Heather Bayer

Today I'm talking to all of the visionaries out there. And whoever you are listening, you are a visionary. If you're in this business, then you have that visionary quality. And I'm talking to Steve Trover from Better Talent about what a visionary needs to make your business really work.

Heather Bayer

This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources in 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.

Heather Bayer

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and I'm super excited to be back with you once again. Now I'm back in my home office we're getting the sound sorted out, I hope; it's just getting better every time I record. And we're getting some stuff put up on the walls.  In this particular episode I've got a bit of a blank wall behind me, but that's okay because we don't need decorated walls to talk to my guests today.

Heather Bayer

Steve Trover is the CEO and founder of Better Talent, a subscription-based talent acquisition solution, which means finding people.  Finding the right people, hiring the right people for the right seats in your organization. Now, Steve has been in the business quite some time. He's going to be talking about that and where he came from. I remember when I started in this business, I came across a company called All Star Vacation Homes, and it was really for me, the benchmark for when I started my company. I had found in a property I'd been to see, an All Sstar Vacation Homes brochure, and it really set the standard for what my company ultimately became. So super excited to be talking to Steve about the right people to hire. Without further ado then, let's move on over to my interview with Steve Trover.

Heather Bayer

Well, I am super pumped to have with me today Steve Trover of Better Talent. I alluded to it slightly in the introduction that I have known Steve, or his companies, from the very start of my business. We'll come back to that in a bit more detail in a few moments, but I just wanted to say welcome Steve, thank you for joining me.

Steve Trover

Thank you so much, Heather. Really excited to be here.

Heather Bayer

Well, we've come across each other in passing at many events and conferences over the years, but this is actually the first time we've been able to sit down and have a good conversation, which I'm so looking forward to, because we're going to be talking about something that was very dear to my heart. And that was, I called her the ‘general manager', the general factotum, the person who was going to come and turn my world upside down and make it so much better, which she actually did. And we're going to explore a little bit and go into a bit more depth, aren't we, Steve, on taking what I've just said and teasing it out into all the component parts and how anybody can actually do this. Go from being overwhelmed and harried to not being that person that looks serene on the surface with the madly flapping legs underneath the water. But let's kick off, Steve, what's your background in the vacation rental business? And how did you get started? I love hearing everybody's origin stories.

Steve Trover

Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to hear as well. So going back, in the mid-90s, individuals would come into the Orlando market where I'm based, and they would buy vacation rentals, except they would call them holiday homes because they would have a similar accent to yours. In fact, this goes back into the 80s, and my mother, when we moved to Florida about 40 years ago, she got a real estate license, like most people do when they move to Florida, and started selling homes. But she sold primarily residential. Then she started selling homes to people from the UK. That's really who started the market here in Orlando. And she would run into problems with management companies. So she would try to find the owners  a property management company to manage their property, and they'd come back a year later unhappy with the reference. And so she tried over and over again. Now I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started my first business when I was 17, exporting cars overseas. I thought, how hard can this vacation rental thing be? And so that's when I jumped in and started managing a couple of properties out of the gates.

Steve Trover

And this was mid 1997, so about 26 years ago now. 26 years later, I can tell you it's pretty hard, as you know. I've been doing that ever since, or been in the industry ever since. I was a PM for 20 years. I grew the company from zero properties to 400 properties over those two decades. Grew into four markets here, Orlando, Captiva Island, Florida. We were in Sun Valley, Idaho, and in San Diego, California. We had four destinations, 100 employees at peak. I also started a real estate company focused on vacation rental real estate, an interior design company called Beyond Furnishings, and we furnished over 500 homes over that time frame. We then launched a development company called Purpose-Built Vacation Homes, and we designed purpose-built. You'll hear that around the industry now, that term where individuals are doing the same. I'd like to see that following suit. Then I also got into the technology side of the business and developed a proprietary PMS platform going back early 2000, right around 2000 actually started that process. That became LiveRez, which a lot of people know of today; private equity owns it today.

Steve Trover

I don't have anything to do with it, but I was a chief strategy officer and a shareholder for a lot of years there. Then I'm the past vice-president and president of VRMA over a five year period, going back about a decade ago. So super involved in all aspects of the industry, hyper-passionate about it, loved to talk about it, and loved to meet all of the really great people in it.

