Heads In Beds Show - Run Your Vacation Rental Business Like A Poker Player

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul try on a fun new idea for size: what if you ran your vacation rental business like a poker player? EV, bets, investment, bankroll, the whole nine yards? 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 right, Paul, good morning. Not our typical recording slot. What's going on?

What's happening? You know, it's, this week has felt really cold walking to school. It's felt like Minnesota, like about 30. 40 in the morning. And it said 40 this morning, but I got to tell you, when that sun is out, I forget how much of a difference it makes, like a powerful sun. Like, I got the UV warning and the UV warning seems weird right now because it's still like 30, 40 degrees. But if you get a sunburn with 30, 40 degrees, I guess that's something that can happen. So I, I guess I'm adjusting my body to that today and hoping that I can figure something out for Mother's Day here this

weekend. How are you doing? Oh, man. You know, it's funny, I listened on Thursday back to our podcast. We had recorded the prior week, and you were pessimistic about your Timberwolves, and I was optimistic about my Celtics. And whoopsie Daisy, I think is the official term there. Whoopsies went the opposite way. You ended up fine, and I ended up bad.

So just, you know, just dealing with allergies, dealing with, you know, the loss of the inevitable trade, one of the Js, and, you know, having a hard time with that. So, you know what? Sometimes all the cards don't come your way. all the cards don't go your way, hence the topic of today's episode. And you just got to soldier on and play the odds over the long period of time. So we shall see. But I'm hoping to get a little bit better weather.

That's crazy that it's May, as you know, you're listening to this next week, listener, but it's May 7th right now as we record, Paul and I. And it's still in the 40s there in the mornings. That seems pretty wild to me. Expect to get better weather than that. Some days you want that. Some days you don't. It's just depending on how happy the kids are to get out of the house and to walk.

I told you, we walk about three quarters of miles of school, and that can be an amazing time, and that can be interesting. So, you know, we take it for what it is, and we keep going and know that there's a month left, so it's all good. Keeping on going, Paul, that's an interesting thread to pull on as we kind of talk about this episode. So trying a weird one here, listener, maybe you'll like this, maybe you won't. Paul and I were talking about sports and other things, as we sometimes do before we hit

record. And it spawned from this idea. So everyone knows someone in their life who is, you know. is a gambler, maybe sometimes an amateur gambler or people do just like buying lottery tickets or whatever the case may be. And then maybe you know someone or maybe certainly you know of someone who's a professional gambler, let's say a professional poker player or someone who's specializes in doing betting and they're analytical and they think about it differently. And the way that those people behave around their gambling is very different, right? The so-called amateur

gambler sits down and hopes to get lucky. The professional gambler, a professional poker player, thinks very differently about it, right? They have math on their side. They have equations in their head. They know probabilities. They know statistics. And I do think that, although I personally am not much of a gambler at all, I think that that way of thinking of thinking. There's actually a book called thinking of bets that. But I think that's the premise of bets, which is like you should think about your life in

terms of thinking of bets. Because everything you do in your business is kind of a bet in a way, right? You're not buying a scratch-off ticket or as Paul and I were talking about before you record sports cards or Pokemon cards or anything like that. You know, you're buying, let's say, a service. You're buying a PMS. You're buying a vendor relationship. if you're paying an employee and that that's essentially a bet on how that person's going to

help you grow and things like that. But these are all ways to think about what's my upside, what's the bad things that could happen, and how do I help grow the business? So we're going to try to tie these two concepts together. Again, we tried something weird here. So if it doesn't work out, then we'll admit that. But yeah, it's kind of like think about your business like a gambler, like a professional poker player and what are some concepts within that thinking that would help you make better decisions so that you can be the player that ends up winning if you put it enough reps and hopefully avoid losing. So that's the concept. Paul, I sort of

of tried to shoehorn this one in. You didn't stop me, so we're doing. Let's see what else. I think, just think of punts, I think about some of the conversations I've had with people. I'm sure you've had very similar conversations with people where it is, you know, the hook here. Two people sit down at the same casino table.

