Heads In Beds Show - Making The Real Case For Focusing On Direct Bookings

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into the ACTUAL costs of being OTA-focused and compare that to your direct booking marketing costs and expenses. They get real...Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational 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. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All the new era has begun, and we're here to record and talk about it all. One minute, two minutes on sports stuff.

So the Jalen Brown trade fell apart. You don't have to root for Lamella Ball. So apologies for that in advance. like justifying all those feature actions. But man, what a day. The interesting day here. It's, you know, it is. When we do summer recordings, I don't expect us to be talking basketball usually.

But boom, we are. To be fair, we are one day, two days post draft now and everything else. This is when stuff starts to move. So we haven't had much World Cup conversation. I guess we got to talk basketball. It is, it is a fun time to be a Timberwolves fan. I think, I don't know. We're movers.

We're dealers. We're shakers. You know, dealers and shakers have their place. So we'll see what the final outcome is. You know, it's kind of like what we do on a daily basis, really, I would say. That's a really good bridge because you're trying something and you don't know if it's going to work. In fact, you won't know if it's going to work for many months. Not too dissimilar from marketing and not too dissimilar from changing the focus of your company.

So that's a nice segue in today's topic, which is kind of, you know, this title might change by the time I publish it. But in our notes, at least, for today, is kind of this idea of you're probably underinvesting in your direct booking marketing. And I'll explain why. Oh, and I'll explain why. And as a result, your company is probably growing very slowly because of it. And I've seen this now over and over again. I've just had a hard time articulating it, putting all my thoughts into one place, working on this. But maybe this episode will serve as a little bit of a, I'm going to send this out to people a few times down the road in terms of like what I think they should be doing, because it's actually been informed a little bit of a conversation about it a few different

people, one more like an external advisor type person who's dealing with one of my clients. And just laying out the math so simply and so straightforwardly around the concept. of here's what it costs to get a booking from this channel, that channel, this channel, that channel. When we're getting direct bookings at this rate, why are we spending so little? Why are we underinvesting into those direct booking marketing? And I'm like in the back of the meeting, like, nodding my head aggressively, you know, as the clients listening to this, you know, from this external consultant.

But the opposite of other external consultant experience I've had before, which is, no, let's be more efficient. Let's cut this cost. Let's cut this cost. This individual that I'm working with is more like, nah, like this is working. Let's at the gas pedal. So he's kind of giving me some thoughts and some concepts there. from there. So I did LinkedIn post the other day. And here's kind of the question that I'm asking now.

It's even like part of our sales script now that I've added in. So how much money did Airbnb take from your guest payments last month? Which is a little bit of a reframe. I know some people have asked recently on LinkedIn. Like how much did you pay Airbnb last month? Which is fair. I'm using that that wording somewhat specifically. How much did Airbnb take from your guest payments last month? This was your money. And then Airbnb decides to take some of where they send it over to you. By the way, they don't send them to you until later. So you don't get to hold it. We'll talk about that in a second too. So let's just say the number, the number I gave in LinkedIn was a 50 unit company doing $50,000 per year in bookings from those properties. And I did the math to where that was like

25 bookings per year, something like that per listing. So they might be giving Airbnb between 25 and 35. There's all these variables on commissions and things like that of revenue every month is that what they're giving Airbnb. Now, Airbnb is giving the bookings off that. So this is not an anti-airbn episode at all. It is not. I know people kind of pigeon me hold that into my thought process, which is not at all what it is. It's just a naked truth of the facts. The facts of the situation of that Airbnb takes a ton of money from you every single month in your gas payments for most of our clients anywhere from five to 15 to $50,000 a month of cost there. And they're delivering booking support, absolutely. But the only question is if you can invest why and we could

determine what why is $3,000 a month, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, could we eventually flip the scales a little bit more in our favor? That's it. That's the whole conversation. So are you doing somebody to change that? It's kind of my question as we got going here. And what of people to be thinking about as they as they start. So that's my bridge of building. We're going to walk over it and tell me how you like the brickwork that we're doing here. I think you've hit it all there. I think the point that you and one of the line or the little phrase that stuck out is they're not growing as quickly as they could be. And I think that that's that's the key is that you have these successful businesses that are growing year over your growth, you know, 5%, 10%. We don't have

that gold standard, that KPI that says, this is how much you should be growing. We could, we could say it's based on your market, based on your portfolio, but there are so many factors that just growing the business sometimes, again, because it is going to be a roller coaster, growing the business feels like it's enough. But I think what you're really laying out here is that it could be more. Like, there's more opportunity there until we have evaluate it kind of through this lens, it's difficult to say. My fee structure is different. I get X amount.

