went well. But if I ask them for 10 minutes of their time, even once or twice a day, Like most inspection people wouldn't think like,

and should the reservations team, like what's kind of your logic on those involvements from marketing? Yeah, I think, I think I would encourage it, but only encourage it during the kind of shoulder and off season in the high season, I wouldn't even ask them to do any of that thing, right? They're going to be head down and focused on that. One thing I did want to mention, we were talking about video and kind of content production, but another thing that an agency, other than kind of the photography agencies can't do is actual still photography, which is probably the single most important thing from a marketing

perspective, but I think you would probably agree if we don't have quality pictures, nothing else we do from a marketing perspective matters as much. Right. And so whether that is an agency that focuses on photography, which there are some that send photographers out, you know, across the country or somebody in house that is doing that exceptionally well or a local photographer. I will tell you after years and years of, you know,

working through that, it was very difficult to find a local photographer that was really good at interior photography in a way that is, because, you know, a lot of interior photographers will take a section of a room or a portion or that's like lifestyle shots. You need the whole room, right? And you need to get for that listing, right?

And so having somebody that's really good at that, really good at lighting, really good at post-production, all of those things is imperative, whether that's an agency thing or in-house. So photographers are important. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Again, I feel like back to that shaky foundation comment, right? Like if you got very mediocre photography,

all the ads were going to run, everything were going to do to that listing. Once we get someone to that listing, if they don't see something that's visually very impressive, especially if we're trying to market a premium stay, a premium property, those things have to be congruent. That's kind of the way that I think about it from a marketing perspective, right? The congruence between I'm charging $1,000 a night and needs to be visually impressive when I get there, and I get excited about spending $1,000 a night at a really high-end vacation rental perspective, right? The congruence between I'm charging $1,000 a night and needs to be visually impressive when I get there and I get excited about spending $1,000 a night

at a really high-end vacation rental home, right? So I think that that's so important. But what I see happening a lot, Steve, in marketing just in general, especially if the founder or the owner of the company is not very marketing-focused, is it's kind of like check the box. Like, okay, I took photos.

Like check the box, like I took photos. Or I wrote a list and description. Okay, check the box, it's done, it's all set. But in my mind, there's always a massive difference between having done something and having done something with best practices in mind, right? I wrote a list and description, a good title tag there that actually targets a keyword that people are searching for, and we've optimized around that keyword. So if we just have this idea of like checkbox marketing,

hey, we wrote a description, we did photos, we did a video, we have a title tag on the homepage, et cetera, et cetera, it can lead us down this, you know, I think at times flaw of just like, is it actually good though? Is it actually working well? I have a client, we've talked this on different, you know, shows and webinars, stuff that we've done in the past.

I have a client sends two photographers to every new listing they do, completely separate times, different everything. And they go, what I always end up doing is I end up using, that we've done in the past. more expensive. This is a luxury property manager. Not everybody maybe can have that their budget, but it's just like, yeah, like, why not? Right? To your point, this is some of the most viable assets we get. Why not have people that see it from a different angle and different, you know, I, it could be positives there. Absolutely. Yeah. So this would be a thing that we repeat a little bit as we keep going here. Again, you may hire one or all these things, you know, as you get going and depending on the

size of your company and what you're looking for and you know, the more, you know, kind of, I would say logical pieces that you have in place, the better the results going to be so uh cost steve i think this is probably where you have a lot um a lot more knowledge on because you're putting these listings out for folks and you're helping people you know secure this talent um and we kind of joked when we were getting putting these slides together about this idea that maybe some people come to you and they want this unicorn marketer who's going to make 60k a year and they're going to do everything they're going to do email and social and facebook ads and stuff like that are you finding these people people? Because if so, Steve, I think I need to. How are you to find more of these people on my team?

