Heads In Beds Show - Special Recap Of VRMA 2023: Feat: Heather Bayer, Andy McNulty, Catherine Ratcliffe & Valerie Gangas

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

In this episode Conrad drops a special release recapping VRMA along with four wonderful guests. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingHeather BayerAndy McNultyTouch StayCatherine Ratcliffe STR Benefits Consulting Valerie Gangas🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 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.

Hello, and welcome back to the Heads and Beds show. I am your solo host today, Conrad O'Connell, because we've got some interesting episodes coming your way. I am just back from VRMA. It was an awesome conference. Wow, is all I can say. The events, the people that I was able to see, all the awesome experiences that we had there. It was really fantastic. So maybe a quick recap on my side before we get into the interviews and share a little bit more about what we're heading for here on the Heads in Bed show. So number one, we arrived at VRMA on, I actually arrived on Saturday. I just make sure that I had plenty of time to get everything ready for Sunday morning was the official tournament.

And I joked with the people that I was playing with and, you know, other folks at the tournament that I snuck in a practice round on Saturday. So after the plane landed, I headed over to the golf course and got a quick 18 in to warm up and didn't play particularly well, but got to see the course and got to see what we were in for on Sunday. So Sunday morning, the VRMA Advocacy Cup gets going and we were able to do, I think, a decent job. Couldn't make a putt. You'll hear that in Andy's interview here that we did here in a few minutes, but ultimately it was a great time. Madison Rifkin, her team at Mount, did a phenomenal job putting on the event. The pace play was excellent. Everyone was having a good time. The heckling was minimal. Maybe they can take it up a notch next year. But ultimately, it was fantastic. And everyone that I saw there at the tournament had a great time. lovely Tyann Marsink-Hammond and the Touch Day crew. So luckily I was able to experience that. Very fun. We went to a dance studio and did this kind of got lessons, if you will, from a Jedi master, I think, that does some of the performances at Disney and things like that.

So that was fantastic. And no rest for the wicked, so to speak, because Sunday evening, the party at Discovery Cove kicked off by all the lovely sponsors that were there. I was told it was a multiple six-figure investment to rent out the sort of event venue that they did, Discovery Cove. I've been there since I was a kid, by the way. But what an amazing experience. I'm not the person to stay the whole night, so I didn't catch every little bit and piece of it. But obviously, I was able to experience a while of it and then headed back and wanted to rest for Monday for the official kickoff of VRMA. And I'll be honest, I did not make it too many general sessions. I did not make it too many sessions in general, because I would go into the hallway, I would walk five feet and I would run into a client or I'd run into someone in their industry that's helped me or supported

me in some way. And so it was really fantastic. Again, I'm not the one to give you a recap on the sessions and things like that. Maybe some other folks will do a better job of that. But really, it was just awesome to see everybody. It felt different for me this year than last year, even though on paper, maybe the sort of amount of people attending and things like that were similar. I just feel like maybe this year was a lot more of an unlock for me in terms of my growth

and the career and build up and where we're headed. And it was just awesome to see people that were supporting me and seeing clients there that were smiling. And I had clients say nice things during the session that I had on Monday. They didn't need to do, and that was just fantastic.

So Monday morning, I was able to actually be in the first breakout session slot. We had standing room only. You can see pics on LinkedIn of the fact that we couldn't fit all the people in the room that wanted to hear our session. If you missed it, no worries. Or if you were there and didn't get everything, no worries. I can either send you the slides or we can even publish a video of that talk here at some point soon in the future if that thing does appeal to you.

We did a whole session on search, social, email marketing, kind of are the channels that we focus on, excuse me. But really that particular session, I should say, was focused mostly on search marketing, which is my thing that I've gotten into for the longest time and certainly something that we've had a lot of success with our clients with around PPC and SEO. So that was fantastic. Did it done with the lovely Terry White from Annamaria. He flew down from Canada to be there at the event. He was a gracious enough co-presenter with me, listened to all of my edits and refinements on the proposal itself and on the actual session and went along with everything and gave really valuable feedback to people that were there listening and to be able to do it with a client who can talk about the return on that spend, who's willing to be vulnerable about what didn't go well in the business at first and how he's improved the business and the website and how we're getting the traffic we are today for his brand and ultimately how it's providing a good return on his investment, just puts a smile on my face. It's awesome to get up there and say how great you are. And I think as a marketer, I have to do a little bit of that. I can't just be the humble thing all

the time, but ultimately to be able to get up there in front of a client with a client sitting literally shoulder to shoulder with me and go over the fact that yes we deliver yes we have these results yes it's because of our team it's not just me by any stretch of the imagination that's our team that does a great job for clients like terry it was really fantastic honestly like that we couldn't have gotten much better from that perspective forward in my point of view just because that went well the attendance was great people cared about what we had to say and ultimately we were able to also launch the book so the book we've talked about here a few episodes back, we had some little weird formatting issues with Amazon and things like that. It wasn't

like ready to go live, but luckily I was able to give away a free chapter. And I will put a link now in the show notes here to this episode and the episodes here coming up with our lovely folks that we interviewed at the event, because the book is now ready on Kindle. We'll get the paperback sorted here in a few days. But if you want to buy the Kindle version, that is now ready to go. So from there, Monday, there were some other events and things going on. Tuesday was a little bit more low key. I was able to attend a lot more sessions on Tuesday. The chatting and things like that was down to a lower level. And I was able to see all the people that I wanted to see for the most part. On Monday, got to see Matt Landau on Tuesday, got to see so many folks, Heather Bayer, you'll hear some from her here in a minute. But

honestly, it was just a wonderful event. I don't know if I can do a good job summing it up in a very short period of time, but hopefully I've done an interesting point of view here on it. The Heads in Bed show. Why are you listening to this and not myself and Paul like you normally would? Don't worry, Paul and I will be back on Monday. It was just one of those things. Scheduling the event.

We didn't necessarily have the bandwidth, but we wanted to bring some new voices in. Paul and I are going to be launching an interview section to the show. Our original kind of show that we do, the solo show, if you will, myself and Paul, is not going anywhere. Don't worry about that. We're going to get just as nerdy on marketing as we've always done. But we thought, why not bring in some additional voices? You've heard from us. You've seen our point of view on things for the past 40-odd episodes that we've done together. And we're so proud that we've put those out there in the world. And I think we've got some great feedback on them. But why not get some more perspectives? Why not get some more point of views on marketing, on brand, on building an awesome

business, etc. So the interviews that you'll hear from the different folks that were kind enough to speak with me at VRMA in person are not necessarily only marketing. We did touch on marketing and various elements. We got different perspectives, a vendor, a property manager, a recovering property manager, as Heather jokes about. Her sessions were hilarious as she was going through her sale of Cottage and Lincoln where she is focused today. And just the perspectives that we were able to gain. I think talking to these folks was fantastic. So I'm going to go ahead and let our editor Savannah and producer Savannah roll these clips of our various interviews that we did. This might be a long episode. We'll do our best to timestamp it so you can skip through and get to the particular interview that you might be most interested in. You could always

listen to them all. And I just wanted to say thank you. If you listen to the show and you came to my session on Monday, or if you listen to the show and you like my stuff on LinkedIn, it's always funny too. There's all these people that say, oh, I follow everything you do and I know everything you do. And I've never seen their name or I've never seen their profile picture pop up or anything like that, but still thank you. So if you're a ghoster and appreciate anything that I put out or you've learned something from what I've put out, more to come, a lot more to come, a lot better to come, for sure. We're just scratching the surface of, I think we can do a build up. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. VRMA. It was an awesome event. And let's roll these interviews and get into the meat of today's

episode. Alright, so first up, we've got Andy McDulty from Touchday in our interview series. Andy is obviously a vendor in the space as the founder, co founder and CEO of Touchday. Great, phenomenal product disclosure. They are a client of ours, I should say that but I don't care. It's a good product either way. A lot of our clients use it. And I really appreciated Andy's perspective in his interview. He gave a different view of the industry. A lot of people believe that things are going a certain way with regards to centralization

or we're going to use one tool, one tool to rule them all. And Andy's perspective was very different. So this was an eye-opening conversation. He takes a different view on things. And of course, he's got that lovely British accent that we always like to hear. So here's my interview with Andy McAdulty. Andy, how are you doing? I'm very well, comrade. How are you? Good. Our week started very interestingly. How did we start our week together here?

We started with a lovely, beautiful round of golf at Disney Palms Resort. And we hacked our way around. You hadn't played in a minute, right? I hadn't played in six months or a year. Yeah, I was a bit rusty. Luckily, you were sharp shooting. Yeah, we had some great drives off the tee. We did nothing with them after that, but we started some holes perfectly. But we had fun. Yeah, we did have fun. We did have fun.

The goal is obviously not to win, but it's to have fun and make some putts. We just couldn't seem to make any putts. I felt like we had about 25ts yeah from 10 feet and we couldn't do anything we couldn't seem to make a single had we done that we would have walked away as the witness oh completely that's the story of golf though isn't it it really is it's only the putter dropped yeah exactly won the tournament but it wasn't just that we were missing we were like burning the edge every time and we had several really close yeah we were wrong it wasn't like oh we were five feet away we were robbed on another day we would have won yeah 100 but anyways it started with a fun but ultimately disappointing four hours around around disney palms golf course what happened after that what was has the event been for you so after that the the event's been uh

really good it's been like high energy you know what these places are like where you are for me i always find that i'm on all the time yeah and with the five hour time difference the jet lag it's just been crazy trying to keep myself going but But yeah, no, we had after the golf, we had our Camp Padawan event. Yes, we did. Which you came to. I did. What did we learn there? We learned how to use lightsabers. It's Tyane. Tyane puts on the best pre-events. So it wasn't any surprise that she took us to a dance studio in Disney and had a dance teacher teaching us how to do lightsaber moves. But yeah, we had great fun. It was good. It's a great way just to meet Disney and had a dance teacher teaching us how to do lightsaber moves. But yeah, we had great fun. It was good. It's a great way just to meet people and have a chat.