If I do this, I get this amount. But if I get a greater percentage of my direct bookings, let's say I take it from 15 to 30 percent. Or if I take it from 30 to 40 to 50 percent, something like that, what does that actually look like? And it is. We'll talk about the long term, the downstream effects of that as well. but I do. I think that that's, it's difficult to comparing every comparison as an apples to oranges's comparison. Let's just call a spade of spade. It's hard to put that gold standard of, yes, you should be increasing your overall revenue 7% every year, 12% every year, whatever that is, because we don't know what's happening with your portfolio. We don't know if your inventory is the same. We don't know if there's a weather condition. It's delightful to try to put all. all this into perspective and bring the anecdote into the numbers and say, well, here's the ultimate story that we're telling. But truly, I think that ultimately the unwillingness to,

I don't know, how do you say give Airbnb the boot or just be a little more guarded with your Airbnb side of things and taking that on yourself? It's, it's, it's, I'm not. Oh, it's tough conversation there. It is because I think, you know, what it is, Airbnb is in a lot of cases pretty predictable or pretty reliable in driving bookings for a lot of our clients. And they know the waters they're waiting into. And they make it easy. You know, credit all the world to Airbnb.

There's a reason they become a multi, you know, 30, 40 billion dollar whatever is public company because they make it easy. You throw up your listings. You get bookings. They take their cut. And it's like, yeah, totally fair. You know, and it's actually a philosophy that I have now that I've learned a little bit doing this work for the last few years, which is that if you're,

Airbnb payments were like worked similar to how advertising worked, you would be a lot more in tune with them. So for example, imagine Airbnb sending you a full guest payment and then whatever that, you know, whenever that was valid for it to go through. And then they sent you a bill and said, okay, well this month, yeah, 27 bookings, you know, this amount of money. We go ahead and send you bill now for $18,000. Then you had to go pay after you held the cash for even a day. You had to give it back to Airbnb in the matter of $18,000, which they'd never do, by the way. This is a dumb concept. As I say it all loud, but that's not the point. You'd riot in the same way that I believe people would do that with their personal income taxes, which were not a political show.

But I believe that people would act that way. But don't you remember when Homeaway went through and said, oh, like, hey, we took credit for this. That was all this end of days. This is, because we did experience that to a certain extent. And now I think everybody worked through what they worked through there. But that was a huge deal. Like that was a, and that was just someone saying, we're, taking credit for the booking. I mean, it is. That's not, it was a direct booking that's come through.

They had the, you know, the back end of your property management system and could say, well, you took this many bookings, but they all came from this first. To be, this was a while ago. Maybe we could take a hold here a mental article and see people can find it because someone new to the space is like, what are you guys talking about? Right. Right. It's a good call. But I'm not surprised they came up with that idea. I just can't believe there was no one in that room that's like, yeah, people are going to be really bad if we do this, right? Like there's going to be a and they were just like they did it anyways or at least they announced it anyways um that that just still blows my mind to this day and this was like seven eight years ago i think it was

definitely pre-covid um i mean homeway still existed so it had to be at least quite a while ago right um this was even before the VRBO rebranded and all that kind of stuff pretty sure so yeah definitely definitely a ways ago but yeah i mean a good example right and i think the memory serves that was only 10 so it wasn't either like as aggressive it's exactly yeah we're now paying what 60% more commission today than we were back then to Airbnb and you don't see anyone riding the street you know against Airbnb necessarily. Maybe you'll get a little eyebrow raise or a little, you know, snarl or whatever the case may be. But it proves that like, and the same thing happened in hotels, by the way, this is not new, this concept. You know, booking.com in the hotel space brought that

