Heads In Beds Show - The Essential Building Blocks Of Building A Vacation Rental Company

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellVintory (homeowner marketing)🔗 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. All right, Paul. Glad to be back. So I think we have a great episode lined up for today. Today, we're going to be talking about the building blocks for building a great vacation rental management company. But I just wanted to dive in and check in with you. How are you doing?

I'm having a great week. We're recording this on Halloween. So it's that time of year where families, people with young children, which I know we both have, are getting excited for costume time. I've got Spidey and Ghost Spider going out in the neighborhood tonight. So I don't know, what do you have heading out for Halloween trick or treating tonight? Yeah, I've got an Enderman and I've got a pirate headed out of my house. Yeah, that's from Minecraft. Yeah, the six year old he's obsessed with Minecraft. Like, I get get it but i'm surprised he's as into it as he is i don't know like when i was a kid it was runescape that was like my game so sure i feel like this is a modern version of that anyways like it seems graphically somewhat similar but it seems more like i don't know it's not as engaging to me

i'm still like team minecraft all after 20 years later i still don't see the minecraft appeal so anyways yeah enderman and a pirate heading out. Don't know why the younger one wanted to be a pirate. And the baby, I think she's like the scallywag or something. There we go. There you go. That's a nice combo there. Awesome.

Yeah, as you said, it's Halloween. Do you want to do a quick marketing minute on what's going on in the industry and what's going on? Any specific headlines or anything that caught your attention? Oh, yeah. I think it's a sign that it's getting to the end of the year. We're heading to the last two months because I'm starting to see the, oh, here are 20 things to think about as you're starting to improve your SEO in 2023

or starting to get to the end of the year where you as a content writing team, I'm sure you've seen this. Maybe that stale time of year where we're trying to grasp at straws a little bit, but I was a little surprised to start seeing the top 20 list, top 10 list of things you can optimize for next year already. That's maybe me. You got to get them indexed though. You're not going to get them indexed unless you go in there.

I like that. It takes time. It takes time. Again, not a lot of things really caught my attention. I would say very broadly, I did see a few things that I looked at since where I think there's been a lot of changes, obviously, with the digital advertising marketplace. And one thing that caught my eye, I'll put a link here in the in the show notes, as always, that there was Apple was rolling out some new advertising, which isn't necessarily a huge impact for us. We don't

really do any like App Store advertising or anything like that, to my knowledge. But I do think that Apple is like the sleeping giant in a way. Apple has been rumored for a long time now to be working on a search engine. And why wouldn't next year be the year that they launched that? I think it makes a ton of sense. So that's one thing that caught my eye a little bit is like Apple's building out like a pretty robust like ad infrastructure. Again, mostly today it's for the app store. So I don't think it impacts anyone really listening. But if there was an Apple search engine in 2023, and that Apple search engine became the default search engine on, oh, I don't know, whatever it is, a billion iPhones around the world. If you look in analytics, at least when I do, the number one browser that people access most of my clients' websites on

is Mobile Safari, and that's aka iPhones. So I think that's something that could be pretty robust as we go along. I think Facebook continues to stumble and Twitter went private. Elon Musk took it over, I think it was last week. I forget, it was Thursday or Friday, something like that. But Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter. So a lot of changes occurring. We'll see. I don't find Twitter to be a particularly productive channel from like a vacation rental marketing standpoint.

I like spending time on there. Like I have people that I follow and there is like a community of people who are like the hosts and like the manager crowd on Twitter. So I've seen that. But we'll see. Like it's an interesting thought experiment as to how Elon can make a social platform better for everybody because Twitter even though I like it certainly has its flaws so yeah we'll have to keep tabs on that and see where all those things go but I like you didn't see massive shifts or upgrades and I do wonder if there's a bit of that like fall q4 let's just

focus on making all the advertising dollars we can if you're google right like these next few months are going to be critical for you from an econ perspective and I think that ties in a bit to vacation rentals as well people People typically plan, I think, a lot for that family vacation. Post Thanksgiving, post Christmas to New Year, that'll be the time where you might have a chance to see your family. And typically my clients do see a little bit of a lift in terms of overall guest demand bookings occurring during that timeframe. So I suspect that'll be the same this year, maybe a little bit muted compared to where it was last year, but we'll just have to see how the numbers go. And we'll share updates as appropriate as we go along here.

