Heads In Beds Show - What Should The SMALL Vacation Rental Host Or Manager Do To Grow Their Business?

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the starting point in any vacation rental business - the 'featherweight' stage starting from $0 up to $200k in gross booking revenue. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental 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. Paul, that is a very colorful shirt that you're wearing today. What is going on? How are you doing? This is the Grant Wall.

He's the soccer writer during the World Cup that passed away. This was one of the memorial jerseys. I actually had someone last time we were in Florida ask me the same question because he was a big soccer fan. He had actually gone to a couple of the World Cups. He had driven around to the different sites in the last U.S. World Cup, and now he had gone to the most recent one the last U.S. World Cup, and now he had gone to the most recent one, the most recent, a couple.

Yeah, this is just a nice little colorful soccer jersey that I like to pull out when it's going to get a little warmer outside. It is, I'm trying to bring this nice weather after the four seasons that many of the Midwest experienced. Last, earlier this week with a severe thunderstorm warning, I saw some tornadoes i saw

we had a winter storm warning that turned into a wash that turned into there used to be some snow outside and it'll be 70 by the end of the week here so how are you doing sir yeah that's wild i'm not much of a soccer fan i just never got into it adam on the other podcast that i do is a soccer nerd level 400. And I just feel like I can't get there. I told him it's too low scoring of the game. Americans, we have too short of an attention span. Basketball might be too much. I get it. I forget who I watched a game with one time. They're like, this is too chaotic. There's too much scoring. I'm like, I see your point. You're not wrong. And it's that's why we settled on football. There's roughly three,

typically till eight scores per game could be field goals could be touchdowns. Obviously, that is the right level of scoring to watch a professional game that's not too much not too little lacrosse and basketball it's too much soccer's too little it finds the right balance that's my take on it i i would say i would say if you were some european just screaming at the he's like how dare you yeah we lost anybody in europe maybe oh yeah we just lost an entire concert down there yeah that's that's tough. No, you won high-scoring college sports last night. You should watch the Gophers, women's or men's.

We gave up a combined 213 points. It's impressive, actually. It takes skill, almost. It was quite the interesting evening. I watched the men's game against Illinois. But, yeah, I can understand those people who like the 100-point output or the 80-point output being a little put off by maybe 2 one or one one or the dreaded 00 tie. So Oh, gosh, yeah, come on, guys, we get we got to figure we got to figure that out. I don't know what the solve is. I'm not the soccer czar here. But if we want Americans watching, we got to make the field

smaller, less people, we got to make the goal bigger, we got to do something to fix it. It's all about numbers. And yeah, and today's episode is all about numbers too. So we've got a fun one planned, an outline that we had some assistance in drawing up and some different thoughts here. So I wrote a book Paul last year. It's called Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing. I don't think we've talked about it on the show only 30 or 40 times at this point. I mean, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Well, click the link in the show notes. You can pick up a copy. Anyways, the premise of the book when I was putting it together was like, I was trying to figure out, all right, how do I, because the topic is a lofty one, right? Mastering vacation rental marketing. That's a tricky thing to do because there's lots of facets

of marketing any business, nevermind a vacation rental business that can be pretty complicated. So I came up with this idea early on of splitting kind of every company that I've interacted with into tiers because our industry is so fragmented. There's not one model, right? For what a vacation rental company looks like, or a vacation rental management company even looks like nevermind the fact that some people own, some people don't work with clients now that are funds. So like they've taken investor money. They don't necessarily, it's not necessarily their money, but they do own the asset. They don't have to answer to an individual homeowner. Most of our clients are individual property managers where they own one location or what they're in one location, I should say. And they might manage for a hundred separate

owners, 200 separate owners. So there's always different models out there. I was like, that's complicated. And it would be tough for us to sit here and write a chapter of how you do marketing if you're a fund versus not, because a lot of that is somewhat individual in your preferences. So we started to come up with this idea of tiers. And if you've read the book, there's this boxing analogy. And if you are 185 pounds and you were to be a fighter, you would fight against people that are also 185 pounds or so, plus or minus some reasonable margin. And so that was actually how we ended up putting together the book outline was off this idea of that there would be a featherweight, there would be a lightweight section, there would

be a middleweight, heavyweight, super heavyweight. So we broke things into these different tiers, if you will. That was actually the outline document that I called it tiers. And I broke it out by revenue. So you're a featherweight if you're doing less than $200,000 in gross booking revenue. You're lightweight if you're between 200K and 500K. You're a middleweight if you're between 500K and 1 million. Heavyweight between 1 million and 3 million gross revenue. And more than 3 million, you're probably a super heavyweight because at that point, you've probably figured out a lot of things. And sure, a company, we've worked with companies that do 40 million a year gross revenue, but they pretty much have a lot of the same marketing challenges that a 5 million a year company does, if I'm being honest. They just

