Scaling to 150 STR Units: How Patryk Became the Go-To Expert in His Market

Today, as Mark mentioned, we're gonna be talking about how to become the person of interest. How to become the go-to person in your markets, in your individual markets, where people want to go to you to do business with you because you're the expert and the thought leader in your respective market. And when I talk about this, it's funny because I'll talk to people about this and they'll be like, well, I don't wanna be an influencer. I don't wanna be out there and, you know, Don't worry, nobody's gonna meet, see you at the pub and be like, "Oh my God, let me take a picture with you," right? It's not that kind of influence. It's a very micro influence that allows you to do deals and sell better than anybody can ever sell. And I've done this in Joshua Tree, and we're gonna go through how you guys in this room can do this as well. Does that sound pretty? Sounds good? Awesome, I love it. And if you guys have notes, if you wanna take on your laptops or something like that, we're gonna have some stuff to do on your phones, so just, this is workshop mode, okay? So today, maybe one of you might get some new leads. That would be like the goal. Would that be exciting to get some new leads? Who wants to grow their business? Let's do it. Okay, so scaling— how I scaled to 150 units in under 3 years. So I'm the owner of the Cohost Company. We're a luxury vacation rental management company in Joshua Tree, California. I've acquired 4 short-term rental property management companies in the last 3 years. Um, our work has been featured in Netflix, Architect Digest, Dwell, New York Times, yada yada. We have HGTV coming out to some of our properties right now, so Our properties are luxury, high-end experiences. That's what we cater to. A lot of the owners that cater to us tend to be Los Angeles-based or San Francisco-based, some New York, with loads of money to just dump into something and make it completely unreal, like inexpensive and cool, right? So yeah, I also am a host of the podcast, the SGR Growth Show. We have around over 100 episodes. We just crossed not too long ago. So feel free to— If you guys wanna get more tips and tricks, like, I feel like those episodes are really, really good. So today what we're gonna be covering is why inventory growth is so, so important, the person of interest framework, that's what I like to call it, how to build credibility that converts, and then also outbound tactics you guys can all use in this room once you develop the person of interest that makes it so much easier to sell people. And then also, I want to talk about real action. When I heard this statistic, by the way, guys, it blew my mind. You guys know 50% of the information you guys get today, you guys are going to forget in 1 hour. 50%. 70% within 24 hours and 90% within 1 week. Knowing this, we're going to be taking action at every single stop because that is so Crazy. So why inventory? Inventory is important because it scales with more inventory. How do you get more revenue for your business? You get more inventory, right? You have more homes, the more money. I mean, it's pretty simple. Economies of scale with operations is huge. So the more properties you have, the more revenue coming in, the more you can eventually start delegating. You can start getting employees, you get boots on the ground employees, VAs, as Haley was talking about, or whatever the thing is, right? You start getting more support so you can actually help get one person that deals with all the owners so you don't have to be the one talking to the owners, for example. And the company has more stability and a higher valuation. Why? Is when you have 100 properties and you lose 10, it's not that bad. But when you have 20 properties and you lose 10, it's pretty bad, right? So it's more risk from somebody that's looking to acquire you being on the side of probably dozens and dozens of acquisitions on both sides. I will tell you that when people look to buy, they want to make sure that there's stability within the company, right? That's important. And every additional home, this is what I'll say, is an additional revenue source. What do I mean by that? Every— so what I like to say is that the more— the bigger your company is, the more salespeople you have in your company. Does that make sense? Because the people do a holiday at the rentals tend to be the people that eventually wind up buying at the rentals, right? So they have a good experience, they go with their family for a holiday, they're like, "Whoa, this is a fantastic place. I'm going to buy myself a place in this area." And then who are they going to call? So, revenue source. So what I want you guys to do is to write down right now what's your current door count and what is your 12-month target. Let's set a goal today. And I just want to get— I like to interact with y'all. How does anybody want to share how many units they have? Sorry, 200 units. Where do you want to grow to? 300 units. Okay. 20, 30? Oh, 1,000 by 2030. Oh, that's very ambitious. If somebody wants to talk about big goals. Anybody else want to share? It's okay to have 5, 10 and want to grow to 20. I mean, you know, it's not always about unit count. Sorry? Oh, 2 units? Okay. And what's your goal? 100? Okay. Triple digits. And I just want to say, we are talking about unit count, but also being intentional with units, right? If you're only taking on units that do over $100,000 a year, you can set your goal at 20 and be in a really good place. So it's not only about, okay, yeah, let's get to 1,000 units. But 1,000 units each making $10,000 a year, you know, it's really not, not, not the best, right? So you want to be intentional with your goals. Cool. The number one STR, or the number one mistake that I see time and time again is too many people are chasing