Heads In Beds Show - Standing Out From The Vacation Rental Crowd In Your Market: How To Attract Owners & Guests

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

In this "experiment" episode, we dive into the tools that we both use on a daily basis to be more productive and get more done for our clients. Conrad shares the tool he uses 30 times a day and Paul laughs at the absurdity of Conrad's obsessions. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellGPT-4The race to the bottom - Seth Godin🔗 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.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? I am doing great, Conrad. We've avoided our typical early morning audio kerfuffles, so I think we're in good shape.

We're ready to get rolling on today's topic. So how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good. It's a great day here. The weather is not fantastic, but you know what? I still feel great, so we're going to go with it. My son's birthday is tomorrow. He's seven years old, but we did his birthday celebration on Saturday.

He went to one of those trampoline jump park things. If we could harness that energy inside of that room, forget solar, forget nuclear, we got it right there. We just need to harness the six year olds at a trampoline park, because they are crazy, just like going from bouncing, climbing up and down and stuff like that. And then they sleep like rocks that day. Oh, yeah, good time. That's what it's all about. That's fantastic. And it was raining too. So that has to be the perfect indoor activity. Oh, that when it's all about that's fantastic and it was raining too so that has to be the perfect indoor activity oh that when it's raining outside like all right let me just run them in here let them run rag in it's perfect so we'll love it awesome do we have anything on the marketing

minute or should we dive into differentiation today i think we've got an interesting topic i was gonna say the only point i have is just that it sounds like we're on the chat gpt4 sounds like that is the most recent version to come out. So I anticipate that results will be a little different today than they were over the weekend or last week, or as they start to roll that out. Very quick point, but that is, we've got the newest version of chat GPT and it's chat GPT-4 that's officially been released by Microsoft. I love how the release time is now like days or like weeks, maybe it's like the longest release time. It used to be like when you, when we were like kids and we would get like new versions of software, it might be like, yeah, 16 months later, you'll get version two.

Now it's like 10 days later. It's yeah, here's the fourth version. It's 15 billion pieces stronger than the last version. It's like, how is that possible? I don't understand it, but yeah, we'll play with it and see how it goes. They had some more image AI generation stuff over the weekend for my LinkedIn posts, because once I have one thing that works well on LinkedIn, I just keep doing it. Like what's the, I think that's the Seth Godin thing, right? Marketers ruin everything. It's because we take what's working and we like

beat it into the ground relentlessly. We'll see how those go. But just, it always is impressive to me because in mid journey, you have to go in like the public discord. So you see what other people are doing while you're doing what you're doing. And so like, there's a weird form of like accountability there. Don't put any weird prompts in there because everybody else is going to see it. Yeah. Fascinating what people are doing with this stuff, like photorealistic, like interiors of properties and things like that. Stuff that might even touch the vacation rental industry. You could make like a real looking property that doesn't exist and have people rent it.

And I feel like this is going to be challenging for the platform sites and people out there to differentiate what's real, not the technology on the AI image generation stuff is really people say it about the tech stuff. It's like mind blowing. But the image stuff to me is like another level of mind blowing where it like looks like an actual property, but it's not real at all whatsoever. Yeah, this is GPT-4 is multimodal. So encompassing text, speech, images and video.

So taking it to the next level there a little bit too. So I'm interested to see, especially in the video and text or excuse me, an image side of things. Yeah. If you've got people who are going out to the platforms and creating bogus listings, oh good. Airbnb has one more thing to look at fraudulently on, on that side of things. But yeah, this is, this is, I, this is that next iteration and certainly chat GPT open AI aren't the only ones who are doing it. So they're actually catching up, I think on the images and video side of things, but with the

infrastructure they've got in place and certainly the money that they've got in place, I'm sure they'll catch up in a hurry or they will exceed what we've already seen. What else exceeds what I typically see? Companies that are very unique and differentiated. So our topic today is pretty interesting, I think, which is it's all about what makes I've talked about this before, like what makes a property unique. I did this a few weeks ago on the other podcast that I host, Art of Hospitality with Adam and Scott. I'll put that in the show notes if