typically have more inventory, more homes or higher ADRs. So I say all that to say that the point of this episode today is to really talk about that featherweight person who's small. And to be clear, we'll talk about this in a second, they could be a single property host, or two or three properties, maybe if they don't generate a ton of revenue off those listings. Or they could be a small manager who wants to be one day a super heavyweight and do $10 million a year in gross bookings. But they're starting here. So this is the entry point, we're going to do a little series maybe over the coming weeks about those different classes. And what we would suggest the person do maybe who is that featherweight. Now I'm curious your perspective on the homeowner side,

because I think at Venturi, you've seen some people who are like more in this new stage, right? Building a vacation on company, but they might only have one or two listings. They obviously aren't generating a million dollars in gross booking revenue yet. They want to or more, but what's your frame on how I categorize this? Does it make sense to you? And what's your frame? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that featherweight stage on the owner side, because you have more experience there than I do. Yeah, I think from just a revenue perspective, absolutely. I do. I think that's certainly a pretty good characterization of what we see on the, it is maybe this, the single owner,

or maybe it is a small manager of zero to five rentals, something like that. I think the one caveat of that gross revenue number would be, what market are we talking about? Is it a market where it's much more metropolitan, your ADRs there are going to be much lower, and how does that factor into what size, what stage? But I think ultimately, when we're looking at it, that's a good measure. I think from a homeowner's side perspective, if you're working with homeowners that aren't your, if you're a small property manager, yeah, that's probably looking where most of the things we'll talk about are for those people who are in the zero to five. I would say maybe up to zero to 10, but hopefully when you're getting into that eight to 10 area, you're taking some steps to do some of these things that we're going to talk about here. You're putting some of those best practices in place operationally from a marketing perspective. It is right now in a lot

of cases going down to a choosing a name type of level. We're running into such a wide scheme here of who you could potentially be seeing as far as the types of businesses or single operator, whatever that is that you're actually looking at there. So it is, I think that this is a, this is a fun type of company to work with generally, because it is, it's scrappy. It's the people who are going to get out of this stage. And again, hopefully people are growing into some of these higher stages. I think that's got to be the goal as we look at it. But they are, the scrappy people, the ones that know, the ones that have an idea that hopefully they know which market they're going into. They've done the research. I think those are the ones that are, it's fun to see them succeed most definitely because my goodness,

that's that shining level of, okay, we put the right pieces in place. Now you've reached this point where you need a property management system. You need a website. You need some of these things. And we're talking about businesses that might not have that or might have parts of this or variations on that. So yeah, I love the featherweight category. Can there be a lot of needs for this featherweight category? Absolutely. And I think that's where we'll just hop right in here. Yeah. I think you brought up some good points there, which is that you probably don't want to stay here, right?

There's really not a lot of benefit if you're a small company. It's all the pain without really a lot of the benefits. And that's one thing I've learned. I was actually on a call earlier today with someone and he was indicating he'd been at one of the large companies. He was actually at Vicasa. And he said that really it's just as painful when they would go to acquire these companies,

whether they were operating 20 or 40. It was basically the pain was the same, but the 40 unit companies were like much healthier financially, all other things being equal, obviously ADR and so on and so forth, because they just had roughly the same team size, but just the margins were better. They just had a little more breathing room built into things

and they could afford to bring on, maybe it's still three team members or something like that, but it's higher competency team members. Maybe they can pay the cleaners a little bit more because they have a little bit more deal flow coming in. So when they go to call the cleaner, they show up on the marketing side. Again, I always say this to clients. I did a LinkedIn post to this effect recently, where it's the cost you're going to pay for click on Google. Google doesn't care whether you have one unit, 10 units, a hundred, a thousand, or if you're a listing site where you're marketing 10,000 units in a given location, obviously you

don't own them, but the cost per click is the same for the most part. So let's be honest, in this business, you're better off being a little bit bigger than a little bit smaller, all other things being equal, barring something that you do that's very high touch and wouldn't scale at all. And when I say scale, I'm not talking about CAS 35,000 40,000 units, I'm talking like a single destination having 10 homes versus 20 versus 50. There's things that do scale well within that, you know, micro example. And I think you're right. I think if you're trying to grow out of this stage, there's a lot of things you're going to do. And I say this, I've said this before on this podcast, too, that are not revenue producing right away, correct, coming up with

a name, we have a client who's coming up with a name right now, he came up with a name. He had to go spend $8,000 to secure the domain. I like the name and I fully supported him buying this domain name. But think of that cost over like the 10 years, hopefully, or 15 years this company exists. And it's not that much. But in that moment, he saw $8,000 hit his MX without really any appreciable benefit in the short term. So now he's in the whole 8,000 on this domain name that represents a nice tour.com for his market, for his destination, but there's not a lot of benefits to date. You mentioned a second ago, the other things we have in the book that we talk about, you're at the scrappy stage, you're trying to figure out who's your competition, maybe a little bit. What are their,