multiple markets too early. It's okay to chase multiple markets, I get that. You wanna take everything. In the beginning you wanna take 10, 20, 30 homes. Oh, they're here, they're here. Now you have operations all over the place. Let me tell you something. When people come to Joshua Tree and they wanna compete with me, Truthfully, I'm not, this is not just to toot my own horn. I'm like, bring it. It's home. This is home for me. Bring it, right? I know what, at what time, at what day those properties are gonna get booked for what dates they're gonna get booked for, right? I know that Coachella's coming up. I know that those dates book 3 months in advance. I know that this specific Memorial Day weekend books 2 months in advance. I just understand because I've been in this market so many times and I only do pricing in this market. And so I have a nuanced understanding of this market that somebody else that comes in doesn't. But here, I'll be the first one to tell you, if I get an opportunity in London, you bet your butt that I'm not taking the opportunity because I know that I won't be as efficient as some of y'all maybe that are in the London market, for example. And so you gotta understand what your market is. What— and one thing I will say is you also get compounding network effects in one market, right? So eventually you get the same person that stays with you multiple times. When you're in one market, you can have that same person stay with you, you know, in your property every single year. And you can start doing the networking effect allows you to be like, okay, well, I have 20 properties all in the same area. So now I can start marketing to the people that are coming from London to go to my market in whatever, 2 miles outside of London, or like for me, Los Angeles. I know I can start marketing in Los Angeles and just focus on my parameters there. So the marketing goes higher, there's a higher return on that marketing, right? And then we've also had situations where like, for example, and you guys probably don't know geography of, I mean, maybe you guys do, of California, but there's a market called Big Bear near, it's like a ski market within 2 hours away from LA, and there was this big wedding venue. Is making $250,000 a year, they, you know, at 25%, I mean, sorry, at 20%, that's $50,000 in revenue that we would make as a company off one property. And it was really enticing. I really wanted to take in and get that property, but the problem is, the moment that I take that property on, what happens? We're diversifying our focus, right? And when you diversify your focus, now you're trying to, You're trying to balance 2 things at once, 3 things at once, 4 things at once. And on top of that, it was a different type of property. There's weddings. Has anybody heard of Bridezillas? Has anybody heard about how crazy it gets? Talk to an event planner for weddings and you'll know that there— I've never met one event planner for weddings that's not miserable. Sorry if you're an event planner for weddings, but it is a difficult thing. It's a completely different thing. And so why take something on that doesn't match the criteria that we're working on today, right? So being very intentional with what you take on is really important. And so I want you guys, I mean, if you guys already have a market, that's great. Write that market down. But I want you guys to pick a specific market. Let's just stick to that market, okay? That one market, and I want you guys to commit to that one market to grow and become an expert in that market, okay? And it can be one that you're currently in or you're considering. It doesn't matter. If you want to go into a different market, that's totally fine. In terms of picking markets, one really easy way to pick markets, I'm going to plug AirDNA. There's a lot of data tools out there, but AirDNA is a great way to see how, you know, does this market, how many properties are in this market, right? Can I effectively grow in this market? You know, our market in Joshua Tree has 3,000 units. So there's still some room to grow, right? If your market has 10,000 units, it has room to grow. What is the average revenue per property in that market? If it's only $10,000 and it's 3 months, you know, and $10,000 a year is like, or $20,000 a year is the average, understand that there's going to be not enough properties for you to grow into that market. Especially if you're intentional with the properties you take on. We try to take on properties that do at least, you know, $70,000 to $100,000 a year, right? If not more. We have some properties doing $400,000 a year. And we have a percentage on that. But we are very intentional with how we scale, so we say no to something that doesn't apply to that, right? Yeah. So like with AirDNA, what would you say your market is? 70%? 70%? Yeah. So she said, with AirDNA, what do you say your market is? So our market is 70%. For me, I wanted consistent cash flow throughout the year. People do ski-in, ski-out markets and that kind of thing, and it works. But the problem with that is you have, you know, 6 months of just— 3 months of great activity, and then you have— now you have cash flow problems. And the moment you build your business, the problem is you have fixed costs that, you know, I have to pay somebody $100 grand a year to run the operations, and it's like, well, in the summer I'm taking a loss. So then you have to hold your cash to make sure that you can pay for those off months, if that makes sense. So, you know, it— so occupancy is a fantastic thing. I like also looking top 10 earners in that market and seeing, all right, where the top 10 earners go, right? Like for me on my market, it was like $800,000. Okay, that's an anomaly. There's some in the $400,000, $500,000s, and then it ends at like $250,000. So I'm like, oh well, there's probably