How To Build A Business As A Digital Nomad

One of the troubles that we often see in the hospitality industry is that we love to travel ourselves, which is part of the reason we love to host people. But the trouble with hosting and traveling at the same time is it's not always possible. And I know that's one of the situations that many people out there would love to solve. So today we're going to be talking about how to build a business as a digital Nomad. Somebody who can work from just about anywhere. There's a WI fi connection with a laptop and make success out of it. Today on the Boostly podcast, we're going to be interviewing a host, going behind the host to answer that question of how do you build a successful business? And for those of you who's never heard of the Boostly podcast, if you're listening to it, this is the podcast that gives host the tools, the tactics, the trainings, and most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and today we're going to go behind the host with Spencer and Ashley from www.travelluxpropertymanagement.com. go and check them out. They've got an awesome website. And yeah, without further ado, let's say hello. So welcome along Spencer and Ashley.

Hey there. Thanks again for having us on.

Thank you for joining us. So before we dive into some of the questions around Digital Nomad, can you give yourselves an introduction for somebody who might not be familiar with yourselves and your business?

Yeah. So we're Spencer and Ashley. We started in the short term rental business probably about five years ago, started investing in properties, to be completely honest. And we saw the tremendous success we were having with that. And you know, at the time we both had corporate jobs and our goal was, well, we want to travel more than three weeks a year. We only had three weeks vacation. Well, she had four, I had three. And you know, it was immediately our goal to, okay, how, how can we get out of this rat race as fast as possible, be able to travel but still make money while we're away and kind of live the lifestyle we want. And short term rentals. The first property we bought turned and we turned it into one. It did extremely well. And then we ended up buying a couple more within a year or two after that. And then we kind of hit the part where it was tough to scale with banks and being at that debt to income ratio. So how can we do this much faster? We have the tools, we have the resources. How can we blow this thing up? So essentially we found the management model and you know, that was, the rest was kind of history. We, we partnered with two good friends of ours who owned a digital marketing company and they did all of our lead gen SEO and kind of kick things off in that front. And now we've been able to scale to over 55 units across Canada where we're from. Canada forgot to mention that. And yeah, we're looking to expand even outside of Canada and kind of take it to the next level there.

How do you travel while hosting? What are some of the tricks and tips of the trade to do that?

So that didn't happen for us overnight. When we started the business we were still very well hands on and anyone who's a host in the industry and runs short term rentals knows that it's hospitality and hospitality never sleeps, there's no weekends, etc. Right. So after we got to about 25 properties we were like, look, we're burnt out. We still have full time jobs at this point we are not any closer to traveling more, actually doing less because we're so overworked. And at that point we actually hired out all of the day to day messaging and once we were able to step back from that day to day messaging and put a ton of systems in place where the business would run whether we were in the country or not, that is when we were able to actually go out travel and it didn't really matter if we were on Eastern standard time.

Is there any kind of tech or tools that you use to really help you do that?

Oh yeah. So we use a PMS channel. We use hostly personally, we have wheelhouse for pricing and we use breezeway for cleaning accountability so that we don't need to actually go and schedule all the cleaners each time there's a clean they can self schedule.

One of the pushbacks we often see is that cleaners struggle with some of this tech. Is there any tips that you'd have around getting the right people within the team? And I guess that's a great question. Who's in your team? Who allows you to do this while you're, while you're traveling?

Yeah, I mean, well the good news with the cleaners that we work specifically that we have like say a manager that oversees the entire staff. So our goal was just to get all these managers in the same room and get them trained on it and essentially there is that learning curve of getting them bought in. But once they kind of see the other side of it of like hey this is actually going to make their life A lot easier and now they can have some accountability. You know that that's really when the switch kind of went off for them. And obviously it's, it was just kind of learning through, through trial and just onboarding, you know, a few properties at a time and getting them used to it. We found that that was a pretty successful way to, to make the switch over from just, hey, you know, here, here's a playbook of how we want the property to look. Here's some pictures. This is where the remote goes. Now it's okay. No, the remote needs to go here and we need a picture of it or this needs to get cleaned and we need a picture of it. And you know, we find that from an accountability perspective it's, it's been a game changer and obviously from the training side it's a little bit more work up front, but it's definitely been beneficial and will be over the long run.

What advice would you have you mentioned this playbook, which is something that I'm a huge advocate of in any business, is procedures, everything written down. Um, where did you start with that? So there'll be somebody listening to this who is going, I haven't got a playbook. Where do you start?

Well, it really depends on what you're looking to offload. The first thing for us was our territory managers got extremely busy with the day to day messaging and they were more, more so tied down with the clients and running, running around. So we brought in va. So our first thing was, okay, let's, let's get the messaging off their plate. So essentially what we did is just went back into, you know, one property at a time, went back into like a year and a half to two years of guest history and looked down the messages. What are the common questions being asked, what are the issues? What are the answers to those questions and what are the solutions to those issues? And you'd be surprised how big that the playbook can become just from going back previously if you haven't started one yet. If your property's brand new, we always suggest, you know, just put a list of basic top line stuff. You know, where's the, where's the circuit board for, you know, where's the electrical board if they need access to that, you know, where's the secondary lockbox? And then as the, the bookings start coming in, whenever there's an issue or a question that isn't in there, just be trained or have your people trained to constantly be updating that. Because that's one thing. It's it's never perfect as much as you'd like it to be. There's always going to be questions or issues that come up that you're like, ah, I didn't think of that one. All right, well let's go talk to the manager, let's figure this out. But let's also make sure that this gets updated to that playbook and then over time it just becomes this monster and well oiled machine where your VAs or your team can simply just look up the issue for that specific property. Because every house and every property is different. It's got different nooks and crannies and issues that can happen. So every playbook will be slightly different in that regards.

And I think a big tip that we've done too is you may think, hey, it's pretty obvious this is how you work with thermostat. But not everything is obvious to everybody. So we actually take how to videos of like 60 or so different things and we do it typically when we're onboarding a property. And I think that's really important because it can eliminate a lot of issues or a lot of guest questions. Because instead of going to you and saying, hey, the house is really hot, how do I get the temperature down? Which is actually something we get quite a bit. And you and I may think, well, then they don't turn the air up on the thermostat, but instead we just say, well, instead they can go to their guidebook and it's right in there how to work the thermostat. There's an exact video of us videoing that exact thermostat. Not one like it. And it can, they can troubleshoot it on their own.

If you could go back to sort of five years to 2018, what advice would you give yourselves to either improve or speed up your journey, which has been massively quick anyway. What advice would you have for yourself?

I would have to say the use of leverage a little bit faster. I mean, I wouldn't take back the both of us having to deal with the unfortunate call Friday night when you're sitting down at dinner and the guest can't get in or there's an issue because. Because you still need to be able to have experience dealing with that, especially if you're going to train it. But I will say I think most people, I can't speak for everyone, but at least for us for sure probably hang onto it a little bit too long before they go, okay, you know what? I think we need help now. If we really want to scale this, we need to outsource.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee? Cause it's so hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.