what are your best moves? How do you stay focused on what's going to help you? You're also trying to figure out who is the guest that you're serving? Who's the guest you like to serve? And where's the underserved need in the market? That's one thing that I've talked about recently too. Because if you don't have an underseemed need in the market, if you were serving the same large group rentals that come to Destination XYZ that 50 other property managers are serving, it's not that they're not there, but it's, man, I'm company number 51 in Destin, Florida, Myrtle Beach, serving this guest, but everyone else can serve as the same guest. So what am I doing a little bit differently? What edge have I found in the market? People at this stage often haven't found it yet, or maybe they found it, but they just found one example and they have to go, is this just one example or two of these properties that I'm doing a good job at? Or is there opportunity to have 50 homes either owning or managing to really scale this out?

The one example I'll give, this is maybe something that a lot of people don't think about, is there's a lot of condo markets where people will accept like the mediocre, the inferior quality interior design. I feel like it's really common to beach markets, right? There's a condo building, especially that condo buildings a bit older here. You can pick up a unit for between two 50, three 50 price point wise, 250 to 350,000. And people just leave whatever furniture's in there. It doesn't look good. And I saw this company here locally to me and they go in and they make the interiors of these properties like top notch, like they do great design. They use more modern, like higher quality furnishings and art and all the interiors

and their units honestly just straight up look significantly better than every other unit in that building. And that could be a competitive advantage. We will design your unit to be the best looking. If there's 300 units in this condo building, your unit will be amongst the top 1% of the units. And therefore we're going to attract people that want to stay in this community, want to stay in this condo area, but they're going to be willing to pay a premium because they see the way the unit is laid out versus like the dated approach that some people will allow to stay for some time. So that's one example, but there's a lot of things that I think it's not always like these unique stays. I know people like to talk about that and that's fine. That's a great way to run this business. Don't get me wrong, but it's not the only way.

There's always going to be demand for the beachfront condo too. So if you can figure out a unique angle within that, I still think you can find some efficiencies. Or we did an episode on the art show that I do with Adam and Scott about a property manager in Hilton Head who went from zero to like almost 200 listings with like very little paid advertising. One thing he said is he got this PMS and he didn't know how to block dates and make it only Saturday to Saturday. So he just let it open. You could just book any dates. There was a minimum, maybe two night, three night minimums or whatever, but you could check in

whatever day, check out whatever day. And he got all these bookings out of COVID because he was like the one that was more forward thinking of how he did date blocking versus the more legacy way of doing things Saturday to Saturday. So that's taken the same unit, same interior, same design, same everything. Take it on the strict Saturday to Saturday rental program, pop it into his rental program. And all of a sudden he was getting more revenue because he was willing to be a little bit more diverse in his approach to calendars. So these are just random examples. I'm not saying that these things are what you need to do if you're in this lightweight

phase and you're trying to exit it. But the point is you have to think, I think a little bit differently. You can't just maybe copy and paste with the large guys doing in your space, whether that is Vacasa or something like that, or whether it is just a local property manager that has a thousand units, because you're probably not going to do it better than them at first. Like you've got to find some other unique angles. So I don't know your thoughts on that, but go ahead. It is just when you're bringing up Myrtle and bringing up Destiny in that area. It is. As a featherweight, as someone who's trying to get into a space, I would actually say, if you're doing your market research and doing those type of things, I would steer clear of being a featherweight in one of those bigger markets.

I think it is going to be very difficult to differentiate yourself from 40, 50, 60. Even if you're doing it really well for one or two, can you really expect to see that growth into a lightweight? And that is that's something that I think any entrepreneur, any business person is going to have their own idea of what they can do, what they can't do. But I would say, again, and now being more on the homeowner side of things and thinking about how competitive it is to get more people in your inventory in some of those markets. is to get more people in your inventory in some of those markets, that is where I would start to say, okay, let's maybe try a little further down the coast a little ways or something that's maybe not as established a market. That's an area where if people are, they don't know where they're going or they're looking to select a market or do something like that. I think that's something to consider. It is if you're

trying to get into the space. And I don't think there's a lot of people that are listening to us maybe trying to enter the space. Oh, hey, if you are, absolutely. I hope we're giving you the tools here. But I think it is. I think we talk probably a little more about those people who are a little more established that at least have that idea of what they want to do with the company, where they want to be in the market. Because I think that's one of the most important things of really establishing that area as a featherweight of where am I going to manage properties? Because I think some people don't quite have that direction or the idea of where I can manage them anywhere. Let's make sure that you really have an understanding

of, do you want to get to one of these next levels? And if they don't, they want to stay at that featherweight managing eight properties across the country remotely doing stuff like that. That's fine. It is. It's just for whatever that really just triggered me into thinking of, it is going to be difficult for a featherweight to jump into one of those major markets and say, let me grow and let me scale my business there. So just a thought there. No, well, I think your homeowner thing is valid. And I've talked about this one before where it's okay, if you're in eight markets, and you have two rentals in each market, so you've got 16 units, you're probably past feather rate at that stage. But just for the