a lot of properties are making over $100,000 if top 10 is like that versus top 10 being Oh yeah, you have one property making $100,000, then it's $70,000, then $60,000. It's like, okay, well, there's probably not a lot of properties doing what I need it to do, right? So, does that make sense to everybody? I see some people yawning in this room. How you guys feeling? Do you guys wanna, you know? It's probably pretty late, and I know I'm going after lunch, so I totally understand. But yeah, let's get the energy, you know, energy going. This is exciting, guys. This is making more money. Is this an American thing? Or do people like making money? Okay, you're here because you wanna make money, cool. Awesome, so let's talk about the POI framework, okay? So owners wanna hire people that they trust, especially if it's million-dollar homes. You don't need to be famous, as I mentioned before. You are not a Kardashian. You will not be a, or Justin Bieber, or whatever. You will not be approached at the bar and have selfies taken for you unless you're in this room, and then in that case, that's a good thing. And people wanna work with those people they know, like, and trust. That's really important. And so, here's some things I've done. I've done podcasts. I've been, you know, being in rooms with people. I wrote a book. You know, just, you don't have to write a book to do what I'm about to teach you, 'cause I'm gonna teach you how to do it. So here's, One tactic, right? Let's get tactical, right? So post market-specific content. This is huge, guys. There's so many things that you can post. And so like, this is like a post that I made. It's just like, look, we just completed our fourth acquisition. Here's what's going on. I have 156 likes, 37 comments. I mean, it's not, not crazy. It's not I'm not making millions of views. And millions of views, you don't need millions of views to become an expert. All those, I mean, there's probably a lot of people that saw this, 4,599 to be exact. And you know, that's all impressions. That's all, marketing's about staying top of mind at all times. And a perfect example of this, I mean, shoot, I'm using a lot of US examples, but I'm hoping maybe this translates. Who has seen a McDonald's ad in the last 30 days? What do you guys go to here? What's a big marketer here? Coca-Cola, maybe? Who's heard of a Coca-Cola ad in the last 30 days? Dang. What? Coca-Cola ads come out at Christmas. Christmas? Yeah, with the bell ring. Oh yeah, Christmas. But look, OK, you guys are not making my point. But McDonald's spends— So, so much money on advertising, right? But the thing is, we all know what McDonald's is. So why are they spending so much money on advertising? You can look at their advertising budgets, probably in the billions. But the thing is, McDonald's understands one key concept of marketing is that you gotta stay top of mind. So this, yes, the people in my market, or sorry, my network are seeing this. But the thing is, everybody that's seeing this is getting a reminder of, hey, this is Patrick, I'm in Joshua Tree, I'm here to help you. And by the way, if you guys haven't noticed yet, all these concepts that we're talking about right now work in any business. So just take notes when everything that you learn here, if you can grow a successful company in this industry, in what we're doing here, you can do the same exact stuff with whatever else, side hustle, anything, tech company, whatever you got going on. Mark Simpson does the same thing too. How do you think Mark Simpson got on stage? He's given a lot of value, a lot. And I'm sure you guys, you guys that know him understand that. So I like to say that solve one problem, create another that your service fixes. What does that mean? Right? And so I used to make these videos and I'll share some examples. I used to make these videos of like Joshua Tree. I'm not a realtor, right? Or at least I don't, practice. But I'd make videos where to buy in the Joshua Tree market, right? Now that does— that solves one problem for the end user that's, that's watching that video. But what problem is created when you solve that problem? You buy a house, what is the next thing? You need somebody to help you rent it. And that's exactly where you come in. That's when you upsell, right? That's when on the bottom you have a call to action. Hey, if you're looking to get in and want to work, if you are looking for somebody to help maximize the revenue on your property, call me, message me, whatever. Boom. You solve one problem, you create another problem. And then what to share, right? Data, trends, insights. I'll give you guys some things, right? Examples you guys can do quite easily. Honestly, you guys can do this. Today if you really wanted to. 5 tips to drive more revenue for your vacation rental market. 5 ways that your vacation rental can make more money. And you're like, well, I'm solving their problem. They're not going to have a problem anymore because I'm going to tell them the 5 ways. Guess what? There's a second thing that comes into place. People are too lazy to actually do the work to make the thing happen, and/or they realize it's way too complicated for their scope of what they're doing. They're too busy. And you create— what problem are you creating for them? That they're too busy to actually— they realize, wow, I'm too busy to actually do these things and I need to hire somebody. So you, you create a problem that actually you solve, right? And then how to start a vacation rental in the market, as you mentioned. And what are the best areas to own a vacation rental in that market? Because I don't know anything about London. But if I search on Facebook or Google and I want to figure out what are the best areas to own a vacation rental in your specific market, I bet you nobody else is making any— anything on that topic. You're gonna be