How to avoid the top 10 mistakes STR operators make

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Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Boostly podcast. This is a podcast that gives you, the listener, the tools, the tactics, the trainings and most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. Today we are going behind the host slash the Spotlight series. It's a little bit of both because we've got a very special guest where he's not only grown from zero to over 500 properties in a very short space of time, but he's also now sharing. He's an author. He's sharing all of the experience and that information with you as our listener and I'm really excited to dive into that. So our special guest today is Brooke from frs. Is that correct? Did I pronounce that correct?

Close the fs. Yeah, Close Fouts.

He's the MD and founder CEO of Vintry. So think Infantry Vintry. And we're really going to be Diving into the new book today, which is Vacation Rental Secrets. And this is all about how you as a host can avoid the top 10 mistakes that we see all the time in the short term rental world. So welcome along. Brooke, thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to get into this.

Absolutely. Liam, big fan. Glad to be here. So, yeah, really, really excited. Thanks for having me.

So before we get into that, just let the listeners know whereabouts are you in the world? And just give us a bit of a background to your history.

Yeah, so I'm located in Baltimore, right outside of Baltimore, Maryland, which is about an hour outside of Washington D.C. i, like many other people, you know, stumbled into the short term vacation rental industry. I was actually in mortgage banking. That was, I was a corporate finance major in college, got into mortgage banking, thought that was going to be my career. And then 2007, 2008 kind of financial crisis put a kibosh on that. So ended up stumbling into short term rentals. Started a company in Ocean City, Maryland that I founded. Did have a silent business partner in that business, but ended up, yeah, growing that company pretty fast. Grew that company from zero to 500 properties in five years. I exited that business in 2013. Then I had various other leadership roles within the short term rental space, but almost all of it was based around inventory acquisition, all around growing inventory. I really wasn't doing much on kind of the guest marketing. I really wasn't doing anything operations. I was focused exclusively on the supply side of things and growing inventory. And then I found about four and a half years ago I founded Ventory. And the really the reason, Liam, I decided to start that was I'd go around to these conferences, I talk to people and the biggest struggle that I found that everybody had was growing their inventory. And there was no companies out there that was actually solving that pain point. It was the biggest pain point that they all had. It was something that I absolutely loved. It was something I was super passionate about and something that I was blessed to be pretty good at. So I said, you know what, let's, let's start a company that helps professional short term vacation rental managers add more properties. And that was kind of the catalyst of inventory four and a half years ago. And fast forward today, we've, we've helped over 650 companies with their inventory growth efforts. We've got over 50 people, 50, we call them growth experts on our team that do one thing and one thing only and that's help you grow your inventory. So that's how I got to Where I am today.

That's amazing. And talk us through how the idea for this book came along. Where did the idea of vacation rental secrets come from?

