Mike Bayer

This episode is brought to you by Lodgify. Lodgify is your all-in-one platform for managing and scaling your short-term rental business, from easily publishing your own bookable website to managing all your day-to-day tasks just in one place.

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Mike Bayer

Whether you're a seasoned host or starting out, Lodgify can simplify your journey to building your thriving vacation rental business. And with Lodgify, you can accept direct bookings and payments, sync your reservations across all major booking sites, and automate your workflows, helping you save time while increasing your revenue.

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Mike Bayer

It's the smart way to grow your business. Keep your guests satisfied and enjoy what you do. So get started today and make sure you use the code VRF10. That's VRF10 for 10% off your professional and ultimate yearly plans when signing up.

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Heather Bayer

I met Andy McNulty long before he started Touch Stay. In fact, he was the first person I met in the industry many years ago, and we've remained friends ever since. Since co-founding Touch Stay, he's developed a loyal, dynamic, and motivated team from around the world, who all work remotely. In this episode, we're exploring how to keep your remote staff inspired at all times and create an outstanding business through their commitment and motivation.

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Heather Bayer

This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

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Heather Bayer

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again.

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Heather Bayer

Well, as ever, it's all change in the vacation rental business. Companies come, companies go, companies get acquired, they sell. It's a very dynamic and changing business. And you might have heard that the digital guide, Touch Stay, was sold recently to a company called itrinity. itrinity [sic] is a rapidly expanding software as a service operator [SaaS], and it's based in Slovakia and Czechia. What they're doing is growing a portfolio of really highly profitable SaaS businesses, and they clearly saw that Touch Stay was a great addition to that collection. So that may have come as a surprise. It may have come as a shock. I was happy, super happy for the co-founders, Andy McNulty and Joe Jones, that they had found a buyer that they really resonated with and that they knew was going to look after their team.

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Heather Bayer

But let's go back a bit and just talk about my history with Andy and Touch Stay. Andy was one of the first people I networked with way back in the early 2000s, when I was just starting out with Cottageblogger. I mean, that's just going back, almost coming up on 20 years ago. I met Andy through a group, not a Facebook group, but it was an online group that we had at that time because there were no Facebook groups then, it was called Lay My Hat. It was a UK-based forum for homeowners. It was an early form of a Facebook group. I spent a lot of time on Lay My Hat. It was a tremendous network of owners, some of whom I am still Facebook friends with after all this time. But at that time, when I met Andy, he was the Chief Financial Officer at Alexander McQueen, and he worked as CFO for Gucci as well. So a long history of the fashion industry.

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Heather Bayer

But he also had a passion for the vacation rental business, but as a guest, not an owner. Actually, Andy's never owned his own vacation rental property. But that passion caused him to start an online business way back in the... I don't know. Andy could probably correct me when we talk, but I think it was 2007-ish, and it was called Getaway Earth. It was an early form of a listing site of sorts. Then he created Guest Hook, which is still going. That's a company that creates really great content for vacation rental owners, and then Touch Stay.  Touch Stay kicked off in 2014.

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Heather Bayer

But off and on over the years, I've met up with Andy on occasion. I'll never forget him making a flying visit to our Vacation Rental Success Summit in Toronto, and he just came for the day. Super supportive. So Andy took Touch Stay from the germ of an idea of creating a digital guidebook, to developing an outstanding product with an even more outstanding team. And he made that decision to bring the amazing, brilliant, Tyann Marcink-Hammond on as Touch Stay ambassador. And that was a decision that was nothing short of genius for anybody who's been to any of the Touch Stay events that Tyann has organized.

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Heather Bayer

But Andy has mentored me in so many ways over the years, and I've valued the too few brief times we've had together. But this isn't ending as Andy has agreed to join our advisory board for THRIVE. So I'm going to be picking his brains for many more years to come, I hope. But he's also sticking around at Touch Stay for a while during the transition, so they're going to get the benefit of his years of wisdom and counsel.

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Heather Bayer

So in this episode, Andy's going to share how he and Joe built such an amazing team at Touch Stay. I mean, the team is located in the UK, in Spain, New Zealand, Ukraine, Turkey, Australia, and the US. It's no mean feat to be able to retain remote staff. But the Touch Stay's team are remarkably sticky. They're a loyal and committed bunch. With more and more people wanting to work from home now, it makes a huge amount of sense to research what it takes to create that team that's going to stay with you over time. So without further ado, let's move on over to my talk with Andy McNulty and find out more about what it takes to create the best remote team in the world.

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Heather Bayer

So I'm super happy to have with me Andy McNulty, the former CEO of Touch Stay. We're going to talk about team building and remote teams. But first of all, Andy, welcome. You've been on the podcast several times. This is the first time you've come on since you sold the company. How are you feeling?

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Andy McNulty

I'm feeling weird. It's the best way to describe it. By the way, I am still the CEO, weirdly, even though I've sold it. But that's why it's weird, because I'm transitioning it to somebody else. And that means that I am still here. So I'm not enjoying that output of having sold, if you know what I mean. You do know what I mean because you were the same.

