Heather Bayer

Today, we're talking about mistakes. We all make them. But don't worry, we're not here to point fingers or we're not going to shame anyone. Instead, in this episode, we're going to learn from the biggest mistakes that property managers have made in their business. Our guest today is Brooke Pfautz from Vintory, and he's been asking some of the leading property managers in the business to reflect on their top 10 mistakes.

Heather Bayer

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

Heather Bayer

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. And as ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again. And today we're talking about mistakes. And I made a lot of mistakes in the 20 years that I was in the business of property management, and I've talked about them over the years on the podcast.  And I've recorded a couple of episodes that are actually focused on the mistakes that I made. And I know that one of them was, if I started up in this business, what would I do differently? And that focused on some of the things that I'd done that didn't work so well and the changes I would make if I had that time over again.

Heather Bayer

One of the earliest podcasts I recorded was called 10 Mistakes, VRBOs Often Make, and it's been the most downloaded episode of all time. Nearly 5,000 times that's been downloaded. So it seems like people like to hear how others got it wrong and hopefully then make sure that they don't replicate those mistakes. And I'm talking about mistakes like getting distracted by new shiny objects. Who doesn't do that? And for those of you who are out and about on ChatGPT every day and then getting distracted by other new AI platforms, that's you. Not to say there's anything wrong with getting distracted by new AI platforms, but there is always a time and there is always a place.

Heather Bayer

So other mistakes, like waiting too long to implement revenue management strategies, we certainly did that, and not having a business plan, I realized that when we came to sell the property management company that we'd waited too long to start implementing a business plan. And there's many, many more. So our guest today is Brooke Pfautz from Vintory, and he's been asking some of the leading property managers in the business to reflect on their top 10 mistakes and to share them. He's had over 40 responses so far. And if my math can be trusted, that's over 400 mistakes to sift through. And he's already sorted them into handy categories like strategy, and team, and processes, and communication, and owner acquisition, and a lot more than that. So you could then learn from those mistakes of others and avoid making them yourself. And of course, we can't talk about 400 mistakes in today's episode. So Brooke is actually compiling all of these into a book, just as he did with his first best seller, which was 0 to 500 Properties in 5 Years. So you will get the opportunity to read them all. I'm going to be talking to Brooke about a number of these mistakes that some of these property managers made, and we're going to be exploring them in a little more detail.  So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn, maybe even cringe a little as we delve into the biggest mistakes made in the vacation rental industry. Let's get started.

Heather Bayer

So I'm super delighted to have back with me once again, I think it's the fourth time, and that is Brooke Pfautz from Vintory. Welcome, Brooke; always an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Brooke Pfautz

Absolutely. Heather, glad to be here. I can't believe it's been… Man, has it really been four times?

Heather Bayer

Yeah, when I look back, it was… Yes, this is episode 494. So I'll put the links to the other ones in the Show Notes because your company, and I'm just going to ask you just to recap in a second how you got to where you are now. But your company is involved in one specific area of the vacation rental industry, but you've been in the whole gamut, really, of the business, having run your own company. So just over to you, just briefly recap on your history in the short-term rental business.

Brooke Pfautz

Oh, my gosh. We don't have enough time, but I'll try to do so as quickly as possible. So a little over 15 years ago, way back in 2007, I somehow stumbled into the short-term vacation rental business, started a company called Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, Maryland. Didn't know anything about vacation rentals because I was in mortgage banking before, but ended up building that company pretty fast. Built that company from 0 to 500 properties in five years. Sold that company in 2013. Then I went down to Orlando. I was chief business development officer for a large vacation rental company. That's where I really got into purpose-built design, purpose-built vacation rentals. We were designing and building these big luxury 7 to 14 bedroom homes. But we were designing them from the ground up to be the most optimal vacation rental on the planet, not only from the guest's perspective, but also the asset holder or the owner's perspective. Did that for about five years. My wife said, Hey, when are you going to actually live with your family? Because I was commuting to Orlando every week from Baltimore. Went over to LiveRez for two years where I led up sales and marketing.

Brooke Pfautz

That's how I fell in love with software, fell in love with SaaS [Software as a Service] in general. Then four years ago, I launched Vintory.  We're a sales and marketing platform. We do one thing and one thing only. We help professional short-term vacation rental managers grow their inventory. So we don't do anything with guest marketing, we don't do anything with OTAs. We don't do anything with operations.

Brooke Pfautz

Riches in niches, baby. We focus exclusively on inventory acquisition. And I would argue, we've got 60 people on the team that are the best on the planet at growing inventory, and we're doing a great job helping. We just signed up our 550th partner on the Vintory platform, so really excited to share some of the wisdom of what we found over the last 15 years and over the last couple of weeks with this new series, which I'm sure you'll jump into here shortly.

Heather Bayer

I will do. I just wanted to add to what you just said that when I was running  CottageLink Rental Management, we did work with you for a good six months or so. Found some glitches between the US and the Canadian market, which made it a little bit difficult to go ahead. But I was blown away with the quality of the service I was getting from the people on your team. They were second to none.