And I've met some people afterwards here who were at that event and they've said how cool it was that they walked down the corridor and then somebody's, hey, fellow Camp Padawan. So it's like a good, it's a good icebreaker. It's a nice way to start the event. Yeah. It can be a little bit, we were joking previously with Heather about it being a bit of a meat market in there, right? Where the property managers walk by and a lot of the vendors are trying to sink their teeth into it but it's good just to hang out like people isn't it you know yeah totally and on that point i haven't i found this firm or event i haven't been to the last two so it might be that they have progressively got more but they call it elevate this year don't they it might be that they have become less kind of rigid and formal. It's been quite fun. I found the conversations we've had.

And I don't know, I'm the kind of person that will, if there's a property manager walking past, I will jump on them, but I'll do it in a very like friendly British way. Yeah. Friendly British way. Hey, I see you looking at our booth. Can I help you? But yeah, it's been good. I've really enjoyed it so far. Yeah. And the interest in Touch Day, I feel like a lot of clients that we work with end up using Touch Day, but how have things been going over the past year?

And the product itself has improved significantly. You're continually working on it. Yeah, it has improved. I think the thing that we have done though is we've kept the product still simple. So the number of conversations I've had this week with property managers who say, so tell me what Touch Day does.

And I'm like, it's a guidebook. And go oh anything I'm gonna no it's simple look around there's so much complexity in this room right don't you want a product that you can just use right and they're like yeah and that's the story when we've had some customers who that's the nice thing about being around a few years we've now had customers coming to the booth here and I ask every single customer how has it been going with touch their guidebooks and they say oh our guests love it they're great and i said to somebody yeah but has it saved your team time and the response is hell yeah and that's the best thing about our product that we end up talking to customers who have been with us for two three years and are

still loving the product and i guess they're still loving it because it's simple. It's boring, but it's simple. But it has feature rich too. Like when you're actually building the guidebook, there's a lot that can go into it, right? Yeah, totally. I mean, you can put whatever you want into it. I mean, that's the beauty of it. It's simple, but it's also got the flexibility that you need. If every property manager is different, they all want to say something different to their guests. And it's not like a rigid template. So you can put whatever information you want in there so that your guidebook can look and feel like your own and so that kind of that feeling of like i've accomplished something and i've actually built a guidebook that looks like my own is what property managers feel that going back to that simplicity point they're able to

easily do that in a way in which they may take months and months to onboard to a new pms or ages to get their heads around how dynamic pricing works and all those things are required don't get me wrong of course they're needed but I also think in a busy property manager's life for us kind of niche vendors the importance is about keeping it simple so that they can do these other things like touch day digital guidebooks without a huge amount of brain power and actually feel like a sense of return, a sense of accomplishment. And at the back end of all of that as well, it's not just about how they feel good about doing something, but it's about how they then don't have as many questions from their guests.

Right. And that's the thing I keep asking. Are your guests using it? But is it saving your guest services team time? And when I get hell yeah every time back, I feel like we've indicated on having such a simple product in this increasingly fragmenting and diverse and crazy industry that we're in.

It is that case. Have you made it to many sessions so far? I have been to a few sessions. I moderated a couple. I mean, moderating, you know what it's like. You stand up on stage and you introduce the panel. So, but you then have to sit there because you have to then give the mic for people who want questions.

So I've sat in on a couple. I sat in on the one that Jacoby Olin did with Dustin Abney on going from a letter of intent to closing the deal. So for property managers who want to sell their business. And I thought that was a very interesting one to hear how important it is for property managers to get their ducks in a row early. So like the contracts that might exist in the draw, get them digitized. And that was an interesting one. And then I sat in on my lane, which is technology. I sat in on one about the fragmented nature of technology. So like I was just talking about,

they debated this at great length on the panel so much so that there was quite a, I wouldn't say a heated exchange, but certainly some swapping of robust opinions, let's say. And as a tech person over the Simple Tech product, it was very interesting to hear them talk about the complexity and where they thought the future was in terms of technology. So yeah, so far I've enjoyed it. And I've been to a couple of the main sessions too.

And I mean, I haven't gone to all of them, so I can't talk for all of the sessions, but I have found that the ones I've gone to have been interesting in a way which I didn't think the Verma was like that. It feels like things have progressed. Yeah, some of the ones that I've been to, I haven't made it to as many as I typically would have. The one that I led the first breakout session, that was the first opportunity that I had to speak this week, was about search marketing, which is a very familiar topic to myself, so it was easy. But standing room only, these rooms get packed with the breakout sessions,

even though there's multiple going on at the same time. I've seen some interesting ones about the owner acquisition side. I've seen some interesting ones about hospitality. I think that's an under forgotten thing. It's like everyone wants to talk about revenue and profits and cleaning and fees and technology and all this kind of stuff. But how do we take care of the guest? Because my point of view on this is that if you don't take care of the guest, it's not going to show up in the reviews. It's not going to show up in repeat booking rates to get on my side of the table a little bit.

It's not going to show up for the reviews. It's not going to show up in repeat booking rates to get on my side of the table a little bit. It's not going to show up for people searching for the name of a company. Or if they go to search the name of the company and they see a Google review showing up on the right side of 3.7 stars, that's not going to lead to a lot of success. So my kind of frame on this is that share marketing is obviously a key part. And that's the lane that I swim in, so to speak. But if you're not great operationally, marketing doesn't save you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree.

And that kind of leads into one of the other things that I watched was at the session on branding. operationally marketing doesn't save you right yeah yeah yeah no i completely agree and that kind of leads into one of the other things that i watched was at the session on branding in fact it was a it was andrew mcconnell was talking about lots of different things in the industry but he had an interesting mix of panelists and one of the discussions was about branding and it was about it is it relevant for a property manager to create a brand like what does that really mean anymore and i found the discussion quite interesting because I felt like it was talking about the traditional branding aspects of,

like, what your business logo is and all this kind of, is there a room for you to be found in search engines with your tiny, teeny brand? Whereas I have a different perspective because I think your brand in that sense is about the experience that the guest will get when they stay with you. And that's not important for the outside world future booker as much as it is for the quality

of the reviews you get because you know what your lane is so if you're a tech enabled property manager or you're I don't know like you cater to large groups whatever your thing is if you execute on that the reviews to your point come in and they're very good reviews and to me that is what your brand is it's not necessarily about how i then go and get direct bookings of course that's possible off the back of it but that was the bit they didn't discuss which i was desperate to ask that question but they didn't there was no time for questions but that was the thing i picked up yeah and to your point there's a lot of people who we joked about this on a previous recording we've just done a few minutes ago about spreadsheet nerds, where they run the business in a spreadsheet.

And that's fine. We know how much the properties cost or what our management fees and all those different cost elements are. And that's great. But it doesn't matter if the guests don't have a great experience because they're not going to come back. They're not going to refer you. You're not going to build any sort of flywheel.

You're just basically hoping they capture people and they go into your ecosystem. But some people just don't make any effort to making the guest experience good. They do the bare minimum, unfortunately. Yeah. but i do think that's changing about i think that you know it's also a struggle to know what guest experience is like we all talk about that and so i think it's hard for a property manager to go how do they relate this kind of slightly i don't know guest experience exactly and actually tangibly make something of that we actually have a survey going to drop fairly soon. I forget the title we're giving it, but it's basically a guest experience survey.

And we look at the effect of how you communicate with your guests on the satisfaction of those guests and the types of ways that they like to be communicated with email, SMS, etc. And there's some quite interesting findings in there. And I'm really excited about it because I think it goes part of the way to explaining what is guest experience, because you actually see tangible results from guests who have said, X percent say, this is what I value. So therefore, now you can think of guest experience not as this nebulous phrase,

but as, oh, it's this tangible thing. If I get better at delivering one of the things, a quick brief preview, one of the things we found, and it's this tangible thing if I get better at delivering one of the things a quick brief preview what one of the things we found and it's not surprising but it's it sometimes the unsurprising things when they said you go oh was that that early on in the stay email was what guest wanted that's that's their prime thing as they get closer to the stay and during the stay becomes sms it flips into that and i think we probably all know that but we all anecdotally know that until we do a survey which we've done and then we get this result back it then helps the property manager to and the host by the way to say oh so now i can

break down guest experience in terms of this is how i sequence my messages and these are the types of messages i deliver to them in order to get them to feel like they're getting the right information and also the frequency of the messages you've sent is important. So I think that's one thing that I think we're all getting better at understanding, not to use this bland term called guest experience because it means nothing to anyone, but it means all these component parts like how often do you communicate? How do you communicate? What do you do when things go wrong?

All this kind of stuff, like the tangible stuff. That's an interesting piece too, because like people and people are different. What one person may prefer via email, one person may prefer via text. So you almost have to like cover all the bases. You know, it's like the classic approach of distributing information in multiple ways. That way people can say, oh, I didn't know about that. Yeah, it's true. You're right.

You're right. We all consume information in a different way. And you therefore do need to know as a property manager what are the ways that that most of my guests prefer to communicate and i think that's probably if property managers looking for something that comes out of this it is to give them confidence that the way they're doing things is right because most guests like that or not so when you see the results you'll be able to say where do i fall in that camp and you can tweak your processes and i think you're not going to it's not going to be

the solution which says to you 50 of your guests want it there's 20 one of this and 20 one of that that's not going to do that but it will give you a good sense of what most guests prefer and like where you should flip between email and sms in terms of delivery for the majority of guests and and and that inevitably is going to mean that if you start to hone your processes and your operations and your communication flow to the majority of guests, then it goes to figure that you will get less questions

coming back from guests. And you will get some, like you've said, some people who are like, I never read texts or I never read emails, but that's life, that's gonna happen. What's the expression? You can't make everybody happy. That's right.

We can do our best, but we'll all fall short eventually. Totally. Yeah. If we did this interview again a year from now at the next VRMA conference in Arizona, what would you want to be true about TouchState between now and one year from now? Oh, what would I want to be true about our specific business? Yeah. I would really hope that we still have a very simple product.

I think it's very tempting when you listen to the many voices that exist out there in our wonderfully fragmented world. It's very tempting to think that we need to change the product here and change the product there and add this and add that. And I'm a firm believer in staying in your lane, like I was saying earlier. And I think a property manager who comes and sees us in our lane understands the product more easily. So I want to see Touch Day just with more happy, satisfied customers who come to that booth and say, is Touch Day saving you time? Hell yeah. That's what I want to see more of.