the only one. So here, there's this one video that I made that made me realize that this works really, really well. I got 30— we call it co-hosting, but property management leads. So 30 property man— 30+ property management leads from one video. It was actually this video. Look at that number, 2,800 people saw that video. I'm not Kim Kardashian for that matter, or I'm not somebody famous making this video, making millions of views, right? But guess what? Every one of those 2,800 people are the people I want to get in front. That is way more valuable. And I bet you that maybe— let me ask here, who here maybe has a kid or knows somebody that doesn't have any social media presence but made a video on TikTok or Instagram and went famous? Raise your hands. Or went viral. Some people, maybe your kids? No, like big? Okay. Guess what? I wanna ask those kids that made that video, how much money did they make off of that video? Off that million views? Probably like, I mean nothing, probably it's just like, "Wow, cool, Mom, look, I got a million views, great." But what did you get out of that million views? You're just more popular now, I guess? Maybe you got a couple followers, but who cares about followers? We're in this room, why? 'Cause we're looking to make money. Okay? Sound like money hungry. Like you guys are probably like, "Dang, these Americans, they really just really like money a lot." But it's true, right? And I'm not saying you gotta grow to 1,000 units like this gentleman over here, but you know, I think, you know, reasonably that we all need to drive revenue to support our business. And so this one video, don't buy an Airbnb in Joshua Tree before watching this video. Simple. $160,000 from a 2-bedroom in Joshua Tree. Boom. 1,000 views. Touring a $2,250,000— whatever, $2 million, sorry. Touring a $2,250,000 Airbnb in Joshua Tree. Boom. So I want you guys right now in this room to choose a topic that you think you can go home tonight, or maybe, you know, or to your hotel room tonight and maybe crank out a quick Doesn't have to be a video, but maybe a quick post. And we're gonna talk about some more strategy. But let's give some topics. Can we get some topics going? And maybe can some people give me some examples? I see you're writing, Patricia. What do you got on there? I'm writing my assignment. What's the topic? Choose a topic. I just wrote that down. Oh, you just wrote down assignment. I'm gonna have all the assignments at the end, but that's good. I like you're taking notes. Does anybody have a topic that they think would be really good? Best areas in London. Sorry? Best areas in London. Best Airbnbs in London? Oh, best areas in London for short-term rental or vacation rental. Correct. And here's the thing, terminology too, right? Your market, I mean, for holiday rental, is that how you say it? Or vacation rental? Like terminology matters, right? Like what are people really searching in the results? Or sorry, in the text box? That's important. Cool. Second tactic, relationships. Relationships are— so this is the hard thing with multiple markets. When you're in multiple markets, you would have to fly in or drive into all these different markets to get relationships created, right? But the thing that I like to do in my markets is I like to know, you know, going back to what we were talking about, Who are the people that are gonna be in front of my ideal audience? People that are architects, or building really cool homes. People that are realtors, that are showing homes for people to buy. Those are the people I wanna get in front of, right? Maybe the local town, the local business, commerce. Whatever the case may be. What I like to do, I've realized that in my market there's a lot of realtors. That's— the realtors are the ones that are standing in front of my— the buyers, the new buyers that are coming in the market, and they know the old buyers that bought properties. So they have relationships, right? So what I started doing is I went to lunch and dinner with agents, architects, and builders. It will be the best time that you spend going to dinner or lunch or whatever And realtors, what— so here's the thing about realtors, or anybody for that matter. People have motivation to do business, not only because they, of course, want to take care of their clients and they want to make sure that everyone's, you know, they're doing good service in the world and that kind of thing is great. But also, you know, they're like— realtors, for example, get people coming to them all the time saying mortgage lenders, you know, escrow companies, you know, title companies, whatever. There's a lot of people going up to realtors asking for business. But here's the thing. You don't ask, you give. That's the key component here. So what I like to do is I go up to realtors and I say, listen, it's your business who you want to give your business to, even if you have somebody that's really good and whatever. I totally understand that. However, if you need help with somebody buying a property in this market, and they need to run the numbers on what that property can make, I'm your guy. And there's a sense of weight with that, because we're partners now. I'm coming in and complimentary. I don't care if they end up self-managing. I don't care if they go with another manager. I'm happy to write a pro forma for you. I'm happy to guide that buyer. I'm happy to build confidence in that buyer. And I will do that. I'll hop on calls with buyers that end up self-managing. No harm, no foul. I stayed true to my word. But guess what? When that person starts struggling with self-managing, who are they going to call? It just kind of works that way. When you start giving people value and information, they become trusting you more that you understand what you're talking about. And so it Eventually what happens is you also help