Brooke Pfautz

Well, thank you so much. It is challenging getting data. It all starts with data and data in Canada and outside the US borders is very challenging. But we still have this killer CRM and marketing automation platform. It still works, but it's a lot harder to proactively do that outreach when you don't have the target. So you have to almost build out more landing pages and inbound marketing strategies. So it's a little bit of a slower process, but it still does work. But as you found out, getting that data was a little challenging outside the US borders for sure.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to have you back on the show today because you've been very busy out on LinkedIn asking managers to share their top 10 mistakes. And I jumped in on this one because the most downloaded episode ever on the podcast has been, I think it was called The 10 Biggest Mistakes that VRBOs Make. And I initially did that episode right at the very beginning of the podcast and then updated it a few years ago. And there's been over 5,000 downloads of that just single episode. So for some reason, people like to hear about mistakes.

Brooke Pfautz

I didn't even know that going into this. That's crazy.

Heather Bayer

But I think it's because everybody wants to learn. And I think this is why you've done this. You've been out there asking the question. You've had over 40 responses from managers now. And even with my poor math, I know that's over 400 mistakes that you have now, bearing in mind that some of the responses are very similar and there's themes that run through the 10 mistakes. So I'll hand it over to you to talk about what started this off and actually what you're doing with it right now. And then we're going to go into some of these mistakes that have been sent to you.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. So there was no strategy here at all. So it was a Sunday evening a couple of weeks ago, and I'm just sitting there watching some TV with my wife, and I just had my phone out. And somehow I stumbled upon some blog that said something about top 10 mistakes. And I was like, That's a great question. So I quickly just fired up my phone and just shot off a text to a couple of friends of mine that are in the short-term space. I think I sent out four texts and I got four answers within 12 hours. I just said, Let me post this on LinkedIn and see what happens. Heather, it virtually went viral. It was crazy, the response that we got from that, and I said, Well, maybe I think I'm on to something. So I asked a couple of other people and some of the people would respond and they would comment and I would ask them and it just kept on growing and growing and growing. Next thing you know, I had multiple people tell me, You should make this into a book.

Brooke Pfautz

I was actually at a conference. I was at Northwest VRP, and one gentleman told me, he goes, Brooke, he came up and he said, You know what? I actually print out every one of these. To me, I saved it in a folder. And that to me was like, you know what? I got to do something about this. Now, luckily, I have a little bit of experience of making a book, so it's not as hard, not as challenging. So what I'm going to be doing here is I'm going to be consolidating all these and putting it out on a book. And yeah, really looking forward to seeing where this goes because I just know there's so many, like you said, there's so many commonalities and it's funny how they all bucket into, ironically enough, about 10 different buckets.

Heather Bayer

So those buckets are, and I'll list them just as you sent them to me, so we've got Strategy, we've got Team, which is really the hiring process. I was very interested to how many people had issues with hiring and firing. Processes, things like standard operating procedures.  Finance & Accounting.  Cleanings, Inspections, Laundry & Safety. Communication, Feedback & Guest Marketing.  Big one, Inventory Acquisition, that's what you're involved in. Taking on the wrong owners and inventory, I know I feel every single one of those comments on that one.

Brooke Pfautz

That one, Heather, was probably… I think there were more comments on that one than any other. Other than networking and conferences, I think that was number one. Number two was taking on the wrong inventories and the wrong inventory.

Heather Bayer

Yeah. And then Technology and then Networking, Conferences, Community & Local Competition. And then you're going to have a bonus section, but I'll leave you to talk about that one at the end, because after we talk through some of these mistakes that people have sent to you, you're going to share with us what's going to happen with the book and where people are going to be able to get it from, because we may just get through 10 of these out of 400 plus.

Brooke Pfautz

We could be here a while. Yeah.

Heather Bayer

So what I've done, I just picked one out of each section, and we'll just explore each one a little bit more until we run out of time.

Brooke Pfautz

Let's do it.

Heather Bayer

Okay. The first one, the overarching theme is strategy. I think the ones I'm picking out because I'm thinking, yes, these are the ones that really impacted me through my journey in property management. And the first one was shiny objects. I was amazed how many people mentioned shiny objects syndrome.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, everybody wants to do everything and everybody's chasing all these shiny objects. And I am more guilty of this than anyone. I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is my fourth business I started. And I've really honed in on realizing one of my favorite sayings is riches in niches or inch wide, mile deep, be the best on the planet at one thing and really focus on this. A lot of people have found that they started chasing all these different things, and it really wasn't the right strategy. Stick to your core competencies, stick to what you know, stick to what makes you unique. And I was just as guilty as that, too. So when I had Vantage, we chased after every single property we could get to. And then we learned early on, we said, we're just going to stick to these four or five buildings and capture as much market share as we can because we're really good at marketing and there are high ADRs. And it was just rather than try and chase all these other different things. I think that was another one. But you saw that theme come up time and time again.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, it was all about staying focused. And one I picked out was getting distracted by shiny objects, stay focused. What is the core business that you're in? And it's so easy to think, Oh, this is something I could do because here's something new that's come along and I could get into this. And I did like this. I don't know who Dustin is, but you do. Stay true to your niche or focus. If it's not a ‘F*** yes!', it's probably a no.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, that's a good one. Dustin with Portoro. Yeah, he's a great guy and he's so spot on. I know Justin Ford used to have a boat rental business, but I remember I stayed with him multiple times at some of his properties up on a lake in Maine. He would spend all his Friday, Saturdays and Sundays doing nothing but towing boats around. How effective is that? Is that the best use of his time? Now, it was great for us to have the boat sitting there, but I just don't think that was probably the most effective use of this is time. And I think he admitted that, too, in this as well. Yeah.