One's a tourist chasing a rush. One's a professional playing the mat. They're playing the same game, completely different operating systems. Yeah, I think that the pros, they don't care about the individual outcomes. They care about every decision they make that is a positive, expected value over time. And I do. I think about those weekly calls, biweekly calls, monthly calls, where people are so into those individual numbers, oh, this day was off. This individual rental

is off or we're pacing behind. We're doing this. I mean, those are good identifiers, good KPIs to understand, good things to really know. But when you, get sucked into that conversation and how you're not missing or how you're missing on the small things you are i think you overlook that bigger picture so i do think that this is this is one of those things where we can frame it in a lot of different ways gambling poker playing carpling felt like a fun way to do it today but i but ultimately that is it's it's trying to i mean trying to see the forest through the trees there's a lot of different things there that we can kind of pull back in. So I'm excited about this and it does. It feeds into a lot of that gambling mentality.

I think there are some owners of businesses, CEOs that are. They're gamblers. That's the way they've grown their business to a certain point. They've taken risks. They've taken challenges. Sometimes they've worked. Sometimes they haven't. But that's, I guess that's maybe more of the conversation here is, do you want to be the gambler? Or are there ways you can kind of over overcome that and make sure that the expected value is always in your corner. So this could get a little loosey-goosey as what I'm here to say to you. But yeah, I mean, let's just jump right in. Let's do it. Yeah. So I guess here's the way that I think about it, right? When a gambler is making a bet or if they're making a decision, they basically feel like their odds of winning, you know, over a large sample

size are, you know, better than their odds of losing. So there's a lot of parallels, I think, because I'll give an example that's like very, it's like very close to home. I imagine for both of us, which is the concept of people investing into Google advertising. I think I have clients in a really hard time. I'm showing them hard facts and hard numbers on the screen, indicating that when they spend $5,000 a month on Google advertising, they're getting back, let's say, $60,000 or $70,000 a month in gross revenue. And yet, we all agree that's profitable based on their business model,

based on their collection practices, fees, whatever the case may be. And yet, they don't want to proceed with that. They don't want to do that. Because for whatever reason, maybe they're uncomfortable spending $5,000 a month and they don't want to do in their business. So that's another thing where it's like, if you're shown the numbers, if you're shown the data, and some people say to me too, sometimes, oh, I'm not a numbers person or like, oh, this is confusing to me or whatever.

And I'm like, okay, well, it's imperative if you understand this. There's things that I feel that way about my own business. So I can, I'm empathetic to people that are maybe having a hard time kind of processing what I'm talking with them about to some degree, because I get it, who can be an expert in all the things that are running a vacational business and also be an expert in all these like nuanced marketing metrics around cost per click and click through rate and all these kind of things. get it. There's like literally a thousand metrics when you load up analytics and bet ads, for example,

and start to look at those numbers. There's a lot in there. But I try to still it down and say, here's what we spent. Here's what we earned. You know your margins. We know it's for it's profitable or not. We can sit here and have a debate, by the way, about how many those bookings would have happened without, you know, doing these advertising. That's a fair question to ask. Again, the betting question may be if I, sometimes the best bet to make is no bet, right? Like, I'm just not going to bet on anything because I don't think that my odds of winning are high enough. And I think in the, in the sports wedding world, it's like the odds of a certain team winning and the odds of a certain team losing are like different enough where it's like, wait, no matter what side of the coin I'm on

here, like it's not going to work out in my favor. You know, like the spread that the house is making is too much. And some professional betters will say, I'm just going to stay away. I'm just not touch it because that's actually almost a lose-lose for me. You want to find a scenario where it's more win-win. So I think there's so many examples in there of that. And I've thought about this in my own business too a little bit. Like when you're buying something, when you're purchasing a service, you're purchasing advertising, you're purchasing, let's say a sponsorship. to a big event. There's these big events of the fall and things like that coming up.

And out of curiosity, I'll say it. I went through the VRMA sponsorship page. And I'm looking at that. And I'm going, what is the expected value? And I'm not saying a thing. Negative of VRMA. I have mostly very positive things to say about VRMA. But what is the expected value of spending $25,000 on being the closing party sponsor,

which I personally would never do. But there's a company other that's going to do it. And I'm like, what do they get out of that? What are they're upside? What are their upside? Because people do it. So you can either assume that like they're stupid and they're doing something dumb. You can think that way or you can think, why would they do that?

and at least just ask a few more questions until like how they're thinking is, which I think is the way that a good professional gambler would think about things, which is like, to people are betting on this, why? Is it just that they're all uninformed? They don't know what they're talking about or do they see something that I don't see? Do they have data that I don't have? Do they have additional information or do they have additional insight based on performance, you know, what am I missing?

