[Heather Bayer]

Today, I am talking about family businesses, tradition, and how one person steps into a decades-old family-run vacation rental business and does it with a brilliant balance of respect for the legacy and a clear vision for the future. Listen in to this brilliant episode with Alexis Miller of Cottage Connection of Maine. 

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. 

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.

So if you've been with us for a while, you know that this podcast is more than just about tools and tactics, although you may have thought from the past few weeks that we are just focusing on AI and nothing else. But you know, it's not just that, it's about the people behind the properties, the stories behind the systems, and those relationships that give our industry its heartbeat. 

And I've had the pleasure of meeting so many remarkable people through this work, and one of those connections that really stood out to me happened recently at the VRNation Conference in Austin. That's where I met Alexis Miller. And let me tell you, this is someone who made a real lasting impression, not just because she's smart, she's insightful, and she's deeply involved in her family's long-standing vacation rental business, no, it's because she also brought me Yorkshire tea bags. Which, if you know me well, which many of you listeners do, you know that is the way to my heart. 

She also carried the most wonderfully voluminous bag, and it had everything in it, including, I kid you not, tape to bind my broken pinky finger. I've mentioned that in a previous podcast that I went walking with Ali Cammelletti early one morning in Austin, it was still dark, we did a little bit of off-piste walking, and went from trail to trail, and in doing so I tripped over a big pile of wire and ended up with a little broken finger. I haven't done anything about it, it just sits a little bit proud of the rest of my fingers right now, but during the conference when I came back from that walk and I was showing my very black finger, which was very black and bruised, Alexis went into her bag and came out with this tape, which she proceeded to tape my finger up, along with a little splint that we got from the coffee machine area. It was fun.

Honestly, the VRNation Conference was one of my favourite events, even with the fracture. In fact, it was at that moment when Alexis presented me with my teabags, and I thought, this is someone who truly embodies the spirit of hospitality and preparation, so I was thrilled when she agreed to come on the show. 

Alexis, or Lexi, is part of the next generation stepping into a decades-old family-run vacation rental business, and she's doing it with this brilliant balance of respect for the legacy and a very clear vision for the future.

So in our conversation today, we're exploring how she's introducing change, navigating the family dynamic and adopting modern solutions, hopefully including AI to streamline operations and support growth of the business. And as someone who also works closely with family, my son Mike and I run the Vacation Rental Formula Business School together, I really resonated with Alexis's journey. Her story is full of heart and full of great takeaways for anyone evolving a family-run business in today's very fast-paced environment.

So get comfy, pour yourself a cup of Yorkshire tea, if you've got one handy, or coffee, and enjoy this conversation with Alexis Miller. 

So I am super delighted to have with me today Alexis, or Lexi Miller, from Cottage Connection of Maine. As I mentioned in the introduction, I met Alexis at the VR...., we've met before, but properly in Austin at the VRNation Conference, and she brought me teabags, which means she has an absolute entry into the podcast, apart from the fact she's got a fabulous story to tell us as well, so welcome, thank you for joining me, and I love to see that you are drinking some tea.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Of course, the day you see me not drinking tea is the day you should be concerned.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Hey, I just went down to Orlando for the weekend for an AI Conference, it really was fantastic. I geeked out for three solid days. I have never been to a conference yet where I have not, at any point in three days, felt the urge to leave a session. You know, you sort of sit by the door, and just in case it's really not what I want to hear, and I'll just sort of slip out at the back, because my attention span is not great, but I spent three days, and I was just glued to every single speaker. But I took, because I know that you will never get a kettle in a hotel, I took my own kettle, I took my own teabags, and very few clothes, because it's not very much you can fit into a carry-on after you put a full-size kettle into it. 