Heather Bayer

And I think the other thing that comes into this is getting distracted by new softwares and new technologies. And I think we all do that no more so than now. It's not just ChatGPT. It's every other peripheral bit of software that's out there that can capture your attention, something that says it's going to save you time.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. I think… and I've drawn a blank at the exact quote, but it was Mike Herrington that talked about something to the effect of, Your team probably isn't as excited about the technology as you are.

Heather Bayer

Yes, I certainly resonated with that because I used to have all these wonderful ideas and I was the only one. I never really thought, why am I the only one getting excited about this? My business partner at the time, he said the four words he hated to hear from me was, ‘I've got an idea'. Which is great if you're going to start a completely new company, but probably not when you're right in the middle of a summer season to get a new idea. So that was a very common one, letting yourself getting distracted and how important it is to stay true to your niche.

Heather Bayer

Hey, Brooke, I'm going to Europe next week and I'm doing a presentation on niches [nitches]. But over there they call it niches [neeshes]. But you can't say the riches are in the ‘neeshes'.

Brooke Pfautz

It doesn't work the same way, does it?

Heather Bayer

No. I'm trying to find something that rhymes with ‘neeshes'.

Brooke Pfautz

Peaches?

Heather Bayer

The Peaches are in the ‘neeshes'? I don't know. Anyway, let's move on. The second category is team. There were so many comments about team and hiring and firing. What were the sort of themes that came out of it all?

Brooke Pfautz

A lot of it, obviously, was hiring the wrong people. It came up many, many, many times. Conversely, I also heard – waiting too long to hire, stretching yourselves too thin. And then on the other side of that… it was really…. I don't know how many times, Heather, this came up. It must have at least a dozen times – too slow to fire the wrong team member. I forget who it was that said it, but the point of it is – Look, this is good for you, but it's also good for them, getting them into a job where they need to be. A lot of people talked about culture index and predictive index, using psychometric personality assessment tools. But yeah, hiring the wrong people and waiting too long to fire were often mentioned throughout this for sure.

Heather Bayer

Yes, I wish we'd hired more slowly. I wish we'd taken somebody on sooner. And I know for me, it was taking somebody sooner. I talked to Steve Trover recently, and we did a great episode on… We didn't really touch much on EOS, but we talked about the visionary and the integrator, and when was the right time to hire your integrator? What's your thoughts on that? Because it seems like if many of these managers had gone that route, they would perhaps not have had such issues.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. No, I mean, that came up time and time again. There's a lot of people, and we might talk about that in processes, but a lot of people are running EOS. I think one of the themes was not starting EOS earlier. EOS is entrepreneurial operating system. But a big part of that EOS system is the visionary/integrator relationship. So in most businesses, you need a visionary. So this is the strategic visionary. Typically, very often it's the founder. It's the Whoo Rah Rah! Let's burn the ships. Let's go. But conversely, you need that integrator role, which is someone that is more like…. I think they say the visionary is all gas, no brakes, and really the integrator is the brake pedal. They're the one that has to build the systems and the processes. And that's a classic in our organization here at Vintory. I'm the visionary; I have no detail whatsoever. I have a lot of weaknesses, but I think I'm pretty strategic. I think I'm pretty visionary, but I have no brake pedal, and I do not know how to set up a system and a process. Luckily, I've complimented myself with a gentleman named Randy Bonds, who is our integrator, our COO, our GM, or whatever you want to call them.

Brooke Pfautz

He's the one responsible for more of building out those systems processes and the team structure and things like that. But that visionary/integrator relationship is so important. But also conversely, it's like knowing who you are in there. Very often you have to understand where… and that's where I think predictive index and culture index comes in too, based on those profiles; luckily, we have that. But that was, I think, one of my mistakes was not actually hiring an integrator, or GM, or COO to complement my vast, wide weaknesses.

Heather Bayer

Yes. In my company, my business partner, Craig, was the integrator, which made it pretty easy. However, once we got to the point of… And that's where it fell apart, because once we got to within a couple of years of selling the company, how could you sell a company to a buyer with no visionary and no integrator, because we'd be gone?

Brooke Pfautz

Good point.

Heather Bayer

We then had to move to hire our integrator at that time. I was the good visionary. I had no idea how to work the PMS. I don't think I even had a login for it, but there were other people who knew it. But we had to do some very quick footwork before we sold to make sure that there was somebody in place to take over from the…

Brooke Pfautz

Jacobie Olin [C2G Advisors] talks about that all the time too, is make sure you have… If you are looking to sell, it is definitely easier to sell if you already have that GM or COO in place, just so the wheels don't fall off the bus, so to speak, and everything operationally can transition pretty easily. So that's definitely, if you are thinking about considering selling in the next couple of years, I would make sure you get a good GM, COO in place.