But what's what's the reality of this? Yeah, we are not. They don't actually exist. And what I mean by that is somebody that can do everything that you just described. And what's interesting about marketing today is there's different types of personalities that work really well for different components of marketing. Right. And so the unicorn that can do it all well doesn't exist because the person is really good at being super creative and coming up with new ideas from a marketing

perspective and producing content is unlikely to be very good at the analytics of marketing, which is such an important component of marketing. So can you get somebody to do one piece of that or multiple pieces? Sure. Can you get somebody that does it all very well, and especially for 60k a year today? No, you cannot. It doesn't exist. And we do get asked on a regular like I'm ready to hire a marketing person. What do you want them to do? I want them to do everything. And, you know, exactly. And so we have to come,

you know, go through the process of talking through what that looks like. And I always ask, am I kind of divided into the two? Do you want somebody that's really strong and content production or distribution and analytics? Because those are the two, you know, if there's a divider, that's from a personality trait perspective. And as you know, Conrad, anybody listening, part of our process is we profile every individual that comes through as a potential applicant. And there are certain personalities that work with one or the other. And they're really, it's much more multifaceted than that, because there are really strong, yet to be really strong at organic SEO, you may not be great at cost per click management and managing paid ads, like that type of thing. So there's, it really gets granular and to have somebody that can do it all is unlikely. Can you have a marketing coordinator that understands all of those different components and knows enough about it to make sure that the supplier, the contractor, the third party, you know, agency that's doing it is doing it well,

yes, I believe you can get somebody like that. And I went to SEO conferences not so that I could do SEO so I could understand if I outsourced it or I hired somebody to do it, that I knew they were doing it well. I kind of use the analogy when I go to take my car to an auto mechanic, I don't want to know how to change the oil or the transmission or whatever's got to be fixed, but I want to know enough about that to not get ripped off. And that's the same thing with this. It's not about getting ripped off.

It's just making sure they're effective. And so knowing what to look at and knowing what ROI looks like and that type of thing, owners, operators, general managers, CEOs, COOs aren't necessarily going to have that much marketing prowess to really understand that. So maybe you have somebody on the team that is that kind of central figure that understands all the different aspects of it

is not the person to produce it all. And maybe they're good in that localized content production we were talking about earlier, understand enough about the analytics to be able to kind of look at it. And that's your marketer, right? If you have one person on a team, for example. Yeah, I think the story I told Steve when we were putting this together

was this idea that I had a client call a little while ago, a potential client call, and he said something to the effect of, well, I want to make sure you're working on the account when it comes to content or comes to email or something like that. And I go, I mean this genuinely, it's not like a bit, I'm not doing this. So you'll sign the contract, I will do worse than my team on some of these things. Like when I give you know, the email marketing project that we're about to do with this particular, you know, client or potential client over to Dawn on my team, who's not been doing this

for six, seven years at this point, and all she does is email marketing for vacation, middle managers, like she's gonna do a better job than I am. If I were to go do that email, I would do it worse, like I'm giving you to someone who's actually more skilled on my team and does this all day. Now, again, same thing, right, Steve? I don't want to say that I'm just the figurehead of not doing anything, but just this idea that I'm looking at what they're doing, I can review the numbers, et cetera.

But she has so many examples. She's made literally hundreds of newsletters for different clients that we work with over the last time frame, and she knows what's going to work well. And my pitch, if you will, or just the benefit of the agency model, whether you hire me or any other agency is that you don't need 40 hours of someone like Donna, my team or someone like Matt on my team a week for most vacational companies. And if you do, yes, in house may make a lot of sense, obviously, what you need probably is five hours a week of one specific thing done for you, like five hours of video editing

when we do get those property video shot in the off season. Great, I'll take my video editor, who I fractionalize his or her time across, you know, a dozen projects and say, well, you need five hours of someone that really knows what they're doing for this. Let me give you that five hours. I'm selling at an increased price from what I'm paying them, but you're getting a lot of value out of that

when we put it as part of a comprehensive strategy. So again, whether you work with Buildup or not, or you hire any other agency, that's ultimately what we're offering. So when you're working with, I think, an agency, that should be your question is like, why is this person's five hours of time gonna do a lot better than if I try to do it myself or DIY or hire a contractor, whatever the case may be.

So that's kind of been my experience with it. And I think you're spot on. Some of our most successful relationships, I feel, are people that have this type of coordinator. I don't know exactly what their salary is, but someone who's kind of in the company, they know everything going on. They know all the little weak spots in the calendar. They know where the occupancy is weak because they're looking at the numbers, the data with their team internally. And they go, you know what, we really need to push XYZ holiday. July 4th is still slow right now. You know, let's go ahead and put together some advertising for that. And then it's my job and my team's job to say, okay, great, we're going to do an email campaign. We're going to get that out. We'll do the design, the

