Heads In Beds Show - Scaling Your Vacation Rental Business Beyond $1m In Bookings With 'Middleweight' Marketing

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the scaling of your vacation rental business past $1m in gross bookings with frameworks from 'Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing' - in the middleweight section. 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. All right, Paul, tax day is upon us. Now we're releasing this much later as you know we definitely record a few minutes in advance anything fun about tax day for you or is it just pure pain and misery as it is for most of uh lovely americans that are listening oh absolute pain and misery um it used like it used to be fun ish kind of sort of not really fun because the reason you don't get refunds anymore yeah um yeah you used to get get those refunds um you know kids were young a lot

of those expensive all that fun stuff yeah um yeah the yeah it's not not nearly as much fun as you get older i've found um that's not bad like that that means we're we're getting past some things and growing into other things and that's a good thing that that means we're we're getting past some things and growing into other things and that's a good thing but how do you feel when it comes to april 15th last year but we did last year was april 19th april 18th april 20th something like that didn't you have the five-day automatic extension whatever yeah at some point there has to be a date right there's got to be a date that sort of thing i was i was joking before you record that my cpa doesn't even ask me.

He just sends me the paperwork for an automatic extension because I think he knows that I would not get it done in time if it were necessary. In fact, for S-Corps, it was due March 15th. So it was actually due last month. And that's when I was traveling, even when that was happening. So he automatically sent it to me. I already filled out that paperwork. So I guess ask me again, whatever it is. The actual deadline is for me, October or something like that. I do typically owe, but he's got me tuned in where i now owe less so it's like i owe but it's not like a

shocking amount like it has been in the past where it's like you get that pit in your stomach like wow and what exactly am i getting for this money we probably shouldn't do a whole uh libertarian debate on the podcast i think we'll lose a lot of listeners very quickly a lot a lot a lot of listeners you know we don't tune in for that sort of thing. So awesome. So we're taking it in a different direction. Speaking of things changing in your business, now we've done a little bit of a mini series so far with respect to my book, Mastering Vacational Marketing, and the idea that there's different tiers of success, if you will, or revenue maybe that you have in your business.

And those tiers might naturally associate themselves to different levels of effort that you might need in various areas of marketing. I don't know if that made a lot of sense. But basically, it's like when you're new, focus on these things. When you're getting to be a little bit bigger, focus on these things. When you're at this middleweight stage, hence the topic of today's episode, focus on these things. And these things that we're going to talk about today, I think are more appropriate for what most of our kind of clients are, right? At this stage, maybe, Paul, it might make sense for them and they're

probably going to have a good budget for owner marketing. They're scaling, they're growing, they're bigger. And then certainly on the guest side of things, this is typically when I feel like we're starting to talk to them. So middleweight, let me get the exact numbers that we're defining this very clearly on our side. So everyone's on the same page. In the book, we kind of talk about maybe 500K to a million dollars in gross booking revenue is middleweight. And again, that seems to be a number for me, especially that million dollar mark at the top end of middleweight. Million dollars a year in gross booking is when you really do have a marketing budget. You'd likely have more than one full-time team member. And it's starting to look like a really real company. You know,

it's not like, Oh, me with my laptop, you know, renting out a few properties that like starts to think it starts to feel like the structure of something that's very going to be very, hopefully big and successful one day. So what's your take on this middleweight stage? I guess, just generally speaking, and then maybe specifically in the owner management side of things that they are in fact, property manager. i mean i would say and i think one of the characteristics you have their top three in their market i mean i would say this is where probably a bulk of the professional property managers sit maybe in that next in in in kind of that next level up as well but it feels like this is where like the is where the heart of the bell curve is

if we're talking about kind of our space right now, I think. Again, I think that's where that top three in the market designation, maybe there's some wiggle room there, but ultimately I do. I think that this is the time where maybe you've pieced things together up to this point. This is where kind of when we look at marketing i think you start to think about the full funnel and hopefully you've been thinking about the full funnel all the way up to this point but it is it's it's how are you capturing people

with that brand awareness at the top of the funnel how are you you know kind of bringing them down into the the booking path at the middle of the funnel how are you taking them all the way through with your direct booking website that's hopefully been optimized and then doing all that? So I hope that's like it is. I think maybe the focus on some of the earlier, lighter weight stages are specifically on top of funnel or specifically on bottom of funnel. I think this is where you really start to put a comprehensive, we look at it on the owner side as an omni-channel

strategy in place. And then, you know, you kind of take it from there a little bit. On the owner side. Yeah, definitely. The hope is that you, if you've grown to this point, you've probably started to sell some on your own. You, you, you haven't, you don't just have referrals. You don't just have referrals. You don't just have properties that you own. It's not just friends and family. Likely, you've had to go out there, maybe make some relationships with realtors, maybe do some outbound emails or done some cold calling, or maybe you've done a postcard. I think this is where we just start to maybe dabble into the marketing side. And again, I think that depends

where you're at, what the market is, you know, how big you're looking to grow. And, and it is, and I think gross booking revenue plays a little role there too. If you've got some high end properties, maybe you're giving people a little more care. If you've got more, you know, lots of little, little more of a volume game for you right now, then maybe, maybe it is more about growth, growth at a, at more of a scaling pace. So yeah, I mean, I, I think that this is where everything starts to come together. You have to focus more, maybe you have to diversify your focus a little bit and thinking about, okay, it's, it's not just this one area. It's what am I doing in multiple areas? How is that operation