Heather Bayer

If you're wondering what we're talking about when we talk about ‘integrator',  go to the Show Notes, check out the episode with Steve Trover of Better Talent. That's when we were talking about the necessity for an integrator.

Heather Bayer

So we're moving on to the next one, processes. Lots of people talking about standard operating procedures, SOPs, people waiting too long to create and implement written ones. I think we all wander about as sole proprietors or property managers, the visionaries, and we have it all in our heads. And then you hire the first person and it's like, how do we get that information out of our heads and into theirs?

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, this came up all the time. Having those processes, having those SOPs, getting them on paper, don't having them in your head, get them in writing. There was tons of specific examples. EOS came up again a lot, having that entrepreneurial operating system. Then another one was interesting was ‘simplify'. Just try to simplify the business. Don't make it too complex, keep it real simple. EOS talks a lot about SOPs and processes as well. But yeah, this was a common theme for sure. Get it out of your head and get it on paper.

Heather Bayer

I've got the EOS book on Audible at the moment, listening to it, and it's really interesting. Got me really thinking about different things…..

Brooke Pfautz

…..You know what?  There's about four… Sorry, Heather, there's four or five videos you can watch on YouTube that just talk about EOS. The big ones, if you want to limp into it, to just start off, it's The Level 10 Meeting, it's Rocks, and Scorecard. If you just start there with those three things, you can get 60, 70% of EOS just by watching a couple of YouTube videos. Now, I would recommend eventually bringing in a professional facilitator. You will get a lot more out of it. But if you want to just test it out and dip your toe in the waters, just watch a couple of those videos. Again, Level 10 Meetings, Rocks, and Scorecard, you can go far away with those.

Heather Bayer

Okay. I will put links to those in the Show Notes as well. You've got me busy now.

Brooke Pfautz

There you go.

Heather Bayer

Staying with the topic of processes, there were lots of specific examples of these. One of them – not having integrated smart locks as part of our reservation system. There is nothing worse than having to manually port over door codes. It's just something simple like that. Another one which really struck a chord with me was – not giving owners clear instructions after onboarding their property. And we'd get texts saying, Well, when do I get paid? Something simple like that. Never really come across in the communication. Who to contact for certain needs. Sarah Bradford talks about this in quite a few of their episodes about… And she and Tim actually had one episode on the 12 things that you have to talk to your owners about on onboarding. And a brilliant episode that will be in the Show Notes as well.

Brooke Pfautz

That came up a lot. It's just not only it's onboarding, but offboarding. What are those processes in place for that? And that communication to owners as well definitely came up a lot.

Heather Bayer

Other things, stocking amenities like bikes, boards, and beach toys without having a tracking and inventory replacement system. And that goes for just about everything in terms of inventory. There's so much wrapped around that or that topic of processes wraps around a lot of things.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah.

Heather Bayer

Okay, where are we? The next one is… I'm scrolling back up to the top of the page, then coming all the way back down. And the more I get down, it takes longer. Finance and accounting.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, not having budget, setting up cash reserves, rainy day fund, and this was the big one. I'm going to say this – pause – setting up trust accounting, even if your state doesn't require it. Please, please, please set up trust accounting, even if your state doesn't require it. That one came up multiple times.

Heather Bayer

Yes. We were fortunate because we had to have trust accounting. It was part of our registration with our travel and tourism board. I couldn't imagine that a company would run without it. But I'm guessing they do from reading some of these.

Brooke Pfautz

There's a lot of states that don't require it.

Heather Bayer

Yes, a lot of people talked about – budgeting, operating without a budget, and without tracking my profit and loss statement against my monthly budget. I was so guilty of not doing that.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. Robin Craigen – missing a budget meeting because we were too busy. Seems like that was a common theme. Seems like he missed a lot of those meetings. Not having those budgets in place. I think Sarah Bradford mentioned that. I think Simon Lehmann talked about that as well. So yeah, there's a lot of good things talking about the budgeting process.

Heather Bayer

Okay, moving on. Cleaning, Inspections, Laundry & Safety. I was looking for something from Andy Meddick in here, and there it is – Not bringing housekeeping, maintenance and laundry in-house at the outset. I remember in Andy's time at Sea Change Vacations, where he would post pictures on a Saturday of himself at the wheel of the van with all the laundry in the back, and then sitting in a tiny little space with all the laundry around him.

Brooke Pfautz

Yes. These came up – like in-house cleaners came up a lot. I think it was Ginger Harrelson with Beach Ball Properties, Brian Olson, Andy, but also the one that was brought up six times was in-house laundry, waiting too long to bring laundry in-house, six different times that came up. I was actually really surprised by that one. Sarah Bradford, Brian Olson, Eric Thibodeau, Justin Ford, Andy Meddick, Dennis with Casiola, they all mentioned it, saying they wish they'd brought laundry in-house much, much sooner.