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Heather Bayer

Yeah, I went through exactly that. There's a lot of emotions. There's a lot of thoughts. The one thing I never had from the moment I signed that paperwork was a regret.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah, I know what you mean. I had a lot of, not regrets, thoughts that I might regret it leading up to signing it. You have to get over yourself pretty quickly there because I should imagine it's pretty awful to still have that when you sign it. But when I signed it, I had exactly the right feeling that no regrets. It's the right thing to do. But yeah, that process going up to actually putting pen to the paper is really weird. Nobody ever tells you all those things that you'll feel about the thing that you built and what it would be like to let it go. And are you giving up on something too early? Or how are the team going to be? Or just so many things that go through your head. But yeah, no regrets having done it.

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Heather Bayer

It's exactly that. I'm sure everybody that's sold a business has gone through these exact same things. Just tell me, Andy, we were just talking about this before I pressed the record button about people asking, they asked me after I'd sold, Well, I'm thinking about how I might sell my business, and how did you go about it? I think people have come to you and asked you that same question. What would be the first piece of advice that you would give to somebody who is thinking about selling a business?

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Andy McNulty

I would first of all say, it sounds obvious, but are you really sure? Because when you take that decision and then you get an M&A consultant, as we did, AJL, Simon Lehman, and then you start going out to the market. It's intense. Everyone said to me, You can't run your business and do this at the same time, Andy. I'm like, Yes, I can. You quickly realize it's very all-consuming. It sounds obvious, but the first bit of advice is, are you really sure you want to do this? Because there's a lot of heavy lifting and stuff in front of you, so you better be sure. Also, you don't really want to mess anyone around. If you're not sure, then best not to.

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Andy McNulty

Second thing, I would say, is before you even think about selling, everyone says this, of course, don't they? But make sure you've got a good handle on everything. And you've got, particularly because there's so much due diligence and proving of things and contract gathering, make sure you've got as much of that as possible pulled together and in place. Because it's not that they're not going to ask you. So it's not like, well, I'll leave it because they might not ask me. They're going to ask you.

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Heather Bayer

Yeah, they are going to ask you every minute detail. And if they haven't asked you, they're going to. It's coming. I would also say, have a pretty good idea of what you think your number that you want to sell it for.

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Andy McNulty

Perhaps do some homework before you get to that stage and you maybe engage the M&A consultant you use in a bit of pre-discovery stuff about your business, maybe on a one month exercise to deep dive into your business and assess it and tell you what it's worth, etc. Because that's really important, too. If you don't know your number, then when you start going into this and you start going into negotiations, then you don't really know. In our case, it was two of Joe and I, with shareholders, of course, but mainly Joe and I. We also had to know between the two of us what we were comfortable with. We didn't start out with the same number. We were fairly different. So we were slightly more complicated in that we had each other to think about, too, in the process, as you did, too. You had that same thing.

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Heather Bayer

Yeah, exactly. We went out about three years beforehand, before we actually sold. We talked to Jacobi Olin of C2G, and we talked to Ben Edwards, and just had those... It wasn't a consultancy, it was just a general conversation that we might be thinking of selling in the future, what should we do? And we talked about numbers with both of them. And yes, Craig and I had slightly different views on the numbers we were looking for. And we were actually surprised what we got in the end. But yes, it does require a lot of forward thinking, and it's not something you suddenly wake up in the morning saying, Oh, I'm going to sell my business, let's talk to somebody about it. You've got to think about it for a few years before.

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Heather Bayer

But anyway, I want to move on from that because it's not the topic of this episode. Because I've known you for years and certainly known the startup of Touch Stay way, way back. And I've been such a, call myself a rock star, Touch Stay rock star. I've been a supporter of Touch Stay from the moment you started. I've always been so envious in one way, and I can't think of the word for the other way, but about the team that you have created. Admiration, I think, because all your team has been remote. You don't have an office, and you don't have people coming in. When I started, I had people coming in and coming to my basement every day. But you started as a remote team. What did that team look like when you started out?

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Andy McNulty

Me and Joe. That was it for a while. We outsourced all of our development work to a small little agency in the US and then to an agency in the UK. We didn't have any in-house development team either. The first thing we did when we had a little bit of money from the business was commit to a full-time developer. We stumbled a bit with that in the early days. We didn't quite find the right ones, but eventually we did hit on the right ones. The right ones were, I would say, people who are like us. I don't mean clones of us. I just mean they have a similar set of values to us. All the people we eventually went on to hire, bar maybe one or maybe two, were recommended to us. That's pretty easy, to be honest, a team of our size. We were 17 people in the end. It wasn't that hard to do that. I can imagine when you're growing... Like Margot from Hostfully made a post on LinkedIn last week about the benefits of remote working and how people say it won't work and how you prove them wrong and it can work.

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Andy McNulty

She's got a much bigger team. For her, it'd be much harder. But for us, relatively easy because we didn't have that bigger team. Anytime we had a new position that we wanted to hire, I was literally in my network thinking, Who do I know who may know somebody like this? Kate was our biggest hire our CMO, and she happened to be doing some work for a customer of ours called Beside the Sea Holidays. He thought we would get on. He thought we were two like-minded people. So he just introduced us. Then, of course, that led to her coming on the team. Tyann was the same. I knew her way before Touch Stay, I knew her when she was GladToHaveYou days. She's the sort of person that I want to be around. So that was obvious, too. But every time, like Emma, our head of product marketing, for example, she was a recommendation from somebody you may remember Jess Ashworth, who used to be Lodgify. It's just about finding the right people. You can only find the right people by talking to the people that you know who know good eggs. Then you don't necessarily know if you're going to jive with that person, but that's where the interview process is.