Heather Bayer

Well, as I said, I alluded to it in the introduction. I'll tell you this, the story is, when I first started, I mean, I first started in the business in 1998, buying properties in Canada, and then moved over here and started our property management company in 2003. So 20 years as well, as a property manager. But when I first started out, I remember going out to my very first owner, and there was a lot of trust involved in that because the only properties I was managing was five of my own, my sister's and this guy down the road who said, I'll give you my property to manage if you don't charge me for it for a year. So going out to get my first one was just so major. And I walked into this house and I had a lovely chat with the owner, and on his coffee table was this brochure for vacation homes in Orlando. And it was All Star Vacation Homes. And I didn't know you at the time. I didn't know this was your company. But I picked that up, picked that magazine up. I borrowed it. I took it home.  It sat in my office for probably four or five years after that. And it became the benchmark for how we did our business because from the brochure, I went to the website and it became the standard that we aimed for.

Steve Trover

I'm so proud to hear that. I really love that story, so thank you for sharing that.

Heather Bayer

But I just don't think I have that anymore. It's so great to hear that you still have that passion. I certainly have it after my 25 years in the business, too. But I think at some point, as you have done, you need to do something different to keep that passion going. What was it that motivated you to get into the hiring business, the HR business, if you like?

Steve Trover

Going back about six years ago, I sold my group of companies and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I wasn't even sure that I would stay in the industry after 20 years. I thought maybe I want to try something else altogether different and for the first time in my life – I started a lot of different companies – I didn't quickly start a company. I started a consulting business with the intent of trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I was consulting inside and outside the industry, mostly inside, or at least in lodging. One of the first things I got asked to do was recruit for a general manager for a large-scale vacationing company. I looked at the industry and I realized there wasn't anybody doing recruiting in the industry. I had used recruiters, and quite frankly didn't really like the experience all that much, because they didn't really understand my business very well. They charged a lot of money for what they did, and at the end result I felt like maybe I could have done it on my own. And yet I felt like there was a need because it was the biggest struggle that I heard over and over and again as a consultant, it was all related to people.

Steve Trover

And so I looked at it and thought, maybe there's a different way to do this. Maybe there's a different model we can build. And so over the course of three years of consulting, developed a methodology that we use today, and then launched Better Talent three years ago with that intention of focusing primarily on the vacation rental/short-term rental industry. We do hotels and resorts, independent ones anyways. But our core focus is on VR. And so that was the impetus, if you will, to start it. And I know how hard this business is, and there's a lot of things that you have to do really well, and you got to do all these different parts of the business. But if you don't have the right people in the right places, it's exceptionally hard. I had a really great team in my various companies, and when it was all working well, it was when I had the team right. It didn't matter how good the tech was or anything else. If I didn't have the team right, it was really challenging. I wanted to help companies do that. I'm very passionate about people in general. That was the reason why we started the business and continue to make that our passion today.

Heather Bayer

Well, I was on the Facebook page this morning and looking at some of the job ads and thinking, Wow, I think I'd quite like to be 30 years younger and joining this business again, because there are some amazing jobs to be had now. Just briefly, you started this three years ago, so it was the beginning of COVID. How did you navigate through that pandemic period?

Steve Trover

Obviously, an interesting time to start when nobody can actually go to work. I don't know that a whole lot of talent companies started during that time frame, but pretty quickly, and I felt like this was going to be the case with COVID, and we all know we had that huge increase in demand. It went from nobody being able to work to all of a sudden we need talent rapidly. So probably for the first time in my life, I started at the perfect time. Usually, it would be too early with a lot of our businesses. But in this case, it was really fortuitous timing. And a lot of people, if you look at those jobs on Facebook, for example, or on our LinkedIn, you're going to think that we only hire for these six figure positions, that type of thing. But we do hire across the spectrum. So we do everything from a general manager, to housekeepers, to maintenance tech, to all the frontline roles. And so we help in all that and all those components. And that was all needed in a big way as soon as we all started coming back to work and the demand was there like never before.

Steve Trover

A lot of companies had laid off people and all of a sudden it was like, Oh my gosh, we have to have people now. And so it worked out pretty well from that perspective. That said, we try not to get people to rush. We want them to really spend time identifying the right person for each role. So that demand created a demand on our side and we had to really navigate that. It was a challenging period, for sure, going through COVID.