Yeah, I think the notable news that actually happened was it is the fact that Twitter, Musk is now in charge of Twitter, and Google and Facebook both missed earnings by a pretty significant amount, obviously, Facebook much more than Google. So I'm interested to see what as we know, this holiday season is where a lot of that revenue is generated. If there's any recovery there or what Facebook looks as an advertising platform in 2023, because I do believe that there's going to start to be some shifts. They change everything behind the scenes, but they're not making it any easier to actually advertise on the platform. So leave it there. Yeah, no, I think that's a good place to leave it. Maybe there's a future episode in our list of things that we could dive into more on the

Facebook ad side of things. But today I really like our topic quite a bit. So we were talking about the building blocks for building a great vocational management company. And I think we've both seen this. So I really liked what we came up with. And this might be a little bit more of an intro fundamental episode. If you're very far along and you're doing tens of millions of dollars a year in bookings, this episode may not be a ton of value to you. But I hope we can send this up to people that we talk to in the future. There's a decent amount of table stakes you need to compete in this game. Last week we talked about, or last episode, I should say, we talked about someone that

you were referencing who came up to you at the VRMA event and a large national competitor went in and bought two of their property management companies in their market. And the resources of a large national company, whether it is a vacasa or whether it is someone in that space, they have a lot more resources than you. So I think that if you're going to go compete, this is like my entry point here to get us going. If you're going to go compete in the marketplace and you're saying that, okay, I'm going to go offer vacation rental management services in destination XYZ. I almost don't know if that really matters for the point I'm about to make. There's people there that have been there longer than you probably. They have more resources than you.

They have more marketing budget than you have. They probably have more built out teams than you have. They probably have better built out processes. There's a lot of stuff that you have if you're coming in new that they already have set up. So I think the one thing that sometimes you and I both see on either the guest side or the owner side, and sometimes these things coalesce to some degree, is people come in and they say, I'm going to compete in this market. Pick a market, right? I usually use a very competitive market, like a Destin, Florida,

Myrtle Beach, Orlando, right? And they say, company XYZ that does this, they're old, and they're slow, and this and that. And maybe that might be the case, maybe it depends on the client. That's not always completely wrong. But it's often something that they underestimate how much momentum that other company has, and how much it's going to take them to get up to the minimum acceptable standard of what that other company can deliver. And we can talk a little bit too about value and commission and like how to build the company and things like that. But I've seen this, I've seen companies go from five or 10 to 100. Over the past few years, I've won that I've talked about before on the show that's done that. And there's a lot of growing pains. And there was years where he

was very candid with me, the founder of the company, co-founder, where he was writing himself checks that were very small. They were putting a lot of money back in the business. And a lot of people would say, oh, you're at 50 properties and you're growing like crazy. Surely your personal bank account must be flourishing. And that was not really the case because he was putting a lot of it back into the business. So these businesses are asset light in the sense of it's not like you're buying homes in many cases. Very few clients that we've worked with have that model. There's a few out there, but it's not super common. But it's not asset none.

You need a lot of things to get going and to compete in the marketplace, whether that's getting inventory or whether that's managing that inventory and marketing it and scaling it from there. So you had a little list. I would love for you to get us started. When you say building blocks, I guess, what does that mean to you? And then what's those few things that you see at a high level that a company might need to get entered into the marketplace and actually compete and make their offering at least comparable

to a larger national player or regional player? That's very well defined. Yeah. When I started, I just started throwing stuff down on that list. But I said, initially, website, need a website, social handles. And I say social handles because do you have to be engaged initially? We'd love you to be. I think that's a best practice certainly, but you at least have to secure them so that someone else isn't taking them or that you just have that. It's more real estate.

It's more digital real estate to think of there. Brand identity, that's a big idea, but I think it's something that people overlook quite a bit when they're thinking about starting a new business or a new brand and then budget. I think what we see a lot on the owner's side of things is that, okay, we're going to be able to do this and this. We're going to make all these relationships with realtors and we're going to be able to do this. And then we're going to advertise on top of that. What are you going to advertise with? What money is there? And I think really giving people that right mindset of how much, what does it take to acquire a new guest? What does it take to acquire a new property? And what does it take to just build up some of these resources? That's a very

high level looking at it, what it takes to get a new owner or get a new guest. But there's a lot of budget that you need just to get the framework started, get the systems in place, get the tech stack in place. So there's a whole lot of items there that, and I was admittedly quite brief with my list, but I know you've got quite a few on your list as well, and you dive in quite a bit deeper. What do you have on your list there? Yeah. So I think that I agree with everything you said and the brand identity piece, that's one line item, but there's a lot to, we can try to unpack a little bit more as we go along here, which is like the most obvious question to me is like, what does your company stand for? What do you offer? And how is it different in the marketplace? Because I think that the problem that I see often, and I feel like we've talked about this many times in the past is that you're entering