commission up as high as they could until people started breaking and then they stopped. So they kept going until they got up to this 20% zone. And then they realized, okay, if we take 30%, we'll get away with it, but we just break these companies. We can't do that. Like, they know that their limits are, you know, at some level and they kind of backed it off from there. And I think there's maybe like certain markets or certain examples where maybe, you know, booking.com might charge commissions or whatever the case may be. But think about that for a second, right? It's like they've taken as far as it can go. Same thing happens in Amazon selling, by the way. Like, I'm not super knowledgeable about the e-commerce world. There's people that are, but I follow some people

online who are in Amazon e-commerce world. And basically they're like Amazon has taken us to the absolute limit on fees. Like the amount of fees they charge for things like shipping my product to an Amazon warehouse, holding it there, storing it, promotion fees. So now like Amazon's holding it. They're selling it. They're shipping it. I have to pay a promotional fee just to get my product to show up on Amazon, similar to what, you know, one might assume Escapie is about to do or they're in process of doing these like boosts or promotion boosts there. Imagine a scenario where you have to pay 15.5% commission and you're having to boost your, like, quote, unquote, results to get bookings on an Airbnb or a Verveo or an Expedia or something

like that. So you're probably playing closer to what, 20%, 25%, 30% commission maybe when it's all said and done. That's what happens to an Amazon seller. If you go buy a product on Amazon, most of that money is not going to the person who actually, you know, selling that product on Amazon. It's mostly going to Amazon for the fulfillment, the logistics, the advertising costs, all that kind of stuff. And it breaks sellers at some point. They're just like, I can't make anybody doing this. Or the obvious thing, it just raises a cost for everybody. You know, the thing that used to cost $7 now cost $14.50 because of all the costs that are baked into it. So same thing, right. After we talked about the one more e-com business that I do deal with, and niche, very, very niche.

But probably the most painful part about that is the fact that when I look, we do Google ads, We're trying to get their merchant center out there and everything like that. The people I'm competing against are Amazon and the stores that they have the seed in, in store, they have in store seeds. So it's confounding to think of that. You are paying for Airbnb's ad dollars to saturate travelers who are looking at this, to get more eyeballs on there. And that's just, that's the frustration. trading part is that like we can't turn that off because that's just how they're choosing to allocate that you know that capital but we are reaffirming that cycle and it's a deadly it's a dirty cycle when it comes

right down to it because we're never going to make that math work in our favor so yeah you you laid it out exactly why because they've already pushed pushed that commission ceiling to the breaking point and it breaks us. So what are we supposed to do? Yeah. I mean, so let's go back and beat the drum that we beat now for, you know, several years and you hear all the time. So, okay, let's say you started your direct booking journey. Now, this brings up an interesting point. What do you consider a cost of direct booking booking? In other words, I'm coming back to my econ classes and things that I took back at college where there's variable cost and fixed costs. So are you going to have a website whether you have a direct booking strategy or not? Probably yes. So I do disagree a little bit with some of the notion or feedback that I've gotten recently. around this concept of like, well, the website is part of my marketing expense. It is and it isn't. I almost think of it as kind of like operational costs, whereas something like Google Ad Spend is obviously completely optional. You don't have to run Google Ads.

Your business can run just fine without running Google Ads. So that we should be very critical of the incrementality. We get fancier with the words. How many more bookings we get when the Google Ads are running versus not running? We should be more critical of that spend and we should hold it to a higher standard of return on ad spend. But things like your website just operating and just sitting there and being active on the internet, first of all, hopefully you're not paying a ton of money for things like hosting.

Although if you're hosting one of one of these venture-backed large PMS companies, you might be paying a ton of money for hosting. That is almost all profit margin, by the way. I saw a invoice the other day, Paul, from one of these VC back companies that was charging someone $700 a month to host a basic WordPress website. I promise you that it's costing that company, probably in the neighborhood of like three to $5 to $5. So it's like absolutely crazy.

But because they've got the website, they're like, well, what are I going to do? Get rid of my website. It's like, you might want to consider it because you're getting absolutely destroyed over here. And meanwhile, like, I'm charging $49 about $50 a month. There's something for hosting. And I feel like that's pricey. I'm like, man, I'm making a lot of profit off that. So there you go.

You know, another lesson in private equity pushing things as far as they absolutely can. And, you know, private equity is terrible. Different discussion for a different day. Anyways. So you got to decide in your business, what are the expenses that are, again, more like they'd be here, no matter if I was doing so-called doing a direct booking marketing push or not and then determine how you want to account for those. I don't want the right answer is.