sake of the argument, unless they're just like the worst units known to me. But yeah, if you're past that stage, then you go in, you're then marketing to unit numbers, like destination number six, you're trying to get unit number three. That's that might be 12th on your priority list. There's someone in that market almost for sure, where it's their number one priority. They wake up all day, every day, and they go, I'm going to be the best property manager in insert small town in Texas here, right? Like, I'm going to do a good job. And yeah, maybe you have things more figured out than them. Maybe they're mediocre at revenue management. Maybe they're mediocre at owner reporting. They didn't do a good job there. Maybe they're mediocre at marketing right to this point here. But if they do a lot of things,

it's going to be pretty tough for you to convince that homeowner, hey, the company you're currently working with is doing a B plus job. I can do an A plus job. Come over here. There has to be a large enough delta, right? For someone to want to be like, wow, I'm having a really challenging hard time with my unit that's sitting with Vacasa right now. It will be in better shape with another company. Let me go look out and shop for that. It's just that doesn't occur as often as you think. I know we tried to figure this out data-wise a while ago. Maybe we get Jamie Lane at AirDNA to assist us on this one because I would love to know how many units leave one property management company and go to another property management company, even in a big market in a given month.

I feel like that number is pretty low. I feel like that number is 10, 15 units a month, even in a market that might have thousands of units, because it's just, it doesn't, things don't move in that way. As often as you might think it's out there for sure. And this is one thing we've talked about too, like with some of the owner marketing that you have experience with, they're going to go to the company that they remember. And a lot of the marketing that you do, and Brooks talked about this a lot too, it's true. You don't often get the ROI in the first postcard.

Like people, your phone's not ringing off the hook off the first postcard, but it's that is one touch point amongst potentially a dozen you might have to do for them to go. Then that one statement's going to come. One problem's going to happen. And they go, you know what?

Forget company XYZ. Let me go over here. And if you're at this featherweight stage and you're trying to peel off those units from a heavyweight or a super heavyweight, it's going to be hard. Like it's just to be hard. It's going to take time to see traction. You know what I mean? I wouldn't wish this stage on the family member that I love because it's going to be hard. And not only is it hard work, you can't hire anybody. You don't

have the budget to hire anybody. And you're not really generating a lot of revenue for yourself, I would imagine. Certainly if you're a property manager that's only doing a few hundred thousand a year in total gross booking revenue, your take home might only be 30, 40 K and then you have expenses on top of that. This is a tricky part for sure. So like you said, I'm just going to highlight some of the common featherweight challenges that we've talked about. No brand awareness or defined brand that a guest search for.

So they list stuff on Airbnb. They list stuff in Vrbo. Again, I think at this stage, that's actually perfectly fine. I'm not someone who's, you have to do direct bookings from day one. I think it's fine to get traction, leverage the platforms, get some revenue coming in the door to build up hopefully a little bit of a bank war chest so you can start to actually invest in the business and build it out.

But yeah, like you're on Airbnb, it's probably Paul is the name of the host, right? And it's Paul and Conrad, right? But we buy a property together and host it. That's going to be the name of the host on Airbnb. It's not going to be named anything. No one's going to be able to find it outside of Airbnb or Vrbo or anything like that. That's something I think you have to solve to get to be named anything. No one's going to be able to find it outside of Airbnb or Vrbo or anything like that.

That's something I think you have to solve to get to that next tier. Probably likely no PMS software, almost for sure. Maybe that every once in a while I see it, but it's pretty uncommon. Most people are at this stage of having a handful of listings or under 200K gross revenue, excuse me.

They probably don't have a system. They probably don't have a direct booking site. Again, some exceptions here, but for the most part, they probably don't have a direct booking site or they just have a template site from their PMS if they do have one. And maybe they haven't tweaked it or customized it a system. They probably don't have a direct booking site. Again, some exceptions here, but for the most part, they probably don't have a direct booking site, or they just have a template site from their PMS if they do have one. And maybe they haven't tweaked it or customized a lot. It's just rolling out of the shelf out of the box what they have. And then my last thing is like

probably not much of a presence on social media, or much of an email list. It's plausible they maybe have a Facebook page or Instagram page. But it's hard when you don't have a brand. How do you even name that page? And if you have an email list, it might be like, yeah, like I've got like 40 guests that have stayed with me. Half of them gave me their email and the rental agreement. I've got like 20 emails, but they don't really have the infrastructure to market to those people through an email marketing platform, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So those are some of the things that I typically see on the guest side. Maybe you could talk to this too, maybe on the owner side of any other things that they're now, if they're a property manager, they're probably trying to scale it, but they might have some of those things, right? They might've tried to build out a direct booking website, but it might not be great. What's your experience with these small property managers? How do they get going?