realtors sell homes as well. So what helps with selling a home? Projections on what the home can do, right? So, free advice, no obligations, kind of the whole thing. But here's the thing, I have agents in my market that constantly send me business. I don't even get, like, granted, we send each other business, but some people are so afraid of giving referral fee. What is $1,000? Okay, let's give an example. This property is gonna make $100,000 a year. You have a 25% commission. That's $25,000 a year. Giving away $1,000? You guys are too scared to give away $1,000 to make $24,000? $25,000 but $24,000 net? I mean, it seems crazy to me. Go to these people, offer them value, and say, hey listen, any business that you send to me, I got you. Whatever you need, I got you, $1,000. Honestly, if you're starting out and you really want homes, and it's a sick home, and the home's gonna make you $30,000, $40,000, I'll give you 2 grand. I'll give you 2.5K. Whatever it is. And I'm talking USD, so, gotta switch that up. But whatever, in quid. You know, 2,000 quid. So anyways, so here's an example of something that I use in my market that works really well. I actually provide a listing flyer, and you guys can feel free to take that QR code. Hopefully that QR code works. Sometimes they expire. I'm hoping it works. If it doesn't, I promise you I'll get you guys a QR code that works. And we've added new things and we made it different, but the thing is the same, right? You have your This is a template and you can just change it out here. By the way, you can ChatGPT or Claude just, hey, here's the reasons this rental is really good. This is a really good rental, blah, blah, blah. And they're going to leave these flyers out with this on the back, which is this is your selling point. So back page selling points, what makes you different? Front page helping you sell the place, right? So when a showing happens, either PDF over Or when they have an open house or something like that, you have the listings, the listing flyers laid out. And guess what? Even if they don't buy that house and they pick this up, if they're looking to buy a short-term rental or a vacation home, they're gonna, they're gonna still reach out to you because they have your flyer. So it gets you multiple buyers this way as well. Oh, did everyone get this? Cool? It's not working? Shoot. It worked for you? Do you want to snag it? I'll wait for you. But, is that helpful, guys? Hopefully these are tactics you guys— who here thinks like, so far there's been a tactic you guys can use? Laser bands? Heck yeah, that's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. I'm giving you guys value. How about that? Um, everyone's gonna be like, what are you trying to sell me then? Honestly, I don't know. Maybe one day, ooh. So here's another tactic I can give you guys. Facebook groups. This one is awesome. I love this one. Guys, I've realized that people love going to Facebook to do everything these days. I mean, holiday rentals in London, vacation rental owners in London. Mine is Joshua Tree Vacation Rental Resource, that's what it's called. Whatever the case may be, look up on your phone in Facebook, a Facebook group that revolves around your area. And if you can't find one, guess what? Create it. There you go. It's even better if you own the group. Why? Because you get to control what gets advertised and what doesn't. And we've made, we've made groups before and we've gotten a lot of leads this way. But here's, here's a post. We have a really solid group, so there's no need. You know, this is an example. I literally said I own a property management company, blah blah blah. It was a while ago. I was like, would anybody be interested in receiving free monthly reports? I had 200 comments. And I had 61— these are people with short-term rentals in my market that commented. And look, overwhelming amount of interest. I'll do it. I didn't even know. I was trying to validate the market idea. I was like, I'm curious if people really care about this. And then I did it. I stood in front. By the way, you know what's funny? People are like, well, you probably have all this great technology. You're young. You could probably put a really nice video together. Dude, I stood in front of this, I don't know, my girlfriend's a dancer and she has this like thing that she like puts in the back to like block out stuff in the apartment so she can do like a slate because she, you know, gets a dance shot, whatever. And so I just used that and the angle of the camera was pointing upwards, so I almost had a double chin there. And I just, I ripped it. I just literally sat there and just went at it. I started going off. I built this slide off of AirDNA. I just took the data from AirDNA, put it in a PowerPoint slide, clicked record on the Word whatever, sorry, whatever it was called, presentation, and it just started going. And by the way, you know what's funny? Right here, I added a state, you know, that was the company at the time before I merged. But, Stays You Like, I added the branding so that people would see my logo over and over again, right? It's just subtle branding. Subtle branding. And then I put it on YouTube. I did one video. I put it on YouTube, which you guys, you guys, that's also my YouTube channel. I put it in this Facebook group. I put it on my personal stuff. I put it on Instagram. I put it on my story. I put it everywhere. And this is just 81 shares just on that group. Just 81 people had the intention to share this with someone. Somebody that— so not only the views I got on that specifically, but the shares that somebody said, wow, you might need— you might want to know this as your understanding. Because guess what? Everyone— you know what everyone else was doing in the Facebook group? Complaining that they're not getting enough bookings, complaining the market sucks. So