into the marketplace and you say, I'm going to manage your home. I'm going to do a good job. I'm going to maximize your revenue. I'm going to make sure it's clean. I'm going to make sure your asset is taken care of. And I have the distribution channels that are Airbnb and Vrbo to get your property bookings. Right. Okay. That's my reaction to that. It's like, you and everybody else, right? Those are not necessarily things that really move the needle in a meaningful way. If my friend was considering a property manager in XYZ someplace in California, and they sent me some of the lists that I just mentioned, if they sent me a property manager that said that, I'd say, okay, good. That's a good place to start from. This path is like a logical one to go down,

but I wouldn't see anything there and be like, oh my God, you're going to put my property in Airbnb. Holy smokes. That's amazing, right? That's like, again, table stakes. We were just talking last episode about Vegas. I'm like, when you go to Vegas and you're even a professional better or something like that, you better walk in with a big stack of chips to get going, right? You need to play enough hands to actually know what's going on. I think the same thing applies here. In order for you to get, let's say, 50 homeowner calls and actually get those 10, 15 homes to really get your company kickstarted some momentum, there's a lot that has to be done. So my list overlapped with yours quite a bit. I more so

just intended to expand upon it. I said brand name, and then you touched on brand identity, which I would argue is more important. But brand name, that's often overlooked. And that's critical because I see all the time companies that are named very generically, and then you actually can't even find the company in Google because they're called like beachfront vacation homes or something like that. And they don't have the.com. So what I said is like brand name, it has to be unique. It has to be something that other people aren't using out there in other markets. Certainly not in your market, but even other markets out there. And if you miss on, that could be a real stumbling block to you getting going. Imagine you do tell a friend

or a family member, oh, XYZ manages my home or, oh, I stayed with XYZ, whether the owner side or the guest side. And the name of your company is like Beachfront Vacation Homes or something like that. And you won't like beachfront dash vacation homes dash.com or whatever. And it's like, they search that and they can't find your company like your toast. So I think brand identity and brand name are two things that if you've made a mistake here, it actually is going to hurt you for years potentially, down the road, the logo and things like that are fine. That's more of a secondary thing. Okay, we have to look a certain way. That's, that's great. My thing was like a brand name that's open, available, not being used by other property

managers. And then that.com domain name, I'm still pretty bullish on.com. I don't really see a way around that. If you have to pay at a client I worked with a while ago who didn't want to pay to get the non dash version of their domain name. So it was like, geo vacations.com. But there was a dash between the two. And I convinced this person like, No, you need to go pay that $5,000 to go get geo vacations.com. And the good news was she was ranking for that brand. So that's a positive thing. But like that dash is going to kill you. People are going to miss, they're not going to be able to get to your website. It's going to be a problem. So yeah, brand name, brand identity, and then open and available.com domain name. When I say open, I mean, you might

have to pay it. You have to pay a domain squad or $5,000 to get your domain name. But if that's the name you're going to go with, then you're going to build this company over the next 10 years. That's dropping the bucket as far as your overall total expenses you're going to have. Direct booking website was my number three thing there. So once you have those things set up, I do think you need at least the basic direct booking website built out at first to really at least consider doing any sort of marketing activities to try to get people to come there. There's a lot of PMS companies out there nowadays that offer template sites. Do I think any of them are amazing? No, I don't. But I do think you can start with a template site. I don't think you need necessarily to go custom right away. And certainly there's a lot of companies

out there that offer custom sites, but they typically will be a $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 investment. And if you don't have that up front, I think you can manage it for a little while. But earmark that. It's not going to be too long before you're going to need to introduce that custom website because I guarantee your competition has made that investment in any competitive market. And if you're not making that investment, you're just going to look amateurish relative to the crowd. So that's another thing that I had on here. And then on that website, you certainly need an owner management landing page that lists

your services, what you offer, again, what's actually unique about your company, that sort of thing. And then we touched on a second ago, but certainly you need a PMS platform to manage all of your bookings and things like that. There's a billion of them out there. It's not the scope of our conversation here to find it. If you're interested, maybe we'll do a different episode about that down the road. But you certainly need like a home for all of your data when you're starting to work with other owners and things like that. So maybe we can dig in on tier one there,

and maybe some mistakes that you've seen along the way. Like I touched on a few with like brand names and not having the.com domain name. But what about the website side of things? This is something that you've encountered quite a bit where people want to get going, but they don't even have a website or they have a $10 a month Squarespace site. What's your perspective on what's like the MVP? What's like the minimum viable product that has a website to like really get some traction and get going and get those first 10 owners or whatever the case may be? Yeah, I do.