Some of that is more of like your opinion or how you feel about it. What would I cut? What would I stop doing if it wasn't there? And then you have to look at it. we've talked about this before, the team that you have that may be running your marketing campaign. So that could be one of three things. Obviously, it could be someone in your house, in-house that works for a company, full-time employer, some kind of rough equivalent of that.

It could be some kind of like external contractor, freelancer, someone you're hiring on a part-type basis. It could be an agency. It's one of those things, regardless of how you end up doing it. It kind of fits in one of those three buckets for the most part. That person, obviously, if you weren't doing direct marketing push, you may not need him or her. So we could make the discussion for you would cut that expense.

So that you should be evaluating against this whole concept. And then, of course, your actual marketing advertising costs itself. How much does it cost me to get a video up on my social media page? How much does it cost me to actually have this person run ads for me on meta or on Facebook or, excuse me, on Google or whatever the case may be? Those are all valid things. But then when you go do the math on all that, you realize that like it's pretty clear, right? As long as you're getting kind of about that five to one ratio in terms of your dollar spent

versus the gross bookings that you're getting direct, your investment is completely logical and rational. And I would actually make the argument, to be honest with you, that you might even be able to go a little bit beyond that because I'd rather get a direct booking, even if it's slightly more expensive than an OTA booking. Like gun to my head, if you said I could run two different businesses tomorrow, I could step in and I had to run these businesses and make them work. And one was a very direct booking heavy business,

but we're paying a lot of money in marketing and advertising. We're paying, let's say, 22% of our gross revenue per booking on marketing and advertising. I've got that in one camp. And the other camp, I've got a business that is much more efficient. It's very OTA driven. And we're paying just the Airbnb Commission, 15%. Some people might say, well, I can figure out how to get the other one more efficient. That's a big difference.

like that makes a difference of maybe 20, 30, 40% of my income. Let me get the OTA business and I'll figure it out. And I'm like, nah, give me the direct booking business. And I'll figure it out because I'm going to have much better economics and control my business. I'll take, quote, less profit and then I'll figure out how to make it more efficient. There are things that you do, by the way, in marketing and advertising, it makes your ads a lot more efficient.

Like, for example, density, the more properties you get on your page that you're sending ads to, the better tends to convert, but it doesn't cost you more, but you make more revenues. That's one example that comes to mind. And there are times, I believe, and I've had to learn this to get in the hard way over the last two years where ads, there are a time in place where ads do not make sense. But it's also like what measure or metric are we using against it. If we're, if we're getting in our head that, and I'll put up case studies where I work with clients and they get a 10 or 20 or 31 row ass,

but they're, they've been around for, let's say, multiple decades. And we've got every single advertising campaign perfectly tuned in. You as a brand new business are obviously not going to get the same return of ad spend that a very established company is going to get. This is, this should be obvious. This should be known. But I haven't done a good job in the past, I would say, of like articulating that. So if you're a new business, going back to that, idea. You have to over invest. You have to spend more of your percentage of your revenue, the percentage of your earnings that you'd like to have into marketing the business and growing it, if you want it to grow. If you don't want it to grow and you just want to be

hyper-efficient and tiny, that's okay too. I'm okay with that. But like, just be honest with yourself about what you're hoping to achieve because you can't have it both ways. You can't say, like, I want to grow this business. And then you're spending to the level of, oh, I only run ads if I'm getting at least a 10 to one return and that spend, which is what I might hear sometimes. It's like, then you're not going to go very quickly. You're going to be picking up a few pennies off the ground, but you're just not going to be hitting the gas pedal hard enough. So that's like my main takeaway from some of the things that I've been working on over the past few weeks is like, you just got to spend more in most of the cases. And we're mostly talking about guest marketing,

but I think all this similar logic applies on the homeowner side if you have something that's working well too. And that's where it was. Like truly, when you think about the return value that you were getting, Brooks got the story down. I mean, you know, the 10 years, 10%, your gross booking revenue, all this stuff. Truly, those were numbers. I had no. idea about before I came over to the homeowner side of things. But it does. Like when you think about that return on the investment, you absolutely need to invest more on that side of things because the total outcome of what you're getting is so much more beneficial for your business. Now, again, I think that part of that has to be, you know, where is it? Where's it an operational cost