people want to check that out because they interviewed me. It was like the opposite of what it should be and it was actually fun. So that turned out pretty good. But I thought we'd go down the thread before we hit record. We were talking just generally about the approach that we had on certain, I guess we'd say like client selection processes or just like ways that we consider ways that we think about clients and what makes them a good fit or a bad fit. And one of our most popular episodes, we pulled data the other day on this is the episode we did a while ago on choosing between in-house marketing, a freelancer or an agency, which I thought was interesting because it's not really our core topic where we talk about like the techniques or the tactics behind marketing. It was more so like strategic

decisions at the company level. So I thought we'd go down this thread today and see where it leads us. Maybe this won't be our longest episode, but I think we just have a few thoughts on both sides about how to structure this conversation about what makes a property or sorry, what makes a property management company, I should say, unique and what makes someone want to go to it. So I'll maybe get us started here. And then let's just see where it takes us. And I was giving examples before we started recording about how like, we work with certain companies that seem to have it a little more figured out than other companies. I guess that's like the nicest way of saying it. Yeah. Some people are coming into this and they're stumbling along. And I've been told by people before it's like we jumped out of a plane without really a parachute on and we're trying to figure it out

as we go along. I've got some of those people I've worked with and hey, me too sometimes, right? So I've been in that bucket. I certainly can empathize with that. And then I have these clients who almost have a sense of like calm about them oftentimes, even during COVID, especially people we've been with for a while that have done that. And one came to mind and we were talking about him before we started recording. And this is a property manager who's in a very popular market who only targets condos. So that is his only type of inventory that he has. He doesn't manage any homes in this particular market that he's in. And as a result, the homes are desirable in his market, I would say, more desirable than condos. And he basically has no competition. He does have competition, he'll use a unit

every once in a while, he'll use a unit to a large property manager. But he really only does condos. In fact, he's taken it so far, he only does condos, he owns a personal home in this market. And he doesn't even list it with himself. He listed with property manager in the market that does home rentals as opposed to condo rentals, because he thinks why put my home on the site, it breaks the sort of positioning that I have in my company opposed to condo rentals because he thinks, well, I put my home on the site. It breaks the sort of positioning that I have in my company to only do condos. So he actually lets his own home

that he owns with his wife now into another rental program. I also wonder if he also sees how they do things and learns from that as well, which is interesting. But I said that and you had some thoughts

around this law of how people actually come in and look for on the owner side, why they look for a specific manager, why they don't. I'd love to hear your perspective on this. You've seen the inside of a lot of companies. What do you see as, oh, that's unique, or oh, I bet that's something that really sets them apart. Because a lot of people use the same stuff. Oh, we clean the property, we set the good rates, we do a good job. Everybody says that. So what

actually makes someone more differentiated? What's your thoughts on that? It is. I think you've, and again, we've worked with people who are new in the market, old in the market that have that established differentiating factor with that, that it factor, whatever it is. I think it really starts with differentiating or building that brand. I think that's something that when you have that brand equity built into place, part of our conversation there was we know that some, that ex propertyproperty manager in the area has been around for a while. They've been well known. So what is it that's either turning people on to them or turning people off from them? I think making sure that you are determining what really sets yourself apart. Is it the fact that you provide better? The default is we make you more money. That's it.

Or we provide a better vacation. High level. What are you going to say? Yeah, everybody's going to say that they provide a higher level stay or a higher level experience. But, but I do, I think that those people who truly try to define themselves by the, I mean, they define their niche and then they truly try to act upon that. And they're not going to make concessions. I really do think that's a huge factor in the success, both on the traveler and the guest side. I mean, it is, you're not going to, you're going, I think it's cyclical from the standpoint of, okay, I'm only going to take beachfront homes, or I'm only going to take multimillion dollar homes.