what did I say? Wow, there's a problem here. Let me explain a solution. So similar to you guys, it could be, wow, how do you manage when there's no snow in this ski town? How do you get a permit approved in this market? That's a really big one, by the way, guys. The permit stuff, especially if your market's complicated, because everyone's complaining how complicated it is, how to make sure that you're abiding to all the rules and regulations of your market so you're Property doesn't, so you don't get expanded, right? Or expended, whatever. Whatever the thing is, that's the whole thing. And honestly, it can be super easy. People think that they need to go crazy. Honestly, taking a video like this, hey guys, so this, and riffraffing. I mean, granted, I know you guys are probably like, I can't get in front of a phone, I'm gonna say so many ums and. I really wanted to, but I can't add this, but I had a video when I first started out, which is really funny because I'm sitting on stage in front of you guys. You're probably like, wow, this guy has a lot of confidence. I had a video where— the most confident thing I did, honestly, was making that first video because I was like, hey guys, yeah, if you're looking to grow your property revenue, yeah, like, you know, you can do this. So it was this completely imperfect video. And then now my videos are a lot more polished because I've gotten used to it, but you gotta start somewhere. You gotta start somewhere. And if you're too scared to do that one thing, then just understand that that one thing is keeping you away from hitting your goals. And if you're not accomplishing your goals, then we can go into the human element. That's a whole nother psychological thing. We all want purpose, we all want to do big things, but we let ourselves stop ourselves from actually doing those things. So I want you guys to, you know, open your phone, if you guys haven't already, let's just join a local market Facebook group. Can you guys do that? Cool. So share social media, similar other stories, You know, I learned about RankBreeze. I was like, cool. Well, shoot, that was cool when they switched managers. We went from whatever this page is to page 10, and then we went to page 2 over time. Now I can use this. Look, this is optimization over time through algorithm. Boom. 14 comments, whatever. 31 people. 29 comments. At the end of the day, this is actually a good one. Oh, I'm a property manager. And if you have a rental that needs an analysis, post it in the comments below. I'm happy to give you some tips. Make you more money, make you better. Maybe 10 people decide to take you up on it. 9 don't hit you up. 1 does, and you get that client. Kind of worth your time, right? Here's another thing that I think is really, really important. And, and look, we're talking about all these things, right? So you're talking to realtors, you're, you're sharing information in this, in this Facebook group. What's gonna be really weird is you're gonna eventually go to the market, and this happened to me, and people are like, dude, I know you, man. Hey, what's up? I'm like, you're the coffee shop owner, or coffee shop like employee. What do you "what do you mean you know me?" And they're just like, "Well, I've seen your videos on the group. You know, my husband does landscaping, blah, blah, blah." You know, get to talk with them. What's interesting is it's a compounding effect, right? So at this point you already have credibility within your own local market, right? But here's the thing, when people search you up, they're like, the first thing people are gonna do, whatever sales that you end up doing, maybe you think, okay, well this is, rubbish and like, I don't want to deal with this. Here's the thing. You don't have to, like, you just have to have the fundamentals, right? Like this right here. When people see you, they're going to want to Google you, right? So if you message them, let's say text or phone call, whatever, you're like, wow, I had a fantastic phone call with this person, blah, blah, blah. And then they go online and they see just a couple Yelp reviews. They're like 1 star, and be like, ah, I don't know if I want to work with this company. Right? What are they going to do? They're going to Google you. So one easy thing you can do— who knows what this is called right here? Google My Business. Yep, Google My Business. And it's completely free. Who here has a Google My Business for their management company? Now keep your hand, continue to raise if you have more than 20 reviews. Okay, this is good. Yeah, that's solid. I love that. And if you don't, then you should get one. And if you have, you know, even if you're like, well, I only have one rental or I have no rentals, honestly, sometimes you got to be who you got to be, the person that you want to be in the future today. You're a manager. You're not— you don't want to become a manager of a property management company. You are a manager of property management company. That's how you get deals done, is because if you're not a manager of a property management company, why are you talking to me? Right? So you're coming from a different place. And so I will say this, and yeah, I know it's a 4.8. The people out there that want the 5.0s, I have some guests that get pissed off and they come in here. It happens sometimes to the best of us, right? But I will say, you know, majority of guests are pretty happy, and we always send anybody that leaves us 5 stars, we try to send them here to to get more reviews, it helps. Yeah, so some other things you can do to build your credibility. You might be thinking, well, how else can I do it? Power stats. That's the way— I mean, you guys are probably like, what are power stats? We'll go more into it, but power stats are like, I have 10,000 5-star reviews, right? I've made 30% more than the market