side starting to come together as well? And maybe that's not our expertise, but I think a lot of these processes and things like that have to be in place in this weight class. Yeah, it's kind of like maybe you can brute force your way to a number lower than this, you know, just like your own effort and putting, but at this level, it's you can brute force your way to a number lower than this you know just like your own effort and putting but at this level it's like the brute force doesn't work as well there's just too many moving pieces right for especially depending on the number of listings that you have again i always give this anecdotal example where like we work with a client with two listings a dozen million dollars here in revenue but that's so uncommon right typically if you're at this stage doing roughly a million dollars maybe gross booking revenue you probably have

closer much closer to 20 properties than 10 most like in my experience it's kind of in that range but again there's exceptions you know there's people that do too there's also people that rent lower you know condos lower end condos that might need 35 or 40 to get a million dollars in gross booking revenue because each one does a much lower amount of revenue per booking but regardless whether you had 10 20 30 or 40 somewhere in that band is probably most appropriate 90 percent of the time you're gonna i liked your comment on the bell curve. I thought that was really appropriate because this is that part of the bell curve where you're starting to edge into the meaty part of it, of actual revenue and making the business really successful and large.

And yeah, to your point, the top three comment, I do wonder if that's slightly suboptimal as I went back and read the book and proof the book. We had a long debate about that, calling someone top three in the market. Because in Orlando, for example, Disney, that market, a million dollars a year isn't probably the top 30, maybe. I mean, there could be 25, 30 other property managers. And depending on how you would define like resort inventory and stuff like that,

they're gonna do way more than that. But if you're in like a smaller market, you're probably easily in the top. So it's somewhat subjective. Like maybe top three means like top three in terms of growth potential. Maybe you're top 3%, you know, and there there's a thousand managers but you're one of the top 30 or something like that so we can interpret that very liberally if we want to but i think

that you bring up a lot of good points with respect to yeah on the owner management side you're not just dealing with your own properties at this point almost for sure unless you happen to own a lot of them you're starting to deal with you know kind of like scaling the business and figuring what makes a lot of sense and it feels like you have momentum that's the word we have in the book and that's the word that i had in our outline scaling the business and figuring what makes a lot of sense. And it feels like you have momentum. That's the word we have in the book. And that's the word that I had in our outline here. At this point, I feel like a lot of companies that are in the stage of doing again, roughly more of the top line there, but like a million dollars a year in gross booking revenue, they have some momentum, you know, they're making some progress, which, which is awesome because I think ultimately you want to make sure that whatever your brand promises,

whatever you say you're going to do, you're delivering on that consistently. And we had a note in there about 95% of the time, you should like have that experience delivered upon. No one's perfect. It's foolish to assume that everyone's going to be able to deliver everything perfectly all the time. I know that we don't do that in our small business. I don't think that any small business does. But having the consistency to say,

you know, we promise these kinds of standards and 95, 98, 98% of the time, we're dealing on those brand standards and delivering to them. I think those are kind of things that you can stick your flag in the ground and really start to scale. So let's go into the marketing pieces and kind of talk a little bit maybe about what some of the marketing pieces should be in place at this point. So we talked about this a little bit in

our previous two episodes. Again, we can, if you want to go back in the feed and look at those previous two episodes, you can, but at this point you should have a pretty standard, like solid style guide in place for branding. It shouldn't be like a surprise at this point that you need to have that. Again, when you're're new i don't know if it's necessarily critical or really important that you have the brand standard stuff be really polished and really perfected but at this point you're probably printing a lot of assets with your brand and logo on it you're probably have t-shirts you might have i don't know if you have um if you notice this paul i've noticed this with some clients the moment they get the wrapped vehicle you know where it's like the

the car the truck or whatever the that they drive or the maintenance people drive is wrapped. That feels like a celebration to me of like, we're really starting to be like a much larger company that we like have the budget to wrap the company car, which is not necessary, but it's a nice little branding touch point that gets your name out there in the community and people see you. And I think people seeing you does help you get more visibility ultimately in the marketplace. So having those kinds of things in place makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe we could touch on that just maybe if only for fun for a minute about branding and style.

And like at this stage, you have the, you have the budget to put $5,000 into a logo and branding, and it makes sense. You might not at first. So what's kind of your take on this idea of branding and style? That was, the rap cars got me. That was something that we did. We did at Resorts and Lodges and it was, I mean, that was, I thought that was the wrapped cars got me. That was something that we did at Resorts and Lodges. And it was, I mean, that was, I thought that was the coolest thing that happened.

Like one of the first couple of weeks I was there and I was just like, oh my gosh, like this is, this is, this is going to be a really cool place to work. And, and it is, I have also seen in the local area, Lance from Minnesotay, he also has had his cars wrapped at some point. I don't know if he still does, but it does. Especially if you're local and you're managing local properties, I think it's a great idea. That's something that people do. People see that. And especially if you've got a link on there. I mean, heck, you can put a QR code on a wrapped car now and have someone just be able to try to stand you as you're driving by.

We have a client that has done that. I love it. I mean, that is fun. I think it gives you an edge over kind of that national brand. Like, Vacasa can't do that. Evolve can't do that. Like, some of these bigger brands can't do that. If you're managing in multiple properties, you don't have the boots on the ground that are really going to be able to do that guerrilla marketing. So I absolutely love the

car wrap. And I do, I think this is the stage where you do get to have some fun with it. I mean, make sure you've established that brand. I think that's super important, you know, making sure you have those colors, making sure you have a guide in place a grand style guide that you are going to follow important please please please please please we've worked with so many people who you know i don't know what my colors are it's kind of reddish kind of greenish a little bluish yeah not exactly but let's let's let's go with that so um but it is i like once you've established that you know again hold true to that don't't, don't, don't be fluctuating. Don't be, you know, don't, don't compromise on that branding, but have fun with it.