I'm only going to provide, I think of a partner, some people take it to that next step, a company like an exceptional stays where, exceptional stays, but we're not providing good, we're not providing great, we're providing exceptional. But there are some companies out there that have truly established this is what we're going to be. And they're not compromising. And they're not compromising either on the owner side of taking in a bad property or taking in something that doesn't meet their standards just because. That's never a good reason to make a business decision there. Same thing. If you're only looking to provide week-long stays or month-long stays or multi-week stays, something like that, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to generate that experience. You're trying to create that experience. And I

think one of those defining factors is you really are thinking about it from, and I lost my train of thought right in the middle of this, so I'm going to try to backtrack there, but it is, you're really truly trying to define yourself as one, I mean, as one something, as something that you're not going to go back on. And like I said, I'm getting a little cyclical here. It's like stick to a didness. Like you have a set of more, it's like personal morals. If you have personal morals and you say, I'm not going to do X, Y, Z, and then you violate them at certain turns,

you should be disappointed in yourself. And I think that there's companies that do that with respect to like positioning or marketing or approaching where they say, like you said, I'm only going to take beachfront homes. And then someone talks them into, oh, what if you took this one? It's a block away, but like, it's close.

It's nice and blah, blah, blah. And and then they take it and then it seems like a small misgiving but then it's oh i booked this home because you said you only offer beachfront homes and it's block away what the heck and then you have an upset guest you get a negative review and you're in a tricky position in that respect so you took the site that's how thank you that's exactly where i was going to go with it i think what you say makes a lot of sense there with respect to it's like respecting your wishes or like your command, but also what makes your property stand out in the marketplace or sorry, your company stand out in the marketplace.

I keep using these terms interchangeably, property or company, but in some cases they are one of the same. But what makes your company stand out, I think is having something like that. Here's what we provide. Here's what we don't provide. Maybe in some cases, here's the type of guests that we're a good fit for. Here's the type of guests that we're not a good fit for. And a lot of people don't stick to that. They tend to just grab on

whatever's closest to them. It's like rock climbing. They just grab on the next thing, you know, that's close to them. They don't really think about what the actual consequences are of that behavior. And I've done this too, by the way. So I'm not sitting here preaching from some high horse. I've made mistakes. And before we hit record, I was sharing a story about how I botched a relationship recently and I didn't do what needed to be done. And this person was upset. And I sat there and said, I think they should be. We didn't deliver on what we said was going to happen, but it's also a learning lesson for me to say, okay, well now I can come back the next time and scope it better and arrange the contract in this way where it would have been more successful

on both sides. And even though I did make a mistake, it was a reversible mistake in some respects because shake hands and move on from it. And hopefully no one's too upset long-term from it. It was just a mistake to take on a project in the first place. And I think the same thing applies to our clients that we work with. Who's the type of owner they're taking on and why? And the story I was telling you earlier was that I believe that a lot of guests, a lot of owners are just look for a good guest marketing. I've said this before because good guest marketing is usually a pretty good indicator that you know what you're doing, right? The analogy I drove was that if you were the top, if you're in a very attractive man on Tinder, you will attract many women on Tinder, right? Because they look

for the most attractive man. They're not really looking to settle for the 50th most attractive man in their area. They want the most attractive man in their area. So the top 2%, and there's some studies that back up this kind of story that I'm telling here. There's studies that indicate that the top two or three or 4% of men on Tinder get 90% of the matches, or they get the overwhelming majority of the matches from women on Tinder, assuming they're straight and all that, because that's what maybe women are drawn to is these most attractive men. And certainly vice versa. The difference is that there's no mutual matching on Tinder because the 100th most attractive man is swiping on the most attractive woman and she's not even considering him. Not to get all relationship on this, but I think the same logic applies,

the same power law applies in the world of vacation rental management, where if you own a million dollar beach home, why would you ever consider the upstart? What would the upstart have to offer you that would be more appealing than you talk to a manager in the market who's very established, they have 500 homes that are management, and they're like, yep, we do this all day, every day. We've got a team of 65 people. We've got trucks. We've got this website.