I think that one of the main is it's that slimmed down version of the website. It's fine. What you need to make sure you're really optimizing for on that website is making sure that people know where you are and people know what you're offering. I think that seems so simple. But the fact that when you get to, I've seen some of these businesses that are three, six months into running things, And they're talking about vacation rental management, property management, just at a very high level, not specific to market, not specific. And it goes back to our conversation from a couple of weeks ago. But you really do have to have that plan of what you're going to do. And maybe that's something that we overlooked as a table stake as well, just a plan of where you're actually going to manage vacation rentals.

table steak as well, just a plan of where you're actually going to manage vacation rentals. Because I do think that there are so many people who are entering the space right now and they're seeing that, oh, I can make X, Y, Z. Okay, we've all seen the Airbnb bros. They're all out there. It's the easy investment and stuff like that. I can manage here and I can sign up vendors over here and I can make it all work from Orlando, Florida, even though I'm managing homes in Park City or Long Beach, Washington or wine country of California. That is, I think that's something where you do, you want to have an accommodations page. You want to have, you want to be people to be able to find the rentals that you are currently managing. I think that's something it's find in book. Having that access to be able to do that from a website is critical. I think you do. You want to talk about some of the, talk about that area. I think that's important. Whether

you're building out a specific blog for that or building out blog content for that, you should still be talking about what is happening in the area because those are some of those secondary search terms that are going to help people find you. And ultimately, and it is, it doesn't take people searching for lodging and accommodations that way. Contact us. Let people, give people an easy way to contact you. Because if you're that early on, people are going to have questions. So whether they're looking to book with your properties or have you manage their home, you'd really have to make sure that it's an easy contact. That should be really one of the most clear calls to action when you're starting that business because you want people to ask questions. You want to see if the work you're putting in is actually getting any output of people reaching out, connecting with you,

wanting to book, wanting to get more information about management, something like that. I mean, I think those are the very basic things that you're going to want to have for a website. And again, being able to have those distinct areas of a booking side of things and an owner side of things with vacation rental management companies, it has to happen because you're not going to just sit at five rentals or 10 rentals. So you're going to want to eat again. My assumption is you're starting this business because you want to grow the business, grow your revenue, grow over time and have something where maybe someday someone's going to acquire you or you're going to acquire someone or you're going to continue to grow the business. So having that thought of this is all I need and this is going to get me through for ever and ever.

It's your first website. I feel pretty confident in saying will not be your last website in the vacation rental space. So it is. It's what are those best practices you need and how do you grow from there? You touched on something that I've said to people recently, which is if you're in three markets or you claim you're going to be in three markets, but you have the resources of a company in one market or even half of the resources of a company in one market. Why are you taking your attention and splitting it three different ways? You know, when really what you need to do is take one market, go all in on that market, and then you have a chance. Like I think that what you described with, I'm going to remotely host four rentals that are in Dallas and I'm in

Orlando. Like maybe that works at a tiny scale, but if you're trying to be like the best property manager or the best person in a market, I think it's really challenging to do that. I also did rant a while ago about automation. People love in like the Airbnb bro guru space to say the word automation. This really bothers me. Like automation is a thing. Like you can automate certain elements of communication or, Hey, you get your door code automatically. You get your, um, you get certain things automatically. That's true. I believe that to be some degree. You can send the automated request to a cleaner

to clean the property. Like your business is not automated. Like a lot of what people call automation is just delegation. Like you just took a task that you were doing and you give to someone else and now they're doing it. But that's not automation. Automation is something completely different.

So that's another thing I think I see all the time is people claiming that they have an automated business or that this business can be automated. That's complete nonsense because wait till your cleaner doesn't show up one time. Wait till your handyman does the job but does it wrong. There's a billion things that can go wrong in this business. We all know that. And automation is not like a button you just click and things just automatically happen.

That's ridiculous. That's not at all how anything works. So that's kind of my sentiment, my feeling about, oh, I'm in market A and B and C and A is Colorado and B is Florida and C is New York or whatever. And you have four rentals in each market. I just think that is the hardest path to go down by a wide margin, unless those properties have some unbelievably unique characteristic. If you're like, I only manage whatever, 25 bedroom plus houses. And therefore I have a client that manages super high end luxury homes and many different markets, but it's hard. They have a team in each market do that. And this is a company that only has 50 listings, but they're super, super high end. So it's very resource intensive to do that. And if you misjudge how resource intensive it is, or you think like

you're going to be able to half do something and then the competition who's putting their whole effort into it and they started ahead of you, like you're bringing a knife to a gunfight in that respect, in my opinion. Yeah. If that's your model or you think, oh, I'm going to just fly under the radar and have five listings in each market, that's okay. But to your point, I don't think that's a company that's going to scale. That's not a company that's going to grow and be a top property manager