copywriting, you know, we'll send you proof and we'll get it out there. We'll do a Facebook ads campaign, meta ads campaign. We'll have some specific creative talking about 4th of July. We've got special deals, discounts, offers. we'll need our web dev team to put landing page together. So it ends up needing maybe eight or 10 people to get a campaign like that out. But we wouldn't have been able to do that really effectively, maybe without that in house person flagging it for us and saying like, hey, we're soft in Fourth of July, you know, give us a little boost, we can assist in that way. So that's kind of how I see it working in practicality. I'm not sure if that's kind of what you envisioned as well, or what you're describing there. But 100% aligned with what I'm saying. And we see

that marketing coordinators, marketing director, whatever title and what's the salary range, it ranges greatly depending on how much experience that person has in the space, how robust they're and how much of it they're going to do versus the outsource agency. But I think for a scaled vacation rental company north of 100 properties, for example, although property count matters less than margin, as we were talking about before, but if you have the ability to hire that first marketing person, I think they should be not necessarily a unicorn marketer like the person on the screen, but that person that has at least a baseline, a strong baseline understanding of all the different components of marketing so they can work with the third party

to do what needs to be done that they can't do. So... Well, maybe Steve, just a little bit on cost for a second or hiring on that side of it, just if we have a moment. So let's say we're hiring more of that coordinator type level. Maybe it's more like a 70 to 80K range or maybe it's something where someone comes in with this skill. But we were talking also about different locations, different places that people can hire from.

So for example, we have some people now on our team from South America, from Central America, we have people, of course, the Philippines has been a popular hiring place for I feel like a few years now for some clients that we work with for things like customer service roles, stuff like that. So maybe walk through that at a high level. Again, if you're hiring someone in the Philippines versus South America versus in the States. Yeah, just any any thoughts on that or numbers that you see with your recruiting? The least expensive or one of the least expensive places certainly the Philippines, the you know, and it's just like here though, and people think they use the term VA, and they almost

think of someone from the Philippines or South America as they're all the same. No, it's exactly like hiring somebody here in the US, Their personality traits matter, their cognitive matters, their skills matter, their background, what they know, all that matters. And what you pay them matters too. The good thing is, is the cost structure is so low in places like the Philippines or Colombia, Colombia is a little higher than the Philippines. But you can pay incrementally better than the market without a big expense and get high quality individuals.

An example, I have a team in the Philippines on my team, some of which have 15 and 20 years of HR experience. I don't even have that much experience in HR. I don't come from it. Right. And so I can hire somebody for say nine or $10 an hour on a direct hire basis that has amazing qualifications and experience in that particular part of the business and it's very low cost. Now the downside of it is they're on the other side of the clock meaning they're if you want them to work at the same time you are

they're working in the middle of the night so there's there's and there's a little bit of language barriers sometimes most of them speak English really well but from a marketing perspective you can find good marketers So there's a little bit of language barriers sometimes, most of them speak English really well. But from a marketing perspective, you can find good marketers, but you definitely have to lead and manage them just like you would a team member here. And they are not all the same. And a lot of people have hired a VA and said, yeah, it didn't really work out for me.

But that's like saying, having a bad hire here in the US and just saying, well, I'm never going to hire any employees in the anymore because that didn't work out. Everyone is a unique human. You need to think of them as such, not as a robot and kind of go through the typical hiring process or whatever your hiring process is that you would for a US-based person with that person really quantifying and making sure they have the skill set

that they say they have in that regard as well. So I think you can get really good talent that way. I don't know that I would say though that that marketing coordinator that helps produce the localized content, that type of thing is really in my would be from overseas, whether it's Columbia or Philippines or otherwise. I will say we've had more success in South America with marketers specifically than we have in the Philippines. Philippines for like guest services and a lot of the other different attributes, absolutely all day, but there's some really strong marketers in South America.

Yeah, we've noticed the same and our team is kind of expanding and growing and we're always looking for where those efficiencies, as far as finding the right people. And same as you're saying, we found someone who joined our team recently who worked on email marketing campaigns for some of the biggest companies in the country that she's from in South America. So she was basically working with like, you know, top agency there was doing a lot of email marketing work for them.