Heather Bayer

I can certainly imagine that. In Facebook groups, I'm seeing that there's a lot of people starting out in this industry. Why do you think people are still starting up property management companies/vacation rental management companies?

Steve Trover

I'm sure you probably are well aware of all the typical origin stories, if you will. Mine is an example of one of those. My mother was in real estate. Another one might be, I owned a few properties like you did, and then you decide to manage yourself. What generally happens, and I think all that demand that we saw during COVID, we had all these new hosts, as we would call them today; didn't use to call them that, but thank you, Airbnb. But that came in, they would own a property, and then maybe they'd take on their neighbor's because their neighbor had a full-time job, didn't have time. And all of a sudden they become a property manager. And people get really passionate about this thing. It's something that everyone falls into. You either love it or you hate it, one or the other. It's black and white. People don't come in warm. You either get really excited about it, you want to grow a business or you don't, and that could be a business of one property, of course. And some individual owners do a phenomenal job at doing that. But a lot of times when they are really good at one, they end up with many more, right?  Just naturally.

Steve Trover

And so, all of a sudden, they need technology and they need people. And so that's where we come in. I love to see all of the new types of businesses and new models that we're seeing today. It's what keeps this industry interesting. And all of the new people coming in makes a lot of fun for us.

Heather Bayer

Well, with all these new people coming in and regardless of what model they're going to take, we all seem to be much the same. We have this personality style, we're passionate, we have great ideas and always chasing after – well, this is me – chasing after the next new thing and often get so overwhelmed with the basics of the business, I guess. And I know that when we start this, we've all got to do the basics of the business. And I was fascinated with an article that you wrote in VRM Intel, and it was a year or so back, but it's just as relevant today. And it was about us, these hosts that become managers or the people that come into property management from another direction. We're visionaries and we need somebody else to begin to ground us, I guess. And I know it took me 15 years in the business before I realized that.  I had a business partner, and that helped a lot because he was the yin to my yang, and I'm the strategy person seeing the big picture, and he's down in the depths and the details and the weeds. So I actually had somebody that would do a lot of that, which is probably why I left it 15 years.

Heather Bayer

But once we did go out and find this very, very special person, not only did it make our lives a lot better, it made it a darn site easier to sell the company five years later.  So let me hand it over to you and really talk about what the visionary is, and….. you call this person an integrator; so what is their role?

Steve Trover

Yeah, absolutely. So it's interesting that you used the term personality, and you're absolutely right, this industry does attract a certain group of personalities. And part of our process at Better Talent, we actually do personality profiling and personality testing. And I started realizing that there was only a few different profiles out of all the different ones that we looked at that are attracted to becoming an operator here. And they generally are very visionary profiles. And visionaries are those that… they're dreamers, they come up with big ideas, they take risks. You come in and start in a business in an industry with not a lot of structure. The lack of structure in this industry attracts these types of visionaries because visionaries like to solve problems. They like to come up with new concepts and ideas. And the reason why I'm not in the medical industry or even in the very structured hotel industry, is because it has so much structure. And I've always described the vacation industry as a big whiteboard. We're still creating it. And so I've been in it 26 years and I come out, I see new ideas every day. And that's what excites me and keeps the passion there.

Steve Trover

And I think that's what attracts our type of profiles. And yet, those profiles or those personalities are really good at the vision side of it, and coming up with the big ideas in the big picture. But when it comes down into the day-to-day operations, doing things that require a repetitive task, leading and holding people accountable is also a challenge for a lot of visionaries. We can do it reasonably well for a while, but then we hit a brick wall because it becomes repetitive or remote. And certain personalities are better designed for that type of thing. And so the visionary and the integrator, and you mentioned the integrator, those two terms come out of a book called Traction. And Traction was written by Gino Wickman. There's a sister book that we actually send to clients and send to people all the time called Rocket Fuel. And it talks about the visionary and the integrator relationship. And just like you, I waited way too long to get my integrator, probably a decade plus, not quite 15 years. And I used to say, I need to hire a general manager. And I ended up hiring a 30 year veteran of the hotel industry.