in three different markets. That's unbelievably challenging to do unless you do it through acquisition or do it through some other means or mechanism perhaps. But to do that, you need a ton of capital. So very few people have access to that amount of resources to make that a reality. And I feel like in the vocational industry, you can on one hand, the number of companies that can be in multiple markets and have the resources to do it at any sort of scale. And they struggle with that all the time too, these companies. If you were to ask them, they would say the same thing. It's hard. It's very

hard to do that, to operate in many different markets and keep the consistency and the quality and everything the same. And I think it is, you do look at the handful that do try to operate in multiple. And it is, typically what happens is you're not going to keep all, you may acquire M&A into a different market that you weren't in previously. into a different market that you weren't in previously. But are you going to keep those, all of those that keep the entire portfolio? No, it's pretty rare that happens. And I think that the added layer of complexity that's come about in the last 18 months, 24 months is regulation. You don't want to necessarily expand too much further outside of where you know the regulations, or if you're expanding, that better be one of the first questions that you're asking about. And maybe another building block here that we can add in after the fact is making sure you understand what the regulations are going to be. Because holy cow, if there was a bullet point that I heard more often than anything else, it's

if you haven't been regulated yet, it's coming. So whether you're in a traditional market, whether you're in a metropolitan market, whether you're in a metropolitan market, that's something that it has to be of consideration for you is how are you going to be able to expand your business and how is regulation going to affect that long term? Yeah. And I know in the past on the Venturi side, you guys have done like TAM analysis and TAM can be massively different depending on the regulations. There's a client that I'm aware of or a market that I'm aware of in Truckee in North Lake Tahoe. And my understanding is from afar that market, no new permits are being issued. This is the case in many places. So the only way you can get inventory is you have to take it from another

property manager, or you have to take a licensed permitted property from like self-managed to managed. So your pool of available rentals, I don't know the exact number, but let's say it's in the hundreds, a few hundreds or something like that in that market. Whereas there's markets where it's not largely unregulated, but it's largely pay your taxes and you're kind of like, okay, there's not a ton of like typically tourist vacation type markets. There's little pockets where there might be like HOAs that ban it. But if you're in like an Orlando, Florida or Myrtle Beach, it's very rare that you're going to run into like major regulation issues. But to that point, the time is so large, like how do you stand out from the crowd? Because there's 50 other

property managers in that market offering exactly the same thing. So, you know, if you're new, like you can only lean on some of these things for so long. Like ultimately, this is another thing I see come up all the time again, which is commissions. Like company A charges 30% commission, company B charges 20% commission. Therefore, an owner is going to choose me because I offer 20% commission. That's nonsense. I think because number one, you're missing the most important thing, which is what's the top line? What would you rather have, 20% of a small top line or 30% of a huge top line?

Or sorry, I live vice versa than that. Sorry. If you're going to have 70% of a huge top line as the owner or 80% of a tiny top line as a small manager. So if the manager in your market, or if you're considering becoming the manager and you want to be the best in that market, you're going to have to not just generate bookings on channels, right? We talked about this before. Channels are great distribution. That's fine. Use Airbnb, use Vrbo. They're great. We love them. They're fantastic. Or we tolerate them at least. But that's not like the best property managers

that you and I have been exposed to and worked with in the past. They get the minority of their bookings from channels. They get a lot of bookings direct. So to compete with that in the short term is not feasible. It's not possible, but at least you need to have the mindset of what am I offering that's different. And commission, I think is actually one of the worst ways to go about it in my experience, because commission, if you're making your cut of the pie smaller and you have fewer resources, you're actually just inhibiting your growth. You're not really benefiting it. Maybe you might convince an owner here and there who's, oh yeah, you're going to charge me 20% commission. This other property manager charges me 30%. But I would argue that's like the worst way to grow because you're actually building in

some ways an unscalable model. The more homes you get, your margins are actually going to get worse, not better. Because you're going to have to hire people and grow. And then you're going to have to go back and charge the people 30% commission anyways. So I think commission at first is like the worst thing to be negotiating upon. Maybe you convince some people to do it. Actually, Lino was talking about this at the VRMA event. He was saying that he has these conversations with homeowners. He's seen it in X days.