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Yep, that's true.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yes, so thank you so much for joining me. What I want to do today is to explore the whole family business thing, because there's quite a few businesses that I see within our industry, and they're really successful ones, where it's a family-owned business, where the new generation has come into the business and has been in there from quite an early age. So I want to find out, first of all, your history, the history of Cottage Connection of Maine, a little bit about your parents and how they started up, and I know your mum, Audrey Leeds-Miller, is such a powerhouse in this industry.

She's clearly birthed a powerhouse daughter who is poised, I'm sure, at some point to do the takeover of this. So give us a little bit of background where the business started, and what age were you when you entered it?

[

Alexis Miller]

So my parents started the business 32 years ago. My dad has a background in hospitality and rentals. He had apartments down in Florida, and he snowbirded between there and Maine with his parents when he was just out of college.

And he also has a background in real estate. So he was literally sitting up here, riding a desk at the real estate office, watching them throw short-term rental inquiries in the trash. And he went, huh?

And he had bought a house and had started renting it on his own in the late 80s. It was the first home on the East Coast of the US to be marketed for family reunions. It's still our flagship home, Captain's Quarters. It's the one in the TV show that we did in partnership with Vermont PBS many, many years ago called Getting Away Together. And he met my mom and said, well, now I'm kind of stuck in Maine year round, what am I going to do? At the time, this was the late 80s, no one was buying real estate. The commissions on real estate were really, really low as well. And he thought back to that and said, hmm, I think I might be able to do some rentals or something up here. And at the same time, my mom was commuting over an hour a day, each way to go to and from work. And she said, I don't want to do that commute in the winter. What are we going to do?

So in 1993, my parents founded the business. And they used to live in Captain's Quarters in the winter and run the office out of there. This is pre-internet. They had a fax machine and a booking board with a big calendar. And then they'd move up to the top of the hill, there's a house across the street they would rent in the summer so people could rent the [Captain's Quarters] house.

The first season, they started with something like 10 houses. And at the end of the first season, they had 75.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Wow.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

And we've gone up and down ever since I came into the business full time, right after I graduated college in 2021. I graduated in May. And by the very end of May, actually, I was hitting the ground running. And one of the first things I did - shout out to Justin Ford again - was complete the short-term mental safety inspector certification. It was that important to us. And I've just kind of never stopped.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Oh, how old were you when you decided that you were going to do this, that you were going to go to college and then come back and go into the business? Or was it something that was always.....

‍

[Alexis Miller]

You know, I never let myself, I never let myself think that this was going to be the end result. I studied international business, I really wanted to be traveling. Of course, I graduated in 2021, at the tail end of COVID. So I couldn't travel anyway. 

What happened was our reservationist at the time was studying to be a nurse, and she was told by Maine CDC, that she could not do her placements, if she worked in a public facing job for a certain amount of time before those placements. So that put her at the Fourth of July weekend, which is basically our second busy week of the season. So I got a call right before spring break my senior year saying, Hey, this is what's going on. If you want the job, it's yours.

And what I heard was, we need help, please come home. And as you know, family business, and especially just where we've grown up, that when your family says, we need help, you drop everything and go. So I did, I graduated and hit the ground running.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

But you obviously were aware of what the business was, had you done any work in it beforehand? Or was it always something that was sort of on one side as you were growing up?

‍

[Alexis Miller]

So everybody in my family, in my immediate family has worked in the family business. So I grew up in it. I remember literally one of my earliest memories is doing spring cleaning training. And four years old, watching housekeepers, learning how to make hospital corners on beds. And so I've done things right up from I started going into houses to help with, you know, WiFi and cable and all of those sorts of issues when I was 10. I started taking reservations when I was 20. I've done just about everything in between from housekeeping, to linens, to front desk, checking people in and getting people out of houses, all the way through.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

So you're now in there. And the business has got such a long-standing history. I mean, I go back to when I first started in this business back in 2003, I think I started my company. And I remember then doing some research online. And because we have cottages up here in Ontario, I was searching for 'cottages' and Cottage Connection of Maine, I remember that coming up really early on. So I did use it as a little bit of a foundation for my business. You know, I poured over every listing, because when I came into it, I had no idea, you know, I didn't have any background in it and there was nobody out there to help me.