Do I want to see it doing 65 other gazillion things and all these fancy features? I don't think so because I think that drains both our product and development resource. drains both our product and development resource. But it also means that a potential customer has to grapple with, oh, this thing is more than just a guidebook. Yeah, so that's the way I would like to see us in a year. What about the industry? What's something maybe that you hope is a little bit different a year from now about the industry, better or improvements that could be made?

Yeah, it's a little bit on that guest experience stuff. I would hope that in a year's time, we can further define what guest experience means by falling back on data that's coming from guests. And I think that's the bit that's missing. We have a lot of revenue data and a lot of pricing data, but we don't have a lot of communication data and guest data. And that, you can have the right robust pricing strategy, et. And that gets your guest in at the right price. But how much time do you lose and how much money do you spend because the guest isn't being given the right information at the right time? And I think that in a year's time, I hope that Touch Day is part of that evolving story

where we define more what guest experience is and what good communication is all about. ultimately that's what life's all about isn't it it's about how you communicate with other people and and that's when things go wrong when your communication does not jive with the person you're talking to and that's not the problem of the person you're talking to it's a problem of you need to be better at communicating and i think through these studies that we're doing i want there to be more data that enables somebody to go oh that's how i need to change my process and really define guest experience in those operational terms as opposed to this kind of really weird yeah so that's that's where i would like to see the industry going and i think that will happen i think there will i do actually think there'll be a few more

tech products out there i spoke to somebody at lunchtime who i'd never heard of and i suddenly found out this other new tech product which is they're literally launching a beta. And I think there'll be more of that too. So there is a flip side where I think the industry will continue to still be fragmented. I think there'll probably be consolidation as well. I think there'll be, you know, there's way too many vendors in the vendor hall.

There really is. So I think there will be new stuff coming along, which is right and it should happen. But I think there'll be a lot of incumbents who maybe aren't here next year because they're part of a larger organization or their brand has been sunsetted because they're part of a different brand now. Sure. Yeah. It's complicated. It's when a large company goes and buys a bunch of individual

brands, I feel like they didn't think about the fact that there's a lot of overlap there. It's drawing concentric circles one over the other. It's actually make things easier, I think, for the property manager out there to not have so many choices that do basically the same thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I've had a lot of people ask me, a lot of customers ask me, if I'm not happy with my PMS, what would you recommend?

And it's a tricky one because I'm not an operator, so I have no idea whether one PMS is good for you versus another, and you all have different requirements. But one of the conversations we had was that the property manager acknowledged that it doesn't matter which property management system they pick, there will be something that doesn't quite work how they want it to in that. And so you're right. I think there are too many of them.

I'm not sure that a mass number of property management systems is the solution. It's more do a few core of them do most of the job to the spec that the property manager wants and then there will always be nuances that somebody wants that's not gonna serve and that's life Yeah, and then they can plug in external systems when it makes sense There you go for example. And also we got to figure out how we can make more putts next year as well We need to yes, we're gonna win the tournament next year. All right, so here's what we're gonna do So between now and then you work on touch time 80% of the time You work on yourself and your hobbies and other things, family,

et cetera, 10% of the time and work on the putting 10%. I will get on the putting green. And I think even if I spray the ball left and right and center, which I was doing, if I can get on the putting green and nail a few parts, I seem to get that part figured out for the most part, a few loose ones,

but yeah, if you can hit the ball straight, I'll, I'll endeavor to be the, the, the finisher, the closer. Yeah.

That's what we need. We need this team environment. Thank you, Andy, for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I pulled you out of your booth and you could have stayed in there and talked to clients and you came and spoke to me. So I appreciate it.

You're very welcome. Thank you. All right. Heather. We saw Heather. It was so awesome. I was having lunch, I believe, on Monday and I was able to run into Heather. She was looking for a place to sit.

I aggressively waved my arm and said, Heather, it'd be great for you to come here and sit and eat lunch with us. And she was lucky enough to do so. And I said, could I please have 20 minutes to chat with you about what's going on? Because it's been a while since I was actually on Heather's podcast. We're going to try to solve that here at some point in the future if we can get schedules lined up. But really, Heather's podcast that she did with me a long time ago really helped launch my career when I was first getting started back in 2016. So Heather's the kind of person that does nice things for other people and expects nothing in return.

And her jokes on our little chat were fantastic. Her joking about being a recovering property manager, obviously successfully selling Cottage Link, her property management company based in Ontario, cottage country, Canada, here, I think about 18 months ago or 19 months ago is the timeframe. And her kind of exiting that and entering into new things. Her perspective is really unique. Her perspective is something that a lot of young property managers need to hear. And honestly, some older ones too. People call her the godmother of the vocational industry, just someone that gives a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of energy to other people and doesn't always get the same returns probably on her end there. So it was great to chat with her, catch up with her, see what's going on. So here's my interview with the wonderful

Heather Baer. Hello, Heather. How's it going? It's going great, Conrad. Thank you for asking. I roped you into this, and the agreement was that there was no hard questions. Where are we? What are we doing? We'll stick with the basics at first. That's absolutely fine. So you're asking me where I am? Yeah, where are we? Where are we right now? Where are we? We're in Orlando at the Coronado Springs Resort, and it's day two of the Verma International Conference, and it's been a, my voice is beginning to go now. It's been a blast actually.

Awesome. Well, we respect, love your time and we won't strain the voice too much. At least I'll try not to. Although people love to hear the voice, I'm sure. What has been your experience so far the last few days? This is the first time in 10 years I've been to a Verma Conference

and I have not been a property manager. You say earlier you were a recovering? A recovering property manager. So I been a property manager. You say earlier you were a recovering? A recovering property manager. So I was a property manager of an Ontario property management company for 20 years, which I sold 18 months ago. And I haven't looked back from the day of closing. But yes, this is the first conference I've been to where I've been able to wander the aisles of the exhibition hall and I haven't bought anything.

It's rest free. That's right. That's right. Because I'm, you know, I've always been an early adopter. I love new stuff. Right. And I used to come back from every conference and I had my business partner would say, what have you got this time? Apart from the 10 demos that I've just committed you to, There's other things that I think we should have.

We could be doing. But this time I had time to talk to people to actually do a lot more networking with the suppliers too. Because I think when you're there as a property manager, you almost see the suppliers as a barrier between you and the vendors because they're there to sell you something. And it's like in any seller-buyer relationship that there is this sort of barrier. But there wasn't the barrier. Although I think they were disappointed when they said, how many properties do you have?

And I said, none. It's like, okay, I don't really want to talk to you. It's like you went from an appealing piece of sushi to a dead fish on the beach. Yes, exactly. They're like, oh, never mind. But it's been great. I've been to some really good sessions.

Yeah. What's your favorite one so far? This morning's keynote. Okay. By the, I'm going to embarrass myself now because I can't remember his name. We'll put it in a post, don't worry. But yes, he was. He's from Disney Corporation, correct?

He's from Disney Corporation. Yes. And it was a completely inspirational, motivational talk about the way we do or do not use creativity and innovation in our businesses so he was talking about how they do it at disney and the one thing the one big thing that came out of that was an exercise we did were you there no i missed it you missed it oh my gosh please so it's an exercise we did where we stood up and with a partner and we had to pitch an idea for a party to our partner. We had $100,000 to spend, pitch an idea. And every time you said something to the partner, they had to come back and say, no, because.

And that was really interesting because even though you knew it was, this was a bit of play acting, you actually felt disappointment. I felt disappointed that you don't like my idea about having a completely pink party. And then we switched it over and said, okay, this time the partner would come up with this idea for a party. And I had to say, and this. Oh, and we can do this. To enhance it. Yes. Yes. Okay. And it was a completely different dynamic.

Right. And it was just a very simple exercise that showed how often do you say somebody comes up with an idea in the workplace and you say, no, because it's not going to work. But if you come in and say yes and then ideas will flow right and it was a lot about being creative and brainstorming and having ideas with and doing that traditional brainstorming where everything anything goes yeah have you ever heard the chesky bit brian chesky bit where he talks about what does a one-star experience look like? And then he goes to five stars? No, I have not.

I think this was an early Airbnb thing. When they got some traction and they were going well, is my understanding of it. He said, what does a one-star stay look like in an Airbnb? And they explained, oh, it's dirty. And there's rats in the walls. And of course, terrible. And we hope that never happens. And then he goes, what's a two-star?

And they say, it's not the worst thing ever. And then he gets to five-star. And they say, that must be the best day possible. Everything went smoothly, et cetera. And then he went, what's a six star? And then people were like, oh no, I didn't realize you were going to do that. It threw them for a loop. And then they went, oh, I guess what would happen is I'd arrive at the airport and they

would pick me up from the airport and everything would be ready for me there. That my bags would already be in the back of the car. I wouldn't even have to pick them off the luggage container. And then of course he keeps going, what would a seven star look like? Until the point where they're like, I don't know what else to tell you at this point. But the point of it was that it was a thought exercise about this idea of a one through five rating system, which is what they use today to be fair. But how could you go above and beyond?

And my sort of theory of that is that if you provide a quote unquote six star experience, you buy yourself some leeway where if something goes wrong, the guest forgives you a little bit more. So if you, if you're, if like the photos are a little bit worse than the actual property, then they get there and go, this place is really nice you bought yourself some goodwill almost and then you're more forgiven if the fridge breaks they're like the fridge broke but the place was so amazing it didn't matter you know so i don't know your perspective on that but just this idea of like above and beyond it seems like a common thread absolutely and it comes back

to something else he was talking about was about experience when he said vacation rentals is so boring interesting yeah vacation rentals is so boring interesting yeah vacation rentals is so boring but experience right you're giving an experience and i've been talking about this for a long time that we are in the experience business and if we get over the fact that we offer accommodation and look at where we can go above and beyond that in terms of the experience and it could be i mean i mike and i my business partner my son and i went to a little company in quebec last month and we did a visit with kerry gibson who runs this company called chalet Hooger. And so she owns seven of these chalets. And it was, you get there, you walk in the door,

and there's music playing. And it smells lovely. And there's lovely blanket coverings over the backs of the couches. And it was just, everything was perfect. And it ties into something that I talk about a lot, which is first impressions first impressions and the first 10 minutes if you can get that first 10 minutes right that experience right then you've got them yeah you've got the guest and even if something little goes wrong or something even if something big goes wrong you've already got them on your wavelength right um so so yeah so that was a couple of things I got out of that session.