And he was saying, I learned the company XYZ offers 15% commission. And he says it in such a matter-of-fact way, but he was joking. He was like, if you're looking for cheap, you found it. And just the way he said it, that whole room was laughing because it's so true. There's some owners that want cheap and that's what they're looking for. And I don't know, maybe that cheap person can deliver at a certain scale or at a certain thing. But if that's the type of company you want to build, like that's like my favorite quote, that Seth Godin quote, the problem with the race at the bottom is you

might win. And then congratulations, you're the lowest priced person in the marketplace. That's actually the worst position to be in over the longterm in my experience. And any client I work with that's big, they don't charge the lowest commissions, not even close. Like I have some, I have a client that I worked with that is charging 35%. New people are entering the market, charging 10%. And she's still picking up homes like crazy because they know that it's not just about that. It's about the overall experience of managing the property. Yeah. With all these things we're talking about that are more technical, like the actual business model itself, you got to look at that too. It's not always so simple. It's just commission charge. There's a

lot of factors that go into how a homeowner is going to consider you. Well, and I think that when we talk about that commission, the mindset immediately shifts to how much money am I going to make? And I think when you just hammer on that, how much money am I going to make? On the owner side, how much money am I going to make? How much money am I going to make? If they don't make the money,

then you haven't presented any other value of why they should be sticking with you. Do you take care of their home the best? Is it that peace of mind? What do you actually offer? Because if you're just talking about increasing their revenue or 2x-ing their revenue, once you put a number out there, 2x, 3x, 5x above the competitors, they know what the more than likely they're going to have a pretty good understanding of what the competitors made. And did you actually make it? And if that's how they were sold, I think that's sales and marketing 101 anyway, is that once you've set that expectation of, yes, the main thing you're buying from me is you're going to make more money because of the commission, because of what else we're doing. But once you've set that

expectation, that's how they're focused. Their KPIs may be, or their key performance indicators can be whatever they are. That's their key performance indicator is money. So you've driven them by money as opposed to the quality of the home care, the guest care that they're going to receive, whatever that is. I think that is, let's say, it's something that I think a lot more about even when I'm writing out ad content, just making sure that, okay, are we actually unified in that idea that how do you really want to sell yourself? Is this a number one of what you want to be? No, you just want to talk about the, if you can talk about the quality and worry less

about the numbers will take care of themselves. And that's maybe idealistic thinking. But I think those good managers that do have all these best practices in place, these table stakes that are already there often, it's nothing to think about there. Those are the people who are going to succeed because they're setting the right expectation for those owners and for those guests that are going to come through that this is why we give a better guest experience and this is why we give a better owner experience there. Yeah.. And I think that first of all, most second homeowners are very affluent. So like, that was always something that I've noticed as well is that I think the revenue conversation

isn't really that, I don't think there's as much substance to it as I think most people think. Yes, obviously they bought the home in many cases as an investment property and they want to make money on it. Of course, right? You can't skip over that. But by the same token, it's just the person that has a million dollar beachfront house. Think about it this way. I've always said this before. Their main house is way nicer than this one. If this is their second house, their main house is way nicer. So that person that might be worth five, 10, $20 million, are they really worried about the property does 210,000 this year or 175? Probably not actually. It's probably not like a major thing for them. In many more cases,

it's usually in the model for a long time. And Mike Harrington has talked about this before. I thought this was really clever. It's like the main model forever was like, just cover the expenses. And then I get to use it a few weeks out of the year. That was the model for 30 years. It was never like, oh, this is an investment and segregate your losses and tax loopholes. That's a new thing. That didn't exist a long time ago. That's a very new model that when I got started, wasn't really a critical thing. It was like, cover the expenses. I want to use it a few weeks out of the year. And if you can put a little bit of extra money in my pocket, great. That's gravy almost in that way. To your point about managing the asset, managing the property, I think that's more so what a lot of homeowners are really caring about. And the

problem with the claim or if I will make you more revenue is everyone makes the same claim. So it's now become one of those things that it's not really hold any truth to it. Every single accountant you talk to, the accountant is, I'm going to maximize your refund. You almost just roll your eyes at one point. You're just like, one of these accountants will actually maximize my refund. The other 15 that are saying it actually probably won't, or they might get close, but only one of them can actually hold that claim to truth. So what do you then do? You know, then how do you parse it? You have to figure out, oh, do you have a history of success? Do you have other clients that you've worked with that have a specific outcome or whatever?

So that's my takeaway too, which is that like the claim of revenue is I think a tough claim to make because you're very limited by like the number of people that can actually deliver on that claim and really make it happen. And you're probably setting yourself up for people not really believing you. They might be like, I don't really know if you can actually get me more revenue or not. You haven't really shown me necessarily that's the case. Unless you're like hyper-focused. If you're like, I manage units in this building and here's other units in the building, they make X, Y, Z. Okay. Maybe that's a different thing where you

can really just focus on revenue. But I think it's a holistic decision to grow on that side of it. And go to the guest side real quick. And the reason I think we're talking more about owners in this episode too, by the way, is that's usually the inhibiting factor, right? If you're decent at managing the property, you should be able to get it out there. We talk to people all the time who have taken five years to get to 20 units, and then they reach out and they say, okay, now I want to hit the gas on this. But they've been able to make some pretty good progress without really having a really robust direct marketing plan. I believe that's okay.