Yeah, if I'd known what I know now, I think I'd have reached out to your mum and said, you know, I'm starting up in Ontario, what do I do? But yes, I've known about it for a really long time. 

What's it like now stepping into a legacy of a business that's been around for so long? And how are you putting your own stamp on it?

‍

[Alexis Miller]

You know, it's so funny, because I've always been part of it. To me, it hasn't really been a step in. It's been more of a continuation on a theme. But it's been really fun to sit and see people start to recognize me as me and not just as Audrey's daughter or Jeff's daughter and say, Oh, we should call Lexi. Like the first time that I had a homeowner call and say, No, I want to talk to Alexis, was the moment I was like, okay, I am in the right place. And people actually understand what I do and why. So in terms of putting my own stamp on it, a lot of it has just come down to I'm very much a 'work smarter, not harder' kind of person, and figuring out ways that we can do things more efficiently and more, or really less emotionally intensive. Because obviously, in this industry, we get so invested in other people's experiences and feelings and emotions, it's hard to separate yourself from that. But also to be able to sit there and really push back and say, you know, we're here, we care, this is our neighborhood too and push through that feeling because we are the oldest company in our area that does only vacation rentals. You know, there's a couple of real estate agencies that have done onesies and twosies before us. But when people think of Boothbay, Maine, and vacation rentals, they think of Cottage Connection. So it's more trying to continue on and show people that the next generation cares just as much as the first, in spite of what people may think about young people and work ethic and all of that.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

So what are you bringing to it? You've got the tradition already in place, but you're bringing a breath of fresh air, youth ideas, what sort of change and new ideas are you introducing? Because I'm very conscious that you need to not rock the boat, as well.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Yes. Yeah. So part of it for us is balancing, how do you keep the core of the company and that core ethos, while also bringing things into the 21st century.

So like, we started doing contactless checkout during COVID and check-in. And at first, my whole company was like, I don't know, maybe this could be not a good idea. But we're counteracting that and those concerns, because we're still talking to everybody.

I talk to all of our guests, you know, five, six, seven, sometimes more times before they even get here. But we're also working really, really hard to bridge the gap between my mom and I, navigating left brain, right brain, my mom is very intensely creative. She's very right-brain. I'm very left-brain, you know, I'm creative in a very different way than she is. So she comes up with a lot of really good ideas. And then I figure out what it's actually going to take to make them happen. If that's applicable to our company, and if so, what's the timeline to actually apply it? Part of it is also, I have my own good ideas, you know, as well as things that I can do to make our lives easier. And also being able to use my business background, my degree is in international business, so all of those skills that I've learned as part of that, like process management and project management and operations and logistics, to actually sit down and say, okay, it's always been hard copies and binders and things to train people and now the way to do that is to use AI and to create these SOPs online and put them in a living document that we can actually update and change as we need to, instead of pulling that dusty binder off the shelf and going, this isn't even the same software we use.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Well, you're speaking my language when you talk about AI, obviously now I'm in my geeky phase. So tell me more about these SOPs, because this is something when I was running my company, like many founders, everything was in my head. So if somebody said to me, do you have an SOP for this? I said, yes, it's in this particular brain cell, it's up here. And I will explain it. So when we had somebody new join the company, I had to spend the time extracting what was in my head putting into theirs. And as we grew, then it became that sort of [Chinese] whispers thing, you know, my office manager knew what was in my head, and then it had to go into her head, and then it went to the new hire. So it wasn't very efficient, and definitely not very effective. So I think this whole idea of getting SOPs into an AI format so that it's easy for people to access is just brilliant and more people could be doing it. Can you explain a bit more how you set that up?