Yeah, so I had no intent. So I did write a book. I wrote an earlier book called From Zero to 500 Properties in Five Years published that became a bestseller in three categories in Amazon. And just loved sharing all the information I have. But I really had no intentions of writing another book. But it was. It was literally Easter Sunday this past year, and I, you know, the extended family had all left. I poured myself a big glass of wine. I sat down on the couch and just started flipping through my LinkedIn feed. And one of the first things I saw was a post from somebody in a completely different industry, actually in more of the software space, technology space. And he asked some other people within that space to share their top 10 mistakes. And I thought that was such a brilliant idea because a couple things. First, it was you learn from your mistakes. That's where you truly find your learnings and you expand and you grow. And secondly, there was something about these top leaders, these people that I idolized that were being vulnerable and sharing how, you know, they made these mistakes. And I just thought it was a fantastic idea. So I quickly picked up my phone. I literally emailed it to four of my friends that own vacation rental management firms. And very quickly, I actually got a response. I got a response from a gentleman named Ryan. Dame was the first one I remember today. It was at 10:26 that night, and I posted it on LinkedIn the next morning. His top 10 mistakes. And Liam, it, like, it. It went viral. I mean, the, the. The engagement on that post was probably one of my. My top posts ever. I mean, the, the comments and the feedback and, you know, everything else. And for the next, you know, and then I posted the next three. And for the next 52 days straight, I continued to post a top 10 mistake from a leader within the space. But what was funny, people actually started coming to me out of the woodworks, people that I never even met before, and just sharing, you know, their mistakes with me. And I kept on posting them. And it just got to the point, I mean, I could have gone on literally for, for, for years on this, but at a certain point, I had to. I had to stop it. And what, what really became the catalyst of turning into a book was I went to a conference. I went to the Northwest VRP Conference in Reno, Nevada, and it was about halfway through my coast, and a gentleman came up to me that I never met before. And he introduced himself, he said, brooke, I just want to introduce myself. I want to thank you for this series you're doing on LinkedIn. It is by far the most informational and value add posts I've ever read in my entire life. And I want you to know that I actually print out every one of these posts and I have a little three hole punch and I put it into a binder and I'm turning it into like his own little, like he turned it into his own little book. And from that point on I was like, you know what? This information is just too valuable not to share. So that was when I kind of made the decision when I got home and I was going to kind of take all this information and turn it into a book.

So yeah, that's amazing. I mean the fact that you're sharing that value is so useful to everybody listening because the thing is that you can learn from your own mistakes, but the quickest way is to learn from other people's mistakes. And if that's all in one place as short term rental hosts, you don't know what you don't know at the start of this journey. Especially when you're, when you're starting out scaling between like 1 and 20 units, you know, it's really, really difficult at that stage. So learning from people who have been there and done that is so, so.

We had, we had a couple people that actually commented. They're like, if I would have had this book early, it would have saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, in, in those mistakes. And I, I couldn't agree more. So I, I really truly believe, and again, I'm not the author of this. I'm just a person that pulled it all together. The 52 contributors are really the authors of this book. I really believe that this book is one of those books that becomes, you know, the good to great, you know, by Jim Collins for our short term rental industry. Because it really is, there's some unbelievable learning lessons in there that become the baseline and you will save hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will grow much faster and by, by reading this book for, for sure.

Now the cool thing is that we normally share the how to find the book right at the end. But for the people who have just tuned in just to find out, we will share it again at the end. But where can people find this book for the ones who are very excited.

Yeah, so it's, it's widely distributed obviously on Amazon. You can get it right there. You can get it on Kindle immediately And it's if you want just a quick link, if you go to.

It.

Goes directly to the Amazon page, if that helps a little bit.

Nice, nice. So for everybody else who wants to find out obviously more about what the top 10 mistakes are, what are some of the themes that you saw? Can you share without giving away the secret sauce obviously from the book, can you share what are the sort of themes within it?

Yeah, well, first off, just the, the format of the book. Just so everybody knows. So again, 52 contributors, 52 co authors. The first half of the book is everybody's, you know, raw feedback. I mean, even with misspellings and everything in it. I didn't change anything. I put it exactly the way it was. It's their top 10 mistakes. So that's the first half of the book. So if you think about it, 52 contributors, 10 mistakes each, we have 520 raw mistakes of the top leaders within our industry. And then what happened, Liam, in the second, what I did was I realized very quickly that out of those 520 mistakes, they all bucketed pretty nicely and pretty neatly into about 10 chapters. And so the second half of the book is, you know, one through 10. It's the 10 kind of chapters, the 10 major mistakes that all these top leaders made. So I'll just give you kind of a. I'll just throw out a little tease and we obviously will maybe jump into a couple of these. But like, mistake number one is based around strategy based. Mistake number two was all around your team. Number three was about systems and processes. Four was finance and accounting. Five was kind of more based around like kind of cleaning inspections, laundry and safety. Six was communication, feedback and guest marketing. Mistake number seven was based all around inventory acquisition. Obviously the one I'm pretty passionate about, number eight was taking on the wrong owners and the wrong inventory. Number nine was based around technology. Number ten was about networking, conferences, community and local competition. And we even had a little bonus chapter. It says, take care of yourself, don't take it personally, and don't forget to celebrate the win. So that's kind of the format of the book. But I definitely had some favorites in there. But I'm happy to dive into whichever ones you want to go into.