I mean, cause that's what people, we're in the hospitality space. People are looking to have a good time. People are looking to have fun. And it is, it's a good way, I think, to get that local exposure and, and build those partnerships because maybe you haven't been able to do that. Maybe you haven't done some of the social contests that we've talked about or some of the other outreach opportunities. That's a good way to just have your organic outreach take place there. So again, love it. It's just a fun thing that you can do. I think at this stage too, we're kind of joking

about how it's fun to have the wrap cars and stuff like that. But I think at this stage too, what you're starting to build is kind of that awareness to where the truth is these large vacation rental managers, which we'll talk about obviously on future episodes that we've got a chance to work with. We got a chance to work with someone for a while that was doing consistently $30 to $40 million a year in a single market as a vacation rental manager. Granted, it's a huge market and they're one of the large companies in that market, but it shows you the top end is really high on the top end as far as what's possible in terms of gross

booking revenue. But what I noticed working with some of those companies over the years is that they get leads by default and people will never attribute or fully understand exactly why those homeowner leads and of course, direct bookings and the guest side of things happen. And it's because of these building blocks effects that starts with things like wrap cars and starts with things like having a branding and style guide in place where people see the brand consistently and they go, well, you might want to list with XYZ company because XYZ company, I see them everywhere, right? That kind of thing. And if someone goes to your website, they see the wrap car,

they get the postcard in the mail, maybe it's from Vittori. They then go look at the website and they see 200 or 300 or 400 other amazing properties in the website. It just feels like the natural, obvious thing for a homeowner to do, or again, I guess to do on that side of things, to either list their property with that particular management company or book directly because they feel like, oh, well, many other people have done this before.

There's this confirmation bias we all have in our head that if many other people have done it and they seemingly have done well, or we see good reviews on Google, we're naturally going to trust that brand automatically. We don't always do a lot more digging or research when we feel like we've got, we feel trustworthy and safe with, with the company. And actually,

so I mentioned the book before we hit record, I mentioned the kind of like the book direct round table thing that we, that I did Paul with Mark Simpson and I did it with Jasper and Arthur from Stay Fi. And it was a good conversation. I put a pin in something. I realized when I listened back to part of it this morning that I never came back to, which is the idea that book direct is a cost-saving move, that the only motivation the guests might have for booking direct on the guest side would be that they get a better rate by booking directly versus booking on an OTA like Airbnb, for example. And I said, oh, let's come back to that. And then

we just honestly had good content. We just didn't have a chance to come back to it. But I wanted to come back to that now because I think that's actually one of the most common mistakes that people make is this idea that Airbnb is charging this 12% service fee. You're going to save all of it by booking direct with me. And then they actually are kind of starving themselves, unfortunately, of budget and revenue that they might need to get their business to be bigger. So at this stage, even though it wasn't even in their outline, I wonder if you start to think a lot too about pricing and how you're doing pricing. if you start to think a lot too about pricing and how you're doing pricing. And the truth is, I don't think the guest actually really cares that much that they get a significantly better rate on your website versus Airbnb. To be clear, I do think you should offer a lower rate, right? So if Airbnb will make a simple math equation here, if Airbnb is $100 per night rent, and then Airbnb

is charging 12%, so the cost to the consumer is $112 per night in that scenario, I know you pay processing fee. We'll take that out just for the time being, for simplicity's sake. The guest is willing to pay $112 a night. So if that same property on your website is $108, let's say for the same mechanics and equations, that sort of thing, and you're taking the 8% as opposed to Airbnb taking the 12%, I think that's perfectly logical. It makes sense to me. And that 8% number, just to be honest, just feels right to me. There's something about 8% that feels seven might be too low, nine might be too high. If you're doing nine, might as well do 10. It's kind of like the thought that I've had in my head before. So I think there's a lot to book direct about, again, this kind of stuff. I trust the brand.

I see them. I'm getting a little bit of a better rate. I maybe get some other perks and benefits. Maybe there's other things that you can leverage and reach out to people. That's not just rate. And I think at this stage, you need to be thinking about that because that 8% doesn't sound like much, but across every booking you do, especially if you have higher ADRs, that 8% can be your marketing budget and a lot more. I mean, it can give you a lot of flexibility. And I think, unfortunately, I see companies that are at this stage that are really effective and efficient, good for them. Like, I mean that it's not, it's not a bad comment, but they actually don't even have any marketing budget because they've, they're running their

business almost one would argue too efficiently, or they're not building enough margin into the business to be successful. Then when it comes to Venturi going to them and saying, hey guys, we're going to go ahead and do a postcard drop in the zip code. It's going to be a $2,500 investment or whatever the case might be. Or I say, hey guys, we're going to go ahead and start this campaign. Let's budget $1,500 to $2,500 a month for Google ads. Here's how we're going to approach them. They start to recoil because they should be able to afford that at this stage. They're doing enough revenue where that should be possible,

but they haven't set up their business in a way that's marginally appropriate for what they're focused on. And they end up in a bad spot. So again, don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but that was one other thing I wanted to tie back to this stage. It is.