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Yeah, so there's a couple of tools that we use. The simplest is just ChatGPT and Gemini. For the simple things, I can just sit there and say, okay, I want to talk about this process. And I say, let me tell you all the things we do and I'll let you order it. I try to put it in as best of a structure as I can. And things that are tangential that happen at the same time I say, well, this is happening, this is also going on. And I let it make out the list of all the bullet points in the checklist saying, have you done this? And if you've done this, you know, you've got to check for this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We store those in Notion now, which is nice. Notion also has its own AI. I have never used it for SOPs, but I'm sure it's great to use with a lot of that stuff. And there's also a couple of things that we do like Loom videos, those little short five minute videos showing people this is where you go on the software or you know, this is the particular report that you want for this.

And there's a couple of other things that I'm toying around with that use AI to actually record your screen as screenshots as you're doing procedures. So, you know, if I'm setting up a house, it says, here's the place that you hit for the listing, and then you click this and then you click this, you can go in and edit it and say, you know, change the wording, this is the button that you want to hit or whatever. So I'm finding that to be very, very helpful. And a lot of it is that same sort of, it's all in my head and it's all in mom's head. I've got 90% of it. She's got the other 10% on top of everything else.

Right now we are a full-time team of two in the office. It's my mom and I, my dad is our outdoor guy. He manages all of the maintenance and lawn care and all of that coordinating all of the caretaking sort of side of things. Right now, just today, we've brought on an office manager, or an office assistant for the summer who's a student. So she's only going to be here until the middle of August. But I can keep going and show her things and while I'm showing them to her, record them at the same time.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. And I think that that is the beauty of AI, because it's there as an assistant and yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, we had this discussion when we were in Austin about AI and hospitality and the fact that it's not taking away our ability to drive hospitality. It's actually augmenting it, because when you're using AI to do all that repetitive stuff and if you've got your SOPs in an AI format, you don't have to spend that time teaching it to somebody. You can give them the link to get into it.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Yeah. And then you're freeing up your brain space too, in a way and all that, you know, you can take all that clutter and stop focusing on, okay, how do I need to explain the linen protocol to someone and instead focus on how can I make this guest check-in easier? Or this person is having this sort of issue with the TV. Is there something I can do to help them in particular and really focus on the heart part of hospitality instead of all of the logistical admin stuff in the back?

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, exactly. And it's a bit of a hard slog trying to get this across that it's not taking away from people, it's giving them the ability to do so much more.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Oh, yeah, I would totally agree. I think for me, just the use of AI, even the limited use that I use on a weekly basis, right? I'm not sitting in AI all day doing everything because it doesn't integrate... Gemini doesn't integrate with our software, right? It's that that sort of thing isn't going to happen. Does it integrate with some of the other things that we do? Yes. Do I use it to help with that sort of stuff? Yes, but it's freeing up my time and things even as simple as I can't find the WiFi password. Now, we use RueBaRue, the guide has an AI that can go in and say 'This is the WiFi password' that's in the guide. If you're having trouble with that, 'Are you having trouble with that?' And if it says yes, it'll tell me that someone's having an issue and I can call them. But instead of spending all of that time, especially on a Friday or Saturday, as many of us have those common turns, and that's the first question, if I take an hour away just not having to answer those questions, suddenly, I have so much time to free up to do other creative things or to go into the community and say, this is who we are. And this is what we do. And we care. And it's our neighborhood, too. And, you know, all of these things that I can't do if I'm just bogged down by all these little minutia.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

I'd love to talk about community because I know that's a passion of yours. You've been in the community for so long, but it's not something you can just say, well, you know, we came in the community in 1993, and now we're still here. You it's something that has to be nurtured all the time.