We have all these fast guests. They built up a little competitive moat around their business that makes them very attractive. They got the six pack and they got the abs and all this kind of stuff. They're tall, all the things that you might look for, right? They can provide those characteristics to the homeowner. So that's kind of the way that I approach that or think about that is that if you're the fifth biggest, 10th biggest, 20th biggest property manager in the market, you have to figure out a way to try to put something out there that makes you appealing. And I think trying to say that you're the best on revenue, like you said, prove it. If that's true, then prove it, right?

Point me at specific examples that you can say, okay, I'm the best on revenue. And here's my revenue publicly on these 10 properties. Show me someone that does more on those properties than me. That actually would be a very, I think, aggressive, but compelling move. If you're the best on revenue, show it to me. Give me real numbers. Give me examples. Don't just say I'm the best on revenue. If you're the best on service, again, you could show that to someone. You could do a case study or an example of, hey, we have this problem or this hurricane came through and I was there on the front lines making sure that our homeowners' homes were in good shape. I put sandbags up and our competition just evacuated and did do a thing. You could point to specific

behaviors or proof that you have that you can map to these sort of characteristics. So I know you've seen this on a lot of landing pages, similar unique propositions or values that the company provides, but what are ways that someone could prove that? All the things we're talking about, how can you not just say it, but actually live it or show examples of that excellence? Yeah. And I think really a lot of that has to do with, especially on the owner side, local versus national. I mean, you think of everybody's trying to, it's easier to fight off the value of a cost or an evolve because they do maybe, yeah, maybe they will make you more. Maybe that's their selling point is we're going to make you 50% more. We're going to do this. We're going to do that or risk-free or whatever that is. But it is. And when you've, when you're in a market where you think about some of those mountain markets

in Utah and in Colorado, there's a lot of people trying to go after a very small number of available rentals, maybe absentee owned homes or something like that. So to differentiate yourself against involved CASA, easy. To differentiate yourself against another 20 to 30 unit professional property manager, that's tricky. It is. And I think that's where one of the exercises I can remember doing back at TravelNet was looking in great detail, three things, vision, mission, and core values. Truly, it is. It's that about us section of your website, but really diving in and saying, this is how we're going to establish ourselves, establish our persona of what we are. What kind of a business are we going to be? What is our vision? And not wavering from that. What is our mission? What not wavering from that? These

are our core values. And those are the things that again, we get into that moral side of things. It's that those things that you're not going to concede to those things that you are going to run your business off of. And I think that, again, you can think about ways to refine or define your company and your business and stuff like that. But I think those are really important. It goes into one of those other base levels that we talk about when we look at the tiers of some of these core principles of how you run your business. How are you going to run your business?

Yeah, you have to have a website. Yeah, you have to have a landing page. You have to have all your socials in place. But how are you going to fundamentally run the business? And for those people who are just entering the space that maybe have run businesses on the equity side of things or run businesses in the real estate side of things or run a business that's not hospitality focused or generated, I think that is. I think that's really important in trying to help further define yourself because without that, without really giving yourself something that's going to pull at the heart

strings, it is at the base level, our hospitality industry is still more about emotion than maybe the numbers. And you want a cheap booking or you want to take, you want to make the most money possible. You want to get the cheapest room possible when you want to combine the quality and the quantity there. But do, I think for some of those people who are really trying to redefine their business or just make that initial, create that initial definition, take a look at how you're going to run the business. Then think about some of the features and the factors that are going to play into that.

We're only going to take nice homes. We're only going to take a certain number of homes, or we're only homes. We're going to make sure that each home that we have is managed by a specific type of team. So you've got your house, your maintenance, your housekeepers, all those things. It is. Put it, make it the starting point, not a secondary or tertiary point where you're recovering after you've already established the business. It is. If you don't have those things in place to start, I think you're doing yourself a disservice. And in the long term, hopefully you're still gonna be able to sustain.

Hopefully there's enough good about you, but don't make it so gray. Make it clear, make it black and white. What you do, how you're better than other people and how you're going to deliver a better experience for your homeowners and for your guests. Yeah, I'm working on this thing right now. It's not fully done yet.