Like, why are the people seeing this differently than I'm seeing it? Because sometimes what I feel like, you know, again, to like do a little bit of a sports example here, I look at certain things and I'm like, you know, not to like put a dagger in your heart here, Paul, but I'm like, why would anyone to bet the Timberoles in the series, right? Like, does that make any sense, right? Like, this spurs should beat them. Like, but someone will because, because what is it?

Right? They made the odds appealing enough where someone would say, and I said before we get record, your one Webby turned ankle away from winning the series. So that's not an impossible outcome, right? This is, you know, so that's where everyone's healthy, do I think they're going to win? Frankly, no. And I love you. You know, but that's, I don't think that's going to happen.

So, you know, but that's the way we have to think about it, right? We have to go through the different options and say, in what situation would this end up being true in what situation would this end up not working it well for me and thinking through and just having Mike Lombardi, I was a useless, he used to always talk about second order thinking. Okay, if I do this, what are the next things that could happen from there? Okay, let me go through my brain each of those different ideas.

If I do this, then what second order things will happen from there and then make a good decision after those particular things you've gone through? Then just do the best you can. And then over time, you know, we'll see if it works out in your favor. So anyways, that was a bit meandering, but those are kind of my thoughts. And ultimately, I think that a lot of it is, You know, we get into decision-making types of, a lot of this does revolve around decision-making. You're making decisions that are going to hopefully benefit your business, maybe have, it's going to have a consequence on your business there.

But I do, I think that that's where there are times we're going by the data. And the data-driven decision causes analysis paralysis. There has to be that healthy balance of not being so into the numbers that you are. We're talking about that property crushed it in Q3. You have those numbers down and it's great. That doesn't mean that long term over the next 12 months. It's going to be great. Same thing.

That marketing campaign was terrible. Okay. Well, if we talked to Brooke about any of the postcards of Ventory, we know that there's some long-term opportunities with. those types of marketing campaigns. And for us, I think we've had the social media conversation quite a few times. Well, the social media really moved the needle for us. Well, take it away. That's not the time when you want to have to find out that it was moving the needle for you. So, so I do. I think that's something that when we get into the mindset of either,

it hasn't happened. You know, it's the odds are against us. Well, we, you know, we're bound to hit one at some point. First of all, that's a gut decision. That's never, never, something we want to do and you certainly don't want to take that mentality to Vegas. But it's where we get into more of those emotionally driven decisions where, oh my gosh, my revenue is completely off point. Now I'm going to have, I need my bookings to come in. So I'm going to take, you know, take all my rates and go boom, boom, boom, boom, let's cut them.

Let's fill the rooms. I don't care how much money I'm making. Okay. Well, in the short term, that may be fine. It may make your books look good for May or June. or July. Again, when we get to the end of the year, when we're actually making the long-term decisions about what we're going to do now in 2027, well, how are we going to compare that to what we did here because we have no basis for why we made those decisions outside of

we really felt like we were in trouble? Well, now we may be in bigger trouble because we were making some of those very short-sighted decisions. So I think it is. It's that, I mean, the operation versus the day-to-day, the in-and-out the results, oriented performance, even as marketers. I think when we see the solid performance for a month or for two months or something like that, we do. We want to double down. We want to make sure that, ooh, this is something that the ROI is 10 to 1.