You've told me before, make sure the lights are on when the property, when they arrive to the property. Yes, exactly. Because who wants to fumble around, especially if it's late at night, they had this panel because you don't see well in past there has never been anything about sustainability at these events or it was in some forgotten room somewhere or something like that yes but it was there was a good attendance and I think more attendance at a sustainability panel that I've seen in others. So it's growing. People are beginning to really realize that they have to look at this seriously. And there were some serious figures on what Gen Z are looking for in travel now.

And sustainability is coming high on their list. So if people aren't offering, if they're not showing that they're operating sustainability practices, they may be overlooked by a very important generation. I feel like I'm a millennial and I feel like our generation, we're like, oh, that's how things are. Sometimes we're a little passive with things. That's the way the world works, that sort of thing.

But these Gen Z, these younger younger people they're not like that they we don't curse but they don't take no crap so to speak it feels like it's a different era i know people may be 10 years younger than me i'm 32 10 years younger than me and they approach things very differently don't they well even it's coming up from the tinies now yeah i go out for a walk with my with my nine-year-old granddaughter. And graffiti, she cannot bear graffiti. And she just gets on a little, she could be hauling a little soapbox along behind her that she stands on every time she sees some graffiti. Why are people defacing this beautiful planet? And then she picks up all the litter along the way and she mutters about it.

And when she throws her litter away, it't be just in a an ordinary garbage can she's got to look for the recycling yes she's nine years old yeah this is the generation of the future yeah and they're they're gonna have a lot of money they don't now you know nine-year-olds they gotta piggy bank but soon they will be yeah but they're coming up on the heels of the gens of gen z's that are already following these principles. And they have Gen X parents. So the parents, their buying decisions start to get influenced by the younger people, don't they? Because they say, mom, dad, when you went into this place, did you look at this? Did you think about this?

And some people don't. And then they get educated, right? Just like we sometimes educated our own parents in some way on certain things. Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, so those are the, I went to quite a few sessions. Those are the two that really had an impact on me. Yeah.

So the property management business that you've sold, it's now in the rear view mirror for you personally, but it's still doing well and thriving in many respects. What's the next steps for you? We chatted about briefly this at lunch yesterday to focus on what's that look like for you right now? Well, I was in the business or in the property management business for 20 years. I own seven of my own properties, which I no longer have. I've sold them over the years.

I've been involved in vacation rentals or short-term rentals for 28 years now. So I think I've got enough knowledge to really share it. And I want to share that. And we're doing that by way of an education platform. And we're particularly focused on small managers. The people that got four or five properties, maybe they've just had them on Airbnb. And now they want to push out, get their own website, go about operations, about financial management and accounting and creating standard operating procedures.

And I could go on and on. But every aspect of the business. So we're creating an education platform that will produce courses. We'll also curate some of the best third-party courses that are out there. So we can bring everything into one platform and in 2024 the first quarter 2024 we plan to start a section on the website which is for consultants because there's so many people you know really qualified and experienced people uh out there doing consultancy but if you want to find a consultant, how do you do it?

You can Google consultants, and I don't think much is going to come up. Or you might find somebody on LinkedIn, but we're going to do it in a way that will bring testimonials. And I want to be able to talk. It's not going to be a matter of them just advertising. I'm going to talk to their clients too. So whatever we offer on that site will have been completely checked out and evaluated.

Yeah. I went to a few sessions and they were talking about SEO. And it's one of those things, maybe I'm too deep in the matrix at this point. And it's hard for me to ignore people just saying things that are very inaccurate. But just because someone happens to work on one of these larger companies

and they might have SEO as part of their job title, it seems like some of them don't do the practice every day or weekly. We do at BuildUp. And it's been interesting to listen. And I don't say anything. I just sit back and listen and let it filter into my ears in here. But we try to do truth telling. The session that I had here at VRMA was the kind of talking about both paid search and organic search. But people just say things and then it gets accepted. Like people will say paid search is expensive and then everyone just goes, Hey, that's expensive. But I'm like, no one really talks about the return on the investment. If I had a vending machine and I put a dollar on the top and $20 came out the bottom, would you do that?

Is it expensive to put a lot of dollars in there? No, it's not expensive at all, but people just say these things and accept it. So it's something that I'm trying to work for as well or work towards as well, which is educating people better. And at least giving even regardless of whether they work with us or not, or work with some other partner or consultant out there, that's fine. But at least know what questions to ask. Even if you don't become an expert in it, I think that's part of it, right? You don't have to be an expert in everything necessarily. It's, you really can be, let's be honest. There's too many areas, but can you get, can you ask the right questions to where you can quickly sniff out who's a truth teller or who's

spouting some nonsense, so to speak. You taught me a lot about, and I was of that mindset. Oh gosh, it seemed really expensive. Yeah. And, but you got me thinking, you got me really looking at the return. It's a wrong question to ask, isn't it? Not what does it cost, but what do I get out of it? Because if you spend a lot of money

and you don't get anything out of it, yeah, that's expensive, right? But if you spend money and you get more out of it than you put back in, it's no longer expensive. In fact, it's the opposite of expensive. It's revenue generating. And granted, it's not always that simple, right? But if you spend money and you get more out of it than you put back in, it's no longer expensive. In fact, it's the opposite of expensive. It's revenue generating. And granted, it's not always that simple, right? Sometimes there's work to be done on the website. This is just one factor amongst money that determines success. You know what I mean? But ultimately, that's a different conversation. And the other question that I would always ask

property manager too, whether there be one unit, 10 or 100 or 1,000, is what are your alternatives? What are your other ways of driving traffic? Because this is not the only way to drive traffic. There's many ways to drive traffic. But talk to me about the efficiency of the traffic. Where does it come from? And talk to me about how well it converts. There's lots of places where you can get traffic very inexpensively. We can go to inexpensive display ad platforms and buy clicks for two pennies. Now they'll never convert, but the traffic's very cheap. Does that sound appealing to you? Whereas on Google, a click costs $4. Yeah, it's like cheap but it doesn't work if it's expensive and it works it might be worth it yeah it was interesting i was i i interviewed brooke fouts

from vintori for my podcast the other day and we were talking about owner metrics and he was saying that you spend a dollar per postcard and you send out a thousand postcards that's cost you a thousand dollars and that direct mail which is one way way, and certainly in the owner attraction side, it's a relevant, valid way of attracting people. But he said, you send out 1,000 postcards, and statistically, you will convert one. One. Owner. Right. People might go, oh.

And you go, oh my gosh, it's going to be $1,000. But then he shows the graph that says you've, at a particular price point, you've paid for that in two and a half months or three and a half months. But you're going to keep that owner for 10 years. If you do a good job. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And then you've got to look at that end figure and not that figure which says I've just spent a thousand dollars for one client. And to Brooke's point, I would have the same question on the owner side.

The numbers are different in terms of like you were saying conversion and things like that but the question is the same which is what's your alternative so if you don't do the postcard okay we saved a thousand dollars that's fine what are you going to do with it are you going to spend it on some other mechanism some other means of advertising are you going to that's the question is not necessarily path a or b in other words people try to make things binary because it seems easier in our brains just to have path one or two but that's not really the case, is it? I could do 20 things.

This is one option. Maybe you need to explore it, try it, put effort into it. But you might need to say, okay, maybe that didn't work for me or there's other things that I need to try and then try those things. And I'm sure that happened a lot during your career when you were on the management side. Absolutely. We tried a lot of things. Some things didn't work. And I'm sure we threw money away.

Yeah. But there should almost be a budget for that in some respect. I'm a bright, shiny thing person. I threw a lot of money away on bright, shiny things. Oh, I think this one's going to work. Yeah. It's easy to do that to be fair. Cause like you said, it's a, we'll be joked about this earlier as well. You know, you walk through there with the people, the listener can't see this, but the white badge, I don't know why they gave me one of these, but the white badge and they assume you're a property manager. And like you were saying earlier, they asked you how many properties you have and it's like your meat and they just, they're a line and they want to tear into you, but it's badge and they assume you're a property manager. And like you were saying earlier, they asked you how many properties you have and it's like your meat and they just,

they're a line and they want to tear into you. But it's, you know, people are there doing what they need to be doing, but there is great technology here and there's great partners here and vendors here, but it may not be right for everybody. And that's okay. That's not a bad thing. We're not right for everybody. Not everybody's right for everybody, but when you get the right people, it really helps you a lot. Yeah. And there are this industry, I love this industry through and through, and it's full of some of the best people I've ever met. Vendors, property managers, people who just skirt around the edges of the business and come in and do and speak and share their insights. There's no better business.

Nice. Did you, is this the first VRMA that you had attended? Did you miss any? I was curious because we, you know. Yeah, I missed, this is the first one I've been to since 2019. Okay. Because there were two after that've been to since 2019. Okay. Because there were two after that. There was San Antonio during COVID. Yeah. And then New Orleans, Las Vegas last year. And I won't set foot near in Las Vegas.

You got to know what you like and what you don't like. Yes. I mean, what I do like, you get off the airplane in Las Vegas and you're in the hotel. But virtually, you come to Orlando and you get off the airplane in Las Vegas and you're in the hotel. Virtually. You come to Orlando and you've got half an hour of traffic. Everything's a little bit different. So the educational platform coming up, but no additional property management is in Heather Bayer's future. No, I can't. So my non-compete says I can't do that in Ontario for five years. I'm not sure I'd ever want to do it again, but I am possibly, hopefully my husband's not

going to listen to this. I don't think he subscribed. We'll check. I'm looking at some land in Costa Rica. Okay. I know you'd purchased land in the Bahamas before, hadn't you? We did, and it just didn't work out. We sold that land. Okay. So I went to Costa Rica for the first time nine years ago. I wish I'd bought then. Yeah, full place. 2020 hindsight is wonderful, isn't it? But I was back there again last year. Yeah. And it's just as beautiful.