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Andy McNulty

For me, the interview process is not really about technical ability. I can tell that from experience and from, well, if they've been recommended, they're bound to be good. For me, it's much more about what's this person like just in talking to them? Can I chat about something and they'll be quite comfortable with that? Do they just smile a lot and are they very responsive and engaging? It sounds simple, doesn't it? It sounds silly, almost, but you really need to have people who you feel like you can just talk to, because that's somebody you're going to be working with every day. So that's how we approached it. And that's how we ended up with the team that we've got.

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Heather Bayer

So did you have a laid out strategy at the outset of growing the team? This is who we will need for marketing, and this is who we need for PR or the other side.

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Andy McNulty

Eventually, yes, but not in the early days, because in the early days we were just bothered by, can we jump into Matt Landau's forum or jump into XYZ group and start hustling and get some customers and build a reputation and be present in that community and not be weird and just be normal. For the first X, I can't even remember how long it was, but that was the goal. It wasn't about who can we get in the team. It was, we don't have any money to get someone in the team, so how do we build? But once we got to the stage where we could hire someone, the first developer was the next step, and then eventually there's a couple more developers. And then at the same time around, then it was Tyann. And then as we got more money, then we took a bit of seed capital. So then we use that money to add a few more people to the team. Each point, we knew what our next weakness was or our most immediate weakness. So we were very clear on that. We knew when we got to certain milestones, what it is that we needed.

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Andy McNulty

But I wouldn't say at the very outset, we knew that eventually we wanted to be a team of 15-20 people with these people in it. We just knew at each point what we needed to do next. It was a matter of means to begin with, just building up some money to be able to hire. Then it became, now we've got the money, who's the right person we need next to build whatever weakness we have in the business.

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Heather Bayer

So I totally forgotten that Tyann was involved with GladToHaveYou, and for those of you listening who probably think that the world started in 2014 when Airbnb came on the scene, there was HomeAway before that and GladToHaveYou. Am I right? GladToHaveYou was their app?

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Andy McNulty

They bought it, yeah. They bought it in 2013.

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Heather Bayer

Yeah. I think when with CottageLink Rental Management. I think we had GladToHaveYou before HomeAway bought that out. So, yeah, it is going back a bit because I'd met Tyann at a HomeAway conference, and it was her first foray out into the conference world. Same conference I met Matt Landau at, and I think that was around about 2012. Gosh, that's a long time ago now. Yeah. I think very quickly, HomeAway saw in Tyann, what you saw in Tyann, that she has this amazing ability to connect with people and to build pretty much anything she sets her mind to. And so was Tyann pretty much your first hire outside developers?

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Andy McNulty

Yes, she was. She was in 20...... I made this mistake the other day when she had an anniversary and I said, congrats, Tyann. You've been here four years or five years. And she went, no, I haven't. I've been here six years. Well, one more than I'd said. So I think it was 2018, actually, she did start, but it was 2019 where I think we were able to get her in the team properly because we had some seed capital. But yeah, she was pretty much the first one. And it was serendipitous, really, because although we did know each other. The stars aligned in that moment because she was looking and she was interested and we were looking and because we knew each other already, it just was natural. It was quite fortunate in a way. But yeah, she's a hustler. That's Tyann. She wouldn't mind me saying that. She often will do her planning for talks, et cetera, fairly late in the day. But that's how she's good. She's very in the moment. If something goes wrong in the moment, she can find a way to instantly fix it where a lot of people might go, What do I do?

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Andy McNulty

She'd be like, This is what we're going to do. Get on with it. That skill in those early days is just invaluable. Obviously, she's blossomed through the same period that we've blossomed, too. She's obviously got a speaking gig thing going on now, and she's well respected in the industry. So it's been a really nice mutual journey for both of us, I would say.

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Heather Bayer

I remember Sun River when the three of us, we spoke at the Northwest Vacation Rental Professional Conference in Bend and did Love Languages.

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Andy McNulty

I remember the Love Languages presentation. I think it was actually VRMA we did it at. That's what I remember doing.

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Heather Bayer

Did we do it at VRMA as well? Oh, my goodness.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah, that was what you...

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Heather Bayer

Because you weren't in Bend, were you?

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Andy McNulty

I wasn't.....

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Heather Bayer

But you were at the.....

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Andy McNulty

I think Jess Vozel took my place.

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Heather Bayer

That's right.

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Andy McNulty

And then VRMA International, I've ended it.

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Heather Bayer

Right. Interesting, because we're now... We have incorporated the Love Languages in the workplace. Into the THRIVE course now. And that's taken the original love languages to the next level and actually brought them into the workplace and knowing what the love languages are of your workmates and of your owners and of the community and how impactful that can be to actually understand that concept. So it's still moving on, Andy.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah, that's good. That's good. Good to hear.