So tell me a little bit about how you are developing and continuing those ties with the community as the business goes on.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

I think the biggest thing is just showing up. So for us, when I went to college, my parents spent a lot of time out and about, you know, we have a home that we rent. We also have a family home in Vermont. I was going to school in Vermont. So my parents were over there more than they were in town, especially in the winter. So when I came home from college, I would go and sit literally in bars in the fall. And people, you know, first off, I turned 21 during COVID. So it wasn't something I could do for a while. But when I could, I was like, this is interesting. And a lot of my friends work in restaurants in town, so I could go and sit and catch up with people that I care about. But I would sit in there and I kid you not, the first month that I did it, I gave out something like 70 business cards, just by saying no, I'm here. I'm the next generation of Cottage Connection. My parents did not retire. The company's still here. 

So that told me we really needed to show up more and now it's chamber events and sponsoring a couple of things like we sponsor our local movie theater as a nonprofit. So we're sponsoring there and showing up there. They do a bunch of members only events as well as, of course, having our name and our ads on the title reels and all of that sort of stuff. But it's showing up there in our local communities and showing up, of course, for advocacy things, to town hall meetings and all of that.

But it's also showing up for other people. So just last Saturday, someone local to us at a hotel actually that has cottages too got into a bind because they double booked. I was their first phone call, because they knew that even if I didn't have something available, I would know who did. And luckily I had something available and was able to get the people into a spot that they're currently loving. But I get those kinds of calls. I get calls from the local realtors when someone's buying and is interested in what regulation is looking like here, or are there things that people should need to know about renting that we don't know.

I got a call two days ago about hot tub maintenance, because they were like, you rent homes, maybe you'll know someone who can help come fix our hot tub. And, you know, I didn't know anyone in particular, but my answer was go call the person you got the hot tub from. And they're like, Oh, we hadn't even thought that they might have a maintenance team.

When you show up like that, people understand that you're the person.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, it's that connection, isn't it? That's taking Cottage Connection of Maine to the next level.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

It is.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

I love that. So what sort of... Do you have regulations? You say you turn up at council meetings? What's...

‍

[Alexis Miller]

Yeah, so we don't really have regulation in Maine right now. I mean, we have our own classification of accommodation in Maine state law, which was something that our advocacy group was able to do in 2014 or 2015. And at the... Maine is still very much fighting at the very, very micro level, like association by association, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town. We did have to go up in front of one of our towns here two years ago. And they had a citizens action committee. Ironically, the person who was leading it, her grandparents and her parents made their living off of summer cottages. So everybody turned around. The first question was, why are you the person heading up this conversation?

And that all went really well because I got word of it. I texted out to every one of our local managers. There are six of us, six companies in the area. And I said, we all need to show up. And so three of us showed up the first time, two of us showed up the next time. And one of us showed up the following session. There were three sessions over the span of a week and a half, right over VRMA in 2023. So we literally went and sat and then flew down to VRMA the next day. 

But what came out was the issue, I literally was told in that conversation, I stood up to say, they were talking about issues with parking and things at one particular home. And I said, who's the person who manages that? And they all said, it was an owner operator who just wasn't, you know, they actually, as it turns out, weren't even in the country when that issue happened. So they couldn't answer the phone. I said, well, then maybe the solution is to have a local person, like a manager or a caretaker who's there. And I stood up to say something else and they turned around and said, and I quote, 'You are not the issue. Local managers are not the issue.'

And that speaks volumes to the value of having people on the ground who are actually out in the community, not just holed up in an office, or a big box store where you're just seeing a car park at a house for three hours and then leave, where there's no relationship building. You have to be able to build relationships with your community to be able to have those conversations, be able to prove it and we can turn around and say, we've been here for 32 years. 

My parents chose to move to Boothbay. My dad and my mom are both transplants. My mom is originally from Maine. My dad is from Connecticut. So he's what we call a summer complaint. And then he wound up here stuck in Maine, but they said we want to have that small town experience for our child when we eventually have one that we grew up with. And Boothbay was the place that gave them that sense of feeling and it's still that same way.

