Marc Hostovsky Minoan

We got two more sessions today. We've saved the best for last. All right, thank you, guys, for taking your seats. You're not going to want to miss these last two sessions. I'm really excited about this. Hi, Annie. How are you? Hi, John. Is everybody ready? How's the temperature in here? It is. I promise you I had nothing to do with that. Nothing. Chris, did I have anything to do with the temperature? Nothing. Did you turn it down? It could go down maybe 2 degrees, and I could throw a hoodie on. It'd be great. All right, here we go.

Everybody ready?

All right. What's one of the most expensive things we do in our properties after we close? Renovate, furnish amenities. Where do we buy our sheets from? Where do we buy our plates from? Where do we buy our couches from? What did you say? He says Minoan. Does anybody here buy from Minoan? Does anybody here buy from Minoan? Does everybody know the Minoan girls over here? And Sage right here in front of you. So come here, Allie and Sage, come here real quick. Come up the steps up onto the stage with me real quick. I got two minutes until we got to bring your boss out here, and I want you to show everybody your shirts. So last year, when I walked off stage, there was about 300 of you that swarmed me over here, and they walked up. So those of you vendors that are walking around right now that snuck in, that are trying to snake all of our sponsors, you know, that actually paid to be here, you guys are not. There's two of you that I know of already. You will never come back to another conference ever, because that's not cool to do that to people that have paid to make a great event for you guys that are here. You guys are amazing. You guys came up and now these are two of my best friends in the industry. Sage is actually sometime I'm gonna hire her away from Allie and Mark, and she's gonna co host and manage for me in Montana. We're gonna fish, we're gonna ski. We're gonna do all that cool stuff. Absolutely. Anytime. So these are. And I sent out an email probably about nine months ago, eight months ago, and I referred to them as the Minoan Girls. And there were some feminists that sent me some hate mail. I want you to understand that I love these girls like my two daughters. We are awesome. We have a great relationship. That's why I call them the Minoan Girls. You guys are amazing. You've taken such good care of me. And my wife and all of her orders and everything that you guys have done, you made our lives easy. So big shout out for the Minoan girls, everybody. Thank you guys. Thank you. Does anybody ever buy anything from our house? You guys like our house? I love getting 40% off from Manoa and that just saved me $13,000 on what my wife bought to furnish our house in Montana by going through Minoan. They're amazing. If you've never seen Minoan. The gentleman that I'm bringing up now is the CEO and founder of Minoan. He has more e commerce experience than anybody I've ever met. He was with Jet.com that got acquired by Walmart. We're talking billion dollar e commerce companies. Ali used to work at Google. This is a legitimate company that first and foremost is focused on the customer experience and the long lasting relationships with their customers. That's why I've connected with them so quickly. They just happen to have over 280 vendors or something like that to choose from. From plates to our house, to linens to everything else that you need to furnish your property. And I don't know that they will toot their horn enough. But one of the biggest things that I have a challenge with, I shouldn't even say me, my wife, is when she's trying, when she designs remotely for probably some of you that are in here and other clients. She has four projects going on right now, our own that we own, and three that she's doing for other people around the country. The ability to order from multiple vendors and have one invoice per property is a game changer. You can't do that going to, you know, five or six different vendors. So please pay close attention to my good friend and founder of Minoan, my man Mark. Come on out here, Mark. Oh, and he's got T shirts and free tickets.

Oh, I'm getting over there.

Wow. Will and Mark are getting them up. Touch. Yeah. One more big round of applause for more.