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Heather Bayer

When you began really bringing on people, it seemed at some point that you had somebody new coming in all the time. There's always a new introduction to the Touch Stay team. How did you actually bring them on board and do that onboarding process? Because it is difficult to do remotely, and I know this because all our staff were remote after a while as well.

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Andy McNulty

It's funny. I was thinking about this during the due diligence process because they were asking what our onboarding process was like, and do we have an employee handbook and all this? And I sat there and I thought, oh, my gosh, we're crap at this. We don't have any of those things. So our onboarding process was like, Monday morning, let's start a Zoom. Let's run through all the things that you need to start looking at. Here's a checklist of all the things that we set you up with. Here's your Slack, here's your email, here's your blah, blah, blah. It was very functional, I would say. And had I... I wish... Hindsight, but having thought about it, I would rather go back and have a much more, not a... structured is the wrong way. It does need to be structured, but a softer, more gentle intro into things. So instead of going straight into functional stuff, it's more about, let's have a discussion now about the kind of business we are and the value set we have and stuff like 'our work patterns are up to you' kind of discussion. And even simple stuff, just showing them in a fun way who all the people are in the organization and what they do.

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Andy McNulty

Because looking back at it now, I'm pretty sure most times I just said on Slack, Hey, everyone, Emma's started. Please introduce yourself and have a half an hour conversation with her. But she didn't have no clue who was going to message her. Who is Tyann? Probably not her, she knew who Tyann was, but you know what I mean? It didn't really happen in that context. We were a bit haphazard about it. We were very functionally focused. And that's weird for a business that tries to be less like that and more personable. But I would say during the hiring process, we probably did a bit of that. They already knew the people we were and the organization we were. Maybe when they joined, it was more a case of, well, it was a case. It was, right, you're here, we need you. Here's what we need you to start doing. It was very functional. So, yeah, it didn't really have a beautifully choreographed onboarding flow. It was definitely hustle again, I would say.

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Heather Bayer

Well, that absolutely mirrors us as well, because I remember, I think it was Pete asked the question when he and Justin were doing due diligence, and he asked the question about onboarding. Actually, I had a staff handbook that we'd done in the Touch Stay guide. So we'd created a Touch Stay guide, which was our staff handbook. Here we are. Here's our processes. But they were pretty haphazard, too. We got into this, okay, on day one, we'll say hello, and then you'll go and sit with Sandra and she will blow your mind with the reservation system. And then you'll go and sit with somebody else, you go and sit with Kaitlyn, and she'll tell you about the marketing side of it. And you hit the nail on the head. It wasn't structured. But probably, I wonder if you would go to them now and say, What do you think about our onboarding boarding process? Did it work? They would probably say, Too right, it worked.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah, I think knowing our team, I expect they would go, It was great, but here's the things I would have done differently, or here's the things that would be nice to include, because I think if nothing else, we're definitely not offended by people saying, You should do it differently or why do you do it that way? And I would definitely open to that. So, yeah, they wouldn't be short of ideas on how to make it better, that's for sure. But it should have been better. It was just... And just to clarify, we all are remote, so none of us are sitting in an office next to each other. We just do the typical thing of relying on the tools like Zoom and Slack to get us most of the way there.

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Andy McNulty

But there's one thing actually we started introducing, which is one of the developers put us onto. It was a platform called Donut. I'm probably telling people who go, Oh, yeah, I know Donut. I use it. But Donut just allows you to put all your team inside Donut, and it will automatically schedule what it calls donuts-like coffee breaks. I might be paired up randomly with Kate one week, and then next time it's with Drew, for example.

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Andy McNulty

It looks at both your diaries and finds a time for you, and you just have to show up and you talk about nothing else in work life. You talk about whatever you want to talk about, it's not work. And that's, I would say, I've heard a lot of people in the team say how really good that's been because it's allowed them to sit with somebody who they never would have come across if we've been functionally working together. But it's not intense because it's only half an hour. And equally, it's not a weird, let's all get together on a group Zoom call and talk to each other, because that doesn't work either. It's just a bit weird. So that's a really nice automated process that we found just was a very light lift. Allows the team to get to know each other a bit more in a non-weird, sort of forced way, if you know what I mean.

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Heather Bayer

Did you get together face-to-face? How often did that happen?

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Andy McNulty

We have done two annual gatherings the last two years. We were supposed to do one last week or the week before. A few different factors conspired against us, so we actually canceled that one. Hopefully, it will resurrect itself before the end of the year. We still meet up once a year. That was always difficult, though, because we had part of the team in Ukraine, and two of the team are men in Ukraine who aren't allowed to leave, and so they could never be present. They were sitting on a Zoom in the corner of the room that we all got together in person. That was a bit strange. But then we have, obviously, at the events, we all get together. For me, we can talk about events all the time and the value of them. But one of the values is that we, not all together because we can't all go to them, but those that are there at the event get to hang out a bit with each other and go to dinner. I actually tried to make a point of not doing too much external networking dinner stuff. I tried to make sure that we as a team do have dinner together because we never get that opportunity.