What are some things that you see that they need to correct? I do. I think more often than not, they do have the website set up, which is good. I'd rather have the website, something to direct traffic back to ultimately. which is good. I'd rather have the website, something to direct traffic back to ultimately. But I think one of the struggles there is they're trying to hide. That is ultimately probably going to turn into your direct booking website. It's going to be more of a guest facing website. And a lot of the early content on that is, okay, list your vacation home, learn about the benefits of listing your vacation home with us. That's great. But I think you have to be a little bit forward thinking once you have that

website in place of this is not just going to operate as a B2B website. This is going to be either a dual use B2B, B2C, or primarily the traffic that's going to come long term is going to be guests or hopefully that they're going to book with you. So I think, and it is, again, you're going to change and iterate based on the business goals. So I can understand doing it. But I think it's just a little bit of short sightedness. And again, this is a tip for people that, hey, make sure you're thinking about where your guests are going to land too as well, because that's going to be just as important and probably going to drive you. That's what's ultimately going to drive the revenue. The owners are going to provide an opportunity for that. But I think that's, and it is, it's the social handles and goodness, we'll talk about it later on. But when you're

basing a domain off of what you can buy, basing a brand off of what you can buy for a domain, we know that's a no. And I've literally been on calls with people who that's what they're doing. They're going through the GoDaddy domain checker and they're seeing, can I buy this domain? And that's what they're going to name their business. Oh goodness, we're upside down and we're inside out. So I think there's some business best practice items that yes, you want to have your social handles secured if you're able to do that. If you have a brand that's you want to have your social handles secured. If you're able to do that, if you have a brand that's big enough to have social handles, make sure they're secured, whether you're using them, whether they're posting on them, make sure you've got them

or some variation of them. Or again, if you're thinking about creating that brand, make sure that someone doesn't already have them or it's not already established. Those are, it's not, that'll be part of a different checklist, different episode we'll go into there. But I do, those are some of the items that we run into more frequently of, of, I still need some of those assumptions that we make for the average midsize property manager. They don't know those things. They don't know their value statement. It is. It's do that brand overhaul. Do that brand overview. As we're

going to jump into the where to start, I think this is a good time to kind of transition over there because I'm starting to step on your touchdown call. So here, I'm going to hand it back over to you. It's your show too, man. No, it's all good. No, but I think you picked up some really important threads there too, which is that initial kind of baby bird cracking out of the eggshell moment of the company is important. And people do, I think, tend to rush through it or they tend to want to cut a corner right away because to be fair, they have no money. And so I get that side of it.

Right. You're alluding to something. Let me go there and then we'll come back to some of the other pieces. Branding. I'll come back to some of the other ideas. But when, okay, when you're at this lightweight stage and you say, I don't want to be here forever. I'm here now, but I don't want to be here forever.

I assume that's probably your motivation. If you're listening, I think the way to get out of that quickly is to like, start to build some kind of identity that you can market around and build the company around. So I think you bring up a good point. I see that all the time. Property manager comes in, they have a website and the website is all homeowner focused. And there's a little tab at the top that may say booking or something, but every large property manager, local property manager has a guest focus website with a little section on the top, click here to list your home or property management or something like that. So again, do you want to mimic what the small company is doing? Or do you want to mimic what the largest companies in our space are doing across 500 different destinations? Like that

people are going to come to the site. It's going to be guest in 10 traffic. Now at first, again, do you have that guest in 10 traffic? No, because no one knows your brand name. So that's keep listening. We'll get there. You have to start somewhere with regards to like people come there. They want to. Now, could you be a little bit more aggressive on some of the call to actions? I think so.

We have that mutual partner in Fredericksburg, Texas, who has like two big call to action buttons at the top of his website. List your home or search homes now or something like that. I think in some cases you could be a little stronger with the property management call to action. But the main intent of 99% of people coming to the website, probably more honestly, is to book a booking, not list their property. So that's one piece that I would say matters there. Branding. Yeah, unique name. You said it. So we're going to do a full episode,

by the way, on this book. I'm making you read the book before we do the full episode. But I know you've already got pretty far into it. I've recommended this book probably, I don't know, 50 times at this point. And the book is like eight bucks. I send my Amazon affiliate link and I think I get 50 cents when it does sell. But it's the name of the book is Hello, My Name is Awesome. Alexander Watkins is the author. Really quick book. You could sit down and read this honestly in a day and a half at most. But the meat of the book to cut to the chase is that she has you put a brand name through a smile test and scratch test. So smile is the reason that you would pick a brand name. So it's suggestive, memorable, has imagery, legs, emotional. A scratch is the reason that you you would pick a brand name. So it's suggestive, memorable, has imagery, legs, emotional.