Heather Bayer

I've talked to so many property managers over the years on this show, and that has come up time and time again. Usually, I was talking to them at a time when they're building their facility and things were happening. Somebody said, I never thought I'd get so excited about washing machines.

Brooke Pfautz

One of the most proudest one of our partners, Darby and Tarrant, down at Stay Local Nashville, down in Nashville, they have this incredible laundry facility. I think it's actually bigger than the Tennessee Titans's laundry facility. And they were so proud. But they've said multiple times, that is what kept them afloat during COVID. They were just doing other people's laundry and they invested, I don't know what the number was, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on this laundry facility and these massive laundry machines. And that literally kept them alive during COVID.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, exactly. I can't get off this topic without talking about safety because Justin would not forgive us for not.  And he said – not paying better attention to guest safety, I almost lost the company from just one guest safety incident.

Brooke Pfautz

That was what got him into the whole safety kick was that instance. And after he sold his company, he's obviously done a great job championing safety and we don't do a good enough job on that. I think it was brought up a couple of times here, Christina and Thor Thornton down in Chattanooga and Eric Thibodeau, really just talking about that safety aspect of it, just how important it really is. None of us are safe enough, if you will. There's a lot of liability there for all of us for sure. You can lose your company pretty quickly.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, we breezed our way through probably 14-15 years of business without really paying much attention to safety. It was only after I did the safety course, the Breezeway Safety Course that I went, Oh, my gosh. We've dodged the bullet so many times.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, all it takes is one.

Heather Bayer

All it takes is one. Yes. So if you guys listening are going to pay attention to any one of these mistakes, if you are not paying attention to safety, then do it now and go to Breezeway, do the safety course. Easy thing to do.

Heather Bayer

Okay, we are talking about Communications, Feedback & Guest Marketing. What were the common ones… Let's talk about owner communications because that was a long, long list.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, it just seemed like… And it goes hand-in-hand with what we talked about before with setting the right expectation of your owners. But yeah, that owner communication. Many people said they were under communicating with their owners, not having communication. Brian Olsen – not having communication plan to communicate with their owners. Ryan Dane with Casago – not having an owner communication strategy for current owners. Someone is always trying to get their attention, show constant appreciation, and what you're doing to help them win. A common theme, and I don't have it off top of my head, but it was something to the effect of, let them know everything you do for them. Very often, you do all these things for them, but you don't let them know what you're actually doing and they don't see it. We used to, when I had Vantage, we would put everything we did in a property on the monthly statement. And we'd just show… And if it was a no charge, we just put no charge. But I wanted them to see everything we did. Every time we went into a property, I wanted them to know that. Every time we did tighten some door knobs and things like that, and we weren't charging for it, I wanted them to see that.  But yeah, I think that was an important one.

Heather Bayer

I just want to just jump in here because we took our RV into the service center last week to have some warranty work done. Nothing was charged. Usually, they don't go beyond… They don't want the scope creep when they've only got your rig for a certain amount of hours. But they will always do an extra check over. And absolutely everything that they looked at was documented. Even if nothing had to be done, they brought it to our attention. And that attention to detail just got me writing a Google review. These guys are amazing. They didn't actually fix these things. They were just pointing them out. But thank you.

Brooke Pfautz

Great example. I would do that if I were a property manager again. Kevin Jones, formerly with Latitude 38, he had a great one here – forgetting to prioritize communication. Timely communication is key to everything. Communicate the good news, communicate the bad news, and know that no communication is never a good strategy. I thought that was a good one.

Heather Bayer

I liked Paul Becker – not fully discussing the potentially ugly part of short-term renting their home with a homeowner just to get a new listing.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, that one came up. He mentioned that on to the homeowner and also to the guest, highlighting the negatives of the property, too. Don't try to oversell it because all it's going to do is make upset guests or, in this case, upset owners; don't oversell.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, exactly. We learned that to our cost on numerous occasions over 20 years. We were always upfront. Let's talk about the damage that's going to happen. Let's talk about the times when you walk in and you'll see scuffs on your walls and perhaps a stain on a couch. It will happen. And really getting those out of the way. And then we're reiterating them over time. Don't forget, damage is going to happen. It made things a lot easier. I like Meg Park's comment about never over-promising. Always promise what you can guarantee you can meet, setting clear expectations and surpassing them always goes much further than not meeting expectations at all.

Heather Bayer

Conflict resolution…….

Brooke Pfautz

Yes.  I was hoping you'd bring this one up because this one came up a lot, too. There's some great ones. I mean, Mike Herrington – letting issues fester. I've learned that if you let guest or homeowner issues fester, it leads to a lot more unnecessary anxiety. Deal with it as soon as possible. And then one that just parlayed so well into that one, Adam Norris down in Blue Ridge, North Carolina – forgetting that the phone call trumps email every time for difficult situations. And I think even Mike Herrington brought that up, being too reliant on email. If it takes more than five sentences explained, just pick up the damn phone.