We brought her on. She's been absolutely fantastic, you know, and she's doing a great job and actually brought some new ideas, things that we weren't doing. And, you know, it was actually interesting to hear perspective from someone who was in a little bit of a different world, more of an e-commerce world, and then taking some of those ideas and applying them to vacation rentals, which kind of is e-commerce in a way when we think about it, not a cart and purchasing a product in terms of this can be shipped to your house, but certainly in terms of purchasing activity, getting someone to come in and buy something, it's the same idea. So yeah, I think that understanding the cost structure, like you said, you could certainly find people. If you want to find someone inexpensively, there's fiverr, there's up work, you can go and find people inexpensively.

To your point though, Steve, it's really about finding A, the right people and B, people that are going to actually move your business forward. Nothing will, I think, sink you faster than, you know, going cheap on the hiring. You know, we can find people for a few bucks an hour, but are they actually going to hit your goals? Is that actually what you're after?

Is the goal to spend the least amount of money on the hire or is the goal to grow the business and make it better and find new opportunities and stuff like that? I'm sure most people are looking to grow the business, not just figure out a way to shape a few bucks off a salary or whatever the case may be. Exactly. Awesome. So we touched on earlier, maybe we can do a little bit of a deeper dive into, you know,

kind of margins. What are things what are some activities in your mind that improve margins? So we kind of touched on the top where it's like, if you're getting that, you know, four or 5% of collected, you know, once you pay all your bills, you know, a little bit's left for you over, how do you ever do marketing? But like, what are some things that you've seen when you look at companies or that you review of companies that actually maybe go from that 15% range to that 30% range? What are all the changes they have to make to improve the margin so they can do more

marketing? Well, so many are not charging, you know, different types of guest fees, they they might not be doing a damage waiver where they make a margin, they might not be selling travel insurance. So there's all of the different fees and different ways that you can increase margin. One of the ways from a marketing perspective that I always encourage is in your rental agreement,

ask for a certain amount of use days of the property on a given year. And when I first did this, I used it as a marketing tool where we would have a stay seven pay six special. They'd get a free night on a seven night stay. I'd get that night from the owner.

So I'd get seven nights from that owner on an annualized basis. I'd use one night for each one of those specials. So the only thing I was missing when I discounted that one night was my margin on that night. So instead of giving a discount where you're taking a significant part of the hit, you're definitely, you know, you're getting that from the homeowner. What I ended up landing on though, was asking those owners for those nights usage for anything.

And what I mean by that is we were able to actually take the revenue from those nights. We wouldn't take it during like peak season periods, but we would kind of grab them in the shoulder and we allocated 100% of that revenue. So we would take the free night, we would charge the client the normal rate, we would put all of that money into the marketing budget. And so when we had 400 properties

and seven days of occupancy each year for 400 properties, we had a significant marketing budget all of a sudden that we didn't have prior. And we were just using for specials and whatnot. And we allocated, now the key is, some companies will do that, and we'll just throw that to the bottom line and call it profit.

But if you wanna keep your owners happy, you definitely wanna reallocate those funds towards marketing efforts to get higher rates, to get more occupancy and drive more for the business. And that's what we did. And so I advocate for companies to do that all the time. I've never heard that one.

So I like that I'm learning here too, Steve, because if I do some quick math, 400 properties, seven nights, one week basically free from each one, 2,800 nights per year to play with. Now, obviously this is gonna depend on your average booking value. But let's say when you are managing premium homes, 350 night. Yeah, 480 yard. That's 1.1 million of my math is right here, 1.12 million in kind of extra just play money. Maybe you could figure out how to how to build off of I thought you were actually going to go a different route there. I thought you were going

to say we could do influencer stays, we could do giveaways. A lot of our clients do things like giveaways, we run some for clients as well. Was that ever something you dived into on that realm? I do, I just tend to go to the one that's going to produce the most amount of marketing budget out of the gates and then go from there. And then it goes on down the line, right? So there's all the different fee structures and margins from that. If you're not optimizing for that, you should be for the business as a whole and allocate some of that towards marketing. But influencer stays was a big piece for us. And you know not all influencers are created equals so you got to be super careful on who you allocate that to. So we would use marketing nights for that.

Put them up. You know PR, I used to say PR as SEO. If you could get you know listed on a high traffic website blog or whatever in the backlink. As you said early on, that still works. That was a really good way to do that through PR efforts. And PR today is really those influencers as opposed to traditional media. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've had some examples of clients kind of going the more traditional PR route and getting coverage in media publications that you might've heard of. We had a client last year who got covered in travel leisure extensively. They were launching a new property and people covered it. It definitely brought a lot of traffic. It brought some awareness and I think it is a legitimacy builder, where people are like, oh, this property is brand new.