Hello, everybody. Thank you to Bill and Mike for putting on an awesome event. We've met so many people already at the booth and there are some great, great people here. And so I know everyone's saying in the networking time, go and meet new people, but there are truly awesome people here working on awesome projects. We've been fortunate enough to meet a few of them who have come by the booth, but definitely go out and meet people. Another thing that I want to thank Bill and Mike for. I know you need to move this thing up a Little bit now, maybe a little too loud. You see the interpreters on the left here? Just a quick personal story or a little bit about myself. My mom, my sister are both deaf. And it means a lot to me personally just to see that Bill, Mike and Chris are focusing on making this content accessible because there's a lot of valuable information being shared on this stage, and so making sure that that information can be communicated effectively. Something that means a lot to me and Elijah I didn't chance to meet earlier, and he's got some awesome properties down in dc. So what I'm going to talk about today is how to furnish your rental like a pro. And I'll tell you a little bit about myself. So my background's actually in retail, and there's some information about that on the screen here. My inspiration for Minoan actually comes from my experience as a guest. So my wife and I were staying at a property in upstate New York, and this place was immaculate. It was incredible. We were completely enamored with this property. It was one of those properties where, you know, you walk in and we were giddy because we loved how well designed it was, how well curated it was. We woke up after our first night. We ripped the sheets off the mattress. We were like, where is this from? This is the best mattress ever. We loved the teas, the coffees they provided, the coffee mugs that they had. Everything about this place was just incredible. And I started to compare my experience in this rental with my day job in retail. And I had this realization that, you know, the best product experiences, they don't happen on screens the way they do in E commerce, and they don't happen on shelves the way they do in brick and mortar stores. They're happening every day in spaces like yours. And so all these brands out there, all these big direct to consumer brands, Casper Parachute, there's tons of them. They're spending all this money to create meaningful moments with people, but they're doing it on Facebook or Google or TikTok or Instagram. And yet in properties like yours, you're creating these incredibly rich experiences all the time. And so I went to the host. Her name was Ella. She lived right next door. She was gardening. And I was like, this place is incredible. Where'd you get this stuff? She's like, oh, I picked it up at a few different places. I was like, can we buy it? We want to buy it. Do people ask this? You get a lot of people asking if they want to buy stuff. She's like, all the time. All the time. And I was like, well, this could be a fun little side project. I work in retail. I know how to build shops. You have an awesome property. You're clearly inspiring people to want to buy things. Why don't I build a little shop for you and you can integrate it into the experience and sell the mattresses and sell the products. And so in this process, Ella, I was like, you gotta tell me where you bought all this stuff. And she started forwarding me all these receipts. And that's when I had a quick aha moment because I was getting receipts from Amazon, from Wayfair, from West Elm, from article from build.com, i was getting pictures of receipts like her phone from TJ Maxx Home Goods. And it was complete chaos. Hundreds of items, hundreds of items all over the place. And the worst part, it was full retail. I'm like, you're getting no discounts on this stuff. And you're literally creating moments of inspiration in your property. These brands should see you as a marketing partner, not a customer. You should be getting the best pricing. And that's what really inspired us to start Minoan. It's connecting hosts to brands and suppliers. We can get them steep discounts and make this part of the process easier. Easier. You need an inventory management system. Something that just look in one place and you see everything you need for your property. And so what I'm going to talk about today is some truths that we've discovered along the way. We started this business really in its current form a little under two years ago. In that time, we've placed hundreds of thousands of orders for hoes and we saved them millions of dollars. And we've learned some stuff along the way. The first universal truth is that the stuff you put into your rental matters. It matters a lot.

A lot.