I mean, I think this is, I think it's a good point and kind of got illuminated this past week for us in the real time where you got to see all the people with the eclipse, you know, kind of Jamie Lane doing all the pricing things that I think the, my average daily rate towards the end was closer to five, $600. closer to five six hundred dollars um but i think most of the average bookings that came through were only like 280 bucks so people didn't i think it is it's where you may want to now that's that's a drastic obviously difference there but it is it there there's certainly the solutions that we have out there in the space for pricing they are beneficial beneficial. And there's clearly a need for them because we're not economics professionals. A lot of people don't know the macroeconomics. We don't know what's going to go into really driving that buyer behavior. But hopefully the algorithms behind the scenes of a Beyond or a Price Labs or any of those others, they are, they've, they've, they understand how

you can make more money for your business. And that is, that's, I think that's one probably overlooked thing for more of the higher weight classes here is that they already have that in place. So they kind of have those optimizations already rolling. But if you don't have anything like that, and you are just kind of trying to manage as best you can, I do. I think that's certainly something where it's a revenue boost without really having the active, it's that passive revenue boost just by better managing those rates. So I think that that's something, I think it is, it may depend on where you are. You may be considering that earlier on in the process, even just to, I mean, at a lower weight class, it's certainly not the featherweight. But I think that that may be another topic of conversation is kind of when do you start truly adding these pieces in the timeline of when you can say, is it three months? Is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it at these stages? And I like that. This is kind of what we're trying to do, trying to lay out the points of your business ownership and business development of when you should be considering

these items. I did hear a comment recently from someone about that same thing, which is like, oh man, I have so many different tools and systems that I'm using at this point, right? He had, I think he was talking about his cleaning systems and processes. He was talking about pricing with beyond pricing, I believe is his software pricing vendor. Maybe he'll switch to price labs, you know, or whatever his decision matrix process was, you know, I got you guys, you guys are helping me in the marketing. You know, we get a Google ads bill, we get a Facebook ads bill. There was like a lot of stuff going on. And I'm like, Hey, I don't like disagree with anything you're saying here. Right? Like in a perfect world, this business was a lot simpler with respect to how it's set up. Or maybe one of these quote unquote, all in one PMSs would actually deliver on that all in one experience and do it a good job. I don't see that necessarily being the case where I would advocate for things being simpler in the business. So things are complicated here. It kind of goes back to way back when, when we were talking about the original, you know, process of getting know process of getting going and it's like if you got one you've already done a lot of hard work you may as well just have two right like the different the workload difference is not double

you've done so much hard work you may as well just take two because you can double your revenue if not more than double your revenue but your workload doesn't necessarily double and then once you have two you think well i may as well just have three you know and then i think i joked about the number actually there are six what i've heard from various people and once you do six by yourself at that stage, it feels very chaotic, particularly if they're multi-market, right? Oh, I've got two over here or three over here. That's really challenging. But six in the same market actually feels like something that a single person could do. Maybe they wouldn't have a really notable brand, going back to what we're talking about here with respect to this stage.

But I think you can take six decently far, yourself, a contractor, and then a r contractors, so to speak with respect to, you know, this person does the pricing, this person does this, this, this is my cleaner housekeeper, which is on a contract basis, and so on and so forth. But at this stage, I think you're, you're, you're laying a lot of groundwork where you're taking it to a million million dollars a year in gross revenue, you let's just again, for simplicity sake, maybe say you have 20 units or 10 units, somewhere in that range, you have a lot of pieces in place where you won't actually have to add a lot more software to go to the next stage, to go to three to 5 million a year in gross revenue. You won't find yourself, like the companies that are doing a million a year in gross revenue still have Google ads running, still have Facebook ads running,

still have a website from maybe a PMS or maybe one of the industry website builders in place. They're going to have Streamline or they might have Honorize or they might have Hostly or they might have Guesty or whatever. There's a million PMSs out there, do your going to have, you know, streamline, or they might have ownerize, or they might have hostfully, or they might have guestie or whatever, like there's a million PMSs out there, do your own research, but you're not going to need a different PMS for 20 that you are for 50. In my experience, like it's very uncommon that that change happens. I do see it sometimes you mentioned like, you know, for the track bid, I saw someone go from streamline to track when they hit 50, I believe was the number that they were comfortable going to track with. And he's been very happy with that change and that's maybe served him well.

But it wasn't like he didn't need it to streamline. He chose to streamline for other efficiency purposes, right? He found other things that were a little bit more efficient. We talked with someone the other day, 400 units on streamline. So it wasn't like they needed to move, but it was more of like, hey, could this be better for my business?

That sort of thing. So it's like, I think you bring up a good point there, which is like, it might feel complicated at this stage, but it actually is setting up such a wonderful foundation for you when you have the budget to dedicate to these things. That's going to feel very, one might argue reasonable or logical

when you're doing hopefully 3 million or four and a half or 5 million a year in gross booking revenue. You probably are using mostly the same tech stack. Maybe vendor for vendor swapped out, but it's not like you don't need this thing. Now you need this thing. That's kind of like one feeling that i have at this at this stage of business the business and and i would say it is like you you know the tool you you're swapping

vendors at this point you're not really like it is you know you're making the comparisons you're not just saying okay i need one of these now it truly is okay what is it that i see that's beneficial to the business right now? What it is? You start to then, you know, the cost benefit of, okay, this over here is worth X amount of time for my team. While this over here, this reporting and automation is worth so much more just for the greater good on the operations side. So I do. I think that's where you, and it is, and maybe you do.