It's featured in a magazine or travel publication. I've heard it before. I think it does help create some credibility that that's a new thing that you should be trying out. It didn't drive a lot of bookings, not necessarily, but I think it's just one of know, a new thing that you should be trying out. Did it drive a lot of bookings? Not necessarily. But I think it's kind of just one of those bricks, you know, in your foundation, right, that you're kind of building off of on the marketing side. So big fan of it. But, you know, something that I think, yeah, it's always a battle, actually, when we do the contest or giveaways, Steve, where the client has to go back to the owner and say, Hey, we want to do a giveaway, would you be willing to participate? It's

always a little bit of a well, you know, what, what do I get out of it? We talk about the promotion of the listing, we talk about the eyeballs that that property is going to get, we'll do email marketing to people that don't win, we'll send them a message, you know, that sort of thing. But it's always like more work than it should be, honestly, versus just like, I like your idea a lot, because we could just be like, cool, we're doing four giveaways a year, something like that. You know, and it can get us a lot more email addresses, get us a lot of attention, it's gonna make our marketing work better. And we don't have to go do a lot of cross checking with them, we could just

kind of pick four of the best homes, use our marketing days on those. And then, you know, we're cooking with gas in that respect. So I've done a lot. It works, you know, and a lot of people when they first do it, they, you know, might crawl before they walk, then they run to a few days, you know, three days, four days, you know, and some of our high end properties later in the game, we had 10 in a year. And yeah, when you're in the sales process to sign that owner, they definitely question it. But when you can say, look, you're benefiting from the aggregate of the whole doing this,

all of these people, we have $1.1 million to put towards marketing, and they see that marketing, meaning they can tell, a lot of them, owners come to you because of your retail marketing. So, and that's another reason to, frankly, do marketing that's not OTA. If you show up in the search results and you show up on social channels, you have a big following, owners are going to want to come to your company. Right. So, and that's,

that's how we grew a lot of our inventory was our marketing. And yet the owners help provide that. So, yeah, that's brilliant. I mean, I've said that over and over again, right, which is this idea of like, you can't fire it a postcard and say that you're the best because owners are smart enough to cross check that you know, it's the best. Why do you have seven homes right in this in this market? And then the competition has 500 homes like again, the concurrency isn't there obviously on that side of it. So when you actually build these in your business, and you just build a healthier margin, it's your point. I mean, most people I talked to when they it's almost like a sad situation when they don't have enough margin. They want to do it, they're willing to do it, but they're like, I literally can't, I'll go in the red. These are small businesses, right? We don't have the VC world for the for maybe more than a month or two before they just straight up run out of money. So we have to build a margin or we can't breathe, right? It's like oxygen.

So... Okay. Well, cool. So maybe let's talk about kind of some of the pros and cons, Steve, on these different concepts, right? So this agency, freelance, or contract kind of idea, why would someone be a good fit for you in each of these ones? So maybe I can speak to the agency side of it,

why someone should hire us or should not hire us. I think, you know, going back to the cost of the margin, that sort of thing, it takes me roughly the same amount of time to do an email for let's say a list of 200 or a list of 200,000. Like it's not necessarily more or less time if you have a much smaller list versus a much larger list. But obviously the smaller you are, the less benefit you get out of our services. So when we're looking to qualify someone for our company, typically we're looking for people,

if it's a property manager, they really need to be in that like one to $2 million floor, and they should be wanting to grow that shouldn't just be like where they want to be forever in terms of gross booking revenue. Because think about it, right to your point from earlier, even if they're doing a million dollars in gross booking revenue, they might only really have four or $500,000 commissions, maybe a little bit of fees, stuff like that on top of it, they're then going to have rent and employees and things on top of that doesn't

leave a ton of room for marketing. I think it's a place where you can start to maybe hire an agency, even if it's only for one or two specialized services, and start to get some benefit out of that. But it's tricky, you know, if you're a property manager, and you're, you know, just getting started, you only have a handful of homes, we're probably not the right fit for you. You know, we tell people that regularly, we disqualify people regularly and say, hey, we just, you know, even if you want to buy this, we just don't really think it's a good fit for you right now in terms of cost, that sort of thing. Maybe that is more of a contractor where it's just like, I just need someone to hire someone temporarily,