We've already heard so many stories today, I think at least two or three on stage where people have gone and stayed at really nice properties. But the stuff in the rental wasn't up to par. There weren't enough towels, the toilet paper wasn't great. The design felt ugh. We did an off site in Scottsdale two weeks ago. The Minoan team, we stayed at a seven bedroom. I think this was like probably an eight to ten million dollar home. And it was not designed well or curated at all. To the point where the whole time we were just like, man, this place had so much potential. It's such a nice home. Why didn't they put a little effort into it? Why didn't they do the little things. And by the way, this is going to show up in reviews. You know, I have a few examples up here. My favorite one. I'm just going to read this one because it's pretty brutal. No cookware for the oven. Not a great start. The bed was awful. Think of sleeping on a concrete floor with a rug on top of it. Really creating a nice visual. I feel that that doesn't feel good. I know what that feels like. There were only two towels and two hand towels. One was heavily stained. Look at the difference between the reviews, the score, the rating of the property and the reviews. This stuff comes up and it's really, really important to get it right. We are in a digital age. When you buy things on the Internet or transact on the Internet, the biggest barrier to overcome is trust. And reviews on Amazon, on Uber, on Airbnb booking platform are the bedrock of trust that you have to earn to get people to click that button and decide that they're willing to depart with thousands, hundreds of dollars from their wallet to stay with you. And so you got to get these right. Thoughtful design and thoughtful curation creates a nice little flywheel in your business. And this has already been touched on, so I'll go through it really quickly. Thoughtful design and amenities leads to a better guest experience. You are not at the property when the guest is there. They are not interacting with you. As nice and as pleasant as you may be, they, they are interacting with the stuff that you bought to put into the property. And a nicer, a bigger investment or a better investment doesn't need to be more money necessarily will lead to a better guest experience, will lead to more 5 star reviews. More 5 star reviews is going to impact your conversion. More people who view the listing will actually click on it and book that leads to higher occupancy. When you have higher occupancy, you can start to mess with adr. As Bill was saying, that creates a compounding impact on your ROI and allows you to reinvest back in. Look no further. Not a lot of people are really leaning into this. You know, a lot of people look at the initial spend on furnishing your rental as purely a cost center line item. It's not a cost center line item on the P and L. It's an investment. Just like buying the property is an investment. Look no further than people who have made billions of dollars in hospitality to figure out where this gets people. Barry Sternlich, the chairman of Starwood Group, he sold Starwood Hotels to Marriott for $13 billion. Still in hospitality. Now, his real pet project is the One Hotel Group. One Hotel spends $35,000 per room on furnishing per room. These aren't even like one bedroom. It's one room. It's like a studio. But their payback period is incredible. They make that back in the first six weeks because they know that they can charge 1500 bucks a night. I'm not saying you need to spend $35,000 per room. I would actually maybe recommend you don't do that unless you think you can charge an exorbitant sum. But I am saying you have to invest. You can't get lazy there. The second universal truth is that building a system is absolutely crucial. Everyone here wants to scale their business. To scale your business, you need to build systems. You need to find small things, repeatable things that are painful to do, and find ways to automate them or systematize them. There are systems for pricing. There are systems to manage guest communications. There are systems to identify what the right markets are for property acquisition. And you need to have a system when it comes to furnishing. And this system needs to let you understand, at an item and property level, all the things that are in your property. Everything. All 286 items. There's a lot of stuff in there. This system also should give you a consolidated order history so you can see everything in one place. Everything you ordered for each property. That becomes particularly handy in tax season, by the way, you definitely want to have that organized. The other thing is that it should be collaborative. As you scale, you likely have more than one person doing all the ordering. The cleaning crew might be ordering certain things. You might be partnering with a designer who's taking on some things. There might be a property manager who needs to order certain things. You may decide to order a few things. So this system needs to allow everyone to come in and order the things they need to order. But you can see it all in one place. It's not tracked in one person's email address or inbox. It's not across 20 different websites. How many of you are using spreadsheets to keep track of all the items you're ordering when you're furnishing? Good. Well, you know spreadsheets better than nothing. So if you're not using anything, you're in a in a tough spot. But a spreadsheet isn't as scalable. That works for a few properties. As you start building your empire, that gets tough and it's tough to manage. Truth number three. Oh, I hit the wrong button. There we go, you don't need a restoration hardware budget to be successful here. You don't need to spend $35,000 per room. You don't need the our house couch, Although if you want it, you can get it through us at a really nice discount. But you don't need that. You just need to put money in the right places. And this is something we call the Minoan matrix. So this is a framework that you can use to think about where should I spend money? What should I prioritize? And on the Y axis here, you'll see aesthetics. How does something look? How does it make the pictures come to life? How does when someone first walks in the door, how does that make them feel? What kind of environment are you creating? And then on the X axis here, you have functionality. How does it hold up? How durable is it? How good at it? How good is it at solving the job to be done? If the job to be done on a mattress is to deliver a good night's sleep, how good is that thing at doing that? And there are areas that are high aesthetics of high aesthetic value. That would be artwork, murals, but it's not high functional value. People aren't touching. Doesn't need to hold up. It needs to look nice. There are things that are important for functionality, but maybe not as important from an aesthetic perspective. Something that you put in a drawer that's not out all the time, but when people pull it out, it's got to really hold up. Then there's this quality quadrant where you have items that are both high aesthetic value and high functional value. What are these areas? We call this the sit, sleep, or eat part of the equation, where people are spending extended amounts of time in areas that are the focal point of a room. Sit the sofa in the living room or the furniture in the living room. That's going to be the main part of your pictures for your listing. It's also going to be where guests are spending a lot of their time. Invest doesn't need to be a $6,000 couch, but it needs to be comfortable, and it should look nice. Sleep. The mattress and the bed, same thing. It's the focal point of the bed. The bed frame. I mean, when you look at the picture of the bedroom, that's it. It's the bed frame. And the mattress is where they're spending arguably the most time. If they're getting eight hours a night, you got to invest in high quality products there. And then eating is in a similar place. The dining table, the kitchen table, these are focal Points of the listing. People are spending extended amounts of time investing in those areas is how you avoid those brutal reviews that I walked through earlier. Do not skimp out on those three areas in particular. Four lead times may be longer than you think. Again, we've placed hundreds of thousands of orders for hosts. We have a lot of data here, a lot of data. These are the actual average and median lead times for these four items. Sofas, bed frames, mattresses and dining tables. This is not what the supplier is promising on their website. This is actually how long it's taking from order to delivery. Those are not the same thing. Websites are designed for conversion. These brands want you to order. How do you convince someone to order by telling them something's going to get there pretty quickly? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And so for these four items in particular, you gotta plan out in advance, start early. Don't start thinking about this stuff only once you've closed and you're ready to flip it around. Start thinking about this a little bit earlier on in the process, especially for these items because you don't want to be in a pinch where you have guests coming. You have two weeks to get things flipped around. You're just making a quick decision, getting something nearby that's cheap and it doesn't hold up and it leads to a bad review that is tough to rebound from early on. Your early reviews in your listing are like incredibly important. It hurts way more earlier on because there's not enough data for the listing platform or for guests to really trust the quality of the product. And then the fifth truth here is, and this one is something I could spend a lot of time talking about, but I will not wax on poetically here. Positioning yourself as a four walled influencer can completely change the economics of your property. And going back to the initial experience I had that inspired me to start this company that was euphoric. We loved that property. We go back, we've gone back several times and we have the same great feeling every time we stay there. The moment of inspiration that that host created for me and my wife with these products has real tangible value. Again, we talk a lot about the experience economy. It's a big one, it's huge. That's what hospitality lives in. There's another economy that I think is going to change drastically in the next decade and that's the attention economy. The value of attention, the value of moments. That's what Facebook and Google have built multi hundred billion dollar businesses off off of. And I would argue that the attention that they're monetizing is kind of shit, actually. It's like a second on a screen, a second and a half. If mattress companies are willing to pay $7 for a click on Google, well, what's it worth to them for you to have someone come in and sleep on their mattress three or four nights in a row? It's got to be worth a hell of a lot more than that. Lean into that. Lean into that. Brands are desperate to get in front of people right now. If any of you are familiar with the retail or e commerce, brands are desperate to get in front of people. All people are talking about in retail is how expensive it is to acquire customers. The term CAC cost to acquire customer, it's gone through the roof. Lean into that. You're creating such value there. We have taken this very seriously. We help a lot of our properties make their home shoppable to guests. Building a really elegant shoppable experience where if a guest is waking up and is like, I love the mattress, I loved the sofa, I love the lighting. We've sold all sorts of stuff. We had someone buy hanging hooks. Inspiration can strike at all of these different moments if you're creating the right types of experiences. And so in summary here, one, be thoughtful. You're a hospitality professional. You're not just a host, you are a hospitality professional. This battle is won with a thousand tiny touch points. The video you leave someone you could take, the bill approach, the handwritten thank you card, the treats or other little things. The sound machine that you put next to the bed, the high chair that you keep stocked in the kitchen.