Let's continue that 10 to 1. Let's make it 20 to 1. Let's do some things like that. But I think we have to be cognizant of at some point, the other shoe does drop. There is a reality that we have to look at. the long-term trends. And it's, again, it's very difficult to do when you see the quick wins because that adrenaline rush, that positive feeling, it is a gamble. There it is. We've got our little bit of a bump, and we want more, and we want more. And how do we get more? I think that's

where you don't want that sugar rush coming once a month. You want consistently dripping out that glucose day in, day out. Let's let's have that diabetic grip or whatever it is. But once you are getting those rushes, you're going for more of that feeling. And yeah, that's how we get into Vegas and get in down a hole and already there. I think you bring up a good point when it comes to like having a quick win, which is, you know, as marketers or as agency, you know, owners, freelancers, consultants will often talk about that. Oh, this homepage title tag is, is non-existent. if I add it and the site has decent authority. That's going to be a quick win. We're probably going to see some quick rankings when runs there. But it's kind of like if you think through,

again, over the course of many, many months or over the course of a hundred micro decisions on advertising or on doing marketing, whatever the case may be, it's like, okay, but what's the ceiling? And then part of it too is how much, what's the cost occurred in doing some of these activities? So some things are very easy to do, right? Going and doing on page SEO is pretty straightforward to do. It doesn't take a PhD, you know, in computer science to go in there and mess with title tags, right, if you have the ability to log in at the back end of a website and you can edit something like Yost or rank math, you're good to go, right? Like, it's not that

challenging. So that's part of it. But yeah, like you're expected upside there lately. I'll be honest, like if I was thinking like it better and I was talking about SEO to someone today, I'd say the upside now of winning with SEO is lower than it was a year ago. It is lower than it was two years ago or five years ago because there's just frankly less organic clicks to go around now

than there was before. Therefore, the value of that traffic, again, expected value has to be lower. We have to associate a lower value that are getting traffic. Now, again, some people would say, are you saying SEO doesn't matter? It's like, no, I didn't say no value. I said a lower value. So let's say it was quote-unquote worth a dollar per click now. And it's still worth a dollar per click.

Let's say it converts it roughly the similar way, which it appears to for most of our clients, by the way. It's not that traffic converts worse. In fact, some situations it converts better, there's just less of it to go around. It's harder to get an organic click today than it was two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, let's say. Now, in the flip side, it's like, okay, if I run my ads well and efficiently, I can still extract a lot of Google search demand to my business, to my vacation rental business and get more bookings, but I am paying per click. And paying per click very quickly becomes, I would argue, a math slash betting sort of thinking,

right, of I'm paying X dollars per click, hopefully more, you know, closer to a dollar than $2, for example. But like you're paying, let's say $1 per click, you are getting X amount of conversion rate out of it. And then how I think about this too, you mentioned like quick wins or how repeatable, I think is what you were saying there, you know, is some of these activities. That's how I think the way that I've always described that to clients is like how deep is the well that we're going into right now or how deep is the pool that we're diving

into right now of traffic. So if we think about something like email traffic, I think would be a good example or long-tailed PPC traffic. You can only send so many emails. You can only bid on so many keywords that are relevant to a certain, let's say, community or a certain condo complex or something like that. And you quickly find yourself like, well, I can't put any more into this. I'm already showing 80% of the time, 90% of time when someone searches for this condo complex or email-wise. You may realize if I send an email every single week, I start to actually lose the value of my list because the open rates go down and my unsubscribe rates go up. So my list actually gets smaller over time by sending more.

So on the surface, email works. Like that's a marketing channel. Well, if I do more of it, that's better, right? Yes, to a point. And then at some point, you crest over this sort of aggressiveness threshold on email. And you actually end up harming your email performance over the long term because your list actually condenses, it shrinks to get smaller. So again, going to thinking of like betting, like the very broad keywords in Google that you could bet on, Destin, Florida vacation rentals, Myrtle Beach vacation rental, some of those keywords are what's so appealing about them is if you can get those.

profitable, the well is very deep. The pool is very large of how much traffic that you could drive from them. So these large companies that we get a chance to work with sometimes that are spending 40, 50, 60,000 dollars a month in Google advertising profitably. What's so, what works so well for their business is that there's almost always more demand there they can tap into. So if they ever need to, they can just spend a little bit more on Google advertising. Sure, their efficiency might get a little bit less. Again, their expected value might get a little bit worse, but they can drive in another 10, 20, 30, 40 bookings a week by increasing the budget. And that's the luxury that maybe a smaller manager doesn't have because they are still struggling, maybe stuck at this bottom, trying to figure out