has. Those kind of things. So here are some client testimonials. People are just really happy. Power stats: 80% plus average occupancy. The market's 70% occupancy, but I'm 80%, right? That's a power stat. Why? Because it's a simple statistic, it's a simple stat that shows that you know what you're talking about. Because right away, when people want to do business with you, they need to like, know, and trust you, right? So they know they need to trust that you're going to be able to take care of their property and make revenue for their property, or whatever the case may be. We have, you know, we did a customer, uh, uh, we did a customer, uh, survey and figured out that we have an NPS score of 8.3 when the industry average is a 7.7, 7, whatever, 7.0. You're showing that you're better than your competition. You're showing that you have happy clients. You're showing that You have good reviews. You've been years in the market. This many properties under management, whatever. So I want you guys to write down power stats to define your hosting company, if you had a chance. Cool. So what are guests saying, right? This is like what we have on our website, right? We show all the amazing things people are saying about our properties. Reviews, you can show that, whatever. So here's an example of credibility. They're gonna Google you. Yes, the Google My Business thing will show up, but eventually they're gonna want to click on your website and see what you got going on. What I've realized is all— every time that I spend time doing these things, when I do the outbound sales stuff, it becomes so much easier because I just text them. I say, hey, this is Patrick with thecohostcompany.com. I'll literally link it, hyperlink it. I saw that your property is not doing that well, and I think that you can actually add value to the property to make it more money. If you're interested, let's chat. And they'll be like, oh, I checked out your website, amazing properties, let's talk. And then again on the phone, they're like, you know, I know you guys have amazing properties, mine is not as nice as you guys', how do I know that you're going to make more money for me? You know, they're already referencing the stuff that they saw online. They're selling themselves to me at that point. They want to be part of the portfolio. They want to be with us. And so like that kind of thing helps if you have all the right things on the website as well. All the things we talked about, the power stats, the client testimonials, you know, we took a home that was making $50,000, now it's making $100,000. You know, all these things that people want to hear. So what we do is, you know, in the beginning of this slide, I have to give you guys credibility on who I am before you guys started listening to me, because why would you want to listen to me if I don't have anything credible, or if I didn't have a backtrack of things that I've done, right? So same thing goes for people wanting to work with you. So featured in Netflix, New York, like that kind of stuff works, whatever. But you don't have to have that. Like review aggregation is really great. You know, show property photography, like how beautiful your photography is versus everybody else. Talk about how long you've been in the market. Talk about, Whatever the thing that you wanna do, and then once again, "Hi, this is Patrick with The Koze Company." That's a great way to kinda go about it. So these are just some other things that we offer just to, like great photography, great branding, like just makes people seem like these are professionals, especially with AI, you guys can whip this thing out like that. I mean, you know, I'm sure you guys are gonna learn that at Mark's session, so stay tuned for that. Understanding owner pain points. This is a big one too, right? I think when you're developing content or when you're creating things to attract your desired guests or owners, you got to understand what's really the problem for them. In my market, it's very motivated by money, right? People buy these as investments. They're not secondhand homes. Well, they are, but like more so like, I want this property to make money. So that's like why I focus a lot of my content about revenue and generating more revenue and case studies around making more revenue. If you think that they're taking— it's too time-consuming, then understanding that will allow you to build content that says, hey, do you know that you're— that if you're a lawyer— let's say there's a lot of lawyers and doctors that buy in this market. If you have a W-2 income, do you know that on average people spend 10 hours a week on managing their vacation rental. And a lot of times, you know, whatever. And then this is how you can solve that. This is how you can make things more optimized. This is the systems you can use to save time. And then they're going to be like, well, I want to save more time because it's still a headache. Well, great. Let's talk. I can manage your property. Lack of home maintenance or upkeep. Hey, we took over a property from another— vacation rental manager that was not keeping up the property. Here's a case study that shows photos of how nasty the lawn was and how disgusting the inside looked. And here's how it looked post, after we were done with it. Bad reviews and reputation. Here's the average review score for the property that we took over, and this is what it is now. Whatever. Hard to find great vendors and support. That's a big one, right? So just lead with their pain and don't talk about your features as much. Don't be like, well, I do guest messaging and I do this and I, I, I. When I talk to owners, 80% is them talking about some yapping basically, and then 20% is me talking, right? And prompting with the right questions to uncover those pain points. So outbound, right? We talked about inbound. But let's