The.

Wireless charger that you put next to the bed to make their life a little bit easier. These are relatively small investments, but they go a long, long, long way. The second thing, create systems. It is the only way to scale. Mike Michalowicz is coming out after me. I think the workshop, it sounds like it's about profit first. He has another book called Clockwork, which is all about building the right systems so that your business can run itself. Build systems. And this is the one area where we see even the biggest operators, they have a real tough time scaling the furnishing and ordering part of their business. You know, they can find pricing software, they can find the other stuff, but this part of the business they really struggle with. So build your own systems. It doesn't need to be us, by the way. We're one option. Our goal is to be the best option for you, but you don't have to use us. But you still Gotta build the system. Third one is do not underinvest in those crucial areas. There are places to focus on cost and there are places to focus on quality. You can't do that indiscriminately. Focus on quality where you need quality. And the fourth one is be a curator. Be a curator. That's the fun part of this industry. It's creating those moments that lead to euphoria. Having a property that reflects you and your values and things you care about and your personality, lean into that. That's what guests want. That's why they're not going to cookie cutter hotels. They want that sort of experience. So lean into that. And if you lean into that in the right way, you could actually start making money off of it. You could have brands pay you for marketing. You could start making money. If a guest wants to buy a product from your property, that totally changes the economics. Totally changes the economics. I mean, if you're getting the mattress 50% off already and you can sell it at full retail and you can make a good commission on it, which is how we structure it. You sell two mattresses, the mattress has already paid for itself. Now it's a net profitable asset in your property. It can really change things. So that's all I got for you guys today, please. The whole Minoan team is over here at the booth. We'd love to talk to you. We've spoken to a lot of you already. There are great people here. I'd love to meet more of you, even if you. Even if you don't think we're a fit. I just like talking to folks in the community. And then if you want a little more information, there is more information on Minoan in your swag bag. So you can sign up or just learn more about what we're offering, but you don't need to use us. You know, that's fine. Don't use us, but have systems. Invest in the right places and don't pay full retail. You guys are businesses. You're not just consumers. You're not. You should be saving money on this stuff. All right, thank you. I think we're going to do a very brief Q and A. We have like six minutes, so maybe time for a couple questions if anyone wants to ask one.