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Andy McNulty

So I tried to make sure that happens. And then sometimes functional meetups will happen. So Joe has the development team. I had them over last year just as a development team. When Emma joined, we actually got together in Brighton in the UK, a few of us, because we had a couple in Spain and we had Kate and I were still here in the UK. Kate's now immigrated to New Zealand, as you may know. During that, we did try to get some functional group meetings. But Honestly, it was very sporadic, as it's totally understandable. This is not necessarily the ease, practically, to get everyone together, given the disparate locations we're all in. So, a slight excuse. I probably, in hindsight, it's one of those things I would challenge myself to think harder about how we make, how we foster it. But yeah, it's a hard one.

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Heather Bayer

Yeah. I mean, we were all in Ontario. At least we were all in the same province, and we still only made it to get together once a year. We would have our annual at the end of season lunch. We loved that. It was such a great opportunity just to get everyone together and unwind. Because that's the thing with a property management company, you're taking everybody out on the same day. And that company still has to go on.  Somebody's still got to be there answering the phones if something happens. Fortunately, we had remote staff abroad. We had remote staff in the Philippines that were able to just step in and say, okay, we'll let you know if there's anything, if there's a fire. We'll let you know. But it was only really once a year that we did that. And we'd go to the conferences, we'd go to the shows. The Cottage Life Show was the one place where we could all meet up at some point because people would come in. I mean, that was a trade show for people buying properties and who had properties in Ontario. So we were there to source new owners, and we'd bring all the staff in to man the booth at some point during the weekend so that Craig and I could be there all weekend and we'd see everybody.

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Heather Bayer

Actually, that was the first time at a Cottage Life show that I met Cathy, one of our reservationists, after she'd been with us for two and a half years.

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Andy McNulty

Wow.

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Heather Bayer

So yes, I think that is an issue.

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Heather Bayer

I'm going to take a short break just now to hear about our sponsor. We're going to be right back with more from this great interview in just a few moments.

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Heather Bayer

So I'm glad to be back here again with Dennis Klett from Lodgify. Dennis, I'd like to ask you what Lodgify offers that stands it apart from the competitors because there are so many now in this industry.

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Dennis Klett

I would say overall, it's the comprehensiveness of our feature set. We're really a true all-in-one software, but it's also especially the ease of use and the pricing point that we have. And that's primarily because our main customers are individual hosts or small property managers with anything around 1-20 rentals. And competition very much overlooks this type of customer segment. But for us, it's core customers. So that's why the ease of use and the price point is so important to us.

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Dennis Klett

Then I think we go feature by feature. Our website builder, I think, is the most comprehensive website builder on the market. It's completely done in-house, meaning it's seamlessly integrated to your reservation system. We're really putting the direct bookings at the center of our platform. We have an entire team just working on building the website for you while our competitors use third-party systems, and it's not at their core.

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Dennis Klett

With regards to the channel management, we have obtained the highest and partner status with Airbnb and Vrbo. We're lead partner with Vrbo. We're a preferred plus partner with Airbnb. We're one of the few players who are connected to Google Vacation Rentals, which is a fantastic way to generate more direct bookings.

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Dennis Klett

We have a full content sync, so we synchronize everything to those platforms. And we're also connected to Booking.com, which is especially important in the United States. It's an up and coming booking platform over there. And with regards to the property management system, it's really ease of use. The level of automation that we provide, everything in a super easy to use mobile native app, where you can really manage your entire short-term rental business from your palm.

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Dennis Klett

And we have a fantastic customer service. So yes, it is a self-service software, but whenever you have any questions, we have a support team that you can email, phone, chat 24/7 during weekdays, and we have a free onboarding to get you up and running.

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Heather Bayer

That's great. I've heard about your customer service. I've had some testimonials from people to say how that service is so great.

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Heather Bayer

Just touching on, you mentioned your staff in Ukraine. That must have raised a lot of challenges at the outset of the war in Ukraine. How did you manage all that? Because these were developers that were working on major features for Touch Stay at the time.

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Andy McNulty

We had three developers in Ukraine, and our other two developers, one's in Montenegro and one's in Turkey. At that time, we didn't have Egemen in Turkey. He wasn't in the team. So there were four of them from memory. I hope I'm not forgetting anyone. I think that's right. Yeah, it was hard. It's hard to remember that far back. I remember one of the things being very concerned about what we should we do? And you can't do a lot. I remember thinking, Wow, what should we do? What should we do? What should we do? And Tyann said on one of our business meetings, Well, why don't we ask them what would be most helpful? I was like, Oh, good idea. So we did, and they came up with a couple of charities that they wanted us to support. They thought that was just the best way of doing it. So we did do a big Ukrainian aid campaign where we got our customers and our community, in fact, to contribute. We matched that donation from the company side. I forget how much we raised, but it was a significant amount.

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Andy McNulty

Then we also had Jane, our longest-serving developer, she decided she wanted to go and help with the war effort, put her skills towards helping with the war effort, her technical skills. We just said, Fine, go right ahead. Obviously, we couldn't pay her during that time, but she was going to get paid anyway by the government. But we kept her job open because she was so good and we knew that she was so valuable to us and said, Take as long as you need. And eventually she said, I'm ready to come back now. So we were just, Sure, in you come.

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Andy McNulty

We tried also to, aside from just the monetary, we also tried to think about how we could best support them as individuals. Arthur, for example, is very active in his local church group. He wanted desperately in those early days to help with the people who were moving out of Ukraine through Lviv, which is where he's based, which is on the Polish border, across into Poland. That whole refugee element, he was very… We said to him, of course, Do what you need to do. I remember Yuri was much more, I just need to get on with my job and I need to do something.