Take away. Which one was your favorite? I'm lying.

Well, it's probably too obvious, but inventory acquisition, because that's what we do here at Adventory. It's all about inventory acquisition. And I would say there's probably about four or five sub bullets within that, but a lot of it came down to what I realized was most people don't have a strategic plan to grow their inventory. Very often they have a very strategic plan to grow their guests. They have very like this marketing calendar built out a year in advance. But very, very few companies, you know, they or they, the mistake they made was not having a proactive strategy and not setting aside a certain budget to grow your inventory. Because Liam, honestly the, the, the lever that has the greatest impact to your top line revenues, your bottom line profits and even building net worth is really growing your inventory. It's like a four to a six time impact of any other lever that you can pull. So what people realize was that the mistake that they made was they just weren't having that proactive plan to go out there and do it. They weren't investing properly. They didn't have the right team around it. And a lot of them shameless plug for Venturi, they didn't have the right software to power that back end like we do here at Ventory, the one.

You mentioned about team. Because that is one thing for me as a, you know, outside of Boostly, I'm a short term rental host myself and the one thing for me is thinking well if I double or triple the amount of stock and it's even a mindset shift in itself because when you first get your first place you don't think of the nights as stock or the inventory is, you know, the rooms. But ultimately that's what we sell. You know, we're selling nights, you know, people can come and sleep in the places for, for money. So what would you say was some of the mistakes around the team building and that because my worry is if I was to triple or quadruple the amount of stock over a very short period of time, I worry about the, what labor and the operation side is going to, going to draw from me. And you mentioned you've got to look after yourself. So you know those two chapters of how do you look after yourself and grow fast while putting in place the right team.

Yeah, well, let's tackle the team first. So it really came down, I think it was like six or seven sub bullets of it. A lot of it came down to hiring, you know, hiring the right people. Make sure you're, you're spending the right around time, you're, you're putting the right systems in place to hire effectively and not just hire to fill a body because the wrong hierarchy cost you so much. We talked a little bit about psychometric personality assessments. A lot of our partners, a lot of people that Were in the book use these, these are like predictive index. And then we also talked about firing. You know, it's like you have that employee, you know, you need to get rid of them and just usually you're really slow to do it and just not getting rid of them quickly enough. There was a lot of discussion in the book of like not delegating, you know, like keeping everything yourself, you know, being a little bit afraid to delegate, a little bit afraid to delegate to virtual assistants. That's obviously become more and more popular now, but it wasn't a while back and people were slow to adopt that. And then culture was a big part of it. Just, you know, building a really good team culture and one that actually I really enjoy. I don't know if you're familiar with eos or entrepreneurial operating system. There's this thing called the visionary integrator relationship. So typically most, you know, vacational management companies are founded by this visionary, very strategic, very, you know, growth at all cost. And that is not usually the best person that to build the systems and processes. So you need this really good. They call it the eos, they call it the visionary integrator relationship. Or it could be the CEO and the COO or the gm. And I fell into this one myself. I mean I. So again I grew vantage from zero to 500 properties in five years. I didn't have nearly enough systems and processes in place. I still think to this day, had I had a really good gm, had I read a really good COO to build out those systems and processes, I'd have probably 10,000 properties under management today. But the problem was I was really good at the vision, I was really good at strategy, I was really good at growth and sales and marketing. I was a horrendous operator. I was awful at systems and processes. So the proverbial wheels were falling off the bus as we were growing so fast. But had I had that really critical important person next to me, I think we probably would be in a much different spot than we are today.

