This episode began somewhere else entirely. A few weeks ago, Heather appeared as a guest on The Art of Hospitality Podcast, hosted by Adam Norko and Conrad O'Connell, expecting to talk about AI. They ended up talking about values. That conversation planted a question Heather has been sitting with ever since: if you train an AI on your processes without first being clear on what your business actually stands for, are you just automating the wrong thing, faster?

Adam returns to the show for a third time to help answer that question. He is the founder of VR Growth, a consultancy working with vacation rental and PropTech companies, and someone who has seen this industry from multiple angles - as a marketing director for a large management company, a vendor-side executive at Point Central and Breezeway, a Chief Growth Officer, and now an independent consultant. He is also, by his own admission, a small Airbnb host on the Outer Banks, running five properties with his wife.

The conversation moves through the gap between values written on a wall and values that actually show up in daily decisions, the leadership behaviours that make the difference, how AI can help operators discover and articulate what they genuinely believe in, and Adam's emerging thinking about self-selected communities of like-minded operators as the industry's next meaningful structural development. The through-line is clear: values have to come before systems, and community has to come before scale.

Key Takeaways:

• Speed without judgment produces confident mediocrity at scale. AI amplifies what is already there - which means if your values are unclear, AI will scale that confusion just as efficiently as it scales anything else.
  
  
• Values are not what you write on the wall. They are how the leader of the business shows up every day. Teams follow behaviour, not stated principles.
  
  
• AI can be a genuinely useful tool for values discovery. Asking Claude or ChatGPT to interview you systematically - not just feeding it your bio - produces a depth of self-knowledge that would otherwise take much longer to surface.
  
  
• You cannot get the entire STR industry to agree on shared values, but you can build small communities of like-minded operators who share them. Adam believes those communities are the industry's next meaningful structural development.
  
  
• Autonomy comes after values are embedded. When a team member can make a decision without asking permission, it is because the values are already clear - not because they were handed a rule book.
  
  
• Find your tribe deliberately. Start locally, use LinkedIn, look at Rent Responsibly's market-level communities, and consider that the conference circuit is only one part of what professional connection in this industry can look like.

Resources and Links:

Adam Norko

• VR Growth (consultancy)
• The Art of Hospitality Podcast
• Adam on LinkedIn

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Heather's 50 Questions for Property Managers - PDF available contact - heather@vacationrentalformula.com
• Rent Responsibly - local market communities
• Beach Getaways, Gulf Shores - Deb and Ken Furlong (example of values-led operation)
• Brittany Blackman - Coffee and Connections (informal industry community meeting)
• WisprFlow - voice-to-text tool recommended for AI interview process

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VRF Resources:

• THRIVE Essentials - VRF's staff training programme (values, hospitality, responsibility)  
• AI Ambassador Program - Cohort 2 - launching May 2026

Connect with Adam Norko

Adam is active on LinkedIn and welcomes conversations with operators who are thinking about community, values, and what the industry's next chapter looks like. If you are working on something in the collaborative or community-building space, he would like to hear from you.

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