how do I get my little advertising campaigns to convert well so I can sort of move up the ladder and get into these more broad-scale advertising campaigns. So all these parallels, you know, really do make a lot of sense as we kind of start to break them apart. And I think when we take that mindset from the Gus side of things and try to shift it over to the homeowner side, it becomes an even more difficult conversation because you are, you identified a really But you identified a really key point there is that at a certain point there's a lot of divination returns on email and on PPC. I mean, we know that at a certain point, you know, we get into the search impression share

at 80 to 90 percent. Google's going to start. I mean, Google can't make more people do the searches. This is a conversation I had so many times on the acquisition side of things is that, like, we can't make more people do the searches. So what is Google going to do with that extra budget you've given them? They're going to spend it. They're going to actually increase your cost per click just because there's no more people doing things.

And they're going to spend your money because it's Google. But I think that is, you know, when you look at the homeowner side of things and know that there's, you know, tens of thousands of searches on the guest side, there's 100, 200, 300, 400. So you do. You start to get into that mindset of, okay, well, I'll then take a higher cost per click because we have to. That's part of it. You know, you are going to average maybe $4, $5 a click, maybe $6, $7 a click, maybe $10 a click. Ultimately, if that cost per acquisition still matches where you want to be, maybe you're going to spend $500,000, $1,500, you know.

I remember running a poll on LinkedIn asking people what their desired cost per acquisition is for a homeowner. I think the most frequently, you know, it was $500, $500,000, $2,000 or more, or $5,000. 1500 was that middle. But that's where people felt comfortable. So getting into that mindset of a $1,500 investment at a minimum to acquire one home, okay, well, thinking about your growth goals then at that point, and should you be getting some less than that?

Yeah, you should be getting some more than that. Yeah, I mean, it's not a simple science there. But contrast that with, let's say on average between some email marketing, some Facebook ads, some Google ads, you're spending maybe $40 or $50 or $30 or $20 for booking on the guest side of things. It does. It makes understanding that calculated risk and the expected value, you really have to understand what that expected value is going to be.

We've got the LTV versus KAC and your ratios there. And I think there is. There's something to be said for that. you don't want to overspend for a commodity property. If you're only going to ultimately yield 20,000 in gross booking revenue a year, it's hard to spend $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 to get that home through into your inventory. So definitely something that it's important. I think that equation may be more important to understand ultimately than your,

and we can battle back and forth. on this one, but then your cost of acquisition on the guest side of things, because there will be more fluctuation just on the different ways people are going to find you as a guest versus a homeowner. So I don't know. I think that that's something that, yeah, if we could get everybody new homeowner leads at 500 bucks pop or 250 a pop, man, that would be phenomenal. And there are some companies that do that, but they do it based on the equity they've built up of the brand like we've talked about. You have the companies that have 200, 300 properties.

Their cost per acquisition on the homeowner side doesn't need, like they have their equity buys them a discount. We'll say, we'll say it's about a 30 or 40% discount that they're not having to pay to get those homeowner leads in. They're coming in organically. They're coming in through a lot of different ways. So I do. I think that the maturity of your business, we've talked about that as well, probably

impacts your need, the necessity to think about more of a gamble on some of these items, as opposed to hopefully you do have the models in place. You're not basing your success on the results. It's how successful your overall model is and how it's going to scale upwards, moving forward. So many thoughts about what you just said, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think what someone wants to pay while an interesting fun LinkedIn experiment or a fun thing to chat about is irrelevant because it doesn't matter what you want to pay. It matters, first of all, just what it actually costs, right? And then second off, what is your competition

willing to pay? Right. You know, because if I said to someone, I can give you a home for $2,000, a signed contract for $2,000 and that home is going to generate $50,000 of your gross rental income and, you know, Brooks gone through this math many, many times with me in the past and I understand how it works very well from his teaching, which is great, then someone else will come around and say, well, I'm willing to pay $2,500 or I'm willing to pay $3,000, right? So I think, I think, think what's interesting though about what you're saying though if you compare a guest like guest acquisition cost up motor acquisition cost is two things number one we have a very clear model of what a guest cost to acquire yeah because there's large marketplaces where they have going rates there's a going rate

on verbo booking.com and Airbnb for what it costs to acquire a booking and it's typically around 20% somewhere in that zone a little bit less a little bit more maybe depending on your credit card fees and all that kind of blah blah blah blah blah but that's what it is 20%. So there's a pool out there and there's companies that are Airbnb only that are super successful by the way like I I'm not sitting here of some direct booking guy that's like, oh yeah, like you can't run your business on Airbnb only. Of course you can. There's businesses that are very large. They're only run an Airbnb and they do quite well financially. Now, I would argue they have very little control over their business, but that's a separate discussion for a separate day. It's not what we're talking about today.