It hasn't changed. It has changed. Actually, it's changed a lot. The area around Uvita and Dominical on the Pacific side. Okay. It takes three and a half hours to get there, which is why it's still very quiet. It's not touristy because people don't want to travel that far. But it is absolutely stunningly beautiful.

So I'd like to buy some land. I'd like to build a house on it. And I'd like to document it every step of the way as to how you do this thing. Yeah. And if you were to purchase this property and build it at some point, what would you be the things that you were doing differently that you went, when you were running your business, you went, I wish we could have done it this way, but it was too far along perhaps. And now I can

do it the right way from the beginning. Yeah. I know what guest expectations are now. It's not good. It's not, wouldn't be me furnishing it and doing it my way. It would be doing it for those guests. and interestingly talking to Nick Halverson from OSA property management in in Uvita I was talking to him yesterday and he was saying that the people seem to be buying these properties building them and they're they've become a little bit cookie cutter and a little bit sterile inside and it could be a little bit like Costco doesn't matter where you are in the world you go to Costco and and it all looks exactly the same. And he said, these houses seem to be doing the same.

All the interiors are the same. And I want to do it differently. I want to do some traditional Costa Rican jungle property. I don't know. Maybe I'll just put yurts on there or something. But it may not come to anything. Right. That's what you're saying.

It's just what you're thinking about. It's what I'm thinking about. Usually everything I think about happens. You have a very high success rate. I do. I manifest. Manifest.

That is a common word. Yes. I'm a power manifester. Awesome. Awesome. I don't want to keep you forever. I think you have a trip to get to, an airplane to get to.

But thank you, Heather. I don't think we've chatted before in this context. I've been on your show, but it's been good to go this way. Thank you for helping our recap episode here, and we'll catch you next time. Thank you, Corret. Thank you. Catherine, it was fantastic to chat with her. So Catherine's a client as well, and she's been through a very interesting process over the past probably 10 months or so.

Originally contacted and said, hey, we should build a website for your vacation rentals. She has several in a few different markets. You'll hear about that in the chat that we roll here in a minute. But ultimately, Catherine has a lot more to share because that is not just the only thing that she does. Obviously, she has phenomenal properties and does a great job hosting those properties. She might be what I would call a professional host in every sense of that word. But Catherine has a whole nother career. Catherine didn't get these properties by chance. She did it by being phenomenal in her line of work that she was in before around benefits and consulting around employee benefits and kind of understanding all the nuances and complexities of that business, which it sounds just as hard as the vacational

industry. I'm not a pro and luckily Catherine is. And of course, we were proud to be working with Catherine here over the past few months to launch her new brand, her new business, her new hustle, not side hustle. Maybe hustle is a way to say it, STR Benefits Consulting. And I think that it's interesting when you meet people who are knowledgeable about a domain or something that you don't know much about, maybe the basics or some of the entry-level things and Catherine's knowledge of the benefit space. It's like talking to Picasso about painting, right? It's that sort of feeling that I get when I speak to Catherine about what she understands about that industry. And she can help so many different people out there on the property manager side or the vendor side with

their employees and with the benefits. And it's not just healthcare. That's one component of it. She'll go into that here in a second during our interview. It's really about so many other things that she can layer in and talk about employee wellness and how to think of the things that you don't think about that you don't want to get caught flat-footed on. Catherine's unfortunately seated at all. Some of these things aren't always great, but it's such a key part of being a great team is really taking care of your employees

because your employees is really what gets the job done for your brand and your company. You can't do it without great people. And Catherine wants to take care of those people in a very meaningful, compelling way. So it was awesome to chat with Catherine. I think we went the longest of the interviews that we did. So let's roll Catherine and my interview here now.

How are you doing? Good, how are you? Pretty good, can't complain. Where are we? We are at Verma International at Disney's Coronado Springs. Awesome, and what have you been learning so far at VRMA? A lot, a lot of, I think, interesting facts

about how to round out my marketing. And I loved the session this morning talking about really capitalizing on the experiences. Certainly Duncan got me crying with the thoughts about my senior daughter. And then working back into my marketing about how am I portraying that out to guests and why my property will maximize their experience as opposed to just being a place to stay. Okay. What was the main message behind what he was saying? That time is limited? Time is limited.

He started counting down the months if you have a senior and the tears started flowing for me because it was so true. He was heading too close to home. It was a little close to home. Yeah. It was like, you've got nine months left. That's how many vacations left. And it's very true.

And so when you put yourself in the shoes of a guest that's making, looking at your property versus other properties and trying to decide on you, how do you convey that experience to that guest? So that's, that's what I've been thinking about all day. Yeah. It's, I have much younger kids. I think we've talked about this before, seven, four, and two. So I can't imagine what that's like to have that expiring feeling. It feels like we're very much in the middle of it, but to your point, I'm sure it goes very quickly. I'm sure it feels like yesterday that you had a seven-year-old, not a 17-year-old, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I was thinking about it today. This is like her last birthday that she's probably going to have at home because she'll be in college next year for her birthday. So how do you make that special? What are the things that you do to extend that time? And thinking about all the pictures that I have on my sites and the things

that I can recommend when people do come to celebrate things, right? Where is the best place to go? Not just the place we like, but the best place. And what are those extras that we can incorporate and try to make sure that we're their choice. So thinking of if you make that recommendation, what recommendation would you give to someone in that same situation?

Is that kind of what you mean? Pretend it's their last birthday, in a vacation with their daughter or son, whatever. Exactly, not just here's the ice cream place we go to. Right. But what is going to take it to that next level? Which I think conference wise has been so cool because you and I both did the Jedi training with Touch Day, which was so fun. And from an experience perspective, you know, my husband and I just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.

And we actually went to our beach condo and we challenged ourselves to go to different places. And we went to this fabulous restaurant and it wasn't so much the view, it was really the food and the atmosphere inside. But we had this lobster grilled cheese and it was outstanding. Sounds good. And so I completely changed restaurant recommendations and that sort of thing. If you're really finding that place as opposed to just, you know, here are the closest restaurants that are walking distance. Because I think sometimes I get focused, especially on that property, because there's a parking issue with it. There's only one spot. Like here are the eight restaurants across the street. That's true.

They're there. But if you were coming in for something really special, I would tell you all about this lobster grilled cheese at the helm on St. Pete Beach because that's the place to go. And so it's been really connecting, I think, a lot of those dots. And people probably don't drive 20 minutes to get to that place, right? They've driven for hours. They've driven for a day to get down to your beach condo. And then giving them, I don't want to say a plain recommendation, but just giving them a convenient recommendation is easy. And maybe there's a section in your guidebook or something or on the website to your point for

that. But then there's like a, if you don't mind a bit of a, if you don't mind maybe 20 minutes in the car, 30 minutes in the car, here's what you could do. Here's the benefits of that. Yeah. So I just, when you really start quantifying the number of vacations a person gets as a parent, right? I had 18 birthdays with my daughter. And after that, she's probably going to celebrate with friends at college. And so how do I make, how do I make this one really special? And then counting, because she's my oldest, I have a 16 year old and I have a 12 year old. You start ramping up then on the 12 year old because you realize you only have six left. And so what are the things that you do to make them special? But I'm the youngest. So when I was exiting my house,

it was like, now we're done at this point. Get them out of of here yeah it's like the first one leaving where it's oh wait a second like you're having that feeling right now it seems wait a second yeah I don't know I think we upped the ante for my youngest constantly like when we were at Discovery Cove on one of the opening events here with with Cassiola and Travelnet we we had been there for her sixth birthday that was her thing when she turned six we went to Discovery Cove. And some of that was because you have to be six to swim with the dolphins. And so I think kid wise, there'd be some arguments that maybe the youngest kind of gets the most attention on the things because it is the last, it is the last first day of school. So they're like, wait a second. I barely got anything going out the door because I was budget conscious thinking about,

man, there's two more behind you. I've got to make sure. You also got to be careful setting the wrong standard, so to speak, which kind of goes back to guests. So you did a session though, too. There was some things that you were doing and that session was a bit more serious. What was the topic of that session? Yeah, that session was on human trafficking and the short-term rental industry holistically, not just from the guests that come and go from your places, but also the communities that you invest in, how you communicate to the vendors that you're working with, the owners that you're partnering with, and then the communities that you are serious about.

What is the training that you do to help not just take care of your guests, but to take care of your staff as well? So we talked a lot about different things from banking verification to make sure that you're actually paying your team members, that they didn't just give you a routing number and account number that is not theirs because they were told to give you that information. We talked about the safety of folks having locations on when they're in the properties, if they're cleaning or inspecting so that they're, you know, it's not obvious that they're at, you know, especially as we pin our places on whether

it's Google or Facebook or any place else, if somebody can see that you're there and you're alone in the facility, you don't want to be in danger and presenting the human trafficking education as a holistic, not just for the team, because we're asking you to do this because this is a requirement, but because we care about you and your families as well. Because a lot of parents don't know how the technology is changing and how their families can be targeted. And so we, we spoke on that Justin Ford and Andrew Bate both spoke with me this morning on that. Okay. Yeah. I can't say I understand those topics well, but like every time we talk, I'm always like, I never thought about that. Sometimes it's on the benefit side of things and we can go there in a second, but I often feel like you're a good

teacher in that respect. And it's sometimes it's about serious topics, but it's always something to be like, like, yeah, I should be thinking about that. Cause you've seen maybe the good and the bad, unfortunately with some of these problems, right? Yeah. Unfortunately employers are doing the best that they can with the information that they're given. And if I tell you, this is where I want my pay deposited. Yeah. Makes sense, right? Why would you question me? Right. And people get a little protective or concerned about asking questions about things like that. And sometimes with trafficking, you assume it's somebody that they don't know that they're being kidnapped and all that kind of stuff. And very often it's actually somebody that they do know. And there's been instances where it's been a spouse that is trafficking them. And my pay, I'm working for you, but my pay is going into an account that my spouse owns and I

have no access to my money. And the problem for you as an employer is if I report that to the Department of Labor because I'm trying to escape and I have no money, now all of a sudden you're in trouble and you didn't know that you did anything wrong. So you were just doing what you were told to do. And so there's all of these little pitfalls. And certainly there's huge class action lawsuits against some larger hotel chains that it's easier to, I think, make us the target as being these fly-by-night proprietors that don't follow any rules and that sort of thing. And my messaging is that's not true. But I also have to make sure that everybody understands that then you do have to be aware of some of these things. And most people, I think, want to be.