And part of that is that community relationship and that dedication to the preservation of the community. Some places are very concerned about tourism changing the town. We're very fortunate in that Boothbay has been a tourism hub for over 150 years. So the community has sort of been fostered around that understanding as well, but it's being willing to go out and say, look, I may not have all the answers, but I care enough to find out and I care enough to try.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, exactly. It's interesting as I talk to so many different leaders across this industry, the ones that are most successful are the ones that are deeply embedded in their communities. They're known when they go out on the streets and as you say, and I'm quite sure this happens to you if you go around town, you're recognized and that is such a huge value.

When I see some of the, maybe the AA or.... the AA??? - the Airbnb co-hosting companies that are all remote. And that I find really concerning, because they're setting up in locations that they know nothing about. So they don't have that connection with the community.

And that's where, I mean, you mentioned a situation a bit earlier on where the person was hundreds of miles away, but where it just feels that those successful companies are the ones where they have that community engagement and embedding into the community. 

So Alexis, I'm really curious. You said so you've in the office, you've got yourself an office manager now. Well, an office assistant part-time. An office assistant who's going to be there till the middle of August, and how many properties do you have?

‍

[Alexis Miller]

We have just shy of 50 for this season and we will grow. We go, as I'm sure many people experienced during COVID, we went from our best year. We had 160 properties. That was 2012. Then Airbnb came in and we said, Oh, we could go for quality over quantity. So we did and we cut half of our homes in a year and soared because of it, to COVID knocking out about a quarter of our inventory of people either moving to just get out of Dodge during COVID, because Maine was a very safe place to be, especially the coast of Maine during COVID to saying, oh, we could retire here now; maybe we should. And having people selling their homes who we never thought would sell, who never thought they would sell, because the price was just so good. The value for homes right now is starting to come down, but it's still very, very high. So we had a lot of homeowners who said real estate offices are saying that my home could sell for over a million dollars. I can't not try.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. I remember that because I sold my company in 2022, but those previous two years were just crazy, crazy years. But I remember talking to somebody who said they were going to put..., they had a full summer of bookings, and he said, the money truck came up my driveway. How do you turn it away? Yeah, no, I quite understand.

And, you know, we had fairly rigid clauses in our contract about selling, but, you know, some of those just went by the wayside at that time because we completely understood that when that money truck rolls in, they're not going to turn it down. But, you know, we made sure that we got part of that money out of that money truck. But yes, there was a lot of churn going on at that time.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

There was, and I think it's very telling too, even with all that churn, we, I can't think of a single homeowner who told me, you know, we're not going with you because we're dissatisfied with you. It's, we're going to do something else because we want to, our grandkids are old enough to come summer with us. So we want to be up here in the summer. 

We're going to sell the house because, you know, we just had a really good offer or we're going to come live. But I mean, we had a homeowner who actually had his home in our rental pool for a year during COVID and his family home, which he co-owns with several siblings and cousins and everyone, which is still in our rental pool. And he turned around and stopped renting after the first year. And he said, it has nothing to do with you. It's that, you know, my wife and I are still healthy and able and God willing, we want to be up here for as long as we possibly can. And he said, I'm going to tell you what one of my favorite professors, and this is a very, you know, like, logistically minded guy. He was an engineer. He said, I'm going to tell you what one of my favorite professors always used to say when someone did something good. He said, good work, well done. And I look forward to working with you on the family house for many, many years to come. So clearly we're doing something right.

I had a guest who used to stay with us who bought a house up here this very early spring. And guess what? They're coming into the program in 2026. They said, we had such a great experience with you as a guest. We now want to be a homeowner.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

And that is really telling. It shows that what you're doing is really hitting the mark. So, you know, I feel you probably, as you said, you don't lose homes because people are dissatisfied with the services you provide.

What do you believe are the best of your services? What is it that keeps your owners with you? If they were telling somebody else about Cottage Connection of Maine, what would they say?