I'll post it on LinkedIn when it's done. I think hopefully in the next week or so, we'll have it finalized. So I won't be able to put this in the show notes, but follow me on LinkedIn, you'll see it there. And it's this idea of there's three cups or three buckets, if you will, that you have to pour effort into

when you're starting anything that we do like marketing related. There's a diagnosis cup, there's a strategy cup, and there's a tactics cup. And I think sometimes people come to us and they want to go straight to that one. They want to go straight to the tactics. What are the things I can do now that are going to get me more bookings or maybe on the homeowner side, they're going to get me more inventory today. What are the little tips and tricks that I don't know that you guys know you guys are the whizzes with this stuff, right? What are the,

what's the cold email subject line that's going to get someone to open my email? That's a little cheaty kind of tactic, right? And those things do work, by the way. I'm not completely dismissing that. A lot of what we do day to day is tactical execution. But before you get there, I think before you get on like doing things, the first two buckets or cups, the diagnosis cup and the strategy cup, I think is what you're referencing there. At least that's what I'm thinking about it right now, where the diagnosis cup is like, what are you doing and why are you doing it that way? And how does it all map to what you're referencing there. At least that's what I'm thinking about it right now, where the diagnosis cup is like, what are you doing and why are you doing it that way? And how does it all map to what you said a second ago, your goals, your mission, your vision, all those

different things. That's a diagnosis. You have to sit there and sit down with a patient and figure it out a little bit. What's your blood pressure? What's your blood here? What's your cholesterol, all those things, and then give them the right course of treatment. And you could have twins, right? Maybe in some respect, you could have two companies that are the same size with the same number of units that are in two different markets and have completely different diagnoses of what they need to work on because they might have fundamentally different problems. So just looking at the size of the company or what they do isn't necessarily enough to know what the diagnosis might be. So that's, I'm actually trying to work on my side,

making that a bigger focus of our initial engagement. I don't want to do that forever, but like initially spending a little bit more time on what do you have? What don't you have? Instead of just asking a few questions, which is how we do it today. And that's got us to where we are. I'm not like boohooing that whole idea, but rather sitting down really and understanding like, okay, this person is zero to a 10 on this particular area of the business. They're like a one and they need to be like a five or six to even have a chance in this market. So like on the SEO side, let's get like tactical just for a second. If someone is new in the Orlando market and they want to rank for Orlando vacation home rentals, and you don't have like at least a thousand links coming in the door, I'm probably

going to give you a zero on like your link building scale, if you will, because you are so far behind in such a competitive market that it is going to be pushing a boulder up a hill is probably easier compared to that task of getting someone ranking for a competitive keyword like that. But they may have awesome homes. They may have awesome guest care. They may take care of the owner. They may drive a lot of revenue on listing sites, but it's going to be very hard for them to do that particular thing, that action of getting them to the top of Google when they have no history on the website side of things. So that's one example, right? So early on the diagnosis stage, spending a little bit more time, whether it's with a vendor, an agency, a partner, whatever,

or just internally sitting down and really being honest with yourself. That's always the hardest thing to do is being honest with yourself, I think, about where you are in different areas of your business, where you're spending too much time, not enough time, and what would make you more appealing if you worked on those things. So if I went and spent a lot of time on this area, I might be more appealing. So my diagnosis is I'm weak in SEO. That's going to be a key growth driver, I believe, for me long. So long term, once I have that in place, I would I'll have more success if I have that in place. But today, it's a two out of 10 would get it to at least be like a five or six and give me a chance to start to give me some momentum on that will be doing these five things. Okay, that's the strategy.

So the strategy is like, we're going to increase our presence in Google by doing these sort of we're going to create content, we're going to improve the site from a technical perspective, they will redesign the website, we'll go to our PMS provider of choice and get the website redesigned to using all the best practices. And then tactically, we just do those things, right? We got to go build two links a month. We got to go put out five new blog posts. We got to go do that. That's just a do. That's like the last stage, honestly. But if you get misaligned a little bit up here, it's like the plane story, right? You're like two degrees off, but then you're trying to go from Seattle to Florida and you're two degrees off over 3000 miles,