What I love about that is we all as entrepreneurs need to self analyze and know that there's areas we're great at and there's areas we're not so good at. And like you say, usually the founders are the, the visionaries that the head in the cloud type, you know, like that sort of person. I've been lucky enough to find a business partner and the first thing before I became, you know, business partner was I, I did a test. I actually done like a wealth dynamics one but there's many of these type of tests out there and he's the polar opposite to me. And that was such a great sign that we were completely two different sides of that.

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What tests do you recommend people go and check out? You know, is there any kind of like off the top of your head that you go to know what these are? These are pretty good?

Yeah. No, I mean that was what we were talking about before the psychometric personality assessments. 100%. I mean that was a huge one. So predictive index. So there's a gentleman named Steve Trover out there with better talent. He kind of is like the guy for the short term rental space where he can help you hire and then help you fill those seats. But he also does personality assessment. So predictive index is the one that he runs that's highly effective. So I would definitely start there. I definitely call better talent because you know, that was where I really realized the difference between me again as the CEO and that visionary versus my gm. So I'm what's called like a maverick in predictive index and my integrator, my CEO currently here at Venturi, he's an architect profile which is, you know, I don't say it's polar opposite but very in certain traits were definitely polar opposites which he's got the systems and the processes and the high detail and I'm more kind of fly by the, you know, seat of my pants kind of a person. But, but again we, we complement each other really well. It sounds like very similar to you and your business partner.

That's really cool. I've got to ask, is there, was there any mistakes around direct bookings? Was that mentioned in the book? Is Bruce Lee that's what we're all about?

Yeah, I mean it's relying too much on the OTAs. I mean it was a standard one. That came out time and time again, for sure.

That's cool. That's cool. And just diving into tech now, I know you've mentioned Vintree. You've got the tech there. Is there any advice you'd have for the listener who is thinking, you know what? I'm not sure if I've got the right tech stack. What sort of tech do they need to be considering and why?

Yeah, so it's kind of ironic right now, as we speak, I'm doing a new series on LinkedIn called My Tech Stack. So I'm interviewing, you know, dozens and dozens of the top leaders in our space, and I'm asking him the simple question of, like, what's your tech stack? What does it look like? What are you using? What are some of those hidden gems? And then what's one that you would just never, you know, let go of? And it's. It's really interesting to kind of see what some people are using. You have the standards, you know, the tracks, the streamlines, the breezeways, the key data dashboard. But then you have some of these, you know, some of these people that are really kind of, you know, taking advantage of Zapier or Airtable or, you know what I mean, and making almost like their. Their own tech stack and kind of integrating things together through APIs, which I thought was pretty cool, but from the book, it was. There was a couple. There was actually three major, like, themes within technology. And it's funny because the first two seem kind of contradictory, but the first one was take it slow. The second was act fast. Again, the polar opposite. And then the last one was due diligence. So what they talked about with taking slow is very often you can walk down a vendor showcase at a conference and get all the shiny things just start jumping out at you, and you can start just signing up for everything. And as I think Mike Harrington said, formerly of Carolina Retreats, he. He said something to the effect of your team isn't as excited about all this new technology that you signed up with. So I envisioned Mike coming back from a conference, you know, and he signed up for all these three different, you know, new technology platforms. And he's all excited that it's going to make a much more efficient and, you know, tech enable the team. But guess what? Secretly, the team doesn't really enjoy it. Secretly, the team actually hates it. So just, you know, slow down a little bit, make sure you do your due diligence, make sure you have done a good job. But I guess from the other side of it was Some people realized that they, they didn't act fast enough. They just sat on the sidelines before they actually switched. Maybe it was, you know, I've heard a story, you know, it's like the average NPS of a property management Software is like -18, you know, and it just blows my mind that people don't change fast enough their property management software. But I think what ends up happening is it's such a barrier to your team. It is. So you lose so many reservations. You lose a lot of that owner acquisition. So you're not acting fast enough when you know you got to do it eventually. So sometimes it's best just to kind of pull off that band aid and just do it. But then that leads kind of to the third bullet point there was make sure you do your due diligence, make sure you're interviewing people, make sure you're interviewing some of their other clients. And don't just use the three recommendations that they give you. Try to do your own due diligence. What I did when I was, when I had my company and I was vetting software providers is I asked them a couple different things. I said, hey, give me three references that can be your brother, your sister, your uncle, whoever you want to be. But I also want to, I want you to give me the last three installs that have gone live and I want you to give me the date that they did it. That way they couldn't really seed it with, you know, just your proponents. You were actually getting a more, a wider swath of, of people. So you can kind of get a good, good idea of the due diligence.