We're talking about expected value. So that's the one thing I would say there. Number one, there's a marketplace for where you can acquire a gas and there's a there's a printed price, a sign on the wall that says here's what a cost to acquire a guest from Airbnb. We all know what it is. No such thing exists for homeowners. That's, I think, the threat. that you're pulling on there very accurately. So as a result, it's like, again, what you want to pay is irrelevant. What you actually pay is the variable.

So if you are skilled at homeowner marketing, you have an advantage because you can grow faster. You can grow more efficiently. You can grow with more consistency, maybe as well compared to your competition. And I've talked to people all the time that are not skilled at homeowner marketing. They're not skilled at owner acquisition.

I was on a webinar yesterday. I did a webinar yesterday with the Stafi guys. And there was in the comments of that webinar, the Q&A section, there was kind of someone debating, and hopefully I'm not saying anything in a turn. I won't say the person's name if they don't want me to do that. But this person was debating putting a Stafi unit in their homeowner's homes.

And they say, well, the homeowner pays for the Wi-Fi. So I'm uncomfortable going to that homeowner and asking them to put the Stafi unit in their home because they pay for the Wi-Fi. And first of all, I'm just like, I wouldn't ask them. I would just kind of do it. I'd be like, we're installing Stafi in your home to collect guest emails just so you're where, you know, when you come in now, this is what this hardware does. And if you get pushback, I guess you deal with the pushback after that that. But I think, like, asking for permission is like probably the worst thing to do at 90% of

situations like that. I think it's that's important in some situations in this situation. I don't need your consent. Like, this is my property that I'm managing. I'm doing this. If we ever part ways, I'll happily take my hardware out of the home and, you know, send it back or whatever the case may be. But yeah, I wouldn't ask the homeowner, like, do you want to do this? I'd be like, we're doing this. Like, just so you're aware, it would be more my thought process on that side of it. But then, but then, oh, well, there's a cost. There's a $10 month or $15 month cost or whatever the case may be. And I just shrugged my shoulders and I'm just like cost to a new business. I mean, maybe you can try to pass the cost on the homeowner if you want to. I think there's a path where

you could do that and then say, well, Mr. Homeowner, I'll give you the email addresses if we ever part ways. So you have a list of all that you live stayed in your home. Maybe that's a needle that you can thread, you know, with that sort of scenario. I've had clients that have done that. And I think that's a reasonable outcome there. But again, in my head, I'm just thinking like the expected value of the emails that you're adding. For $10 a month, you're going to be getting 20, 40 emails, maybe a month from each of these homes across 20 homes. Like the value that you're adding is incredible. Of course, I'm like a stayfi fan. So I'm like, and out there's there on the webinar, of course, and we're talking about

rear positively. But yeah, you know, in my head, I'm just thinking like, why wouldn't you do that? But this person needed convincing. So that's one of those things where it's like, I don't think she's thinking in the right way from an expected value perspective because she's going, well, I just don't want to pay $20 a month or whatever it is for a stafi units of these properties or my homeowner is going to have an objection to it. And I'm just like, first of all, they're probably not, you know, kind of first of all. And if one or two have an objection, okay, don't put it in those homes. But for the other 20-year program that you can add that to and then get so many more emails, let me show you what's going to happen downstream of those emails, ABC, XYZ, all that kind

of thing. So anyways, I veered away from. homeowner stuff. You talk about homeowner stuff there. But I think the reason that the homeowner piece is so challenging for so many people is that there isn't a marketplace where one person can go and there's a going way for what a contract costs to acquire. It's all based on sort of your judgment or your opinion on what a homeowner cost to acquire, which is so variable from, as you mentioned, from person to person, from company to company. In the downs, I mean, what we're not even talking about is, you know, what power you have over the homeowner? Because ultimately, we don't know the situation that people are switching from. Maybe they

are self-managing. Maybe they're with a Vakasa, a Volvo, C, larger, big box brand there. Maybe they're with a local competitor. Maybe there's another variable in there. But ultimately, the home is only one part of it. And it may be the

most important part, but I tend to think that the relationship with that homeowner is a little more important than the home there overall. So it is, when we talk about odd odds, one is the home someone worth pursuing there. Yeah.