Yes.

Wait, wait. Okay, nevermind. The question was, can you ship overseas? It depends on what sea, but mostly no, we're not yet. I mean, what we do for folks in the Dominican Republic or in those areas is we will ship everything to Florida and then we'll help them coordinate, like a freight carrier or someone to bring it out to the Dominican. But we're not involved in logistics after that yet. To this point, we're still figuring out we're the seller of record. We're very hands on with the administration's operations and support. And so when you're getting into crossing country lines, you have to think about tariffs and stuff. So we haven't done that work yet. Any other questions? Oh, sorry. How long do you have to wait for the furniture? Good question. It depends on where you buy it from. So some suppliers have very efficient supply chains. Wayfair, I believe, is here. Wayfair is a great partner of ours. They're pretty reliable. They can get you stuff really quickly. It depends on the type of furniture. A sofa. Bigger items take longer to ship. It also depends on how it's packed. So there are certain suppliers that we work with, like a Walker Edison that flat packs everything. What does that mean? It basically means you can get everything down to a package size or it can go out parcel. It doesn't need to go LTL or truck, you know, truckload, basically. So it depends on what you're ordering. But there are suppliers that are really, really fast and there are suppliers that are slower. And if we're working with a client and they're saying, I have an install date, it's got to be ready by, you know, August 4th. We will actually help them narrow down the range. We'll be like, well, in that case, you know, you're not going to want to order from these people. You're going to want to focus here because they're pretty reliable, getting your stuff on time. But it really does vary. Yeah. Is there an option to use the U.S. postal Service to eliminate them as a delivery option? Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes. The U.S. postal Service is not great, especially in remote areas. We have, you know, we're now again doing millions and millions of dollars with hosts on a monthly basis. And so we've gotten to a scale where we can actually go and get our own rates with the carriers. And so when that happens, we will be able to pick the carrier. Right now for a lot of our suppliers, they pick the carrier. And so we can't intervene. But we have a lot, we work a lot with properties in Montana, remote places. I live in a town of 500 people in Vermont, so I can relate to stuff getting lost. But that's all stuff that we try and work with you on. Yes. Yeah, good question. So the question was if I have a specific vibe, if I'm looking for bright colors. Can I go to Minoan to get recommendations on products that I should be looking for? We are not, you know, we feel very strongly that the curators are the designers and the people themselves. So we don't want to get into the business of like necessarily making recommendations, but what we do want to do is connect you with tastemakers and curators who can create lists of products. And our focus is on having breadth of assortment. So on Minoan, we have over 200 suppliers. We're talking about access to tens of millions of SKUs and products. There's really nothing, very few things you can't find on the platform. But when it comes to helping you narrow the range in the right product, we have a designer on staff. We can make recommendations, but we generally point you to people in our designer directory or other folks that are better tastemakers. All right, one minute. It's probably one last question. Yes. Yeah, so the question was I had mentioned creating a new revenue stream through a QR code. How does that work? So if you've ordered through Minoan, we know pretty much everything that you're ordering for your property and so we can just pipe that in. We have this templatized shoppable experience that uses images from your listing the products you actually ordered. And it creates this really nice shop for the guest where like they walk into the property and there's, you know, we have this nice powder coated note card stand you can put in the front that says found something. You like scan this code, the shop, the space, and if they scan that, they can go through and be like, oh, the living room. And like in the living room it's like, wait, this is the sofa I'm using. These are the speakers, this is the tv, this is the vase. You know, they go into the kitchen, this is the toaster, these are the items. And so it's, we call that native retail. It's like almost a personalized showroom for them where they can try these products that you've selected. And we manage the whole process. So if they can check out, they can place the order. It comes to us, we manage customer service, we make sure it gets to them and then we do a 50, 50 profit share with the host. And so yeah, the way it works is, you know, through Minoan you're already saving up front because we're going to these suppliers and basically saying, you know, you need to give host good pricing so you save up front, you can pile on more money on the back. End via the commissions through the shoppable experience. All right, I'm negative, three seconds. It keeps going after you get negative. So thanks, everyone. We're around. Rest of the day and tomorrow. I'd love to meet you. Thanks. Hey, buddy.