That's a great, great point. I mean, just being able to go in there and find that information, then like you say, there's no hiding for them, you're going to be able to check that out. So thank you for this year.

Well, and here's another thing through, through my new series on LinkedIn, you know, my tech stack, you will see, you know, hundreds and hundreds of, of different, you know, tech stacks that people are using and you can actually DM them right on LinkedIn and then you can find out, you know, directly if what they think of them get, you know, real raw feedback not filtered through the technology provider.

And we're going to be sharing the link to LinkedIn at the end of this. So do stick around. If you're listening to this on the Boostly podcast or watching on the YouTube channel, one question I've got asked, Brooke, is what top tip would you have for the Short term rental owners out there who need to increase their inventory, is there like one thing they could go and do tomorrow or today right after listening to this to really help their chances of increasing their inventory?

Well, so unfortunately there's no silver bullet. I will say that that is, it is. The reason it's hard is what makes Ventory so valuable is because there's a lot of systems and a lot of processes. Remember, we've done this over 650 times and there is no silver bullet. It takes time, it takes consistency. So I will say this like the one hint I can give you is you have to be consistent. You have to continue to do it. And there's this thing called the gap of disappointment. So whenever inevitably what everyone does is they end up canceling and they end up stopping like three to four months in their marketing efforts because they just, they don't see it's not going fast enough. But it's a lot like SEO. SEO does not happen overnight, right? It takes time. So the same thing holds true here with inventory acquisition. You just have to stick to the fundamentals. You have to stick to, stick to it, be consistent and keep plugging away. But with that said, I'll give a couple little hints. The first would be direct mail. Direct mail actually works. Again though, you need to be consistent. You want to continue to run those campaigns month after month after month. Second kind of hack, if you will, is data. You know, inside the U.S. luckily it's really easy to get data outside the U.S. it's obviously very challenging to get that data of your targets that you're going to go after. But again, 50% of all marketing just comes down to your list to make sure you get a really good list. And there's multiple different places you can get it from. You can go out there, you can, you get, there's list brokers out there, you can get it from. There's. You could scrape the OTAs, you can scrape large venture backed conglomerates, you can get vacation permit data. So if your city, county or township requires a vacation permit in the US do the Freedom of Information act. You can actually get that list and you can start targeting those people. But again, be consistent with that marketing. Another surprise for me was cold email outreach. So this is one that actually works really well. We have a partner in Kauai. First email campaign he sent out, he signed up two properties immediately. Average gross booking revenue about a hundred thousand dollars each. And he ended up signing up a third property a couple months later from that one email campaign. But there's a lot of different little hacks you can do with that. I wouldn't use, I wouldn't use your regular primary email servers. I would use something like Mailshake or Lemlist. They'll ensure those emails kind of get delivered to get me to make sure they're not going into the spam folders and make sure they're not getting blacklisted.

You know what, that is such gems of advice in there. And I mean we're always saying at Boostly, you know, direct bookings, it doesn't. There's not a sudden switch and you just go do this thing and it suddenly works. And in the same way I've been listening to Alex Hormozi recently where he just says, you wouldn't expect to go to the gym twice and then suddenly be really buff. It's exactly the same with anything as business owners that we do. So ultimately, if you do all these things right and then add consistency to that, that's how you're going to get the result. And that is amazing. So I think we need to let everybody know about the book, where the proceeds go and why, because that's something which we've not mentioned.