Heather Bayer

Yeah. We used to tell our staff that were managing issues, just pick up the phone. So much easier. And you can have that conversation and it may be a difficult conversation. But in the long run, you're going to… It's so much better than sitting on the email that you really want to write and then sending the one that you know you have to write and maybe not getting the tone right. So I love that. Yeah, conflict resolution is a big one. And I think lots of people mention that, trying to solve a dispute by email. Don't do it. Yeah. Do jump in, Brooke, if I'm missing any.

Brooke Pfautz

No, these are good. We could be here all day, though.

Heather Bayer

Oh, I know, but we're rattling through them.

Brooke Pfautz

I wish someone would write a book about all these.

Heather Bayer

Well, this is great that you're going to do this, because I think this is really going to be sparking people's interest and they'll be waiting for this book to come out. Let's talk about your favorite one. It's in inventory acquisition.

Brooke Pfautz

Yes, I love this one. It seemed like many people made the mistake of doing inventory acquisition as an afterthought. You put all this time, money, and effort into guest and your website for guest, but you forget about the core part of your business is really if you don't have any inventory, you don't have a business. So making it a conscious effort, and a big part of it, big theme here was from multiple people. I think there was like four or five people just off top of my head that talked about not dedicating a specific budget towards continuous owner acquisition. Just like you have all these strategies to try to get new guests all the time, having a very thoughtful proactive strategy of getting new owners. And many people don't do that. There was Michael Podenko mentioned that, Christina and Thor Thornton, Ryan Dame with Casago, Eric Thibodeau. They talked about having that very specific, conscious effort of going after and getting new inventory. Also, I think Jed Stevens with Koloa Kai and Jen Mucha with Arrived, and a couple of other people.

Brooke Pfautz

Koon Rollins talked about hiring a very specific, dedicated person for business development. That was even a mistake I made. It was not specializing that role. Even though we had business development people, we understood the power of inventory, we understood that it was the most impactful lever we could pull to improve our top line revenues, our bottom line profits, and build the net worth of the company. But we still had them doing owner relations things afterwards. And those skill sets aren't always necessarily are the same. Typically, a salesperson is not necessarily the best follow up. They don't have the best high detail trait in speaking of culture index and predictive index. So what I would say is specialize and get a full dedicated business development rep. That's one of the things I've actually presented down over in Reno last week at the Northwest VRP. And I talked about actually going through the math of understanding – does it make sense to hire a full-time business development rep? And the answer is it depends. It depends on two things. The first is do you have some money to invest? Because it's a little bit preloaded. You've got to pay for this person until they start getting ramped up, 'till this property start generating revenue. Then the second is, do you have the right person in place? That's where we've established…. we've done a regression analysis over the 550 companies that we've signed up. What are the best profiles that make the best business development reps? The math came out to it. What we did it on this was, if you can get somebody that goes out there and signs up 16-18 new properties a year, new properties that you wouldn't have had without them, if you fall within the industry averages, it makes sense all day long to do that.

Heather Bayer

I love the part about software, actually, and not using a CRM for owner acquisition.

Brooke Pfautz

Come on, that's what we do! We have the right ideas. I was just as guilty. The funny thing is I remember going to LiveRez all the time saying, When will you build an owner CRM? And, Oh, we're getting there. We're getting there. And at the time, there really weren't any really solid CRMs when I was building my company. So yeah, definitely use the CRM. There's a ton of them out there now. Even HubSpot has a great free version. But be careful, before you know it, you'll be dropping two or three thousand dollars a month because there's so many upgrades and things like that you can do. And obviously a shameless plug for Vintory. We have this really killer CRM built from the ground up specifically for vacation rental managers to use for homeowner acquisition. So there's my plug for the CRM.

Heather Bayer

Right, we're on number eight, so we're moving along quite nicely – Taking on the wrong owners.

Brooke Pfautz

Gosh, this came up… I think this is one of the most popular categories, was just taking on the wrong owners and the wrong inventory and talking about the process of vetting them, talking about just signing up the wrong properties or the wrong owners. But then once you actually have them on there, getting rid of them and helping out your team.  Sometimes, if you have an abusive owner, be an advocate for your team, get rid of them. You could have someone that does homeowner relations, and let's say they have 20, 30, 40 homeowners, and all of them are great, except for that one owner. All they will think about all day is about that one jerk homeowner. So do your team a favor and get rid of them. No one owner is worth the stress to your team. And then saying, that was a common theme too. It's like losing team members because the stress of that one person is just not worth it.

Heather Bayer

In the 20 years that our business was in operation under Craig and I, we didn't lose any properties. We didn't get rid of any properties. We got rid of the owners.  I think I'd mentioned before that we got rid of our highest performing property, and it was the highest performing by a lot. But it was a  nightmare dealing with the owner. We took a real hit with that one. But the time taken dealing with that owner, when you began to factor that in, so it was time taken in terms of money spent on the time, but also taking our staff away from other work. And of course, the stress on them was monumental.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. CJ Stamm said – allowing toxic owners to steal energy from my employees, or Brian Olsen – keeping bad owners too long, they will bring down you and your team. That was a common theme throughout. Yes.