Scratch is the reason that you wouldn't pick a brand name. Spelling is hard. It's a copycat brand. Ask people who have B&B in their name how they feel about having a copycat name right now because Airbnb is selectively going through their list of customers and just picking off every single B&B company. So a little free legal tip for you there. No billing there whatsoever on my side.

Restrictive. Here's a good one. If you are Conrad's Asheville cabins.com and then you go try to manage a Myrtle Beach, you're toast, right? That's a good example. Annoying. I don't see that a ton in our space. I'm really annoyed by names.

I would say more of the spelling thing where people try to spell things very differently. I know there's some in our space where they use wild and that's fine, but it's W Y L D. So it's just going to cause, it's going to cause confusion, right? Like it's going to fail. what I call the radio test. If someone said that name to you over the phone, would you be able to type it accurately and get to it in Google? So that's a bit of a concern. Tame. So it's just boring. It's just like stays comfort stays.com or something. It's just not doesn't really mean anything. Curse of knowledge or hard to pronounce. That's the final things of scratch. So hard to pronounce. We touched on that. It could be anything. I've

seen this before too, where it's like they take a word from like another language, like a French word, and they try to like call their company Maison Rentals or something like that. And you're like, how do you spell it? M-A-Z, no, I-Z, I-S, that's a little bit tricky. Yeah. Or, or cursive knowledge. Someone has to know our space to know the brand name. I don't see that quite as much because I think these words are like common, like stays or book or, you know, rental or lodging or accommodation. These are all words that I think we're pretty used to, but certainly I see people taking a word and trying to make their own word out of it. They take stays, but they use like a Z or something like that. I think those are

all problematic things. So anyways, I say all that to say, we'll do a full episode on Hello, My Name is Awesome because it's a great book and it teaches you a lot about what to do with names. But I think your note there I wanted to dig in on was the domain name thing. And to be clear, the domain name, like I was saying earlier, this might be the next 20 years of your business to cheap out at the beginning and buy the $10 domain name because it happens to be available, I think is such a short sighted decision that you're going to regret. Now I get it, people will squat in a domain and they want a million dollars for it, they won't take anything less. And I get it. I'm a domain seller too. I have probably 3040 domains that I have in my

portfolio that I think have legit use case for selling potentially for a good amount of money down the road. And I've rejected some offers that I've gotten that have been decent because I'm like, I know this domain is valuable. Someone's going to come and want this one day and pay a good penny for a good amount of money for it. But it's really silly and short sighted to short out on the domain name. So doing a copyright search, doing a tier point, a domain name search again, maybe taken, but is it in use? That's different. Those are two different things. It may be taken and you got to go buy it from the seller for $2,000. Some people think that's ridiculous because you can quote unquote buy a domain name for

$10. But believe me, there's domains that are not worth $2,000, not worth $20,000, but worth $200,000 when they're marketed and advertised properly. I think David Ngati bought SmokeyMounts.com for five grand. To say he sold that is probably a huge understatement. He probably could have spent $500,000 in that domain name and still made a domain name work with this business that he built off that, obviously. So yeah, those are things I see quite a bit. I think launching out of the gate so poorly is just such a bad idea because then people come to the site and they're going to conradscoolcabins.net.

It's not even.com. And they're just like, oh, we're already off on the wrong foot from a branding and positioning standpoint. They put up a crappy website with, like you said, it's all owner focused, no guest intent there. I can't even see the properties, the copies vague, the images aren't any good. It's like cheesy stock photos. Like you just, like you don't really get a second chance to make that first impression on the homeowner side or on the guest side in some cases. So when you go and do that initial build of the website, it's probably going to hurt a little bit. It's probably going to, you're probably going to spend more than you want to, or it's going to take you more time than you want to if you're doing it yourself or something like that. But ultimately, that's

what you have to do. Build the right foundation so that when you get to the next stage, you have things built on solid ground. It's an analogy, but it's one that I believe is actually true in this case. I think it's the difference between a website and a landing page. Your Airbnb listing is your landing page right now. When you're in that featherweight area, I think when you're a non-manager, you have to differentiate to get to that point and put that website in place. So it may feel like you only have one page worth of information. You've got more. If it is, if you've got enough to fill up a page, you've got enough to break down. And it is. And yeah, it's going to, I think that's the you've got enough to fill up a page, you've got enough to break down and it is.