or what are some of these other things? It's not even those costs, but then that future evaluation of your direct booking site needs to be adjusted based on whether or not you have grown your inventory, like I said, or whether you're shrinking your inventory. And at that point, even growing revenue, the numbers growing on the revenue side aren't really presenting the best picture of success, or how successful the business has been. So, yeah, the concept of, and we've talked about it many, many times. But I think it is. It's the fact that so many people fall into the business and they didn't have to pay to get their first 10 homes on, 15 homes on. And then maybe you acquire another small business or you do a partnership here, your friend, your aunt, your cousin, this and

that. Like all of a sudden you have 30 rentals and now you have to think about where do I want to take this. You have some very interesting cases where small numbers of homes, beautiful homes, property then on the islands and stuff like that, that's a different type of concept. And maybe in some markets that works. But when you're thinking about growing the overall business, if you're not having that conversation around the homeowner side of things and inventory and making sure, like, that's another part of the business you have to grow. And how are you going to effectively grow the business outside of taking more of your reservations directly. That's the only way you can improve that margin if you're not growing the inventory over

their long term. So how are you going to do that? You have to make that investment. And it's a very difficult cycle to make people see. But I think if you present it in that way of, we maybe have an episode about that specifically of if you're not going to increase your. your fees or your percentages, your commissions, things like that. If you're not going to invest, you know, increase your inventory,

the only way you can make more money is do more effective marketing. So you've got to pick one of those three legs and make that chair work there. What's the concept, right? It's like we can either get more properties. We can earn more bookings per property. Like we can fill it occupancy better or we can charge better rates. But I think there is a fourth lever. I think you just nailed it, which is this idea of we can be more efficient

with our marketing ad spend and things like that. So in other words, when I get 100 direct bookings, and then I got those same bookings last year from Airbnb, I'm more efficient, probably the direct booking. So I make more, you more quote-unquote revenue. And I'm not making more revenue. What I'm doing is I'm paying less commission, but the net effect is going to lay in the same spot, as it were.

So, yeah, I couldn't agree more. So, but I get it. You know, because at the end of the day, if we look at these examples, like, we're talking about the difference between paying, let's say, 150K direct booking marketing costs and $200,000 in commissionable costs. So, like, for a lot of businesses,

they may say, it'd be great to have $50,000 more profit at the end of the year. But it's a lot of work and it's no guarantee. So that's why the Airbnb fishing lure is so appealing and why you want to bite down on it, right? Because it's like it works great. So I understand. You know, so like when we think about the channel mix, I think that you've got to just decide like what kind of company you want to be. You know, I think that's that's part of what I'm getting out here a little bit too. And that's why when I'm talking to someone now, I'm trying to get a little bit better sense of like, what is their objective? In other words, if I have to like really talk you into it,

I'm kind of of the belief that you're not really going to commit to this. You're just going to kind of put your pinky toe into this and not really spend that much time, effort, energy and money into it. And if it doesn't work one way, you're just going to leave. And that's just kind of a loss all around. You're not going to be super happy. I don't want you to leave after a few months. It's kind of a lose-lose. So it's much better for us to, like, jump in with someone who's, like, taking this super seriously and wants this to be part of their business. And if that's the case, then like, we can just come up with so many more ideas of how to execute it. And we have more like marketing team member or agency or freelancer and company leader buy-in. Like, I think that's such an underrated part

that I've had to, again, learn the hardware of the past few years is like, if we're not both bought in together into kind of what we're trying to achieve. And I'm like dragging you along. Like I've got like, I think of a dog that's like you have a leash on it. And it's like doesn't want to walk and you're just like dragging it. It's like obviously it's not like don't do that. Obviously, don't hurt animals. But you know, it's like that's kind of what I envision sometimes with some of the products that we worked on. And like no wonder this isn't going well. Like you're not walking. Like if you're walking alongside me, this would be a very pleasurable experience to take my dog for a walk. If you're laying on the ground and I'm dragging you by the collar like, yeah,