Heather Bayer

I love these. I've still to submit my 10, and I want them to be 10 different ones. Going through these and thinking, well, there must be something that somebody hasn't made a mistake about yet, but I'm not sure there is. I'll just have to…

Brooke Pfautz

Sorry to interrupt, but Heather, here's one that came up that I was actually surprised from both Sarah Bradford and Justin Ford. Sarah's was avoiding having homeowner gatherings was one of her mistakes. And then Justin said – waiting 10 years before I hosted a property owner gathering party, don't be afraid for your owners to gather together with you. It's not only a great retention tool, it helped with future property acquisition as well. So that was actually a surprise to me. I've never heard that before. And two well known people in our industry, Justin Ford and Sarah Bradford, both said that. I thought it was great.

Heather Bayer

We pulled our owners, or some of our owners into a focus group. We took them off to a hotel and we sat around for a day and we did a bunch of chatting about where the business was and where it was going and what they wanted us to be for them and gave them a good lunch. And it was the weekend of our Cottage Life Show. So they got tickets to go to the show afterwards. It was such a great thing to do from their perspective. They absolutely loved that. And then we started up an owner's Facebook group where they could share their experiences. And it didn't last very long, because they lost a little bit of interest. But it was certainly good at the outset. Maybe we could have carried it on in a different format. But just getting those owners together and talking amongst themselves was such a great thing to do.

Heather Bayer

All right, we've got firing owners, I suppose we've covered that. So next, Technology.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, the themes here, keep it simple, slow down. Let's see, Adam Norris – trusting technology products before testing their actual functionality in the field. I think I said this before with Mike Herrington being too tech-focused with a team that wasn't techy. Most of the time your team is not as excited about the new tech you want to roll out. I thought that was great. And then we had obviously a lot of people talking about revenue management, a lot of people talking about video photos, underinvesting in really good professional photos, professional virtual tours. Yeah, there's some good ones.

Heather Bayer

Yeah. Certainly, the reason I think that this book is going to be such a great benefit for people is that there are so many different… Although there's a lot of areas where there's similarities, there's a lot of differences. And this is just brilliant. All these amazing property managers sharing this information. And certainly on the technology side, I would certainly say that my big mistake was carrying on my habit of being an early adopter and having pride in being an early adopter. But then taking on board new technologies that  no one could learn. It was too techy for them. I couldn't learn it. And then we end up with this great tech stack with all this stuff that's completely useless because it's not getting used properly.

Brooke Pfautz

Nobody's using it.

Heather Bayer

Yeah. And then that gets into subscription creep.

Heather Bayer

All right, we've done really, really well here. We are on the last one, which I love, which is networking conferences, community and local competition. This was.

Brooke Pfautz

This was a surprise for me, just how many people talked about networking. When I was at this last conference, Northwest VRP, someone mentioned they're like, You know what? The vacation rental industry is like a family. And if you think about it, it's funny. I was talking to Brian, my business partner, as we were flying home. He even mentioned, he goes, How often do you see some of your best friends from high school or college? Maybe once, maybe twice a year. These people we're seeing easily half a dozen times per year at these conferences. But the networking and conferences came up, Heather, 22 times. It was number one by far. Just like Travis Wilburn says at Stay Charlottesville – not networking amongst my peers fast enough. Justin Ford – not networking sooner. He waited 12 years to join VMA. He's like – I should have joined on day one. The theme that came up time and time and time again was just how valuable these networking and conferences were for sure.

Heather Bayer

I didn't jump in 'till about six or seven years in. I think because when I started back in 2002 or 2003, there just wasn't… There weren't the events out there. And then they began to creep in. And I don't think I could have, or we could have made such a success with our company without going to these networking events. I just wanted to share one thing that I always recall learning at a conference, and it wasn't from education, it was from sitting down with one of our competitors in a lounge and having a coffee and me saying, How do you deal with damage deposits? And he said, Damage deposits? ….this is going back quite a while in the times of damage deposits. And I said, Yes, sending them back is such a chore. And he said, We don't do that, we self insure.

Brooke Pfautz

And the light bulb went….

Heather Bayer

…Off and I went back and we implemented that within three months of getting back and never looked back on it. And if I hadn't gone to that conference, I wouldn't have sat down with a competitor.

Brooke Pfautz

Well, was it a local competitor in your markets?

Heather Bayer

Yeah.

Brooke Pfautz

So that's a great segue. So this was brought up six different times – meeting with your local competitors. Sarah Bradford says, Viewing local competition as foes versus friends. Now she's got some great friends that are in her markets. Justin Ford said the same thing, Not inviting my competitors for coffee. It wasn't until I built alliances with my competitors that we all started to succeed together. Your competitors aren't your enemy. There are plenty of properties for everyone to manage. And that was even one of mine. It's not proactively extending an olive branch to local competitors to build out that local network. I never did that. And now seeing all these and seeing the industry from the outside in from more of a vendor perspective, it's a regret that I definitely have. But there's definitely enough properties out there. Don't look at your competitors as foes, look at them as friends; a common theme. Mike Herrington talked about that too, being too worried about the competition.