And yeah, it's going to, I think that's the issue is people set out to build a website and they've got a landing page and then they don't, it's a contact us page. So it's two pages or it's, it's, you're not even incorporating the guest sites. That's make it more than a landing page, if nothing else. If that's all you've got, then you've got to build out the rest of these, your demographics, your target markets, your interests, and all those other things of who that ideal guest profile and who your ideal homeowner profile is going to be as well. Yeah, because homeowners have different motivations. We've touched on this before. But again, when you're early on, you can be a little bit, you don't want to be, but you have to be a little bit

open in your thoughts to like who you're willing to accept into your program. Certainly you don't want someone that has completely unreasonable expectations and demands your time endlessly and so on and so forth. You don't want like a toxic owner in your program, but it's also hard to be picky. Let's be honest when you're small, like you can't necessarily be like, I'm only going to date the tens when you're like a five right now. Let's be honest. That's really challenging. You might be able to pull it off, but not many people can. So I think that's another thing too, right? You have to be, and you might need to try, let me manage for an investor type. And then the

investor type is going to be very into the numbers and so on and so forth. But he or she is probably going to give you pretty free roam on like how you want to do things. If you can prove that it's going to increase revenue, right? The, this is my grandma's vacation home that I'm letting you rent out while I'm not there. That person is going to be completely different. They're going to have a very different set of criteria. They're going to say, oh my God, the drywall got damaged. This is an egregious failure on your part when the world went wrong. And it was, yeah, someone just dropped something and it fell and we'll fix it. It's no big deal. But to them, it has an emotional tie into the home, right? The investor is like, yeah, how much is the repaid bill? 80 bucks. Okay, here's the amount of money.

So that's the thing too. If you're at this lightweight stage and you're trying to be a property manager, yeah, what are you looking for? What type of homeowner are you after? And it's probably not who you think, right? It's probably not actually the investor. Everyone talks about revenue. We beat that up to death on the show so that we don't need to like go down this path again, see 50 previous episodes

where maybe we've talked about it before. But yeah, like the revenue only focused homeowner is gonna be the trickiest one to manage because he or she made a 500,000 to $2 million investment probably in the property. And their expectation is that you're gonna deliver revenue and nothing else. And your fee is an inhibitor between that revenue and what they paid. And that's always going to be a tricky thing. That was, we talked with Lauren

Madewell recently, and she said something to the effect of if you bought before, I think she said 2018 or something like that even. So it was even like a little bit before COVID, but if you bought before then, we'll probably get along just fine because you put out a much lower right and my fee's not going to bother you basically like we're going to be you're going to love my service we're gonna be really happy if you bought in 2022 we're probably not going to get along we're probably not going to be the right fit for each other because you paid double triple quadruple what that 2018 person paid for essentially the same product but we can only charge what we can charge right there's only so much revenue out there in the marketplace to build off of so i thought that was such a

fascinating insight that lauren had this idea that the vintage of the owner would be such a deciding factor, not necessarily the property itself or exactly where they were located and so on and so forth. Obviously, she looks at that too, but I thought that was interesting. I hadn't heard that one before.

It is. And with Lauren specifically in that market, in that Smoky Mountain market, which has been just real, they've done some interesting things at a regulation level with some of the, I think that the garbage and the parking things for the state park or for the national park there.

It's the people who bought in 2022 have definitely had a different experience over the last 24 months than anybody who's come before that because they bought in and then all of the regulations started to come in as well. So it is, I actually, we worked with another mutual partner just outside that DC area who that's his focus. That's all he wanted. It's that those are the people he was comfortable dealing with, but he wanted those investment minded people.

He wanted to be able to get them that 90% occupancy that they, that is, he didn't want to have to deal with blocked owner weeks and doing stuff like that. So I think that again, everybody's going to be at a different level here and a different understanding of what they can do with the business and how they want to scale it and how they want to grow it there, especially on the owner side. Yeah, yeah, I think that's good. And this is hard. We've said that before, too.

And these initial building blocks, to go back to the featherweight conversation, are things that are very much the seeds you're planting in the ground that aren't going to yield any fruit anytime soon. And yeah, that can be challenging for some folks to get through. And we say all that to say that if you're the host, if you're the owner, and you're in this stage, and you're listening, and you're not trying to manage for other homeowners, like this could be a stage that you want to exit because you're actually going to figure out some efficiencies of I think, owning of like owning one is the same pain as owning two is what I've heard from other people that are at this stage. So you may as well just own two. Owning two, it really is not double to have four.

You may as well own four. Then at some point, you run out of your own time. I feel like for some people, I've heard that number be six or seven. Once you have more than six or seven, especially if you're in different markets, that's a whole nother conversation. But if you had six in one market, that probably is the maximum for a single person to do almost as a, I say, side hustle, but it's still going to consume 10 to 30 hours a week potentially of your time if you're doing a good chunk of that work. But at that stage, you can start to outsource little pieces. Maybe you could hire a part-time assistant to answer the messages on OTA platforms. If you have six units and they're good, driving good revenue, maybe you can't afford like a marketing agency retainer. We've had that

conversation with folks before every month, but you could certainly hire someone to like come in, build you really nice email marketing templates that you could then advertise and run with. Right. There's some efficiencies that I think you can build there where this is like, again, I think we said this at the top. A lot of the pain happens in the featherweight section, not a lot of the financial gain. So you want to exit here. But these are the things that I think make a lot of sense to recap some of these things. It's putting a PMS in place, right?