It's not that they're trying to bury their head in the sand and ignore issues. They just don't know. They don't know what to ask for or what to look for. Yeah. You mentioned that you were talking about Justin and I feel like safety issues could be a little more visible in terms of a property burned to the ground, right? Or, oh goodness, this railing wasn't properly installed in a bunk bed and then someone fell out and broke their arm. Those are very visible. What you're describing is almost under the surface. You would see someone and not really know what was going on potentially. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Even with staff, it's easy to say you showed no cold. And so we're going to just let you go, especially if it's in an early window of time. And without taking a second and saying, hold on a second, there was a big sporting event in town

last night. And let me just ask a few questions and make sure that you're okay and that something else didn't happen. Just basic conversation that can take place between coworkers even. It's not always 100% on the employer, but just you notice something really different. It's the old adage of you see something, say something. If I suddenly change my appearance, I'm dressing in extremely baggy clothing. I no longer wear makeup or I'm wearing a lot of makeup and those types of things, then that can trigger what's going on. Something seems a little bit different. And I think the biggest piece was often when people talk about human trafficking, they think of it from a sex

trafficking perspective, which can be more visible and it can be something that is easier to spot. The labor trafficking is actually more common. And it can pop up in these really weird ways, like the banking verification piece and folks that are living in virtually inhumane conditions because they're being marketed by what is a nontraditional recruiter or a staffing firm. And there's a lot of folks in all industries, but I think our industry too, where you've got more of contract workers that are coming in, whether it's landscapers or housekeeping or even virtual assistants that you're maybe finding them from a different source.

And you want to make sure that when you're talking to those vendors that you understand what's happening because there are some bad actors out there. It's a big money business. It 32 billion dollars a year and every government out there is saying that they're putting money towards ending it so you want to be doing your due diligence to make sure that you are you're trying to do the right things it's you know when somebody is very evil-minded and they're determined, it's tough to stop that.

You can only do the best that you can do. So the reason that you're knowledgeable about this is what? You had a previous career. You had this career for a long time in what kind of area? Could you break it down for the listener as well? Sure. I specialized in large group employee benefits for 22 years, and we saw a lot of things that were strange. Sometimes you would just scratch your head, and other times you're like, okay.

We would often do dependent verifications when we had large claims. So you would have, you know, a child on there that, you know, was a hemophiliac where you wanted to make sure that that's actually a legal dependent of the plan. And then you started to see some utilization patterns that came up that weren't necessarily large claimants. And as Medicaid came in and started doing their own dependent verifications and being more aggressive, the providers started seeing people pop up on group plans. And so that was one avenue. And then when you do any type of employee interaction, I had this one gentleman one year, and he had five children.

He wasn't really sure of the birthdates. And that's, my husband's not always 100% sure on the birth dates either, but he generally has the years, right? But it was a bit of a yellow flag. And then all the kids had different names. And then when he did have the birth dates, three of them were born in one year. And I was like, I don't think that works that way. And his answer was they had different moms. And I'm like, this is a lot of kids. And it's a blue collar environment.

And person making like $11 an hour. This is years ago. And so minimum wage was lower. And $11 an hour. And you've got six kids that you're adding onto a plan. Different last names. Three kids all born in the same year. We're past yellow flag territory at this point, aren't we?

This is I need to start seeing some birth certificates, right? And so it's harder when you do that as a one-off because then it feels very targeted and things can escalate quickly. And it's easier to just have it as a practice and say for all employees, it doesn't matter that I know that you had, you and your wife had this baby last week. I still need to see this birth certificate, right? It's easier to do it that way. And then when you promote that you do those things openly, it tends to be that they're looking for another employer or they're looking for another person to do business with just because they know you're going to challenge these things. You're going to look for those things and they want to go on to somebody who's maybe less in tune with it. Gotcha. So you mentioned in the past tense almost a few minutes ago, you said 22 years.

Why is that? What's changed in the past very little bit with you and your kind of career on the benefit side? I decided to focus exclusively on the short-term rental industry. I recognized as I was talking to friends and colleagues within the industry that there was a lack of, I would say, knowledge of how to buy benefits, package benefits. I would speak to people and they would say, oh, I'm too small to offer benefits. And right away I'd say, so you just changed the word. I said benefits and you changed it to health insurance in your mind. Because benefits covers everything from retirement plans to pet insurance. And a lot of times there's a big delta between offering nothing and offering full core benefits,

retirement matching, and we can put together options that are even voluntary. The employee pays for them and you just help structure it by having a payroll deducted. And we've been really successful in putting that together. And then I also realized that even for folks who were maybe just solopreneurs that just didn't understand how to read a medical bill or how to get lower costs on pharmacy, that there was just some information that I could put out, some content that would help them navigate the system.

Because I don't think there's anybody globally that would say, health insurance is easy. I understand it. I've got this down. Let me show you my tricks. It's complicated for a reason. And people are generally frustrated with the lack of transparency because I dealt with the larger employers, a lot of self-insurance. I knew that I could show people, these are the metrics. This is how you tell your story. This is how you shop, negotiate, choose a broker. This is what you should expect from a service perspective as well as a contract.

Okay, awesome. And the website is? It's strbenefitsconsulting.com. Perfect. I'll put that on the show notes. Awesome. All right, I feel like we skipped one piece though when we started, which we didn't talk about

how you got into the industry in the first place. So now let's go backwards even further. There was the career, but during the career, there was properties that you purchased. We touched on it a minute ago with the condo and your property in Florida, but walk me through your timeline of property acquisition and where you stand today

on your personal short-term rental properties. Sure. I've been a working mom for a long time and I was that person trying to get it right when we went on vacation. And it's a delicate balance doing all those things. And my mother-in-law had died of Lou Gehrig. She loved the beach and then my mom died.

And when my mom died, it was this panicked moment because no one loves their insurance broker. I don't care what line of coverage you're in. Nobody loves their insurance broker. And my mom was a nurse and everybody loved her. And so I had this sense of what are my kids going to have? Because especially with health insurance, with HIPAA, nobody's leaving you five-star reviews about the way you help them with this. And I didn't think I'd be able to create this tangible

thing for them. So I bought a beach condo, which is the most obvious thing to do. And it's an hour from our house. And the idea was that we would have a place, they would have a place after I was gone that we would have made memories and we would find the favorite beach ice cream place and all the different things that we would do together. And so we started with just the one and it was fantastic. And I loved every minute. I realized that I love that guest interaction because while nobody's happy interacting with their health plan, they're usually very happy when they're planning a vacation. So you went opposite, basically. Went opposite.

You went opposite, making people very happy. Very happy. And then I realized that there were tools out there that would give me access to data. And I love data. And so to play with happy data was fantastic. Where are they coming from? What's their budget? How many people are in their party? What's the average daily rental, the window in advance and all that kind of stuff.

And that just fueled my passion of where else do we want to go? So what I did that I think is a little bit different is I'm not consolidated in one market. We're in different markets. So I have the Madera Beach condo first, and then we built a cabin in Blue Ridge, Georgia. And that was designed around the fact that my brother has five children and I can't host them anywhere. So we could build a place where they could come and visit and we could be under one roof. And I'm big on zones for that reason, because when I do go on vacation, as much as I try, sometimes I don't present my best self. As a mom, I get frustrated and irritated. And we're just not all used to being under one roof together for so long.

And you want to regroup, right? Because you spent all this money on this vacation. And somebody needs to apologize to somebody else. And sometimes that person's me. And so each property has a zone where I can have a cup of coffee before I need to apologize and make pancakes. And whatever it is. And so there's mini fridges and that sort of thing where you can, whether you're going to have a beer or a glass of wine or Perrier, it doesn't matter. You've got a space.

And then from there, we bought a place in Homosassa, Florida, which is rural Florida. It's scalloping and fishing. And my brother-in-law has a place a mile or two away from us. And he's taught my girls how to fish and scallop. And we've just had a ton of fun building memories there. And then now we are just getting ready to launch our Ocala property, which is 10 minutes from the equestrian center. My youngest daughter competitively rides, and she's very excited to show that off to her barn. And so again, the concept of traveling with family, they're all geared towards families that are traveling together. And so we just love it.

Nice. And you have a, also a showcase for the brand, right? Explain Lost Together Stays, where the name come from. That was your idea. I know we'd work together on it, but really it ended up being your idea. Yeah. So Lost Together Stays is a premise on a blue rodeo song called Lost Together. And because a lot of times you do feel, I feel anyways, lost on those vacations. Some of the interesting things that happen, especially when the kids were younger, because they were in daycare, there were things that I cannot tell you that my children would be potty trained today if it was not for daycare. There were things that just happened. And so they would come to me and they would say it's snack time.

I didn't know what snack time was. That wasn't part of my job description. So we were sometimes lost when we were on these vacations because there were things that they knew how to do that I maybe didn't know how to do. And we were figuring it out together and there are different properties and we're just trying to do things. Even my husband and I, we spent a lot of time together before we had kids. But then all of a sudden you realize the differences in each other when you have kids and he's an all boy family and he's in an all girl household. So there was a lot of products and cords and he doesn't understand the volume of suitcases that come with us on vacation. Can I ask you, this is totally off topic. I'm sorry. The shoes, like why do we need the volume of shoes that like my wife brings such a ridiculous amount

of shoes when we go on vacation. Can you explain that? Because she doesn't end up wearing them all. If she wore them all, I could understand. I wouldn't agree, but I could understand. Right. But I don't understand because I brought one pair of shoes here. I'm very jealous of the fact that you brought one pair of shoes.