this sucks for you in for me. I don't want that. So I think it's an important piece of the puzzle to understand. And I do think that as we evolve as an agency and as we kind of try to figure out how can we help people best, we have to get unique in how we think about it. How can we come with more ideas more rapidly, get stuff out there quickly? How can we use AI to our ally to our advantage of like, we've tried this idea 17 other ways. We found the four or five ideas that seem to work most commonly. Here's a mock up, Mr. Klein, what this looks like. So I by no means I'm saying that I'm sitting in this ivory tower and I know everything because I've had to learn. I've learned a lot of what I've learned through other people, like other clients that I've

worked with. I've taken some of their concepts ideas, et cetera. And be able to repackage them and bring them into the new places and get results from them and vice versa. Like I think that's a very unique value proposition of what we do. And I think it ties back to this whole thing of like growing the business and growing your direct bookings. You know, people always say this. It's a marathon, not a sprint. But do you act that way. Do you act like it's a marathon? Because you know what people do that run a marathon? They spend months and months and months and training for it. And at various points, they run essentially fake marathons, right? They run like a fake marathon to be like, I'm going to run 25 miles to they say to simulate what

that's going to be like because I'm a month out. And I need to see what that looks like. So someone prepping for a marathon, taking it super seriously, is putting a ton of work into it, not like putting the bare minimum to it. And then going like, yeah, I ran a few times off the couch. Like, hopefully that's going to work well when the marathon actually starts. Like, no, it's not. It's not going to work well at all. It's a really good analogy. I mean, I think people think about the marathon as like the long term forward from starting point. But the starting point is before the starting line. And I think there's so much of the work that happens that happens before the start that,

man that's that is so important when we're talking about these businesses who again have gotten to this point but forgot to get some of them basic bedrock in place and and now foundationally they're in some trouble man you you bring up you bring up the homeowner run too maybe we can go back to that for a second too because i think that's really interesting as a concept to say you know what is an acceptable level of money to pay for a homeowner contract because you're correct that you know you you and I were taught by Brooke, this idea of, like, hacked to LTV and how much you pay versus lifetime value. The one thing I've always had a hard time with processing that and understanding that is that

lifetime value, right? So putting these very long time horizons of five years or 10 years onto it. Like the math supports it. I understand that. But like I run a small business and like I need to make payroll next week. I don't need to make payroll next week. I'm good. But like I'm saying the mindset I have is like I have to make payroll next week.

I have to continue. I have, you know, essentially six figures of expenses every single month running the business. So even if you can justify to me, hey, if you do this, eventually, you know, eight months from now, we'll have this, you know, we'll have this benefit. Like it will be benefiting from it. But if I can get to that eight month window, then it doesn't matter. Like if you run me dry and I run down to zero before I get to that, this like, this like, recovery timeline period from my cost of acquisition, then it doesn't matter. So I feel like this is like more of an Alex Hormosey thing. But the idea of like, how can I get my cash recovery as quick as possible? So the amount of money that I spend, he talks about this law in the $100 million offers book, I think is the one that he talks about this more. How can I get my offer to where I'm running the ads and I'm making the money back that I pay to acquire that customer, like instantly or like within seven days or 30 days or something like that. And his utopia is that, which is like I pay $10,000 bucks in ads, but I collect $15,000 in revenue that first month. So I pay back all my ads, plus I have a little bit of revenue left over. And now I have monthly revenue coming in after that. So it's sort of his like whole gym launch concept, which I find very interesting.

And I've talked about different people before and this concept that I've come up with is essentially when you're onboarding a home, how many revenue opportunities are there that you're not fully taking a thing. advantage of. So, for example, you get a home in, and I've talked to clients about this, and it seems like I sometimes get blank stairs on this, but I don't understand it very well, is this idea of like, okay, Paul brings me his home. It's not ready to rent today. Everything I need to do to get it ready for rent is a revenue opportunity for me. And I'm doing the person of favor because like they want their home ready to rent. That's what they're coming to me for. So I should be selling Paul essentially a package where it's like $3,500. And I go in there and I inventory his forks and his knives. And I mean, shout out someone like Justin Ford. I go in there and put a smoke or a fire extinguisher

in the kitchen. And I fix out all the smoke. smoke alarm, so everything's totally up to code and totally up to safety perspective. But like, those are all things that are value add. Not in the sense of like it's going to get more bookings tomorrow because there's a fire extinguisher there, but like stuff you got to do. And like if you're doing it, why can't you make revenue off that? That's not immoral or unethical or whatever the case may be. In fact, I would argue that's a very ethical thing to do to go install a fire extinguisher,

let's say, into a vacation on property as part of your ready-to-rent program. And why wouldn't you be able to charge a $2,000 for that if it gets the headache out of someone's they're reaching out to a property manager because they don't want the headache. So like you giving them things that are going to like make it ready to go and get it sooner, you know, available makes a lot of sense to me. Whereas I hear from clients sometimes and I just don't understand this. They'll be like, well, the property is, you know, currently being worked on or under repair or whatever. And it's not going to be ready for eight months.