It's having a brand that not only at the property level, but at the company level, it's having a brand that the guest looks favorably upon, that they look at when they go to that website that you're gonna build, when they look at your naming of it, when they look at the way you're presenting it, your logo, all that kind of stuff, they think, wow, this place feels nice. This feels like a premium experience, right?

A guest may be staying in one of your vacation rental homes, might've stayed at a premium luxury hotel before and paid the same rate. They might've paid 500 bucks a night to stay in a nice Hilton property or Four Seasons or something like that. So if they come stay in your vacation rental property, what messaging, what media,

what presence are you putting forward? So they think, oh yeah, this house is worth three to five to 700 to $1,000 a night. Like you have to put forth some of that same effort. It's not just, yeah, click here on Airbnb and like book and I'll give you the address and I'll just text it to you. There's an informalness to that I think might be doing our industry a little bit of harm at times.

Or if you professionalize, I think that's what these things are, right? It's like taking each step so that along the way they know they're dealing with someone who's very competent, who's very professional, even if you're very small. I've dealt with some people in early on. I was like, I'm like, you're going to go places. I can just tell because you have that polish right now or a good amount of polish right now, even though you're small. I know that you're going to execute well when you get to 10 or 20. Sometimes we talk to people where they're at 10 or 20, but like things aren't going that well, like they're having some problems and issues. Maybe their communication isn't there. Maybe they just don't like put that polish on

things. They don't really have marketing or media working in their favor. They can't really attract new homeowners. And when they talk to homeowners, to your point, I know you've talked about this extensively, Paul, they don't feel like they, they close them at a good rate. And it's because they're not putting forward that, that kind of competence that people are expecting from someone at this stage. So it's, you can be small and you can grow, but you've got to like work extra time, double time, overtime on putting forward the plan and the message of how great you're going to be. And it's really challenging, I think, to be at this stage and not have that kind of really clear structure of growth. And I plugged the book at the beginning as a joke, but we really do talk about this in

the book, right? With respect to going through each of these stages and things that I've seen along the way. And you can go a little out of order. It's not always like perfectly step one, step two, step three. It's never like a recipe for cookies. Like it's not that formulaic. There's always going to be a little bit of wiggle room in there.

But these are some of the things that we've talked about today that I think are pretty foundational to getting to that next stage, which of course is making it out of that 200, 300K, maybe annual revenue, gross booking revenue, getting to lightweight, getting to 300, getting to five, 600 a year in revenue, where you can actually start to build some teams. You can build that infrastructure around you a little bit past this stage. At this stage, it is like you mostly with a little bit of contracted help here and there, which can be challenging for sure.

I think it is. I mean, we talked about Airbnb co-hosts, that type of stuff, but this is still the side hustle stage. This is where it feels like you can turn it into a business if you take a couple of steps. And I think we've laid out those steps of what should happen, what you should be considering at the very least. Do you need it? Again, make that decision when you get to that point. But this is where I think that transition from side hustle to, okay, this is now a business that I want to run. How do I get to those next steps? And yeah, and if you focus on a little bit of upfront work, and it's going to feel like a lot of upfront work, you are going to give yourself a better runway to get to lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight, super heavyweight, and get the book

and do all that stuff too. But yeah. Awesome. Although we didn't cover everything, I think we covered enough. We got you in the meat of what it really is to be a featherweight and how to make your plan, make your strategy of how you're going to get from really point A for being honest right into those next steps. So hopefully the listener got some value. One thing that would cost them not a dime that would help them quite a bit paul there's one thing they have to do what do they have to do i always do what you do at this time what do they have to do i think i think if they could just go to their podcast app of choice and just leave us a little review just tell us how we're doing are we giving a featherweight performance are we giving a super heavyweight performance are we somewhere in the middle there i think yeah it is anything

that you can do give give us that feedback. We like to hear it. Even if you want to dog us, hey, we know we put out some tough episodes. So just a little feedback. You've been very negative there at the end. Sorry. This is why I'm going to do my single read on this. Yeah.

Come back next week. You're fired. You hit him with a Trump one. No, all good though paul we appreciate it i think if the listener made it this far they had a good time hopefully or they would have done it at this point so i always feel like you should leave a nugget at the end for folks because anyone making this far does deserve a cookie if you want a cookie email me conrad conrad at build a book.com a bacon door dash you a cookie if you made it all the way this far but now we appreciate it thank you for listening we're gonna again this is gonna be a

series it won't be like we've done series in the past pa Paul. It won't be every week. We might take a break and then come back and do future ones, but it should be fun for us to talk through the book a little bit, the contents of the book. Then I can reference these episodes back, send them to folks that they're in this featherweight stage, listen to it, get a little breakdown of what that chapter contains and build an awesome business. And then hopefully we can figure out a way to partner together down the road. So thanks so much for listening. We appreciate you. Yeah. Do leave us a review that helps us a lot and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Heads and Beds show. Thanks so much.