If that's the company you're building, that's fine. There's only so much money to go around. There was things I could invest in when my business was starting that I can invest in now. And that's okay too. I don't think that's necessarily a negative thing, but usually the bottleneck a lot of times is like, if I had 10 more homes, if I had 20 more homes, I could accomplish X, Y, Z. And I believe that to be true, but that's often the really hard part. It's not as easy to get inventory as some people have you believe. It's challenging and it takes time and effort and energy and money and labor and all those things combined. And you have to offer something different to your point.

So switching gears for a second. So let's say you had a brand name, you had an open and available domain name. You have the website, you have the social handles, you have a brand identity, which is what do I stand for? Let's save a little bit of budget. What's that tier two of things that I think make the most sense to me. I had some things listed here, like email marketing, like a CRM, like an owner CRM, a guest CRM, active, being active on social, having an office verified in Google My Business, reviews for brand legitimacy. What are some other things that you think of or on that? Do you want to pick one of that? I'll hop on the Google My Business listing because I think that is something that it is.

You can't have a business without having a Google My Business listing. I'm sorry. That's just, that's going to be a hill I will die on. You need that exposure. You need, again, it gets into that branding side of things. I remember when I, small anecdote, but when I started at Venturi, there were three seaside vacation homes that came on in about six months. They were not in the same location, but it is. If someone was searching for one of those locations, yeah, you hope that they're going to find the right one, but there's a chance that they're not. So depending on your where you're located, the local SEO that's in place, it is a crapshoot there of whether or not that's going to happen. So I do. I think that having that Google My Business listing, having it on them, having yourself on the map, it's truly putting yourself on the map and making sure that people who are looking in your area, in that 45 minute radius or that hour or the 60 mile radius,

whatever it is, making sure that they're specifically finding your business. And then anybody else who comes to their business, as you continue to grow your business, grow the number of listings or grow the amount of revenue that you're bringing in via bookings. Having someone having that social proof. So getting those reviews on there. You've nailed it on the head of having five Google reviews in the first, what is it, 60 days, 90 days of business. I know that's a Google best practice as well, because I can't tell you how many people we see that are searching in that Google Maps, the Google travel area that are seeing the reviews, or they're looking for an owner as well. And that's the first thing they're looking at. Oh, you're local, you have five reviews. Oh, this person has 200 reviews or 500 reviews. Whether or not you're a new business or not, that's really how they're gauging, I think, how long you've been around or how much trust they can put in you to say, okay, all these, whether or not it's all five-star reviews, all one-star reviews, obviously we're trending one trend on the top side of that, 50 to 100, 25 to 50. We have to make those steps upward to make sure that people know that you're a legitimate

business. And I do. I just, because Google is the source of so much search, 90%, 95%, whatever that number is, you have to have your Google listing or your Google placement as optimized as possible there. Yeah, I think it goes down this point that we're talking about here, which is like tier one is like anything set up tier two, I think is providing proof of excellence or proof of delivery of the product that you're delivering here, which is owner management or the guest side of it. And if you don't have those things actually built out, then again, what's

like what is a homeowner to do be objective. Think about the homeowner for a second. They go on and they search and they see company A, like to your point with five listings, company B with 200. They're going to go to the one with 200 if they're good or bad, then maybe not. But that's just how, that's the power law dynamics, right? Like people are attracted to what they perceive to be as winners. If someone perceives that company B is a winner and company A is not a winner, they're going to be drawn towards that. So especially when it's hard to differentiate when there's 20 companies in a market all offering quote unquote, the same services, it's really hard to differentiate. So I think that that's

where maybe we can put these items together and put a bow on it, which is you have to have brand name. You have to have brand name that's searchable, that's findable. People can find you easily. You have to have at least a basic direct booking website. You've got to have a really nice owner management landing page. You've got to have the backend software to at least deliver the service at a high level, at a clear level to that person. Then you've got to have the actual marketing platform to make this a reality, right? A CRM for owners, you need to have Venturi. A CRM for guests, you might need to have MailChimp for active campaign or whatever, like whatever email marketing tool of choice. So you can actually reach out to past guests and market to them through email marketing. You

probably want to have not only the social handles to your point earlier, but you want to have active social profiles. People actually out there posting content on Facebook, posting content on Instagram. And most importantly, too, good content, right? Like I think that's also part of it. That office location at Google My Business, verified, active, reviews flowing in. Those are all things that I think bring a lot of legitimacy to it. And then you have this base to work from, and then you have a fighting chance, right? Like without those things, without a lot of those things set up, you really don't have a great chance to actually grow the company and scale