Heather Bayer

Yes.  I know that in the first 15 years of our business, we didn't really talk much to the competition. Once regulations started to creep in, then we had to band together. What a change that was, and now the Ontario Cottage Rental Managers Association is going from strength to strength and advocating on behalf of their owners, plus VRBOs as well. So it is so worthwhile that networking locally.

Heather Bayer

Right, there is the bonus section. We've got about a minute on that one. Not taking care of yourself, mental wellness and setting boundaries, and I think that's super important.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah, I mean just not doing it all. Look, this is a hard business. As Dennis with Casiola talked about, he talks about just how difficult it really is. He says, Thinking that managing vacation rentals will be easy, spoiler, it's hard, really hard, 24/7 hard. And it's true, it can take its toll. It took its toll on me. It's why I sold after five years. Just setting those boundaries, not being too available, as Mike Herrington talked about. And it's stressful. And don't forget to take time off, too, for yourself. I think Brian Olson, he even admitted not taking care of his own health. Travis Wilburn talks about not taking vacation for five years. Valerie Gangas said working regularly seven days a week for years on end doesn't contribute to a balanced life or perspective. So just taking some time off, some mental wellness, setting those boundaries. And then also don't take it personally. When an owner or guest is really getting after you, just don't take it personal. As Sarah Bradford said, This too shall pass. But my favorite way to end it is don't forget to celebrate the wins and have fun, which is true.  You can sometimes forget about that as well.

Brooke Pfautz

Heather Bayer

At the end of the season, we used to have what we called the cake celebration, because it was when we went through and did the annual cull and decided which properties would not be going on for another year. And we'd have a very special cake as we decided which were going to be ‘the gonners'. But it was, I guess, a celebration of a win. And certainly for some of our staff after a summer of going through some difficult times with owners and their guests, to find out that they were not going to ever have to deal with these people again was a super win for them.

Heather Bayer

Brooke, I can't believe that we did that in 50 minutes.

Brooke Pfautz

There's a lot more.  We only touched on about 10 % of them, too.

Heather Bayer

We did. Tell us about the book. What's going to happen with it?

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. So again, this just came out of nowhere. The book, you won't be able to buy it here. It'll probably be available this summer and it's going to be available on Amazon Kindle for purchase. All proceeds, 100% of all the profits on that will go to short-term vacation rental advocacy. So whether that be VRMA advocacy or other different efforts, we'll be pushing all those directly to them. So if San Diego needs some money and they're just going through a lot of stuff and regulations going on, we'll be happy to put those proceeds directly to it. But also, we'll be giving it away for a limited time on our website. If you want to preregister, if you want to get on the waiting list and be the first ones on there because we're only going to set a certain amount, just go to Ventory.com/mistakes, and we will be giving away a set number of books for free. We'll pay for them, we'll pay for the shipping and everything, and you'll be the first in line to get those.

Brooke Pfautz

But I'm telling you, Heather, after reading these, look, this is one of these things I think this has the impact of being like the Jim Collins Good to Great for our short-term vacation industry.  There is so much information in here, and that's why I really did the book. It was just too valuable not to share. So I'm really glad to get this out there. And I hope if you're following on LinkedIn, you enjoy it. If you're not on LinkedIn, again, feel free to purchase that book or go to our website and get it from us for free.

Heather Bayer

Well, thank you so much for doing this. I think this is really, really long overdue. And how quickly to go from an idea while you're just sitting there with your phone on an evening, to being able to write a full-scale book and bring so much learning to the short-term rental community. It's fantastic. And thank you.

Heather Bayer

Before we leave, Brooke, there's still time just to tell us a little bit about Vintory and how people could connect with you about that.

Brooke Pfautz

Yeah. So feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or you can just email me, brooke@ventory.com. But yeah, Vintory, we're a sales marketing platform that we help professional short-term vacation rental managers grow their inventory. So we do that through data. We are building the largest database of vacation rental homeowners on the planet. We have this really cool marketing engine that allows you to send cold email outreach to those prospects, allows you to send really cool, well designed postcards and direct mail. Then we have this really cool CRM and marketing automation platform, so once somebody raises their hand and says they're interested, the CRM goes to work in nurturing those leads. We've got a full marketing team as well. We're a full marketing agency as well. If you want us to do any digital marketing for you, or build out custom postcards and direct mail and things like that, landing pages, we can do that as well. But happy to help out. Plans start as cheap as $300-400 a month.

Heather Bayer

Well, thank you. Thank you. For joining me again and thank you for sharing all of this and we will talk again soon.

Brooke Pfautz

Sounds good. Thanks, Heather.

Heather Bayer

Well, thank you so much, Brooke Pfautz, for that. That was absolutely great. So looking forward to seeing that full book come out. I know that there's a lot of those mistakes which are real pain points for people, and they're going to be addressed in some of the courses that we're coming up with in the Vacation Rental Formula Business School. So watch out for those.

Heather Bayer

Time is moving on. We're nearly coming up to an hour. I never go beyond an hour on a podcast episode. So that's it for me. I'll talk to you again 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 this episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you and I look forward to being with you again next week.