So I have someone kind of on the hook, but they're not going to be ready for eight months. And I'm like, wouldn't your job be like, how do I get that person ready much sooner? Like what can I, what lever can I pull? What contractor can I reach out to that would get that project live sooner? So I don't know. That's not even an inner outline, but just this idea of like efficiency. see how do you make things more effective? Like, how do you build your business? Like, those all kind of tie back to this idea of like just rethinking that process. And my goal, if I was running a short-term

company would be that, how do I sign a customer, sign a home owner and get as much cash out of that in the first 30, 45 days as possible so that I pay back the cost that I had to acquire that ad. And then it's like, as long as I run a little bit of profit under your property, I'm in the, I'm in the green. Like, I can sign 20 homes a month as long as I have the capacity bandwidth for it. I'm not waiting for some far out eight-month, eight-year, 10-year journey to repay my cash back to acquire that customer. So I don't know, just random thought. I don't even know if it fits in this episode, but curious your thoughts on it.

I think that that's, it's a very fair way. I mean, it is. I think the beauty of the traveler bookings is instant. You know, you're going to, as soon as they stay. And it's not even that instant. Because as soon as they stay, that's hopeful when you're realizing and doing that. But we're not going to get any trust accounting. This is not that kind of discussion.

But it is. I think there's, and there's a lot of. stories, the anecdotal stories. The reason postcards work so well is that, well, I got a postcard a year ago and I kept it, held on to it, held on to it. I got it eight months ago. But that's a lot of accrual of marketing expense when you're waiting for the dam to open up. It didn't fit our portfolio, didn't fit our booking value, doesn't fit this, doesn't fit that. There's so many reasons why you wouldn't. We can't rent there. They don't do short term. There's ordinances in place.

So I do. I think that the fact that on average, a really good salesperson, yeah, they're going to, maybe they're going to close, and I'm going to air quote this heavily, for those who are just listening, 10, 15%. Like anybody who's close in 50%, they've got the best leads that are coming in possible. And I mean, it is you're pretty much choosing. Like, that's not the reality of marketing to homework. even with the most customized intensive campaign, if you're going into a specific building in Panama City Beach and only going after 100 owners who are on the second floor, you're still going to struggle with knowing what the pain points are. I mean, it's, it is, you're still going to struggle with knowing what the pain points are. I mean, it's, it is a, I know, I understand why it's difficult to invest because you don't have that predictable nature. Even if you put in a predictable $2,000 budget every month, $5,000 budget every month for owner marketing, which be fantastic. You're going to have months where you close 10 deals, you're going to bring

10 people on and you're going to just bust it out of the water. You're going to have four months where you don't bring anybody on. That's the reality. And that's something that because of that, I mean, again, with scale, with 30, 40, 50, 100, 150, 200 rentals, those bookings coming in consistently, that works. The inconsistency of the owner side of things and just not having that predictable nature makes it very difficult to put a predictable marketing budget towards it and say, hey, let's do this and let's make sure that we're, like, again, the people who can hold true to that and say, yes, I have, I've given, there's $30,000 earmarked for owner marketing over

the course of year. That's our CRM. That's our email. That's our direct mail. that's our paid digital, whatever that is, something like that. Holding true to that is a very different thing because that's the thing, abs and flows, your success in actually bringing these homeowners on. If your internal sales team is unsuccessful for a variety of reasons,

that is, where do we kind of recoup that? Because you can't. If you've invested in an SDR or a BDR or someone like that, You've invested in the people. You've invested in the ads. And those leads don't come in. That's just a loss. Like there, I feel on the traveler side, maybe there's a little more leniency.