Yeah. So thanks for bringing that up. So, you know, remember, I didn't write this book. What I did is I just kind of compiled all this from these co authors, these contributors. So I just didn't feel right to make a dime off of this book because it was really built by the community, the short term rental community. So 100% of all proceeds go to advocacy efforts for the short term rental industry. So really proud of that. So we'll be making donations throughout the year, probably on a quarterly basis to various organizations. Obviously VRMA is going to be a big one of that and some other local organizations as well that again, that are all fighting for short term rental advocacy effort. So really excited about that. And again, you can go to, if you just go to venturi.com book that'll redirect you directly to the Amazon page where you can, you can buy right there.

And that leaves us with the last couple of questions. So on Boostly, we like to just mix it up at the end for a random question. Brooke, if there was any time period you could live in, which time period would you choose and why?

You know what I mean? This is not going to sound original, but I love where we are right today. I love technology, I love how fast everything is advancing. I love what's happening with AI. I mean, I'm just, I'm I'm thinking of how like AI is going to change the world. But I like it when it's in those early days. So I was really blessed, really lucky to be in the early days of the Internet. You know, I was in college when really the Internet came out. I was obviously had to grow, got to grow up and see kind of mobile phones evolve. I got to see social media evolve. And now we're in those early days of AI and I just think that this, this has the ability to completely transform everything we're doing. So I wouldn't change a thing I'm doing because I absolutely love it and I would, I love where we are right now.

That's a great answer. And ultimately it's like gold rush, isn't it, when it comes down to AI, the possibilities, and I don't just mean monetary, but just the possibilities, the creation, the things that we can do is going to be exciting. So I'm going to throw the mic open. How can we come and follow you on LinkedIn, you mentioned and the other channels? What's the best way to do so?

Yeah, I'm very, very active on LinkedIn. I usually post every single day. So again, just Brooke Fouts Pfautz or you can follow Vintory V I N T O R Y or I'm happy to help. I love helping out people. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. There's anything I can do to help you out, Brooke B r o k eentory.com email me and happy to answer any questions that anybody has.

Thank you so much. And of course, if you're listening to this or watching on the YouTube channel, then you'll be able to see those in the show notes so you'll be able to refer to those links. Brooke, that leaves me with the last question, which is what mantra or motto do you like to live by and why?

Yeah, so I think I've had this probably since college. I used to write this. I used to be in a fraternity and they, they asked to write in the black books when all the pledges would come by. And the mantra I always had and I still love to this day, you know, gosh, 25 years later, is, you know, carpe diem, you know, seize the day.

I love that. That's. That is the film. What's the film? Is it Robin Williams? I can't remember.

Dead Poet Society.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just in general, obviously existed way before that film as well. But yeah, what a great way to, to bring it to a close. Is there Any last closing comments before we call it day?

Yeah, I think just. I'm happy to help out. Like I said, reach out to me if you need anything. I have another book out there, all from zero to 500 properties in five years that is really the Playbook to help anyone that wants to grow. I give literally the Playbook. I show you how to do it and there's a lot of good steps in there. Like I said, it was an Amazon bestseller in three different categories. So feel free to find that. You can find that on Amazon as well.

Thank you so much, Brooke. And thank you too for listening to the Boostly podcast. There's lots of places you can put your attention. I really thank you for putting it with Boostly. I urge you to share this with a friend or anybody else who is going to get value from it. And go and check out Brooke's LinkedIn and go and check out the book. Please do buy the book. It goes to a good cause. And ultimately, if you can learn even just one thing from that book, and I promise you, you're going to learn a lot more than that, but ultimately it's going to be very worthwhile. So thank you so much, Brooke, for coming on the booster podcast.

Thank you, Liam.