you end up in New York City or something like that. Right. The same thing I think can happen with like setting together, putting together the plan for your business. If you're just a little bit off, but you do that repeatedly over like months or years, you end up pretty far off where you need to actually go. And that's something that I think I see quite a bit as people who are off balance or they're off where they want to be. And they don't even know how to get back to where they should go. And that's where, that's where, like I said, I'm trying to get a little bit better on the diagnosis stage. But I think with homeowner marketing, it's more acute because I was saying this earlier, when, if I do a decent job on guest marketing, I'll get wins in the door,

right? There's so many bookings that are going to come in. Like we would have to just be horribly mispriced or like something like that to get a client out of this baby and not actually get some level of success. Now, is it as much as every client wants all the time? No, but like we can chip away at it, right? We can make little stair step improvements on that kind of stuff with homeowner though, on the homeowner side of things, there's no guarantee of any of that. You could market, you could have 20 leads a month coming in and essentially get no outcome from it. Unfortunately, you've seen that. Yeah, that's the pain. And I think that's where every partner that we work with at Venturi has an amazing team,

a great sales team, or a great BD person that really can take care of the deals that it is. I don't think I've met a partner yet in one of the early onboarding meetings that doesn't say that they have a closing rate somewhere between 80, 90, 100%. Of course, when you actually get those leads through the door, it's a little different because what a lot of professional managers are used to are realtor referrals or other homeowner referrals or whatever that is. And those come in the door and yeah, it's easy. They already know that they want to be there. It's just a matter of making sure the numbers are right or something like that. But it is, when we're trying to catch people who are searching for, admit a high intent still,

people are searching for vacation rental management or Airbnb management or property management in a specific area. Yeah, that's still a high intent lead. That's someone who's hopefully clearly demonstrating some type of intent to look for a management or of their home or whatever their unit is there. But as if I can have someone fill out a form asks specific questions, but if it's not a right fit for them, then there's another thing that if it's not a right fit for their portfolio, or if there's not something else that's tangibly there, yeah, they might be a harder sell. But more often than not, these people who are fits for the program and who do have multiple touch points, emails, texts going back and forth, they're still

not closing the deal. And that's, I think it tells you that, I mean, it is, there is competition out there. There are a lot of owners or property managers out there that can say X, Y, and Z. And it is, I think that's always the question for me is, what was it? So they chose you over you. What was it? Are you comfortable asking that homeowner why they chose XYZ over your professional management business? Because I think more willingness to do that would certainly give people more of those insights as to, okay, what was it? How did I lose? Where did I miss? Was it the numbers game? Was it home care? Was it housekeeping? Was it that my people I'm doing cleans weekly as opposed to after every stay? What really was that? And again, how can you help it help use that information to better define what you're delivering for value? Or is that a core value? Is it a true core value? Or is it just something that you build into some of the marketing materials that you use down the road to make it more clear? Is it that you didn't communicate it or is it that you just don't do it and you have to make that as an update? I think that's another item there. You look at the

guest side of things. I don't have the right rental. Okay. So I'm going to find a two bedroom as opposed to a three bedroom. Okay. I didn't talk about how we do if we have a 50 point inspection as opposed to i we talk about weekly cleanings or something like that like what it's i feel like it's much more detailed in the reasons why not as opposed to the reasons reasons why not all dates and rates didn't fit reasons why not the unit type didn't fit for me it feels like there's there's a much crazier can of worms to try to open up there when you're trying to figure out the root cause of why someone didn't choose you on the management side of things. And I think the other side of it is higher ticket price. You're not

just doing a, not just a thousand dollar or $5,000 booking, but we're talking about you own a half million dollar home, million dollar home, multimillion dollar home, and you're making a decision on who's going to take care of your home. It is, it's a big decision to make. And for, I think, how can you set yourself up for the most? How can you give that homeowner, that potential homeowner, the most granular information about your business to give them every detail that they would need to feel comfortable about letting you take over. And I think it's, it is, it's definitely much more exacting than, oh, what do you need to show a guest to make sure that guests, they book with you the right amenities, the right accommodations, and hopefully the right proximity to activities that they're looking to do along the way. So it's a struggle. Make the joke, I would have more hair