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Andy McNulty

There was also that aspect, too. Often when you think about, Well, how can we help them? Sometimes the best option is just to say, Your job is safe. We're happy for you to work there. As long as you're safe and you can do it, which Lviv was relatively untouched, as long as you can do your work, then actually, that's a normality. That's a sense of being normal. People who are in work as well are really useful to that economy because clearly they need as many people to be in work and to bring in the income to be able to support what is a very expensive war. That's what we did. It wasn't revolutionary, but I can hand on heart say, it was definitely done with as much flexibility and sensitivity and 'what can we do to help you' aspirations rather than just chucking money at the thing or I don't know what. We tried to think about it for sure.

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Heather Bayer

Yes. I can imagine it must have been pretty challenging when it all started up, though, from your perspective, just like, Oh, does everything stop? Does everything stop in terms of developing or do we......

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Andy McNulty

There you go. We didn't even talk about the actual work getting done. Then we talk more about the people and their ability to exist. That's what we started with. Then the work that needed to get done. Yeah, of course, eventually it did. But Joe, who is in charge of all the development side and the product planning, he's very resilient and he's very stoic and he's very detail-oriented and very pragmatic. So he figured out how we reorganize things and maybe put some stuff on hold and worked, obviously with the developers, the team, coming first, then what could we do afterwards in terms of delaying things or building things, different things? And it was the same during COVID. So we kept the development team on during COVID because we figured that there was so much more in the product that could be done when there was a focus on basically we rewrote the code. It was all infrastructure-based because there wasn't anybody buying guides during those early days of COVID. So it was, Well, we don't have any customers to support, so let's double down on how we can make the product better with this time we've got. So, yeah, it's just how we always been.

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Andy McNulty

I mean, in a lot of ways, that's also what eventually we were almost holding the business back because we're a bit like this. We need that. We need the opportunity with all our experience to come in and buy us and leverage the product even further. We got to the stage where we tend to be very pragmatic and in the moment and not always reactive. We've got better at being proactive, but we're very good at maneuvering and juggling and figuring stuff out, the hustle of building something. That concept applied during COVID, during the Ukraine war, and during our building of the business. That pretty much typifies how we approach everything, I would say.

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Heather Bayer

It's interesting you talk about the coding that went on during COVID when we were shut down for five months, what did we do? We revamped all our Touch Stay guides.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah. Our biggest customer sent an inquiry in May of 2020 and said, We'd like to consider Touch Stay. At the time, we were thinking, How on earth are we going to win business? Where's the business going to go? Everyone, what are we going to do? Then out of nowhere comes this, they have 1,500 properties. That was perfectly timed, too. Like you said, people were thinking also about what they could do during that downtime.

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Heather Bayer

Let's move on to keeping this remote team motivated and engaged, but also, how do you track their performance? It was something that was always at the back of my mind, although I was super happy with what everybody was doing. How were they contributing overall to the performance of the company, which we managed to? We could track it in a variety of different ways. How do you go about this?

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Andy McNulty

It won't surprise you to know that we approach it functionally. My philosophy is always that I want everybody to feel empowered to do what they need to do to get there, get their work done. I'm never going to be knocking at the door every couple of days and going, What's up? What are you doing? That can often then also have the negative side, which is sometimes I may be a bit too distant and maybe not supportive enough. That's me being self-critical. I think that hopefully most of the team will say, at least most of the team that I interact with will say that I am supportive, but I feel very much that in leaving somebody to get on with stuff, there is this risk that then you appear somewhat distant from them.

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Andy McNulty

But I always made it my point during catch-ups to ask about how they are finding things and tell me about how are you and what's up and how can I help and those things. Through that discussion, I think that just naturally allows that person to feel supported and empowered because it's not like they would tell me stuff and I would say, Well, okay, great. Nothing I can do about that. They would always be, Okay, what can I do? All right, let's maybe do this. That could be anything from fixing a broken system or a broken process process, which we've had a lot of as we've grown because we haven't focused too much on that.

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Andy McNulty

When new people come in, they challenge that. It's being open to working with that person to fix that and empowering that person to fix that. But also through to if there's any personal stuff going on. I start with the point which is, Is everything okay? Then I don't want to know unless you want to tell me. If you're comfortable telling me, which a lot of them are, we'll talk about that. My style is that I will go all the way through to amateur therapist as well, or just maybe with a listening ear. And that's my style. That's just the way I am. It can't be any different. But I would say if I was to force myself to think about what I don't do and what I think would be more beneficial, would be some more structured planning to assessing performance and growth, whether it's a quarterly structured sit down to go through a bunch of set questions.

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Andy McNulty

But I just struggle with that just because it's not me. It's just not my style. And I think my style gets it done in a different way, but my style means that not everyone maybe feels the same way. And so then I maybe lose a bit of sight as to those who do need that more structured approach. So I'm far from your ideal person to ask that question.

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Heather Bayer

Well, this is it. I'm totally along those same lines because I remember selling the business and going through due diligence. And one of the questions, and it came with this long list of questions that they came up with at the outset, was collect together all the performance reviews over the years. What performance reviews?