‍

[Alexis Miller]

I've asked some of our homeowners about this because we have homeowners who have literally been with us for all 32 years. And we have homeowners who put clauses into their deeds and trust to their children when they get ready to hand them over saying, as long as you rent this house, you will rent with Cottage Connection as long as they're around. And I say, well, you know, what, what is it that we have done?

And the answer comes down to two very simple things. We communicate regularly, efficiently, and with a proper amount of information without being too overwhelming. And we care. That's what it comes down to. I always tell people, we have all these, you know, everybody's got a ton of taglines and mottos and things. The one that I tell people all the time is we are real local people who really do care. And it doesn't matter if you're a homeowner or a guest or a neighbour of ours, we are there because we care.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. And once again, that comes back to the value of being local and making your mark in the community because you won't let anybody down. Because you have a huge massive reputation to uphold.

‍

[Alexis Miller]

And it's not just reputation. It's, you know, these are my friends. These are my neighbours. These are people that not only I have to see regularly, like in the grocery store, if nothing else, but they're people that I enjoy spending time with. And I want them to value my time as much as I value theirs. And you show that by showing that you value the things that they care about. And for all of us, that's this town.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, that's a wonderful sentiment. I met you in Austin, you know, that was Austin where we had the time to spend some quality time as you strapped up my pinky finger, which is fractured by the way. So I'm talking fingers. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of what's changing in the vacation rental world? So, you know, you're going to the conferences, what else are you doing?

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[Alexis Miller]

It's a lot of talking. And I mean, in Maine, there are so few of us, I can name on one hand the number of PMs that I know who go to national conferences at all. So we bring back that information and share it with everybody else.

But we're also I get emails almost every week from other people in our industry in Maine saying, hey, what do you use for insurance? Hey, how do you do this? What are you seeing for your booking pacing right now? You know, how's your season going? Are you noticing X? And sometimes it's as simple as like further south in Maine.

There's a huge Canadian contingent who comes to the beaches and when everything was going on they said, we're not going to go to Old Orchard Beach. Guess what? One of my best friends, who's my age, who runs vacation rentals and another family business in Maine, it's on Old Orchard Beach. And so my first text message the next day was how are you doing? Can I do anything to help? And it wound up being a phone call that she and I did just chatting and her saying, oh, you know, I'm just watching cancellations. We're all in and I'm breathing through a bag and I said, well, you're going to get through it. And sure enough, she took on a new house and it's a very unusual home for their area. It's very large for the area and she recouped almost all of the money that she lost from those bookings just in renting that house. And now she's been re-renting all of those weeks where there were cancellations to other folks, or even to some Canadians who are saying, you know, we still would like to come. However, you know, whatever the political climate is. But so much of it is just talking to other people.

And as you know, I mean, we text each other very, very frequently. We message each other all the time. I do that with people all over the country, all over the world. Some of my best friends in this industry are actually in Australia, Rebecca Cribbin and her family. And of course, they're a much larger company than we are. The way they do things is a little bit different because of that scale. But I text her all the time and say, you know, I really like that format of that video. Can I steal that idea? How are you dealing with this? Are you noticing X? And it's just a lot of back and forth. And it is also a lot of going to conferences and listening to webinars and podcasts.

I was on a webinar that was sort of like AI-101 before this call for our chat, but it's just really, really making sure to pay attention. And we're very fortunate here in Maine, too, that we also have the Maine Tourism Association and the Maine Office of Tourism. We have two groups and they send out regular newsletters to talk about everything from legislative updates to what they're doing to any market metrics.

They can provide to people about who's coming into the state and where, you know, what ports of entry are they coming through? What commentary do they have? What events are going on in tourism?

You know, all those things that we need to know.

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[Heather Bayer]

I love what you said about networking and networking with other companies in your area, because, you know, I go back to my start over 20 years ago when I arrived in Ontario and decided I was going to do this thing. Nobody would talk to me. They were not interested. Somebody once said, I'm not giving you my secrets. And it's really interesting when you take that two decades forward to today. And nobody has secrets, we share everything.