if I was staying on the guest side of things. Yeah, we'll see how I do on that over the next few years. You're probably right in some respect because it's a higher stakes game on the homeowner side for sure. But I would argue that the problems may look the same on the surface. But then when you dig in,

you really learn how detailed the decision and the criteria is on the other side. Because especially if you get a lot of bookings through an OTA, the guests actually trust the OTA, right, on the guest side. The guest looks on Airbnb and they say, okay, this person has 20 reviews. Airbnb seems to trust them. They're showing their property to me when I did this date search. There's some implied, there's some implicit trust in that particular scenario. There is no such product today.

TBD, we'll see what the future holds, but there's no such product today on the homeowner side where I can be like, Ooh, this company that I'm filling out to reaching out to is great. And I know it because of these verified reviews. You could, again, that's my earlier commentary about guest reviews or guest marketing. Sometimes it ends up being homeowner marketing. Cause if you saw a company that had 500 Google reviews, they were all happy. You went and saw their Facebook page. They had all this stuff going on. You went and followed them and you looked at some of their properties on the website themselves today. And you saw ones that were similar to yours. Oh, that's like down the street from mine. That one's over here. Oh, okay. Without even talking to them,

you've already got 80% of your questions answered. Like you know those things. So if you breach that conversation in a cold fashion, which is I know part of something that will happen on your side of things, there'll be a cold email reach out or a postcard and then a cold call occurs basically without really much knowledge of the company. And you're doing that. You've got to build a lot of trust. You're all the way over here. They're all the way over there. And you're going to have to go like slowly walk your way together and get to a spot where you're belly to belly shaking hands and hopefully figuring out how to get a deal done to manage that property. Whereas when someone comes to you almost in some respect, which is what a lot of my clients experienced even pre-Ventory, before Ventory even existed, I had clients who were growing

like crazy and it seemed like it wasn't them doing some amazing homeowner marketing technique or tactic a lot of the time. Usually it was more so just like people were coming to them because they were large presence in the market. So again, my Tinder analogy from earlier, they were drawn to them. They had this attraction, this magnetic almost capability of how they actually structured their company. And you're right. If you don't have that, you have to work triple time over time, probably even doing things you probably don't want to do long-term, but you have to get some wins on the board, like much lower commission. You might have to offer

better service or like different types of service. You might have to offer maybe less fees or no fees in some respect on things that you really should be charging or want to charge fees on, but you got to get some like wins on the board. You have to differentiate yourself in some way. And again, you said this earlier, or I said this earlier too, you have to be honest with yourself. I think you had a good note there where you talk about asking, calling that person and saying, Hey, homeowner, you chose to go with another company. Totally understand. Not going to, no, no pressure in any scenario, but we're just trying to improve. We're a small business. This is our passion. We believe that we, you know, can be the best option in this market. You don't feel that way today. and that's totally fine. I understand that. But so we can improve. Is there anything that we

could have done differently? Is there anything that maybe made you choose that other person? I've had to do that before in my past. I don't do it as much now as I used to. Every once in a while, I'll ask when we don't get a proposal signed. Usually it's the same answers now. It's like you're a little bit more expensive than I thought. And that in my mind isn't always like, I need to lower my prices. Usually that's, I need to show the value better of what I'm doing, or I need to figure out ways to increase the value of what I'm doing. Cause they didn't see it. They looked at the offer and they said, okay, not good enough. And they chose to move on. But man, you get some rough answers sometimes at times where

I've gotten criticized for my pitch. I've gotten criticized for my appearance before. I've gotten criticized in many ways before from people that decided not to work with me. That's not a good thing to hear. No one wants to hear that, right? Oh, you looked unprofessional or you didn't, I didn't trust you or I don't like how you're a remote company. I had someone tell me that a while ago. I like the fact that the company, the vacation rental management or marketing company

that chose was like an in-house, like a local team. And I was like, okay, that's just our philosophy. So if you don't vibe with, that's okay. I'm fine with them. And sometimes you get answers like that, where it just, it's a, it's just like dating. We'll keep doing that now. You're just not a good fit.