You make that consolidation at that point. Okay, this tool actually takes care of these two items. So you do, you start to, I think you're a little smarter about the business or you're, you know, maybe that's the next stage in graduation to the next weight class is you're starting to evaluate and understand and consolidating that tech stack a little bit to be able to say, okay, this is a bigger solution, more of an enterprise solution, but it's something that takes care of these three pieces along the way that I was previously kind of ad hoc-ing or Flintstoning together there. So I think that's maybe that is, that's the graduation point to the, to our next level. Yeah. Yeah. that's the thing too is like do you graduate from level one to level two to level three and so on and so forth or is it more like at some point you wake up and you realize oh shoot like i'm you know this is now where i'm at i need

to focus on those things next i don't know to be honest with you i don't know if there's like like you know we get these ranges maybe roughly a million revenue roughly three million revenue but i see people regularly you know who have items from that are a little bit ahead of the curve i remember um i talked to someone a long time ago who was trying to sign up for one of these more enterprise type software systems but only had like five customers or five up excuse me properties on this program and he said look i've built a successful business before i know what it takes what he was also saying in inherent in that by the way is like i have money like i'm not opposed to spending the money i want to sign up for one of these tools so that i don't ever have to swap down the road so i'm gonna overpay quote unquote overpay for an enterprise type system you know insert pms of

choice here i'm not even gonna say which one it was and they wouldn't even let him sign up basically they were like no like you and he's like i fully understand that i'm like quote unquote overpaying like i'm too small for you guys in some ways i'm like i get that but i don't want to swap pms down the road so like let me sign up and then i'll have the right system down the road and i'll pay whatever fees you want me to pay again like he had sold a business recently that was a many many seven figure business that he was was done working on and it was like they were like weird about getting him to sign up and uh it reminded me of something that my dad has told me many times before which is like sometimes you have a yes it's best just to shut up like if you got a yes just don't say

anything just don't talk anymore. That sort of thing. It's almost like they were trying to talk them out of it. Oh, maybe you should go sign up for this PMS and then down the road, you know, use our PMS. So every once in a while, you might encounter a scenario like that, right? Where you're like way ahead in one area than other people are at that same, you know, general growth of your business

with regards to marketing. So the example I might give is like, well, maybe that's a fun example because he's not doing this and hasn't been doing this for a long time. But David Angotti, when he had smokeymountains.com and he was a property manager for, for they sold the V trips. That was the best SEO I've ever seen on a, I don't know exactly when he had it, when he sold, but whatever it was, it was the best SEO I'd ever seen on that level of website, because that was his skillset that he knew a lot about that particular. He had that skill himself, so he was able to do phenomenally well-optimized SEO work on a website that was, if you were to pay him per hour or an agency like ours, a fee

to do that kind of work, you would have been in the hole for multiple six figures. So on paper, it wasn't worth that. And yet SmokeyMountains.com is now in a different business model, different stage of its life, so to speak. But there was a time where that was your typical property manager in some ways on the website itself. That was the main business model, and there was a bunch of content strapped onto it. So that's a, that's a good example in my mind of like, he, he's so skilled in one area that he can take something to like the 15th degree

of complexity or of skill or of accomplishment. Whereas maybe there was other areas in the business where he wasn't doing much. In fact, I think this is the case. He can correct me from wrong on this. Maybe when I chat with him next, I'll ask him. I don't think they were doing any paid search at all. So he was so good at SEO that he didn't, he wasn't doing any paid search. One could argue. But I was in my head. I'm like, well, you might still be leaving some on the table by not doing paid search. Now there is paid search on the website that we get a chance to assist with there.

But it's different. Again, the business model is different now and that sort of thing. But it's an example, right? And some people are in this bucket where they take their, you know, everyone's file. We come across, we came across a business recently where they had acquired another business and the business they acquired was old been around for a long time but unfortunately was bleeding inventory bleeding homes but they'd been around forever so they had a big email list so you don't see many 20 unit companies with a 15 20 30 000 people email list right and and with going back 20 years like

that's pretty uncommon but that was the case here because they had acquired a company a business i should say in their market that had been around for a long time, but unfortunately had lost a lot of inventory. So they weren't acquiring many units, maybe 20, something like that. But they had this long history that they could then market to these past guests using some of their email marketing and Facebook ads and things like that. So there's always these examples. I think you bring up a good point there of like where people are a little bit different, but I think it all comes back to, you know, sometimes the thing that you're weak at is exactly what you need to work on, right? Like there's certain workouts I

do where I'm like, wow, I'm really bad at this. I probably needs, I need to keep doing this, you know, because I'm really horrible. I'm decent at this thing. It'd be fun for me to just do this thing, but I'm really bad at this. Let me spend more time on that. And then I'll probably at least not make it my worst thing. And I can get it at least to be a little bit higher. So things that come to mind, do you have some practical examples. And I can get it at least to be a little bit higher. So things that come to mind, to give some practical examples. Sometimes I see a website at this stage that has like the basics well done. The on-page SEO is complete.

Maybe there's a blog, might not be super consistent. Like there's a blog, but there's not consistent content going out. Maybe there's a smattering of articles, so to speak, over like a 14 month timeframe. There might be like eight articles posted. So six or something like that. There's kind of something in there.