Steve Trover

And I trained him on the nuances of vacation rentals. But he understood how to lead and hold people accountable. He understood hospitality. He was very professional. And once he got into place, it gave me the ability to get out of the leading and holding people accountable perspective and really focus on the vision and the growth of the company and coming up with new ideas as opposed to trying to just put out fires all the time, which is what you do when you have a vacation company or short-term rental company of any type. You end up being a firefighter on the day-to-day and visionaries were just not designed for that.  So finding that type of person who really can take that vision and execute on that vision and lead and hold the team accountable to execute on that vision is imperative, in my opinion. And it's night and day when you see a market leader, generally, they have that one two punch of the visionary and the integrator, and they're just hitting the ground running, and that visionary is able to just do what they're designed to do. I have that at Better Talent.

Steve Trover

My integrator's name is Adam Tully, he's our COO. I wouldn't run a business, again, without an integrator. He's incredible. He runs the business. I get to focus on the vision. I get to meet the clients. I get to do the things I really like to do. It's a much more enjoyable ownership process when you have that person in place doing the other things that need to be done from a leadership perspective. I've read a million books on leadership, and I was determined I was going to be a really good people leader. What I realized is I'm really good at getting people excited and trusting vision, but when it comes to holding them accountable to getting things done, I'm actually not designed for it, no matter how many books I read; that's what I believe. When we look at these clients of ours, some of them will come and they'll say, I'm really in need for a housekeeping manager or something. I look at the company and I go, You know what? If you have the integrator, you have the right person leading this team, you could do these things that you've told me you'd like, and it will change your world.  We've seen that time and time and time again. It's the thing I'm probably most passionate about, and what we do is putting that person or identifying that person for companies.

Heather Bayer

Okay, so we're going to be exploring this a little bit more into who this magical person is and how we find them. But when is the right time to bring an integrator onboard? As you say, I left it 15 years. You'd left it 10 years and said that was too long. But when somebody's starting out, let's say they've got 15, 20 properties, they're growing quite nicely, and it's time to take somebody on to take over some of this operational stuff so they can go out and carry on growing the business.  I remember getting into this even at 15 years and saying, Oh, gosh, that's a big chunk of change to suddenly start to give to somebody else.

Steve Trover

Well, somebody a long time ago, a business person, I was considering hiring a personal assistant the first time ever. This was a long time ago. And that person said to me, he said, Steve, you won't be able to afford one until you have one. What do you mean? Once I get somebody to take those roles off my hands, then I'll be able to do what I'm better designed to do and grow the business and more than pay for that individual. And you're right, the right integrator, by the way, is not a cheap investment. It's certainly something that you need to find the right person and to find the right person, you've got to pay for it. That said, to answer your question, it's when you're at a stage where you know that you can reallocate your time to… maybe it's business development, meeting with owners, and growing the inventory is what you really like to do. And if somebody took off housekeeping and maintenance and accounting and all those roles, you'd be able to do more of that. And you know that you'll be able to dramatically grow the company because you have that person in place.  That's a really good time to do that. Is that 15, 20 properties? Property counts are really hard metric because, as we know, properties are not created equal, business models aren't created equal. We've got different margins and different seasonality and markets and that type of thing. And so it's really you have to look at the finances and be able to look at the P&L on the balance sheet and go, Can I afford to do this? If I invest in this, am I able to then grow the business and grow these other components so that I can afford it? But my answer would be as soon as possible, because the faster you do it, the more you're going to be able to grow the business and build the business and make it a more profitable business, even though the cost structure goes up. I will tell you, we talk a lot about the people stack at Better Talent and optimizing the cost structure because I've never seen a vacation rental company of any type where the salaries and the contractors, that cost structure is always the biggest cost structure. So you got to got to be really careful when you hire and when you build a business.

Steve Trover

That said, this particular role is the one that will power all the rest of it, in my opinion. So you got to do it when you can afford to or when you get to that point. But I would do it as early as you possibly can. In the case of Better Talent, we were about a year and a half in, and I said, Okay, it's time. And we did that. Probably even then, that was too late. I wish I would have done it six months prior to that. But I was kind of hesitant myself because it is a big investment. You have to be careful in that regard. That's part of the thing that we do is, we advise people on when and look at the cost structure and try to make sure that they're doing it at the right time. But I highly recommend it, at least considering it right out of the gate, making that a part of your roadmap.

Heather Bayer

When I look back and I think that my business partner, who was in there right from the very beginning, but he still had a full-time job at that time. I just carried on growing the company and he joined about 18 months, two years later. I think if he hadn't, I would have had to take somebody else on. He came in and it was that great mix of personality styles that allowed us to carry on without somebody else for so long. But it came to the point where even he said, I don't want to deal with all these conflict issues anymore. I don't want to deal with owner issues and guest issues. I want somebody else to do that. And that was the time we said, Okay. And we had reservationists, and I was managing the reservationists, and he was managing the conflict. And when we took Christina on, it was night and day.