There is. There's something to be said for looking for some of those warning flags and seeing the additional cost that could come from that up. Oh, this person's been with Picasso and then they were involved and then they were with XYZ manager in my market and now they're going to be with me. Okay. If you're going to invest $2,000 in there or $3,000 in acquiring that homeowner into your portfolio, how confident are you that they're going to stick around with your

portfolio if you know. of that history. I think, again, there's just some, there's, there's just more to take into the equation there and, and really understanding, like, if you ultimately lose that homeowner, or if you, if, if there's more cost in trying to keep that homeowner happy, is it, is it worth going after every home? I, and I've said this many, many times. Not every home in your market, not every rental that is eligible in your market is a good foot for your portfolio. And understanding spending your real total addressable market, your real Tam, you know, it is. There may be 18,000 condo rentals in Panama City Beach.

Realistically, you maybe want three or four hundred of those. Now, do you have to wade through the 18,000, the 17,000, 16,000 to get down to where you want? Yeah, that's, again, that's part of having the process in place, part of having the structure in place, as opposed to having to rely on. I need to get up to 65 units by the end of the year. I need to get up to 85 units at the end of the year. There needs to be more than just, I need to get to this number. Because again, if you're making your goal before you're making your plan to get to that goal,

it's going to be difficult to ultimately accomplish that. You're going to need compromise to get to that end game there. I do. I think if you've got the plan in place and you're making your goal based on what your plan is telling you, you're just going to have more success. And hopefully that's in everything that we're doing here. But certainly, you know, when we're putting together some of these campaigns, is that if you are, if you're doing it to get a thousand site visits, you know,

on just a thousand people to your website by the end of the month, well, what ultimately is going to, what's the outcome you're looking for there? I do. I think that half the problem we have in some of these areas of running your vacation rental business as a true business as opposed to. a gamble, a week in, week out, month in, month out is truly having that goal planning in place. And not just having the goal plan, making those goals and setting those goals, but being accountable to those goals and ultimately trying to measure against those goals.

Because we can measure against everything else. But ultimately, we're, if we're not meeting that or if we're not checking in on that, we've just put some fluffy language out there. and what's that going to do to us ultimately? And what does that come to when we get to outcomes? And I don't think we get the outcomes we're looking for. So many good ideas in the notes, you know, here, like this idea, like you just mentioned, this idea of fold equity, so it's powerful to walk away.

Like instead of getting in a bad hand, and like you were saying, going deeper into a bad hand and betting more money, you know, losing good money after bad, so many different expressions there, that's signing the wrong home. You say, you know what, this home is not going to be a good fit, this owner's not going to be a good fit. I'm saying no, which actually the short term is hurting my revenue. That's a decision that that's a bitter pill to swallow in the short term. Every small business owner has probably done that.

And we've also all done the opposite, which is that we sign that home because we need the revenue with that moment. And then we regret the heck out of it, right? Six weeks later, sometimes I was going to say six months later, sometimes six weeks later, we regret the heck out of it, you know? Table selection. So the other thing in our outline here, I know we're, I have a few minutes left up against it, but just kind of hitting through some of the highlights here, where you play matters

more than how you play sometimes, right? So if I was managing 10, high-end $100,000 plus per year, properties. And then the guy down the street is managing 20, $20,000 year condos, right? Like, my life is going to be better than his life. I mean, just to be like me super blunt about it, right? Like the ability to drive bookings, the ability to market those properties. The table that I'm playing at is so much more enjoyable from the high end $500 to a $1,000 a night world and vacation rentals for the most part than it is at the 150 to 250 per night world. So, yeah, where you're choosing to actually sit down and try to get inventory is so important,

so critical. And yeah, I couldn't agree more. Homeowner marketing playing your position. You know, so ultimately, if you know your position, you know what you're offering is a great value to the guest. I've seen this happen before. I saw this happen with a client that I just started working with. And I was watching him or hearing him sort of negotiate with a homeowner. And he offered to reduce his commission before the person actually had an objection to his initial commission.