I think at this stage, you want to consider on the SEO side for sure, having like content pillars, and it could be having different types of property or blog post content that's coming out. So it could be property highlights, local attractions, activity information, could be travel tips, advice, deals and promotions is kind of one thing that we had in there. Company culture values, like what are the main things that you want to talk about? How do you consistently have like the content on your website that maps to what you're focused on? And I think at this stage,

sometimes it is a little bit of a consistency battle, not always a budget battle. You might have a few thousand dollars a month that you can dedicate towards marketing, whether that's internal ad spend or an agency that you might bring on to assist you, but it's how do you be consistent with it? And I think that's one thing

that an agency can often bring to you, at least something that we try to bring to our clients, which is consistency. If you task it on yourself or you task it on someone inside of your vocational business to do all of the blog content creation for you, you may find yourself in a little bit of a tough spot just because ultimately they may not have, it's like they may have the skill to do that particular thing in some cases, but they may not necessarily have the consistency to always publish at the beginning of the month or within the first three

days of the month, every month, two blog posts from now until the end of the following year. So I do think there's some value at this stage in bringing on a specialist because you might have some budget that you can dedicate towards that and you can get someone who's really good at that one particular role. So we're talking around book here, Paul, I guess we have to be careful, but what's kind of your take on this idea of hiring a specialist at this stage on the owner marketing side and what are some specialist ideas maybe that Venturi does or doesn't do that you think would make sense at this stage? Yeah, I mean, I think the key example is that business development side. I think at this point you probably have.

This is where you're hiring some opportunities out there internally with your team. We obviously do some outsource BD as well. hiring some opportunities out there internally with your team or, you know, we do, we obviously, we do some outsource BD as well. But this is where I think, and this isn't like a hard and fast rule, but I think actually Brooke did a poll recently trying to figure out what's the breakdown of who's actually doing the selling. And I think 65% or 70% of the respondents there was the owner, CEO, president, like one of the veto, one of the very, very important top officers at this organization. It's not a BD person. It's not a dedicated BD rep.

And do you need that? No, maybe not necessarily a full-time person. But I think you do have to have someone who is dedicated to being able to be a salesperson. And that's not the role. Hopefully that's not your role as the CEO owner, whatever your role as the kind of showrunner, we'll say, of the business is going to be. So I do. I think this is when we look at like just operationally, this is kind of that offering that we really want to make sure that you have someone who can sell. You know, you're going to get leads and hopefully this is where you're doing some of that outbound marketing. This is where you get the leads in and you don't want to miss out on those leads.

You know, the last thing you want to do is not have a, you know, not be able to sell yourself. And hopefully you can, but not being able to sell that service. So having someone who specializes in sales. Again, maybe they're doing sales on some other side of things too. Gets outside of our content pillars a little bit here, but I think it is. I think like as far as the, you know, they can. I think when you're producing really good sales content, it does, it kind of leads into having that BD rep there. You have to effectively manage these leads. It's not as much on the guest side where someone hits your website. Hopefully, you're leading them down digitally in the funnel there and getting them to that direct booking site or direct the booking engine, whatever that is in your property management system. It's not a lot of touch it requires, where it does require a little more touch on the homeowner side.

You have to manage that lead. And if you're managing your leads, in addition to managing the business, something's going to get set aside there. So I think this is kind of that middleweight level and kind of danced around that before when we talked about the homeowner side. But I think that's a pretty critical part is where you have to at least consider, again, be the intern or whatever that is, outsourced of some kind, part-time, fractional, whatever flavor of the week you want there. you want to have someone who is dedicated to just owning that homeowner experience until they come on the program. And then maybe that's someone that you have a new person, or maybe that's a hybrid role

where they're kind of a BD person and a operations person. Although I think if you look at those personas, maybe they don't exactly match there. So I do, I really think that the sales side of things, the sales aspect, we all know how impactful a really good salesperson could be. Like they're, they're going to drive additional revenue for your business. And even if you can't afford a really, really good one, bringing someone on to do it and focus on it part-time and do stuff like that,

I think is really important on the owner side of things. No, I like that. I think this is the stage where like you are splitting yourself up, you know, as a, as a small business owner myself, I know that feeling, right. Of like having 12 different things that you're doing. Honestly, some things that I was doing early on in my business as it was growing, I was really good at to be honest with you, right? Like there was things that I knew how to do well, like I'd execute on. And then there's the six or seven or eight things that you have to do because you just need to do those things right. To get going funny enough on tax day as we record this like the bookkeeping financial aspects are

never things that i've necessarily always enjoyed or had a lot of like joy towards doing but it was like i need to do those things right to like get to that next stage i'm sure at the in the educational world i know there's like a whole conversation around accounting and trust accounting i don't even understand the trust accounting piece so i won't pretend to you know dive in on that stuff i don't like doing books for my own business. I would never open the Pandora's box that is doing books for a vacational business, which seems like 50,000 times harder, roughly, maybe a little bit more, if I'm being honest. So anyways, but yeah, like if that's not your strong suit and you can go hire a accounting bookkeeping expert to keep all of your books perfectly clean and do all their trust

accounting systems flawlessly, awesome. Then you can free up your time to do other things. And I think that you make a good point there, which is that idea, and you've said this before, so just kind of hammering that point home of answering the phone, being responsive to new business on the homeowner side is really what's going to take you maybe from 10 or 15 to 50 or 60 or 70. And having someone to work alongside you to have like, it is John Doe's job or Jane Doe's job to be specifically focused in on the vacation rental side of owner acquisition. That's what they're working on. And the more they do that, the better the outcomes are going to be.