Like it is, it's all brand building. It's all these other things. You don't get leads through on the owner's side. It's just kind of a sunk cost. And you've got to hope that you can get some use some, you know, ultimately you leverage that in the future. But it's not fun. That's not the fun part of the conversation. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think it's, you know, I know we're coming up against a little bit timewise here, but I think both those threads that we're pulling on there come back to the same concept, which is like, what do you have that's working well? Think about it a little bit more. And going back to another, another, I love a lot. I've been watching a lot of Hormozzi videos, if you can't tell. One thing I love that he does, people will be like, they'll start to talk about their business and these little clips that I watch and things like that. And they go, well, the average in the average in the vacational industry, and he just cuts them off instantly. He's like, I don't give a shit about the average. Like, the average does not help me in any way because the average company is terrible and

makes the money. And, you know, the average person in this, vertical makes 50K a year owning the business. Is that what you want? No, I don't want that. Okay, cool. So like, let's just ignore the average. That makes no sense. I love what he cuts people off because they're like, they're like using it to justify. Oh, I've had a hard time doing X, Y, or Z and I've tried X, ABC. And then he just instantly stops them and it's like, no, we're not going to do that. So I think it's, I think it's so important to think about the fact that like all the, I don't know, like, and this is another LinkedIn post that I did a little while ago and I just come back to this thought a lot, which is like, this business is acquisition.

This business is marketing. That is a major, major, major part of it. And of course, there's other major parts of it, and that's what makes it so darn hard, is that you have to do all these things well. You have to be perfect at all them, to be fair, but you've got to be, you know, B plus, A minus at all these different areas. And they're not very congruent. Like someone who probably is really good at operations is probably not great at marketing and vice versa. Right. The person's really good at coming up with creative ideas for mailers and, you know, designing a website and stuff like that. That person probably isn't the one that likes getting phone calls, you know, at 2 a.m. about a toilet's backed up in a property. That's like a different type of person. So you need these like almost like a, you know, a band. You need a different type of player for different parts of the business.

The bass players have their own little style that doesn't match well. The drummer and the singer has his own, you know, his or her own sort of look and feel. And that's this business. But the theme that I see repeated over and over again, it's just this concept of like what they say versus what they do. And I just want this episode to be like, what you do matters quite a bit.

And explaining the mechanics of the business and how it's working to people. It's funny because like sometimes they don't know how well their own stuff works. So you should be investing a lot more probably into both sides of your marketing. And then what's funny is when you start to do that, you see this like growth kind of come up here. And then it's like things happen that you wouldn't even expect. I feel that way about the homeowner side of it. Like we have a client who was doing a lot of direct mailers and basically hit like the

wrong person with the direct mailer. But he goes, well, do you guys manage in this market? And they're like, no. And he goes, oh, well, I have 15 homes. Like, would you consider it? And they flew out, saw these 15 homes. They're considering it right now. TBD, I'll do it or not.

And I didn't run the side for them to be clear. But it was like an interesting concept. Like you don't know what opportunities will present itself until you do more advertising until you have more stuff out there. Then all of a sudden you connect with someone, you're like, oh, well, this is, yeah, like this is an amazing opportunity. May or may not make sense, but, you know, for your particular situation, but something that you need to dig into and build off of. So yeah, there we go. Spend more money in your marketing, says the marketing guys. But, but, you know, some justification as to why or explaining how to

measure it or how to look at it. And, you know, just kind of a reframing or rethinking of what it is. And, you know, don't put this idea in your head, you know, of no, we're not going to do that for reasons that you don't really understand. And the more you understand, the better I think your company will be as it were. So what's one more thing that got a two ball before they get out of year? What's the last thing? I always forget. What's that one thing?

I really, I think they should go to their podcast to have some choice. I think they should open it up to the Heads and Bed Show. I think they should really give us a five-star review just because we are just so gosh darn good at putting a smile on your faces and giving you some insights that you can help use to build your business because that's what we'd do for you. I mean, if we were listening to you, we'd do the same thing. So, you know, a little five-star review doesn't hurt anybody. Two minutes at your time.

Just hop on it. We love it. We love it. We love it. We super appreciate it. Paul, I throw him on the spot there making him do the outro. Yeah. But it was all funny.

He did an awesome job with it. Come on. That's all good. We thank you. We'll catch you in the next episode. Have an awesome day to your listener. We appreciate you.