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[Alexis Miller]

I think there's part of it, too, in that in the digital age, we all recognize that anybody can go on anybody else's website and see the listing. It's not like you have a binder anymore or a brochure. But I think part of it, too, is at least in Maine, the industry is predominantly women. I know one, two, maybe three property managers in Maine that I talk to regularly who are men. Everybody else is a woman. And so I think that we all have sort of been able to get past our not sense of ego, but past our hesitation, because it's like, look, we're all trying to survive. We all understand that we're all serving basically different flavors of the same ice cream, right? And the way we serve it might be a little bit different. And we may, you know, someone may drop a house and we may pick it up, or an owner may drop someone and someone else pick it up. But at the end of the day, we're all here trying to do the same thing, which is provide really great experiences for guests to help homeowners keep their homes while also helping our communities have a good influx of cash and be able to sustain themselves.

And the sense of our psyche, what I call it here, it's the main spirit, right, of preserving that for not only ourselves, but for future generations, as well as the environment and all of that.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, that is wonderful. So as we're coming to the end here, I just want to ask you to share for someone stepping into the next generation of their family's vacation rental business, what is one piece of advice you'd share from your journey?

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[Alexis Miller]

If you've been in it, like I have, where you've sort of grown up in it or around it, trust that you know more than you think you do, but also trust that there's a lot that you still have to learn. And there's nothing wrong with either side of that. It doesn't make you smarter. It doesn't make you dumber. It doesn't make you more or less trustworthy. It just makes you the person in the room who is there to absorb the information and be able to put it back to other people and share it with other people.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, that's great. Are you planning on being in the business forever?

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[Alexis Miller]

For as long as it'll have me, I think this is a good thing. I mean, I really enjoy it. The big thing for me, as you know, a community is a huge thing for me, but it's the joy that I get out of this is from seeing other people have such wonderful experiences, whether you're homeowners, or guests, or community members, or just people who happen to cross our path in life.

Like we had a group come into our office who were lost last week and we were able to help them and they had actually been driving from Ontario to come down to do Antiques Roadshow and they couldn't get into the place that they had rented. So they came to us because we were the next driveway, like literally the next company on the road, to figure out what they could do. And they left us a five-star review because we let them in and we helped them find a different accommodation. And I gave them a piece of chocolate. And they said that was, it meant, it was after hours, you know, we were ready to go home, but we opened the doors and I sat with them for half an hour. And it meant so much to them that someone would just sit and help them.

And, you know, for me, that's what it's all about, is showing people that there are still places and people who are willing to do that and that they can come and visit them and take part of that back into their regular life too.

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[Heather Bayer]

That is true hospitality and it's just so wonderful to talk to you, to talk to this new generation that's coming into this business is going to change it, that's going to take it forward. Your passion is out there and it's fabulous to see. So thank you, Alexis, for joining me in this episode. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.

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[Alexis Miller]

Thank you for having me. Let's do it again sometime.

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[Heather Bayer]

Absolutely. 

What a great conversation. Thank you so much, Lexi Miller, for joining me and for sharing what it's like to be the next generation coming into this business.

I think Mike was never really that interested in taking over from me with CLRM, although he worked in CLRM for quite a long time. He did some new business stuff, went out to see new owners. It wouldn't have been right for him to take over my part of the business. So I am so pleased that I'm still working with him, even though we are no longer in property management, but we're now in the training and development side and of course the AI side of it now. So you'll be hearing more about that. I'm quite sure, you know, I can't stop talking about this, this stuff because it's freeing me up to do so much more creative stuff.

So with that said, I will be back next week, probably talking about AI and bringing you something new and exciting to share. 

Okay, thank you so much for joining me. As always, it's a pleasure to be with you and can't wait for next time.

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 vacationrentalformiller.com. We'd love to hear from you and I look forward to being with you again next week.