I think that's very logical. And I think ultimately, you know, if you're in that business, then that's the best thing for us for you to have in place. I'll go through some other guest focused ideas here. So one other thing that I hadn't here is at this stage, maybe just instead of doing photography of the actual unit, you can start to get like custom photography and videography, maybe more broadly. So instead of just here's a photo of my unit, I need that to mark the listing on Airbnb, you could do something that's more similar to I have photos that of the area of the destination. So I don't need to use stock photos

when I do a post on Facebook about the pier or the ski mountain or whatever, like I have my own photos or videos that I've, you know, shot how we get those from clients, I always kind of put a smile on my face at least because I feel like, oh, this is awesome. I can use this stuff and blog content. I can use this stuff on social media and some of our advertising. I can use it now on these new ad units on Google, specifically video, which is what Google's leaning into on these performance max campaigns. And I don't have to copy a stock asset or worse in some scenarios, just not have that asset. So that one comes to mind for sure. I think at this stage, you can start to expand your social media presence. We talked very briefly about social earlier, but I think when you're smaller than this, it's really

hard to do more than one, maybe two social media platforms. At this stage, I think you can probably do two platforms pretty well. You could have someone that's focused specifically on Facebook. You have someone specifically focused on Instagram, and then maybe there's other traffic for you to have out there. We worked with a client a while ago who focused on Pinterest and had a lot of traffic coming in. People looking, I would argue, somewhat aspirationally at their properties.

They weren't maybe always the most qualified, but it was helpful. They got some attention from it. They got some links from it. They were getting a lot of pins on Pinterest and it was certainly driving traffic in the door that was interested in that area. Time will tell on like how many conversions

come from that effort. But I think you can at least have the conversation of like, again, Jane Doe, John Doe is focused on Facebook or Instagram. I now could like potentially do another channel at this point. We talked about some of these things before, but just kind of recap some other like marketing ideas from other areas. Email marketing at this point,

you should be pretty like advanced at this point in my mind, which is like not just a monthly newsletter, but probably having a pop-up in place at this stage. I think it makes a lot of sense to have have the post-departure communication workflow automated. So after the guest checks out, what do you do after? Do you just send them a review? Hey, Paul, thanks for staying. Or is there a lot more to that with respect to getting a review or trying to get them to book again for next year and so on and so forth? And then at this stage, I think you can certainly have the option to expand or grow your email list at this point. Maybe you do a giveaway.

Maybe you do Facebook advertising. Maybe you do, you know, different types of offers. So you get more email addresses. A huge component always of offline email collection, guidebooks, stay five. That's always the one that I'm going to recommend as a great offline email collection system. Those, those things should now not just be in place for one or two units, ideally probably in place on every unit. End of our outline here. I know maybe we have a few more minutes left here, Paul, to record. Maybe we'll do like a part two where we can come back and maybe answer some questions.

But I think we got through this one pretty decent, actually. I had a list there at the bottom of a few of the homeowner marketing ideas, like realtor referral, some of the printed assets and materials. Maybe you could talk about that. And then maybe even a mini site.

Maybe you could touch on those homeowner pieces before we depart for that. Yeah, I mean, I think the realtor referral program, hopefully you've been cultivating relationships with realtors the entire time. I think those are just very important to be doing at the earliest stages of the business. But the nice thing about it is if after you've gotten to a certain point, maybe you have a list or you found a list of all the realtors in all the zip codes that you're looking for. Maybe you want to give them a SPF. That's pretty common in our space to be able to give us

a month, well, $1,500, $2,500 for any of these contracts that come on. The value in being able to have that good relationship with someone and not having to do the proactive marketing, the outbound marketing, it is worth that much money. I've heard of people doing up to $5,000, up to $10,000 in some of these markets for the right types of properties there. So, you know, putting, you know, putting something together as far as the referral program, just to be able to, again, incentivize people. You've already got relationships with these people. Hopefully now this is an opportunity to build more relationships and, and really, I would say, strengthen that network of realtors.

opportunity to build more relationships and really, I would say, strengthen that network of realtors. And it is, you want to have a, you know, when we're talking about where you're going to ultimately, how are you going to market to those people? I think you want to start to think about, you know, now we've got the direct booking website. Now we want to put together a kind of a microsite or a mini site for these homeowners. So, and that includes having something specifically set up for the realtors. So, I don't know, having, having that, that, that, the benefits of working with you on a specific

landing page, having all of your benefits from the homeowners themselves, having those USPs, those risk reversals. I think that's where, you know, whether it's a full five to 10 page funnel, or whether it's just a couple of places where you can land people, I think you want to start to have that dedicated spot. And I think that's something that hopefully in some of the earlier stages, you have at least a landing page on your site. I hope that we've talked about that. And if we haven't, that's a huge miss on my part, but you want to have that landing page up to this point. And you do. You want to think about some of the other benefits where you can build out specific content for home. Maybe it is for housekeeping. Maybe it's for maintenance. Maybe you want to talk about some of those. What do you do really, really special? What sets you apart? Those USPs that you've been working on, now let's showcase those with content that really supports that there. So, yeah, I think that the microsite there, anytime you can do something that people can actually hold, I mean, this is still kind of a face-to-face business a lot of the time. So more often than not, even when I'm kind of following kind of the BD work behind the scenes, once those leads come in, you can see a lot of the

form submissions come in as, hey, we're coming to the area. We want to meet you. We want you to walk through the house. We want you to do this and that. So being able to give them something physical to put in their hands to read and see the values there, once again, I think that's beneficial. Yeah. I mean, I think when you're starting to really look after, we've got the dream 100, find some targets, find some homes that you really want. Don't just, you can cast a wide net. That's certainly something we're going to have to do on the homeowner side of things. But be diligent. Like find a list of 50.