Steve Trover

And some companies do what you did in the sense there might be two partners and one partner is more the integrator, one's more the visionary, some early stage, instead of going in and getting a general manager or a COO, they start with an operations manager, where they're maybe just handling housekeeping, maintenance, guest communication, that type of thing. Whereas the visionary is still handling business development and marketing and maybe finance. And we see that as a starting-step start, if you will, to get into that full integrator. But the reality is, if we do it by the book, so to speak, and in my case, in our company, I only have one direct report, and that's my integrator. Everyone else on the team reports to him. And he handles all departments and it works really well when you get there. But a lot of times in a vacation rental company, you start with that ops manager, it's ‘integrator light'. Now, many times that operations manager may migrate into the full integrator role over time as the company starts to scale and get structured.

Heather Bayer

Let's talk just for a second about another really important part of having that integrator or that general manager is that when it comes time to sell, it makes a massive difference to a potential buyer.

Steve Trover

If you talk to any of the M&A specialists in the space, Jacobi Olin or others, they will tell you that many of the buyers look at that role, and that role being maybe a general manager, director of ops, or COO, the integrator, if you will. If you have that person in place and you as the visionary owner of the company, the company doesn't rely on you, the closing is going to go faster, the due diligence is going to go quicker. The multiplier potentially might be higher, the asking price or selling price, it can be higher because a lot of the concern with these companies is that the owners are so attached to that vision area, that owner of the business, that they might leave when the business sells. And we've seen it time and time again and so the buyers have gotten smart about that, and they look at it and they go, Okay, how reliant is this business on that founder or not? And if the answer is not, it's actually very valuable to those and it'll attract more potential buyers. Some of the big aggregators are less inclined to care.  I think they do at this point, but definitely even any of the mid-tier and a lot of the private equity funds that have come to the space that are going to look at it and certainly individual buyers because they don't… maybe somebody that wants to get in, but they don't know the industry, having somebody there other than the owner that's leaving, that knows all the different components and is running the day-to-day is going to be really valuable to that buyer. I absolutely encourage, if you're considering, if you're building this thing, to ultimately sell it at some point. I always recommend everybody look at it like that, whether they're going to do it or not, because if you build a company that is going to attract a buyer, you're building a great company. Your finances are going to be in order, you're going to have a solid team. But this person can help you sell that business. There's no question about it.

Heather Bayer

Let's just talk about the type of person. What qualities does this person have? How do you go about finding the right one?

Steve Trover

We have a very specific way that we go about doing that. The first thing that we start with is personality. I will tell you, a lot of clients and potential clients and people come to us and say, Hey, I'm looking for a general manager, an operations manager, and a great integrator, and they've got to have a decade of experience in vacation rentals. Well, here's the problem with that. There aren't that many people in this industry that have been doing it that long that are not the owner of the company, because so many of the companies are still run by the visionary. And so there's a big need. In fact, if you know anybody, send them our way. There's just a massive need for this type of individual that has that level of experience. And we have literally the entire database of talent in the vacation industry, and still it's a struggle to sometimes find that. And really, the reality though is that the resume is important, understanding a business is important, but if you have somebody with the right personality traits and the right drives, as well as the right cognitive ability, they can learn this business. What I'm really looking for is somebody with the ability to lead and hold people accountable, first and foremost. That's the number one thing.

Steve Trover

So the resume does matter. Experience does matter. Somebody that's managed people well and led people well is more important, in my opinion, than how long that resume is in the vacation rental space. That said, we love both. The perfect world, you've got both. You've got somebody that's got experience in the industry. One of the challenges in this industry, bringing people from outside of it is, they need to know what they're getting into. This is not an easy business to run. It's 24/7/365 as we all know. And so if you've come from an industry where it's the nine to five type of thing, you might not be as excited as you thought you were when you came in. So it's really important that they understand that. And then the personality traits. And we do personality testing, and we're looking for somebody who's assertive, self-confident, naturally speaking, somebody who's socially capable, somebody who is able to handle a lot of priorities in a given day, and then somebody who's got some out of the box thinking.  Not so out of the box that they're the visionary type, but maybe somebody that can be flexible, understanding that you're going to have to be flexible in this industry.