I need a logo design, let's say, you know, you might not want to hire an agency for logo design, we're getting started, you might just want to go on Upwork and find someone that does logo design, they have a good portfolio, they do a good job for you, you pay one time, you're not committed to a recurring fee, like our services typically are. So there's kind of times and places, I think, where we're not the right fit. On the flip side, though, it's kind of like, and I have clients that have done this before, man, we now have hired seven contractors are all doing different marketing things, or, you know, in our company, we got a copywriter, and they do the listing site descriptions. And we have, you know, the social media person doing

this, we have PPC person doing this, none of them talk to each other. And everything's a mess, you know, for us to actually get something out is like, you know, pain and misery to get things out there. And it's like, oh, well, we have like one team, like, you'll be working with one person, our client success team, to go and deal with all the, you know, individual, you know, pain and misery to get things out there. And it's like, oh, well, we have like one team, like you'll be working with one person, our client success team to go and deal with all the, you know, individual, you know, service providers and specialists on our team. And that can be like, oh, great, my headaches are going away. Like I can feel it work better there.

So I do think it kind of happens at the big size. And then at the smaller size, maybe the return on, you know, ad spend isn't there. But what's going to your perspective, I guess, maybe on agency, if you have comments on that, and then also on freelance or contract, like when someone should, when someone shouldn't, you know, on their, in their business.

You know, the positives of agency is certainly breadth of scope, right? So being able to have all of the different attributes of, you know, full service marketing company without having to pay the full dime as it pertains to all the people you would need to build one like I did, right? So I had six people, full-time people

on my marketing team when we got to scale. And that was super expensive. I could have gotten that through an agency for a fraction of the cost. The downside, I think is, you know, the agency works with a lot of different clients, right. And so they get to see a lot and you know, kind of me as a hiring, you know, when we're doing hiring, we hire for a lot of companies, maybe we're better than somebody that doesn't house in one company. So we know a lot, but at the same time, we have all of those, you know, mouths to feed,

so to speak, as does an agency. And so just making sure that that particular agency can handle that, do it well across a large swath of companies, because the positives can go away if they're not executing well. So, you know, I'm a pro agency, but got to have the right one with the right people that are making sure they're doing the right thing for their clients. On the contractor side, you know, I think what you were talking about, if I were not to use an agency, I would have a marketing coordinator and then contractors for those things that that marketing coordinator is not good at, right?

Maybe it's SEO, maybe it's PPC management, maybe it's content production, any of those different things, where I'm gonna backfill what that person's not good at. And I might do that with the agency as well if the agency does kind of fragmented components of it, outsource it. But I don't think that for the most part, unless you're a really scaled organization, you should do what I did, which is hire a whole team of people to do all the things. I think you definitely are going

to be outsourcing some components of this today. And that's coming from somebody who gets paid to hire people. So I just, I wouldn't do it. We talk people out of hiring people literally every day because if it's not going to make sense for your business, we don't want you to spend that money on that. You're going to pay that, that's very little relative to what you're going to pay that person and that's going to put a lot of weight on you. And so we very much want to align with the P&L, if you will, as it pertains to where you invest the money from a marketing perspective.

And so contractor, freelancer, or agency, you're probably going to use one, if not all, over the course of time, even if you do have some in-house team members from a marketing perspective. I can really count on one hand, I would say. Honestly, Steve, doing this now for almost 10 years of companies that actually truly have that, you know, that that budget and the size and scope of

the company to bring it all in house, you know, and there's companies that I admire really that have done that, and they don't have a lot of outside influence, and they have more inside vendors. We interviewed Clark Twitty some a little while ago on the Venturi feed. And he talked about that they have very, very much an in house approach, they don't do a lot of outside, you know, agencies or other services. And I've tried to, you know, pitch them a few times or kind of get get in front of people

on their team a few times. And that's not their approach. But they're extremely successful company right up in the outer banks, 1000 plus units, they have to do about $100 million a year in revenue. Yeah. If you have that, then yeah, you can certainly build a team like that. Absolutely. I think that companies like that are obviously the exception, not the rule by a wide margin and very few reach that level. But like to your point, when you got that, you can kind of make your own decisions on building your own in-house team. And obviously your company was phenomenally successful as well down in Florida.