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Heather Bayer

Yes. I think Craig and I tried it one year, and we had the staff come down to my house, which is where I used to have our office in the basement, so some of them had already worked there. They all sat downstairs and did a little bit of work while Craig and I sat upstairs and did these performance reviews, and everybody was so uncomfortable. It just..., Oh, gosh, am I next? What are you going to tell me? It just wasn't our way of doing things. I'm completely with you on that. And for us, Sandra is still there after... must be 17 years now. Kaitlyn must be coming up on 10, Christina, 8 or 9. It's just our staff stayed the course, and they all did a great job. They're still doing a fantastic job without all the formal stuff. So I think.....

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Andy McNulty

Yeah, I would say as well, Heather, that We're saying, Oh, that's the way we are, and maybe that's not the ideal way. But in a lot of respects, it is actually the ideal way, because the worst thing about an annual review, or even a quarterly or a half-yearly one, is it feels very forced, it feels very routine, and that doesn't allow a free-flowing conversation. If you're talking to the people that you are... I don't talk to everyone in the team because I'm not in charge of everyone in the team. But those that I do have a direct relationship with, I'm talking to them regularly. So It's almost like an ongoing fluid performance feedback. And generally, you don't need to get to that stage where it's disciplinary or something like that. You don't need to get to that stage because if you are, then you've either made the wrong hiring at the start, and we've tried very hard at the start to make sure we make the right hire. But if you have made the right hire and it's going a bit wrong, it's usually because there's a lack of direction from you or a lack of understanding of what that person is struggling with.

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Andy McNulty

I always try to make it my business to sit down, if someone's not clear about... There are a couple of people I think in the team who we've had that discussion with, I'm just not clear what my role is. It'd be like, Well, here's how I see it, but is that what you see? They're like, Oh, yeah, okay.

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Andy McNulty

We're growing all the time and we're learning all the time. Our style is fit for us at this time. You have to be a bit more agile. Someone's role that it is for this six months might subtly change for the next six months because you learn things about the business and each other. I think at the same time, I am cognizant that it's a two ways. I'm very much talking about it as it works for the business and for me. But the recipient of that, the team member, in a lot of respects, may like that more structure. There are people, obviously, who like that more structured approach.

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Heather Bayer

I just wanted to move on, Andy, to the awards that you've won over the years. Touch Stay has won so many awards, but the most recent one, tell us about the Shortyz Award, how it felt to... Tell us about the award and how it felt to get that. It must have been really bitter sweet.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah, it was. It was Shortyz Team of the Year Award. It was the first time, the inaugural, it was the first time they'd done this award. And so we entered it. And honestly, it was really the one award I wanted win. The others are just a bit 'yeagh'. I don't mean that disrespectfully to the awards producers, but often you don't get a lot of... There's not a lot that comes from it other than a badge that you can put on your website. It's arguable how much that really benefits the business. But obviously, I'm not knocking it. Everyone would want to win it, of course they would. But for me, Team of the Year meant something different. It really did mean something different. When I spoke to Paul Stevens afterwards, he was telling me the quality of our submission was excellent. I shout out to Ned on our team for that, because Ned's our content writer. But he was also very, very thorough in his entry, and it was written beautifully, and it captured us really well. It was so thorough and detailed and very reflective of us that it made an impact in our ability to win.

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Andy McNulty

Often, it's interesting, Paul and I were talking about this about the quality of entries they receive, and he receives a lot of entries for all these things. He said, Honestly, Andy, you'd be shocked at how poor some are. I'm like, No, I wouldn't be shocked. I completely understand it. Some people just go, Yeah, let's throw in for an award and not think about it. But it matters. So I'd say that. But secondly, yeah, bittersweet because at the time, I obviously knew that we were about to announce that we were selling the business. I was, without being dramatic, but I do tend to be a bit dramatic about these things, but I was waving goodbye to the team. It was bittersweet. But of all the awards at that time, I just couldn't.... I was so... Happy is just the wrong word, like touched. I felt really genuinely a warm fuzzy about it, and it really got me. I was so proud that we won that one. That was the one that I wanted to win. But you're right, bittersweet because I'm like, Oh, you talk about regrets of signing the deal. It's like when you hear that, you're like,....

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Heather Bayer

Exactly. I was really disappointed actually, because I was a judge on the Shortyz Awards, and I had to recuse myself from the Team Award, because I was asked to judge the Team Awards, and I had to recuse myself because of the connection that I had with Touch Stay as an investor. And so I was really disappointed that I did not see that submission because I went through, it must have been 60 submissions for the two categories that I was judging. And yeah, Paul's absolutely right. The quality of some, it was just not worth looking at them because Well, it's easy, isn't it?

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Andy McNulty

No. No.

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Heather Bayer

Yes. And then there were a few that really came out and it's just, oh, my gosh, I know these people through what they're telling us about in this submission. So for any of you out there who are thinking of submitting yourselves for a reward or getting somebody to nominate you, make sure you spend some good quality time on that submission. It really makes the difference. But you guys were so well-deserving of it.