Actually, I take that back. I did bring a pair of golf shoes as well. I'm not wearing them, obviously. So golf shoes for the golf tournament we did here at V&A. And then these sneakers that I have here as well. I have a lot of shoes in my room right now. So the challenge is the outfits, right? And the colors. I think men don't have the same colors of shoes that women do. And that's a big, that goes with everything. The listener can't see, but it's a black Nike Airs. And I am now comfortably in white shoes,

white tennis shoes. So that's a lot. Yeah. When you're presenting, I think you tend to wear dressier shoes. I think it's the open toe versus the closed toe. More considerations. That's a problem. Different heights based on the length of pants that you're wearing or to the dress, that kind of thing. So, yeah, there's a lot of different shoe options that go along. But I would say all my girls, too, have long hair. And they're far more into all of the curlers, straighteners, blow dryers. So there's a lot of those things too.

So between the shoes and the hair equipment. It's too much. It's a lot. It's a traveling, I don't want to say circus. That's not right, but it's a traveling band. Oh, there's an entourage of things. Yeah. So it's, yeah. So when you go on vacation together, like you're, you're all of a sudden you need each other's world in a different way. My husband's got a backpack and he's good. He doesn't have a lot of stuff. And, and the rest of us are carrying seven suitcases and all the rest of it. But, but I like the stories about the properties because it's tying to you what you're personally interested in a little bit. Right. But it's also the properties were made for a specific reason. Like I like the Blue Ridge story. Oh, my brother-in-law comes with all of his kids and we

can all fit in this one place, which is hard to find in some markets. So you can stand out from the crowd a little bit too. I like that. Yeah. And the house is the destination. That was really important to me too, because sometimes people are spending an awful lot of money just to come to the house. Right.

Thousands of dollars. Yeah. And because my brother's coming from Canada and you've got seven people with plane tickets and a rental car and all the rest of it. So parking was a consideration for me to make sure that we would have enough parking there. And then the house had to be in a place again, because you're dealing with lots of different ages where kids can do different things and adults can talk and visit and the kids aren't whining and complaining because they're bored. So we went through and I did a multi-level walkthrough. If I'm seven walking

through this house, what are the things I'm going to do? And so we did large yard dice and we did a giant connect four game and things like that weren't easily broken by the kids. And then also fun things for the older folks that are there. There's some fun puzzles and games and that kind of thing. My brother's family, they all play cards. We don't play cards, but they play cards. There's a lot of that kind of stuff. And I tried to make sure that it was all weather. It was covered decks and that kind of thing. So it really put a lot of thought into what are the things. And in each of the main bedrooms that have en-suites, that house, I have to tell you, my builder thought I was insane because he couldn't understand why I was doing as much

on the main level because most people put a lot of money into what they expect to be the main bedroom. And I told him, I said, my mother was in a wheelchair. My mother-in-law was a wheelchair. I am not coming to this property no matter how old I get. And so I said, that's my geriatric ward right there. So I'll go upstairs for as long as I can, but then I understand I will be there. So it was a lot of fun and I wanted it to be a place to relax. And the bathtub is big and cast iron and it's a big soaker tub overlooking the trees. And that's, it's really pretty. Yeah.

It goes to show you too, that this is not like a lot of people want to put properties into a spreadsheet, right? And this is a three bed, two bath and it should do a hundred thousand in this market and stuff like that. But what you just described proves or gives a good example in my mind of this. Yes, sure. There's some similar characteristics, like you said, all for the data. That's great. But there's a lot of thought that goes into a well thought out property that really drives home the value of staying in it. And that's going to

reflect in the reviews versus, yeah, let's just throw up a three bed, two bath and try to get as much money out of as possible. And the host like you that cares is unfortunately maybe a little rarer today than you would think. There's a lot more hosts coming in over the last few years, which maybe that's good. Maybe that's bad. I guess time will tell on that. But a lot of them were, you know, spreadsheet people. They weren't people who thought about the guest experience, but I think you seem to strike a balance with both. Yes, it has to make sense financially, but also look at all these things that I've thought of as well. Oh yeah. I mean, there were times when we were driving up and when I was building the cabin and I was looking at, you get in and it's 11 o'clock

at night or 12 o'clock at night. Cause I'd be leaving after the kids got out of school. Everything's closed. So I put biscuit mix and apple butter and there's coffee and creamer. And so they can make it through to the next morning. And there's popcorn and s'mores kits. So you can fake it till you make it kind of thing until you can get to the grocery store. But yeah, I try to do a lot of those things. I like that. I like that.

Awesome. I think we're rounding out maybe our time for right now. But Catherine, thank you. I appreciate it. How can people learn more about you? You've got multiple things going on. So best place for people to follow you, who should we be reaching out on STR benefits consulting and who should be staying with you in lost together stays? Definitely find me on LinkedIn because I'm very active on LinkedIn. And then of course, I'm on Facebook for the properties. You can see the pictures of them. So, um, lost together stays any families or groups of folks that are trying to get together to just have some time together. You know, look at those properties, STR benefits consulting. That's really anybody that accesses

a health plan. If you need some help, you need to understand it. You've got a soon to be 18 year old and you're about to find out that you can't fill their prescriptions for them or make their doctor's appointments. Yeah. Look at, look me up on LinkedIn and I'll help you out with that. Phenomenal. Thank you for your time, Catherine. I appreciate it. And we'll catch everybody the next time around. Valerie, it was so awesome to talk with Valerie. I plucked her out of the crowd and I said, hey, do you have 20 minutes? And she said, and she was lucky enough and kind enough to actually give me some time so we could chat here for a few minutes. I think Valerie's this rising star. She's very much, if you're an NBA fan, there's a rising star game that they have during All-Star Weekend. And those are the players that

are eventually going to be in the All-Star game in the coming years. And that's Valerie. You could argue maybe I'm almost a little bit too late to the trend with her and her business and the growth that she's had. Phenomenally impressive person, very interesting conversation, really not about marketing, to be honest with you, but about the company, about intuition, about people, about building, about doing different models, not just managing for others. And really, she has a really interesting perspective. And I think that Valerie is going to be one of those people that we look at in a few years and go, wow, when she started, she was just like this. And now look at where she is, and she's going to have hundreds of properties or hundreds of listings or have a lot of people

that kind of follow her and listen to what she has to say. Because this isn't just someone who turns a property, cleans it, gets it ready to the next guest. This is someone who cares about people, cares about the company, and really is doing interesting things. So this was fantastic. Valerie will close us out here on our VRMA interview show. Let's roll that interview now with Miss Valerie. Valerie, how are you doing? Good. How are you? Where are we? We are in Orlando, Florida. For? Vermont. The International Conference. How many VRMAs have you been to so far? We are in Orlando, Florida. For? Verma, the international conference. How many VRMAs have you been to so far?

This is my second one. So I was in Vegas last year. What do you think the difference has been for you so far between last year and this year? Your own learnings, your own knowledge, that sort of thing. Last year, I didn't know anybody, literally zero people. And now I've made a lot of friends in the industry. It's a totally different experience because now I get to come here, see all my friends and meet more people. I didn't even know what Verma was last year. It's been a whole, it's a brand new world. It's a whole new world.

It's a whole new world. As the Disney song goes. I almost started singing, but then I controlled myself. Go for it. No, it's okay. You don't want to hear me sing. No, it's great. I had to pull you out of a group of people and you were kind enough. So thank you. No problem. We only have a few minutes, but I would love to hear what's been the session that you've taken the most from so far over the last few days. I think the session that Sarah Bradford did about selling your company. So I work with Sarah. I call her my Sherpa. She helps me with everything that has to do with my business and to see her up there with the broker that she used. He was from Rain Catcher.

And then the gentleman or the COO of the company that bought her company up in Steamboat and to have the three of them up there explaining the whole process and how it works and how you should be running your company from your financials to your org chart, just everything and saying, hey, it's not that you like need to sell, but this is the way you should run your company from your financials to your org chart, just everything and saying, hey, it's not that you need to sell, but this is the way you should run your company.

And think if you were going to sell in six months, how would it have to be set up? And so to me, that's like, it sounds obvious, but to hear all the details go one by one, you should do this and then this, it was like, yeah, I'm going to structure my company that way. And not that I want to sell it, but just it'll be like functioning and in a really good place if I did every single thing that they said. Well, I think the interesting part as a small business owner is that if you set up your company to be sold, the funny part is you don't need to sell it at that point, do you? And when you don't need to sell it, you're actually in an amazing position if you do try to sell it because you're like, take it or leave it.

This is my number. You know what I mean? And you have a lot of confidence in that. Yeah. And I think you just feel more solid. This has been – everyone that's in this industry knows how difficult this is, right? It can be a little chaotic, a lot of moving parts. Again, I'm so new that I think because I reached out to so many people and they've been so gracious to help me and really get things organized. This was like it felt like it all came together during that talk.

And I had already done a lot of the things that they were speaking about. And it made me feel like, OK, you're doing this. You're on point. You're not like off on some weird ride that has nothing to do with reality. I don't know. It just brought everything together for me. Was there anything that you did here that you hadn't heard before that you're like, ah, I messed up that one or I haven't thought about that one yet? Or was it

mostly the path you know you need to go on? They had a whole conversation about which owners you should be removing from your program. And they were coming down to like specific numbers. And they were talking about you might not even realize, but you could be losing money on some of your homes. And I tend to like fire pretty quickly if someone is absolutely out of control. I don't suck the energy out of the company. I just don't want to do that to the girls on the team. But to hear that from them and really have specifics if you fall under this number then get rid of them and you're going to have a stronger portfolio and I don't know it just it was like verifying or all these thoughts in my head it was like how do I do that and

you question yourself you're like I really need this house but you actually don't so I don't know that really helped me it sounds like that's also a little bit more data-driven. And sometimes we need that. We can trust our intuition and our emotions to some degree. But at some point, it's helpful to just be like, it should be here. If it's not over here, don't do it. Yeah.