It's not that this person's bad or this person's bad it's just maybe a little bit of oil and water and that's okay too but i think you're only going to get better when you sit down and you make those have those tough conversations and self-evaluation and then you go through my diagnosis you know strategy tactics a cup of efforts right i'm going to put a lot of effort on this right now get that in good shape then i'm going to build a strategy and then i'm going to put the rest of my efforts into actually executing upon that strategy now that i know where i'm going what i'm doing and how i'm going to help that person yeah yeah i think it is i'm sorry you touched you touched on i think really one of the big is if price is the main point right is the main pain point that's not something you want to

compromise on because over time it is it does it's unfortunate when you have to do some of those no fees or lowered fees or something like that, because over time, people are going to expect that's going to be the expectation is that this wasn't a one time you're going to it is in over time, you are going to make a pretty strong statement of establishing what you're going to do and what you're going to say and not compromising there and saying, okay, if you didn't find the value, then I have to show you more value because it's not a matter of, I provide the value. I just have to make sure that they, as a property manager, as an agency, as anything we're doing, pricing, don't let be the the be all end all of what you're doing there because over time you will you you will put yourself in a position where you're trying to make people happy but by trying to make people happy and maybe lowering a cost you're

lowering taking money away from yourself you are you're not letting your the business grow long term you're not letting giving the true i I think it's the service level agreement that you want to give customers, partners, homeowners that you're working with, guests that you're working with, because it is it's more about that money and money. Money is a tricky, it's a steep slope to go down. I think we have to be so much more in tune to the qualitative on the hospitality side of things. We still have to understand the quantitative certainly, but it really does have to be about that qualitative. And if you can, I think that if you can deliver that qualitatively

superior experience, the money will follow like it is. People aren't going to over time. Yeah. You might lose one or two, but, you're going to end up with more money, even by turning down a few offers, options, whatever that looks like. I love that. Maybe we'll end on this, which is this is a old Seth Godin blog post. I searched it while you were chatting there. And I've used this quote a lot, but I actually forgot the second part of the quote. So the first part of the quote, I believe is still legit, which is the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. But I've never said the next piece after that quote. So maybe I'll read that and then maybe we can put a button on this one.

So this is a Seth Godin post. I'll link it in the bottom that he wrote in 2012. So my brain is not completely toast yet because I remember quotes from blog posts that I wrote that I read in 2012, probably when I was just out of college. Or no, I would have still been in college at that point. So there we go. There's a little bit of juice left up there in the tank between my ears. So here's the quote after that. He said, the problem with the race at the bottom is that you

might win. You might make a few more bucks now, but not for long and not with pride. Someone will always find a way to be cheaper or more brutal than you would be. The race to the top makes more sense to me. The race to the top is focused on design and respect and dignity and guts and innovation and sustainability. And yes, even generosity when it might be easier to be selfish. It's also risky, filled with difficult technical and emotional hurdles, and requires patient and effort and insight. The race to the top is a long-term path with a desirable outcome. Sign me up. So I'll put that link to that in the show notes. I think that's a perfect kind of summary of what we're talking about here today, which is that when you race to the top, you can actually

win in a way that makes sense to you and is authentic to you. And I think it talks about everything that we're discussing here today a lot more succinctly as Seth Godin does, because he is the guru's guru, if you will. But that's all I got. Anything else that you have top of mind for you right now? No, that nice little bow on that one. I do. I think that's the perfect quote to finish us off and send us in the next week.

Phenomenal. All right. If you have any topics or show ideas, we'd love to hear them. You could email me or Paul. My email is Conrad at builduphookings.com. Paul is Paul, P-U-A-L at bintori.com. We'd love to hear your feedback. We'd love reviews as always. If you have a review, I think we've grew up to a dozen or a few dozen on iTunes, but I think we're light on Spotify. So if you're a Spotify listener and you made it this far, we'd love some more Spotify reviews, but either way, thank you so much for listening and we will definitely catch you on the next episode.

Bye.