Steve Trover

And so there's a very specific group of types of personalities that really lend themselves well to this type of role, and that's what we look for. And it's super important to get all of those things. There's another factor I call the grit factor, and that's just people that wake up every day and they just love to work and go get things done. Some people have it, some people don't. There's no test. We don't have a test for that. But when I'm interviewing or I'm looking at somebody, that's what I'm looking for is somebody that just loves to run the business day-to-day. They also need to be somebody who is good with being number two. That's their role. If you talk to Adam on my team, he would tell you he doesn't want to be the CEO. He has no desire to be. He loves being the second-in-command and taking that vision and executing on it. And certain people do. I happen to be somebody who'll start a bunch of companies, I'd be a terrible number two. I probably wouldn't listen to the visionary. I'm just naturally speaking. So you've got to know who you are and what you are.  I think that's important. Then identifying that in somebody is critical for this role.

Heather Bayer

Are you able to give me some concrete examples of companies that actually did hire this right person in a role?

Steve Trover

I wouldn't say that I would probably mention specific names, but there's a tremendous number of companies in the industry that have done this well. I will say one. There's a company that I actually helped a friend of mine sell recently, and he had two integrators. It was because it was a large scale company, 400 properties strong. He had a general manager and he had a president. The president was more focused on the finance side of it. The general manager was leading and holding people accountable. And that was an example where we identified somebody on the team that wasn't at the time the general manager. She became the integrator and she was incredible at it. She's now an integrator at another company in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and is doing an incredible job. Heather George is her name, by the way, and she's an example of one. I was trying to think of one off-hand that I knew would be okay with sharing that. That's a perfect example.

Heather Bayer

I would give a shout out to Christina from my company because when we took her on, she didn't have any experience in the industry at all. But we brought her in, basically to do the conflict management and to do customer service, which she was intensely good at and still is. The real issue we had with her, the problem I guess, was getting her to switch off, to not answer texts from owners at 11 o'clock at night and to occasionally turn your phone off, go and do something. And I know it's six years now she's been with the business and she's still going along extremely well with the new owners. We found her first time. We just interviewed one person and that was it. Amazing.

Steve Trover

Great. Wow.

Steve Trover

I was just going to say, and yet she didn't have industry experience, but she clearly had that grit factor and sounds like the right personality traits for the role and came in and made it happen. As much as we definitely want to look for people and place people that are already in the industry, sometimes you can't find that. In your case, you found a really great person that just had the right makeup for the role, even though she didn't have the experience in it.

Heather Bayer

Yes, certainly worked for us. Let's just move on to that. You know you've got this person. What is the best way to actually get them onboarded as quickly as possible?

Steve Trover

It's interesting because I get asked this question a lot. Onboarding is so critical for all roles, all employees, anybody you bring on. One of the biggest mistakes company owners make is to bring somebody in, there's your desk, good luck!  I'm being facetious a little bit, but it's almost at that level sometimes. One of the biggest reasons that people leave a company is bad onboarding. And so onboarding is key in setting that person up for success right at the gates. One of the first things I have an integrator and a visionary do together is read the book Rocket Fuel.  And so they read that together, book club style, really understanding the dynamics and the relationship between the two.

Steve Trover

The other thing I say to my visionaries is, you know what? I know you're like, Oh, good. I hired them. Now I can go to the Cayman Islands or whatever. No, you need to live with this person for a while. What I mean by that is work in the same room if you have to, do ride alongs, spend a tremendous amount of time, and making sure you're meeting on a daily basis. And then, over time, that can be less.

Steve Trover

But at the beginning stages, you've got to give them all of your knowledge and understanding of the business and setting that vision for them. The right one will come in and they'll start to put structure in around that vision from day one. They'll start to get an understanding of that and start thinking about ways that they can make the company more efficient. It's really critical that that person creates a relationship with each one of the people that are going to be a direct report to them and setting them up for success and making it clear to the team that this is going to be that new leader and introducing that the right way, I think, is critical as well. And that integrator is going to have weekly one-on-ones with all of their direct reports, whoever that may be. And they need to have the keys to the kingdom. They need to understand every piece of the business, how it works, where all the challenges might lie. A good one is going to come in and try to remove all the ‘single points of failure', we call them. It's a software term, but anything that, if it's an individual, it might be, or it might be a software platform or something that if that breaks, what do we do?