He had a number of mine. And then he said, well, but for your property, I'll do this number. I'll do a lower number. Let's say he was at 25%. He said, well, I'll do it for 20% because of these three reasons. But the person on the other side didn't even have an objection. They were just hearing, they were just hearing out basically the pitch. And I was like, that's not playing your position.

That's not knowing where you're at the market. That's retreating, you know, too early and not getting your value out of it. And you just drop 5% of your commission out, which, by the way, might be half your profit, more than half your profit. It could be 70% of your profit that you just gave away. So sure, you can, like, survive, like you can operate. But are you doing this whole thing? And I have some LinkedIn posts coming out to this effect. Are you doing this whole thing so that Brian Chesky can make more money than you?

Like, Brian Cheskey doesn't operate your business. And he makes more money than you and your business, like for most of our clients that we work with. That doesn't seem right to me. Like, I think you're doing all the work to operate the business. You should receive an outside share of the profits. That's the point of doing this. Otherwise, why are we going down this path? So I think so many different ideas here.

I think, Paul, we've got to do is come back and do a part two. You know, we didn't get through everything because we didn't get to, we had like 19 things in our outline. I think we got to like seven or eight of them, as it were. So it's all good. But yeah, you know, in my mind, I think what is a professional better have? They have discipline. They don't have sort of these emotional highs and lows, as you mentioned earlier, right?

And someone argued they have luck. Well, sure. Of course, like in any small sample size, you know, I could beat a professional poker player if I got lucky. If I got sort of dealt the right hands as an amateur poker player, I could beat a professional. But over the course of a thousand hands, over a course of five thousand hands, a professional is going to absolutely crush, you know, an amateur poker player or better in any sort of thing. So I think it's an understanding expected value, which is your probability of that turning

well, how well can it turn out versus the risk that you're putting out there, dollars, time, energy, et cetera, all that. And you make those right decisions consistently, it'll compound. And the math will catch up and you always end up working out there, you know, well. the homeowner you have to ask, is that person going to be value additive to my portfolio long term? Are they going to help me? I'm going to help them,

or are they going to help me? Like, it has to be a win-win. I always say that in business. Like, it's so true. It has to be a win-win. It's going to make sense for you and for me. If it's one of us is winning and everyone's losing, where they're going to resent it or we're just going to want to end it

or we're going to tolerate mediocrity in that relationship because one person's getting something out of it, the other person's not. So it has to be a win-win, which frankly are hard situations to find. They're not sitting out there everywhere. So, yeah, I think it's what is the mass say, not booked, you know, going to revenue stuff. Yeah, like, am I at the right table?

Am I doing the right things, you know, to help increase my chip stack, you know, if you will, increase the business, grow the business, and not just worry about luck, but worry about making the right decision. So very fun there. Any other odds and ends, Paul, you want to clean it up here before we put a bow on this. Very unique. Yeah, I mean, I think we started the conversation as why, you know, with a trading card type of conversation.

Yeah, yeah. Well, why rip the whole pack? Why rip the hobby box? Why rip this? Why rip the $1,000? when you just want the one cart, buy the one card. I think that's what sets the people apart is that why gamble? I mean, the professional gamblers, they're not gamble.

They have the consistency bias. They know what's happening behind the suits. It's not short-sighted. So I do. I think that that it's really easy for us as business owners and business manage and things like that to say, ooh, let's get that quick win. But I think ultimately we should be banking on that consistency. and knowing that, yeah, the gambles fun sometimes,

but gambling with little things is fun. Gambling with your business, gambling with the long-term success of everything, not so much fun. So that's where we can take some ideas from gambling and all this, but ultimately what we're doing is building a successful long-term vision for our business that is sustainable and not a quick chance to win big. I can agree more. You know, it's risk-free, Paul?

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