it because you're not really making yourself stand out from the crowd. So all these things, like I say this to clients sometimes, I used to be bad about saying this, now I'm more direct about saying this. There may be 10 things you need to get going here that have no ROI. There's no ROI in setting a lot of this stuff up. You're going to pay the money and in the short term, nothing is going to come of it, right? Like in fact, you could argue you might be spending 10, 20, $30,000 to get all this stuff set up and out there. And the ROI at first is zero. There's zero ROI. However, the long-term ROI can be fantastic, but we're going to have to go through a period of getting things set up, getting the actual marketplace aware of me and out there, then we

can actually measure from that point going forward, okay, what's the ROI of doing activity A versus doing activity B? That's a valid question, but it's not a valid question. What's the ROI of getting the.com brand name for my company? Well, the short term, the ROI is zero. There's no ROI in the short term. Three years down the road when you're like, man, I'm really glad that I have this brand name and other people don't, so no one else could have that name. And you're getting, like I have clients who get 50% of their traffic direct, meaning when I say direct, I don't mean bookings as in Airbnb versus Furbo versus direct. People going to their company name.com in their browser and hitting enter as opposed to even search or social or other channels. What's that worth? Because that could be $500,000 a year of bookings they're doing off of direct traffic, people remembering the brand name and looking for it, that you can't get through other means. So the ROI then, if we

look at it over a five-year period, it's massive. In the short term, it may be very low. So I think that ultimately that's the way that things should be measured, right? Is that you're setting up a company. This is also what I say to people too. You're setting up something that you're going to hope to be around for some time, right? You're not going to do this for six months and then leave. And people automatically go, yeah, of course, I'm going to do this for some time. Then my next question is, okay, great. If we do a good job of this, X, Y, Z, this, and this website lasts you five years, how much do you think you'll make over the next five years?

Over the next five years, I'm here. I want to go to here. I think over the next five years, like if we do a good job and we get good results, we'll have made $2 million top line off of this business or whatever. And I go, okay, great. Then why wouldn't you be spending $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to get everything set up if you think the business could be a $2 million top line business? We could argue you could spend more potentially,

depending on your appetite for making things excellent from the start. So I think that's ultimately how we can maybe put a bow on this, which is that all these things are table stakes. All these things are necessary to get going. In the short term, they have no ROI. In the long term, done properly, they have an unbelievable ROI if you think about them objectively.

So I don't know if you want to put anything else on it, but hopefully that's the message that people get when they check this out. That's it. I think you can take it as far as you want to go, but just be wary of making it to that trough, making it to and through that trough of despair, that imaginary sass area of of it is just big.

You got to go all in. I think that's the key is that it will be a little painful at the beginning. And you do have to spend a little bit to make a little bit in the long run. And I think once people are in that mindset of, I've run a business before, maybe this is a little different setup, but ultimately it's investing in your business, investing in yourself to grow it long-term. That's the key. And if we can give you best practices and the basics to have, if you're going to spend a little bit, then grow it from there. I like that quite a bit. Hopefully this will be a reference episode we can send to people who are getting going and maybe give them just a dose of what it's going to take. It's going to take some effort. It's going to take some time. It's going to take some money. We all agree on that. These are things to all think about

and consider. And you may not be able to do all of them now today, all at once. So that's okay. Like a little, this can be spread out over a little bit of time. I don't think you want to take like years between these things, but it takes a little bit of time to get everything up and going. But it's ultimately the key to your success over the longterm is that you have, you know, this great foundation. We hate to overdo the analogies relative to a house, but whatever you want to call it, right? Building blocks foundation, whatever the case may be. If that's set up incorrectly from the jump, you're going to have a heck of a lot of problems later on. So I think you want to have this correct, and then you can actually get a chance to compete

in the marketplace and offer your services to who you want to serve, whether that's on the guest side or owner side, or ultimately in this business, you have to take care of both. If you don't take care of your owners, they're going to go away. If you don't take care of your guests, you're not going to get more owners. So I think that it's always a symbiotic relationship and that's a good way to think about it. So we can put a bow on it. Thanks for always as listening. We appreciate it. We're up to, I think over a dozen reviews now, Paul. So we're making some pretty good progress on that. However, we have a dozen. We want a lot more to our point a few seconds ago. If you have 10 Google reviews, you want a hundred Google reviews. So

at least on Apple podcasts, we're decently well reviewed, but we would appreciate yours. If you could be the 13th or 15th or 20th, or maybe you're listening to this down the road and we have a hundred and you can be the 102nd. We appreciate that. Yeah. Email us once you do. So maybe we can send you a little thank you or do something for you as a thank you for doing that. It takes just a second, but it helps us out quite a bit. Get this in front of more people. So that's all we have for right now. Thank you for your time and attention as always. And we will catch you on the next episode.