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Andy McNulty

Yeah. And on that point, I want to say one thing that I think people have heard me say this before, and I think it's really important for me to say it, especially now. We're a tech business, and I think there's a temptation in the tech world, I don't think the modern tech companies would like this too much, but there is a temptation to be a bit faceless and to say it's all about SaaS compound growth rate and churn and NRR and all this stuff. But the reality is, especially in our industry, our customers are serving guests. I always say if we can be to our customers the way they are to their guests, which is We're here if you want us. We hope you don't need us because we don't want to be on the call or on the phone to you all the time. But we're here if you need us. That's the way we've always tried to approach it in a human way. I think there's an unseen value in the power of being human and personable in a business. It's very hard sometimes when you have numbers to hit and ROI and cost of acquisition and all this stuff that's really important.

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Andy McNulty

It's sometimes hard to remember that at the core of it, all of those things are outputs of the team that you have. For us to win the Team of the Year was not just lovely and a warm feeling that made me very proud, but it was also a reality of... It was a - vindication is the wrong word - a seal of approval on the great work that they all do. I think it's really important to know that the value of the business that we've built is as much about the team we've built as it is about all the other nuts and bolts, which are equally important, but the team is as important.

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Heather Bayer

Well, it feels to me that I know your developers are amazing people, and you and Joe are amazing people, but it's your team, the team that are out there dealing with those customers that... and I've met so many of them. I met Kate and Lauren and Alice in particular. Loved Alice, loved having Alice on the podcast as well. You just created this wonderful, a wonderful team. So congratulations, Andy, on selling the business. But congratulations on building this amazing team, which is going to go ahead for itrinity and continue the business to the standards that you created.

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Heather Bayer

So what is next for you?

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Andy McNulty

Well, I've got a transition period with the buyer, itrinity. So we've got a new me. So some of you will see and get to meet and know Sivan, who is the new Andy. And so there's a process of, as you can imagine, handing over knowledge, handing over processes, handing over documents, handing over know-how, blah, blah, all this stuff, which is very intense. And it's intense on the team, too. They're all being asked to say what they do and what the problems are and what the opportunities are. It's very intense for everyone. So that's the first phase, get through that. How long that will be? I don't know. I'm here for months.  I'm contracted here for months more.

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Andy McNulty

So let's see. Once that's done, then I can decompress and I can literally, instead of holding my body in this tight position that I have been this past year. I can literally go, and my shoulders can relax, and I can relax and decompress as I'm calling it. And no matter what I think about what I want to do next here, I know that during that process of decompression, my brain will turn in a different way and I'll have different feelings about things.

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Andy McNulty

I've got three or four ideas in mind already. I don't want to start another tech business that much is for sure. Got the T-shirt on that one. I want to do something else. But quite what I don't know, Heather, I love this industry. I'd love to be able to find some path in this industry because I think I've said it before on LinkedIn posts or on this podcast that I like people and this industry, as my fashion career was people, it's the people aspect I always love. So I would love to find something in this industry. But Yeah. Transition to the new owner, decompress, then see.

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Heather Bayer

Well, I'm hoping we can come back and talk to you in maybe another year and hear what you're doing, hopefully. I've got my fingers crossed that it's still in this industry. Andy, thank you so much for joining me. It's been such a pleasure talking with you, and I will see you again at some time in the future.

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Andy McNulty

You will. I want to say an official thank you, Heather, to you because I gave you the award, didn't I, at VRMA last year?

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Heather Bayer

You did. Yeah, that was very touching, I have to say. That was wonderful.

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Andy McNulty

But you've given and you still continue to give so much to this industry, so much value and wisdom. And you have to me personally, I've said that to you before, and I think I said it in that speech, too, that you've been a wise head for me, too. And I recognize that and I want to say it so that everyone hears that again. And if this is my last podcast in this industry, I want to say that, because I've been on it a number of times. So, yeah, genuinely, Heather, thank you. And I really hope you keep doing all the good stuff that you're doing, because there's so many people that I talk to out there, not just me, who benefit from all the stuff that you do. So props to you. Keep going.

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Heather Bayer

Thank you so much. And as I say, we will talk again.

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Andy McNulty

Great. See you later then.

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Heather Bayer

Well, that was great talking to Andy. I do hope he doesn't leave this business because he's just such a great person, and our business benefits from him being within it. So I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you got you a little bit inspired about remote working. I'm sure Andy would be more than happy to talk to you. In a month or two's time, he's going to have a little bit more time on his hands to actually talk about the building of remote teams, because he just did an amazing job at it. As you could tell from that conversation, he didn't have a structure to do it. He talked a lot about functional management, but the proof of the pudding and all that, his team are just an amazing group of people. I don't think that comes through the luck in the hiring process. That is the skills in managing people who are not... You're not seeing face-to-face every day. So let me know. I'll put Andy's contact details in the Show Notes if you want to get in touch with him.

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Heather Bayer

So that's it for another week. I really enjoyed this, having run a remote team myself, to talk to somebody else who was so involved with remote workers, it was quite the pleasure. And talking about pleasure, it's always a pleasure to be with you. And I will look forward to having that pleasure again next week.

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Mike Bayer

This episode was brought to you by Lodgify, an all-in-one solution that will help you start, manage, and grow your short-term rental business. Use code VRF10 and get started today at Lodgify.com.

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Heather Bayer

It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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