Maybe it's a dream 20, a dream 25. But find those dream properties that are already professionally managed that are, you know, self-managed. Maybe you can figure out what that, what, what they're, what they're being, what their situation is right now and find a way to put together some content specifically for that. And then, yeah, I think this is where you start to step on the gas a little bit with some direct mail, you know, do, Do some of those reach outs. Find some absentee owner information. Find some short-term rental verified owner information if you can.

As we move more towards regulation, a lot of that is out there. So you can go to your city or county offices and usually find a lot of that information. In Torrey, we do a lot of that for our partners as well. So there are certainly some items that you can do. Do you have to do all five of those? No, but I think you should start to put together a little more comprehensive setup for homeowners. Give them more than just that single landing page with a form on it that's going to ask you, you know, ask, well, get more information from us. Let's start to proactively give them some of that information so they can be a little further down the funnel once those leads come into your sales team. Yeah, that's a good point. I know we're at time here, so we might have to wrap, but the idea of the landing page, that's the last step. The last

step is the landing page, at least in terms of it making an actual lead, right? Yep. I do think, and you're right, advocating that as we've done in the past on previous episodes, if you want to manage units for other owners, the property management landing page is kind of like the key ingredient, right? It's the hinge on the door for it to work. But there's a lot of other things that you could do now at this stage, maybe that would make a lot more sense. One thing that's super underrated, we have one client that does this. I've showed this probably to a dozen clients since. They all say that's a great idea. And then none of them do it, is the idea of updating the market and what's going on.

So it's every, I think it is every quarter. Every quarter, here's what happened. Here's what happened last 90 days in our market. Occupancy, revenue, blah, blah, blah. It's almost like they're the Jamie Lane of their market.

Like Jamie, he's like this iconic person. He's on TV and all that, talking about the eclipse. And I joked with him on Twitter. I'm like, Jamie Lane doing the Art of Hospitality podcast one week and then on CNBCbc the next you know like that's that's a that's a that's a come up we can you know we can say like hey we knew him before he was famous but anyways that's right um i joke about all that but yeah jamie lane gets a lot of attention because people

love data and information right like we joke about it but there's a lot of value in what he's sharing otherwise his stuff wouldn't go viral like it does so i do think there's something to be said for you can't be jamie, you're not AirDNA, but can you take the AirDNA data for your region and or your city or market or whatever, and just make it understandable for the average homeowner out there. Like so few people are doing that. And even better if you can do it on video, by the way, but even if you don't do a video, the client I'm thinking of doesn't do video all the time. But I think if you can, that's a huge plus, a huge bonus. If you can at least do it in a written form and make that clear, easy to understand, then you can kind of set the stage for people. And by the way, this idea of

one-to-many homeowner marketing communication can be used on your current homeowners. Every homeowner that's down right now, and they might be down right now year over year, is going to call you complaining. If you can contextualize, here's what's going on. Here's what's happening in the marketplace. Here's the data that I see, not just from our own set of properties that we might have, again, maybe you have 20,000 in a market if you're in Orlando or something like that. But here's what the large aggregator data platforms say, key data dashboard, AirDNA, and so on and so forth. Then you actually make yourself look like an expert. Even if the numbers you're sharing are bad, it's like, well, Paul's got a pulse of what's going on. He's updating us,

that sort of thing. And it makes you look like you're on top of it, even if you're not, again, giving all of the secrets away, so to speak, of maybe how are you doing better. Also, if you send a report that says everyone else is down 20%, you're down 10%, the person with that context with that information may flip their tune completely and go like, what's going on to, oh man, we're doing a good job. Is there some properties you have that are actually doing even better? If so, what are they doing? Can I copy them? And so on and so forth. So it just gives you a lot more opportunity. And at this stage, you do have to think about one to many ways of communication, I think, to save your sanity a little bit or to have that BD rep person focused on new business,

maybe, and not just dealing with all your current customers, especially if they're asking the same question over and over again on the homeowner side. It doesn't mean you should ignore homeowners or anything like that. More communication is always a good thing. And that's not at all what I'm advocating. But having some methodology to reach out to people in some some kind of scale i think is going to help you a lot as you as you keep going so i think it is i think that's where oh it is i think that's where right now this stage is still growth the next stage is growth and retention so i think this

is that that's where it is this is this is still you're trying to just grow, grow, grow. You're maybe going to take a property or two on that isn't in your dream 20 or your dream 50 or your dream 100. But that's where it is. You can deal with that kind of at that next level as you are starting to decide, okay, what's my top end level? What's my bottom end level? And where do I want to maybe remove, cut, cut the trimmings off the bottom there a little bit there. So it's so much more comfortable though, to cut a bad client or a bad homeowner from your program when you have 15 others to replace them, right? Like that's always a much more comfortable feeling. And I feel like some of these clients that I've talked to over the

years that are stuck with these bad homeowner relationships that don't want to end them. It's because they don't have enough. Ironically, they think they need to fix the relationship with that homeowner. And what they need to do is end the relationship with that homeowner and just get a new homeowner. Like that's what they actually need to do. But we can save that maybe for another episode. So there we go. Awesome stuff today, Paul.

We will put a wrap on that one. And if you got some value out of today's episode, I think the one thing that they have to do is just go to their podcast app of choice, iTunes or Spotify, where you get the most listens. So that's what we prefer. But whatever your podcast app is that you happen to use on your mobile device, on your phone, whatever the case may be,

if you made it this far, we appreciate it. Go to that podcast app, leave five stars more people can listen to the Heads and Feet show and help grow their business, which would be awesome. So appreciate that. Appreciate you, Paul, as always, and we'll talk again on a future episode. Thanks so much.