You had in a budget of four to six people, there's a lot of clients who they have six people in their whole team, you know, maybe in terms of full-time equivalents. So yeah, right on there. Well, awesome. So a few more notes here. I know we've got about 10-ish minutes left. We may not need all of it if we go through it. So just maybe two pieces to tie in here.

We talked about people stack, and then we talked about this growth path, if you will. So people stack was more your terminology, Steve. And I'm not super familiar with what this is. You talked about it conceptually, but educate me a little bit. What does people stack look like? You know, I coined that phrase as it pertains to your people structure. And if you think about an org chart, when people produce an org chart, they usually

only put full-time, part-time individuals on the organizational structure. When we develop a people stack and we do that with every one of our clients, we list all of the humans that have some part of the business. And that can be full-time, part-time, independent contractor, consultant, virtual assistant, a third-party contractor, an agency. We're our company as the hiring company and the talent optimization company is actually listed on that structure.

And if you think about it, if you went and looked at a P&L, and I've looked at about 1500 P&Ls in this industry, the biggest cost structure is the people. Well, generally speaking, when people say that, they're talking about their staff, their full-time employees, maybe some part-time employees. They're not generally looking at it from a total perspective.

So I look at it, what is the total cost of the people that do the things to execute your business relative to your whole? And it's generally well more than 50% of the cost structure. So I say we should be optimizing our people stack. Right. And I use the term stack because it's much like a tech stack where we all talk about, used to be tech stack, by the way, it was like a developer term and you know, normal business owners didn't talk about tech stack, today we all do and you go to a VRMA or a VR Nation or one of the conferences and everybody's sitting around talking about their tech stack, I want people to also

consider their people stack and really think about how, what that structure looks like, how can I optimize that way bigger cost structure by the way than the cost of the technology. Now we spent all that time talking about our tech stack. And it's like, you know, 5% 3% of our total cost structure, whereas our people stack is north 50, generally speaking. So probably we should be focused on that as well as a business. Yeah, no, I can agree more. And I think that I mean, this is

always an awkward situation for me, Steve, and hopefully no listening I can agree more. And I think that I mean, this is always an awkward situation for me, Steve. And hopefully no one listening fits in this bucket. And I really struggle with it. But sometimes I go into business and I think the person that maybe has some marketing or marketing adjacent role that we're talking to really shouldn't be there. They don't have the skills. They don't have the talent. They don't have what they need to really make the role effective.

And it puts us in a bind sometimes where I'm like, Hey, we need to almost get past this person to be effective in what we're doing. Email marketing, SEO, PPC, whatever the case may be. And then we almost have like a roadblock in the way that we're running into. So, you know, it's really challenging, especially if we're not dealing with the owner of the company or the CEO, the founder, we're dealing with someone else. And it's like, we have to give them advice based on the fact that I don't think they should be there. Like that's that's happened to us regularly over the last year or two.

We have, we've run into companies where they said, you know, we worked with XYZ marketing firm and it just didn't work out. And I'm looking at Tony, the marketing coordinator, and I'm going, I think I know why. Right. It's because, you know, if you engage with one of those, an agency, you've got to have somebody on the team that's giving that agency what they need to be successful, right? And not being a barrier. And sometimes those individuals fear for their jobs and think the agency is going to come in and take over their job. And so they become a roadblock. And so making sure that that's not the case with your team member, if you have somebody on the team that's interacting. And that goes for any type of agency you're working with, a talent acquisition company, right? We have the same thing in our business.

So it's just making sure that those individuals know that, hey, we're outsourcing this for a reason. We're not replacing you with this company. We really need to be exceptional at getting them what they need and engaging with them to get the value that we're paying for out of that third party. You know that with that last one, honestly, right, which is like, I always dislike that we have clients that are, you know, paying us. It's not like our business is being harmed by these relationships. But I look at it and I go, well, we're not getting all your are paying for though, you know, we're not squeezing all the juice out of the lemon, if you will, you know, in this scenario, because you're not giving us what we need to your point, right? Like we're waiting on an email list, we're waiting on a final photos from the new listing, you know, that you said you were going to give send over to us

and we don't have it. And it just like puts a knot in my stomach, to be honest with you, Steve, because I look at that sometimes and go like, yeah, okay, like we're fine with it, like, it's not harming us in any way. But I can't feel like that client is looking at that, you know, the cost that they're paying us and feeling of getting great value out of it when they're not doing what needs to be done. So yeah, I've had some awkward conversations and awkward emails over the years, right? With people talking with the owner, maybe at some point and going, Hey, we're really struggling, you know, to deal with person ABC on your team or person DEF on your team, who's not giving us what we need to be successful. And, you know, things are slowing down. Here's some proof. Here's all the emails we sent. Here's all things we tried and it's not