Steve Trover

An example here at Better Talent, we have three internet connections. Our main internet connection is down right now. We're on our backup. If we didn't have that, we wouldn't be on this podcast right now. Guess who set that up? It wasn't me, it was the integrator. Helping them to understand what all those things are so that they can then take the responsibility and the reins. A lot of companies will bring an integrator in and not show them any of the finances. I think that's a mistake. I think that this person ultimately is going to be responsible for that. And it's very important as early as possible to help them start to understand the financial structure as well. And that takes trust, right? You've got to feel like you've got the right person. But if you don't do this this way, if you don't onboard them right, it's going to have a limited success, in my opinion. And we've seen that time and time as well. So it's really important putting that structure together and an agenda around it. And it may take a full six months or longer to really, truly onboard that integrator. But I know it's an important piece.

Heather Bayer

Steve, what would you say to somebody who's listening to this and who is harried and overwhelmed and wants to stop going out at 10 o'clock at night and plunging a toilet? But they're on the fence about hiring somebody because they think, how can I hire somebody that's just like me? That's what I went into, thinking I was going to hire somebody just like me when, in fact, I needed to hire somebody that was the opposite.

Steve Trover

I would encourage them to take out a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle and then across. On the top left, put everything that you love to do and that you're really good at. Next to it, top right, put what you like to do and you're decent at it, you're okay at. Bottom left, put what you might like to do, but you're not very good at, and then on the bottom right, what you don't like to do and what you're not good at. Then put everything that you do in the business there. Then imagine, if you will, when you look at that, just doing the top left, the things that you love to do and that you're really good at. Imagine the impact that that would have on the business as opposed to you doing all those toilet plungings and everything else you've got to do. Think about what it would look like if you could outsource those other things so that you could focus. So what I do is, we bring one on, the first thing we do is that bottom right. Get everything off the visionary's plate that they hate to do and they're not good at as quickly as possible.

Steve Trover

That will pay dividends. We talk work-life balance, all of a sudden you'll have one. You'll start to feel like you own the business instead of the business owning you. It will change your life. I made the mistake and you even acknowledge you made the mistake of waiting a little bit too long to do this. I encourage everyone listening, if they're running this thing day-to-day, right now by themselves and they're stressed out, to really deeply consider this. It will genuinely change your life.

Heather Bayer

So Better Talent is not like Indeed where you go on and just fill in a few forms and away you go without any help. It sounds like you really deliver a lot of input with your experience.

Steve Trover

What we like to say is that we are an extension of your team and we are an entire talent acquisition and optimization service. We do have a technology platform we've developed and we're getting ready to launch. We're not a technology company. We don't just hand you a piece of software and say good luck, or you list on our jobs board and maybe you get some applicants. We take what you need and then we go produce the job ad. We do a high performing job ad, we create the graphic design, we push it out to the Indeeds of the world, other jobs boards, our own jobs board. We outbound, so we reach out to passive applicants, introducing the opportunity. We handle all of the marketing. We then filter applicants through personality testing and cognitive testing, depending on the role. And so we take them through that whole process and so a lot of people, if you're running one of these businesses, and I had this same scenario, it's really hard to be good at all the housekeeping, maintenance, good services, reservations, accounting, business development, and then also be a recruiter. You got to do all the things I just described really well, too.

Steve Trover

And so our intent and our goal is to take all that off their hands so that we can then bring them vetted candidates that are really ideal for the role from a personality perspective, right background and experience, taking out the ones that are not. Because if you throw an ad on Indeed, you're going to get a whole bunch of people that just hit that easy apply button. And most of them aren't going to be ideal for the role. And we do all of this very differently than a traditional recruiter. Traditional recruiters charge a percentage of the salary. It's usually 20-30% of the annual salary. I always thought that was crazy, quite frankly. So we're a subscription. And so you can do one hire with us, which is a fixed fee, or you go on a subscription. When you're on subscription with us, it's called Team Builder. And what we do is we also work on talent optimization. So we look at all of the people that you currently use to do what you need to do, whether it's housekeepers, maintenance techs, any role within marketing, doesn't matter what that is. And then we work with you to come up with the most optimized plan for your talent.