And I tend to run on my intuition. So it's good for me to have conversations like that and to surround myself with people that love Excel sheets and love data and are more just, let's look at the numbers. Because I tend to just run on my gut. We need both though, don't we? Absolutely. To really be successful. You can't do one without the other. The spreadsheet nerds, maybe they can make things look good on a spreadsheet, but you need soul. I'm jealous of the spreadsheet nerds. I can't even put one together, but I can start a company. Which one's more valuable? I think we know. They're both really valuable and we need each other. But yeah, anyway, I like having hit that number above or below and then that makes the decision for you. I just brought on EOS into the company and it's a lot of that. Those score

cards, it's either yes or no. It's black and white and that can take some organization, but then it takes the thinking out of it and I like that. Going to EOS really quickly, and then I have a different question. The ROC system, when we get a new member of our team, they don't understand ROCs at all. I say, here's a quarterly goal to set. And they go, they'll write something to the effect of, make guests happier or something to that effect. I'm like, that's not falsifiable. We've got to make it falsifiable. So I always say with ROCs, you should be able to read this to your partner or a friend, whatever.

And they should be able to tell you whether you hit it or not. Not you, because they would say, how are you measuring it? That sort of thing. What do you do on rocks? I'm curious. With new team members specifically, how do you make it specific? We literally just brought it on last month. Okay.

Brand new. Brand new. Brad, our integrator, sat down with us and said, okay, let's get like seven rocks down. Okay. And explain the thing. So we did. And I was like, oh, this is so clear. He literally had to pull out the whiteboard and just get it all on paper, basically. And I'm like,

oh, the system's going to work. So I haven't figured out yet, because I'm only brand new, how I'm going to bring in, we had just hired a GM. How am I going to train her? How is that going to work? So that's probably going to be session number number two. Gotcha. Okay. I'm a newbie. No, no, it's okay. Yeah, I think you'll get there. And like I said, that's just been my personal experience. And these are well-intentioned rocks to be clear, right? Making guests happier, for example, on the PM side, that's a good thing, but it's too squishy, right? Oh, yeah. No, we were really specific and had his guidance and he was like, no, you got to dig deeper. Like, what is it going to be exactly? And so the clarity is like amazing. You can take all that intuition and you can use it to actually

form the rocks, but then use more of that analytical mind to actually write it down on paper or not paper, but write it down. And then have the meetings every week and be like, okay, what have we actually done? I don't know. I like it. Yeah. It brings both two into it. You mentioned earlier that there has been some personal and professional growth in the last year, but what about business? How many properties did you have in Las Vegas last year? And where do you stand today? What's happened there? We had 14 properties in Las Vegas, and we owned all of them. So there was three in Vail and 11 in Southwest Michigan. I never intended to work with the public. We just had our own portfolio of homes, and I was managing them.

public. We just had our own portfolio of homes and I was managing them. And very organically, people started contacting me. Can you manage our home or can we buy your home and keep the contract in place and you will manage our house? And yeah, now we have 50 homes. Back then, I didn't even know I was going to do this. Yeah. Here we are. Yeah, here you are. Exactly. And what about the growth going forward? So you're at 50. Do you want to be at 100? I want to be at 200?

Or is it more, is it a quality discussion? How do you, where do you want to go from here? So my business partner is a real estate developer. We build homes also. And we decided we have a separate company. It's McDonald Development. Build homes to sell. And like business parks, warehouses, all that stuff.

And we've been doing that for nine years together. So we decided now that we have the vacation rental company that we would also build homes for short-term rentals. So this is our first crack at it. We're building 19 homes in our market in Michigan. Oh, wow. Yeah, we just started the site work. They'll be on the market this summer. And we're going to see how this model works. They're like smaller, modern cabins. And if we like it, then we'll probably take that into a second market. Is that just going

to the bank and getting funding? Or is there more creative ways that you actually fund those projects? We have investors. Okay. That have put up the capital to do that. Gotcha. So not going to a mix of ours and theirs. Okay. And this is a group we've been working with for years. So they're familiar with all of our projects. Going back to EOS, what are your improvements? What are your rocks that you're working towards then in the business? Is it just about getting these projects done or is about tweaking or enhancing what you're doing as well from? For instance, we just put a laundromat under contract and we're going to keep the laundromat open, not the dry cleaning part, but the laundromat. And so I was like, okay, one of the rocks is I have to learn how to run a laundromat and we're going to close on this thing and I'm going to keep it open. I need to figure that out. And then of

course it was like, how do I do a linen program? So it's, those were my rocks, like stuff like that. Find an office in a warehouse, which I did because it's, I'm an author too. I write spiritual self-help books and I write about the idea of writing it down and making it happen because when you write something down like anyone that has journaled or made lists they'll tell you that they went back like a year later and found their journal and everything they wrote happened we said manifesting in the last interview is that a word that you ascribe yeah it is it's manifesting it's just like bringing something to a level of

awareness that like puts it out in the universe and then it like happens it's magic right so i feel like with the rocks it's like we put it out there now it's going to happen and it's a clear guidance as well totally there's no again back to my earlier commentary there's no ambiguity about it yeah i'm a fan of not thinking like i want the universe to work for me, not to get like all metaphysical on you, but you know, writing it down and like I, before I go to bed at night, I write down lists or I have, I ask myself questions and then you wake up in the morning and I let my subconscious do the work while I'm sleeping. And then I have answers in the morning. I guess I just want to take a shower for me. Like you get the, Oh yeah. And then you write it down. You should get one of those boards in the shower that you write. It's

like a whiteboard. Because your brain partially turns off and not fully. We obviously are aware and present, but you're just. That's the good space. Yeah. So yeah. That makes sense. What's different in the business other than just the size and scale? What are some other things that you've improved again from last year to this year in the business itself? More employees. Okay. What's that been like? So my background is in the restaurant business. That's what I've always done. Grew up in the restaurant business. So I've been in hospitality forever. And I've been managing since I was 20.

So like my whole life, basically. And it's so different to have employees in front of you. Dinner starts at five. So everyone comes in at four and we eat the specials together and have a meeting. It's different. You can feel the energy with each of your servers, bartenders. This is a different animal because a lot of my employees are remote. So I had to learn to manage a remote team. And I'm not always on the ground either. So that was a new process for me to learn

that. It was challenging, but I think I've got it now. And yeah, that was one of the things that kind of shocked me because I'm like, I can manage people. Like that's what I do. This was different. Yeah. Is there, is it an accountability thing? Is it a communication thing? What are some of the adjustments that you've made to make sure that people are on the right track? Again, back to that like intuition thing. I think that my management style was that like I could read my staff and then act accordingly. And it's a little bit harder for me to do that when the person's not standing in front of me. Okay. So it's like I had to find a different way to connect. I've heard someone say this perhaps

jokingly before, but it made me laugh because they had part of partially their team was in person and then part of their team was remote. And he went, I forgot about a remote employee. I could totally see that happening. He was like, I genuinely forgot that person was on my team. Yeah, it's really hard when you're the owner and you have a smaller company, so you don't have anyone in between you and all the employees. And they're coming to you, you might have someone that's really quiet. And I can't imagine like totally forgetting about someone. Perhaps he was exaggerating a bit. Yeah, that's pretty extreme.

But who knows? Maybe the guy had 200 employees. I'm not sure. So, yeah. And then the other thing I did that was like very different was I learned about CI. I wanted some sort of process to vet all these people that were applying to work for us. And that's been super helpful. Okay.

I felt like that gave me, I don't know, like an advantage a little bit to be able to read people. You got to peek under the hood a little bit. Yeah. And how they think and how they might act. And then how to work with them in the best way possible. Awesome. What's next? We talked about the future growth, the development.

What other things are you working on that you're looking forward to? Or what, maybe I should say it this way, forgive me. If I talk to Valerie a year from now in VRMA, wherever it happens to be, someone said Arizona, what would you want to have come true between now and then? wherever it happens to be, if someone said Arizona, what would you want to have come true between now and then? I would like to go into a second market, do another development, and possibly open a boutique hotel. Okay.

My dream, I love this business, but my dream has always been to have a smaller hotel with a restaurant and a lounge downstairs. I've just, on the first level, I've just always wanted that. I've always thought about it. That would be really combining everything that I'm good at in one section, just one piece, a sliver of the world. That's my dream. I've been working on it,

and I've been talking to a lot of people in the hotel industry, and yeah, just trying to see if I can make that happen too. I think you can what do you have to do write it down i know i gotta write it down we're gonna write it down i do have my whole business plan because i did it like 20 years ago oh that's a long time nothing's changed i want exactly the same thing that i wrote down well at least you've got a clear vision which is ultimately one huge step in the process trying to find a city that i want to be in okay i got thinking

about traveling around and then you'll find something yeah i'm thinking it's swirling around in my brain. Awesome. Any other parting thoughts on VRMA or just your experience so far or what else you're looking forward to? I just think it's such a blessing to have all these amazing people around me. I love these people. They've become like my family, some of them. I don't know.

There's something about people that are in hospitality. They're just beautiful and I'm attracted to them. And I just, I don't know, I feel something about people that are in hospitality. They're just beautiful, and I'm attracted to them. And I just, I don't know, I feel grateful for everyone I've met. Thank you for your time. I appreciate you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thanks so much for listening. Conrad here. Just wanted to take you out on a high note. If you made it this far into this very long episode, I appreciate you. One thing that would help me quite a bit is if you head to your favorite podcast app of choice and leave us five stars. And the very

last thing that I'll say is I wanted to offer you the listener listening to this VRMA recap the same opportunity that I gave to people who attended VRMA as well in terms of a little offer that we had here at build up. If you've listened to previous episodes of the heads in bed show, you may know that I just recently finished a book that book has just been approved. There is a Kindle version of it available for purchase that I will put a link in the show notes too. Paperback will be live here in a very short period of time. But I wanted to give you the chance to get a free chapter. So if you want to taste the book and kind of get a little sample of it before you actually

made your way to actually purchasing it, it's $10. That's a sizable investment. You can go to buildupbookings.com slash VRMA. That is a URL, buildupbookings.com slash VRMA. And you get a free chapter. Just click the get a free chapter of this book button on that page, and we will email you a chapter. And then we'll also email you a chapter or an opportunity, I should say, excuse me, to buy a copy of that book now that

it is live and approved and ready to go. So again, thank you for listening. We appreciate you, and we will catch you on the next episode of the Heads and Beds show.