working. So yeah, I think as the CEO is the founder, if you're listening in and you're the owner, you know, the vacational company, you know, maybe it's agency's fault. I will admit we're not perfect. We made plenty of mistakes. If there's a mistake, I've made it, you know, at this point, for sure over 10 years. But also it's, you know, you got to look at your own team too and say, have I given them, you know, are we working well together? Are we in the same boat rowing the same direction? And unfortunately, that's not always the case. So Steve, anything that we didn't get to, if not, I want to give some final notes here and some pitches in the last two things or any Q&A's that maybe, you know, came in from your perspective that

weren't in the agenda that we should have done over the last little bit. I think we covered the major bullet points of what we intended to do, you know, and I think that the people listening, you know, whether you're listening to the recording or live now, really think through this. This is a significant investment of time and money. You've got to get ROI from it. It's important to do if you're not doing anything to drive direct bookings, repeat referral bookings. You definitely need to be doing this, but you need to do it really intentionally and very well and have experts that understand, that are going to bring you that ROI, but you also have to know enough about it to get that return.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, it has to be always, you know, we always say like, we're doing a lot of services for our clients, but it's always a done with you type thing. We're doing it with you. It's not just like, you kick it over the fence, and then we do our thing and then you have no involvement And sometimes too, you know Do they have the time to dedicate to working with us chatting with us and so on and so forth? So I'm Steve you offered folks coming with her the watching again the recording of their here live something really cool when we talked about Putting this together, which is a hiring credit. How would one redeem this? How would one reach out to your team and redeem this hiring credit for coming in listening to this webinar today?

Yeah, no there if if you whether you work with us on a single hire basis or you work with us on a subscription basis, we would just apply that $500 to when you sign up to whatever it is you sign up for. And I will tell you, we're the most efficient, you know, probably recruiting you'll ever find even outside of the industry. We're the only company of its type that focuses in on the vacation rental industry. And we have a deep understanding of building that people stack with you. So we'd love the opportunity to do

that. And we would just apply that credit to it. So to make it even more efficient. Yeah, for sure. So I'm assuming they just go to better talent.com reach out to someone on your team and the appropriate pieces will get put together if they need to take a screenshot of this and send it along. They'll you'll make sure that gets applied when they're talking into the team there. That's awesome. My email got a little on two lines there. Sorry about that. I made it really

big. But anyways, if you would like, if you were in the US, I'd be happy to send you a physical copy of Mastering Vacational Marketing. I can actually put it in the mail here from my house, send it off to wherever you are, as long as you're within the States. If you're outside of the US, at least the, you know, the place that I can mail to easily from my house, I'm happy to send you a PDF copy. So just email me webinar freebie in the subject line, and then email Conrad at buildupbookings.com. And I'm happy to send over again, a physical copy. If you're in the US, obviously I need your mailing address. You need to send that over to me. If you're based internationally or somewhere where you just don't want to get the physical copy, a PDF, I'd be happy to send that to you. Within the book, we talk at length about kind of what

marketing tactics to do, what makes sense. I think that could be a valuable resource for people. If you want to work with us here at Buildup Bookings, of course, just go to buildupbookings.com, click the book free call option right there on the screen, very easy to find, book a call with someone on our team, we'd be happy to see if we can potentially help you on the marketing side. So Steve, thank you.

This was great. It was good to, you know, kind of chat with someone that has your breadth and depth of experience. It was phenomenal. I thank you for your time. If there's nothing else, we can let people go a few minutes early

and they can enjoy the rest of their day. And I'm sure we get to a lot of fun things they have to deal with for the rest of the season as we get into the summer here. Absolutely. Thank you for attending everybody. And Connor, I thank you for having me really appreciate it. No, it was it was my pleasure, Steve, you made this easy, you know, your wealth of knowledge. So it's easy for me to just ask a few questions, talk about a few ideas. And I think we fill the time nicely. So thanks everyone for tuning in. We appreciate it. We'll catch you on the next one. And Steve, thank you. Have an awesome rest of your day. Thank you. Take care. Success.