Steve Trover

And we do full-time, part-time, independent contractors, consultants. It doesn't matter what it is, we want to optimize that cost structure because it's the biggest part of it. And so I'm glad you asked that. A lot of people  think we only do $100,000 and up roles. That's not the case. We do everything all the way down to hourly roles, and we are not a traditional recruiter by any stretch. We want to really understand your business, your objectives, and come alongside of you and partner with you to be an extension of your team.

Heather Bayer

I will make sure that all the details of Better Talent are on the Show Notes, so anybody wants to connect with you, they canfind  you on there.

Heather Bayer

Hey, Steve, do you miss it? Do you miss being a property manager?

Steve Trover

I would say yes, but the reason I would say no is not because of the burnout. I certainly got burned out, like a lot of us do. It's because I get to talk to them every day, all day. I almost feel like… like I said, I'm an extension of the team. Whereas before I had my own company and I was just doing that. I work with 200 companies in this industry. I get to talk to property managers, large and small, every day, all day. I think that helps me still feel engaged in the industry. Purpose Build, I mentioned before that we did. That's probably the part that I'm most interested in, maybe someday doing more purpose build design of vacation homes. We had a whole R&D process around it. I probably missed that the most of all of it, but I get to work alongside of so many, so it feeds that need. I think if I had left altogether, I probably would have ended back as a property manager again, quite frankly, had I not done what I'm doing now.

Heather Bayer

Well, it's good to hear that you still have that passion for the industry after all this time.

Steve Trover

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have for 26 years now gotten up every day and eat, sleep, drink, breathe, vacation rental/short-term rentals. I love it.  I love all aspects of it.

Heather Bayer

I thought when I signed on the dotted line and took my check for the company, that that would be it. But no, of course it's not.

Steve Trover

No. Well, you're in the same boat. You talk to us all day as well. It lets you still be involved.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, exactly.

Steve Trover

It gets in your blood, I will tell you. I warn people, if you're two years in and you think you're just going to do this for a little longer, you may find out differently.  It gets in your blood.

Heather Bayer

Steve, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you. I'm going to make sure…. you mentioned two books. One was Traction and the other was…

Steve Trover

Rocket Fuel.

Heather Bayer

Rocket Fuel. I'll put links to both of those. I've read Traction, I have not read Rocket Fuel. That's on my reading list for this upcoming week now. But I'll make sure that those links are on the Show Notes, so go read them. I'm a huge proponent of reading a book a week, a business book a week, and it will propel you into areas that you never thought you would be in. I see you're going to the upcoming Northwest Professionals Conference.

Steve Trover

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one. I'll be speaking at it. It's a fun conference. A really great group of people. I love that show, it's a lot of fun. Then I'll be at the Executive Summit here in Florida right after that. So looking forward to those two.

Heather Bayer

Well, I'll probably have to wait until October in Orlando and see you at the VRMA Conference.

Steve Trover

Well, please do.  I look forward to seeing you in person again. It's been a while. That will be great.

Heather Bayer

You've been a great guest, Steve. Thank you so much for joining me.

Steve Trover

But of course, thank you for having me. It's been an honor.

Heather Bayer

Thank you Steve Trover, for joining me. That was a great conversation. I wish I could have done that so much earlier, take on this person. But I just thought at the time that it was just too much. And it was also for me, I thought, how can I share all this stuff that I know that I do so well? Well, in fact, I kept all that stuff that I did so well. I carried on with owner acquisition, which was something I really, really enjoyed, and going out to see properties. What I was able to do after getting the right person in that role was to step back from any issues involving conflict because I don't do conflict very well. I just knew what I didn't do well, but I had to do. And I was able to… That bottom right hand quadrant that Steve was talking about. And once I shifted everything out of there, I was able to work on those other quadrants. So for sure, get in touch with Steve at Better Talent if you want to have a discussion about whether this is the right time for you to hire an integrator and let me know how it works for you.

Heather Bayer

So that's it for another week. The snow has just about gone from my yard so I can spend some time outside now. Having spent five months outside in Alabama, I've gone a little stir crazy in the last week because we've still got so much snow on the ground, but it is very quickly disappearing due to some very warm temperatures. So I'm heading outside. I hope whatever you're doing with your day to day is just as enjoyable and that you've enjoyed listening to Steve Trover talk about staffing, which I think is something that we all need to consider if we want to grow our businesses.  Thank you. I'll be with you next week.

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.