talk a little bit about outbound, about actually going outside of that and finding where to find rentals, right? To target. Airbnb, Booking.com, Zillow. Okay, a little secret. Booking.com posts their addresses. Pretty much it's like almost hard— it's really hard not to get your address posted, at least in the US. So I just copy a lot of Booking.com addresses and I just put I put them into like Propwire. Have you guys heard of Propwire? This might be a US thing. But Propwire is a skip tracing service that gets me their information of the person that owns that property, and then I'll message that owner, and I'll text them. Usually a really fun thing you can do is if you find their address, or sorry, phone number, and some of you guys might be thinking, well, I'm not gonna text somebody. That's a little abrasive, right? I don't wanna like go up to somebody and do that. I just want to say this. When— who here has kids? Good amount have kids. Only like 20% of the room has kids? I feel like there's more. I'm not judging everyone by their age, but I mean, I think there's more than 20%. But when your kid wants to touch the hot stove, and you go out of your way to really grab their hand out of the way to not touch that stove, Are we being bad people for doing that to our kids? Or are we teaching them about life? We're teaching them something that we know. We touch the stovetop, it's gonna be hot, right? So the same thing goes in sales. When you see somebody that could be earning $100,000 and they're only making $50,000 a year, I have a dire need to let that person know I can help you. I can solve your problem. Right? And so the same thing happens when you do the sales process. I think a lot of times people get scared to reach out to people, right? They get a little nervous about thinking that it's gonna be very intrusive. What I found out, the people that grow, and you can talk to anybody that's grown their management company, the thing that really separates the conversion rate to like get sales is Responding really quick. So the people that respond within the first 10 minutes outperform anybody that takes maybe days to respond. Because it's, their problem is right now, right? If you can respond in 10 minutes or at least within an hour, you're gonna be in a really good place. And if you're busy, you text them real quick. Hey, I'm in a meeting, but let's talk today at 11:00 AM, whatever. Now, the second thing is understanding that You can solve the pain point and following up and understanding that the follow-up process is part of the sales process. People get busy. That doesn't mean that their pain is not there. We know they're hurting, we just gotta make sure that we follow up consistently. And if they say no, great, all good. But that's why I take those phone numbers and I put them into, who here has an iPhone? Okay. If you put in a number into your phone, like, you know, when you create a new message, you put it in there, if it turns blue, bingo. Because it will turn blue when the other person on the other receiving end has an iPhone. So if it turns blue, there's a high chance that you found the right number, one, and two, when people get a blue text versus a green text, the conversion is way higher. Yeah, I know you said about that thing in this country. Yeah, just research the land registry. Oh yes, yes, yes. So the land— so you said the land— so research the land registry and that's how you find— then you understand who owns the building and then you email them or you write them. Does anyone hear that? You didn't get it? So land registry? There's a land registry. Maybe if you Google it, and if you're having trouble, I think you can help out, I'm sure. Yeah. Cool. Anyways, there's a lot of ways to find— I mean, that's the kind of thing. But here's the thing. If you guys do that work up front with all we talked about, they're already going to know who you are, most likely. I mean, there's sometimes where I message somebody, they're like, oh yeah, I've seen you in the group, or hey, I I've seen you around town, or I've seen your billboard, I've seen that— like, all these touch points add up, and it becomes a lot easier to sell once you have that presence. Or, I stayed in one of your rentals, even better. I like to identify underperformers. For me, people are like, well, the reviews are really good, so I'm not gonna reach out to them. But remember we talked about in the last slide? There's different pain points. That person, I've reached out to her homes with all 5-star reviews and great— they make great revenue, and I still reach out to them. Because why? Because I know that there might be another problem there, and there was. They're too busy. They just had a kid that came out. And I got to them faster than the next person, so speed. And I was able to sell them and close that deal before anybody else even had a chance to. And so identifying underperformers too is a big thing, right? What I like to do to, you have a higher conversion though, but like if it has all 5-star reviews, that doesn't mean they're making really good money, right? They could still make more, like a lot of times when people have 5-star reviews and they're priced too low, that's the thing. When you have a low, when you come into a place and you're like, wow, this place is amazing and I only paid $100 for it, you're gonna leave a 5-star review. Even if there's like a cockroach that goes across the floor. They're like, "Yeah, you know what? It wasn't that bad. It was only $100, so, you know, I'm cool with this." It was basically, if you have a castle and then now you have this little cockroach, you're like, "Well, at least I had a fucking castle that I stayed in last night, which is pretty cool." So your expectations are lower, but when you start charging more money, that's when reviews start getting a little more intense, right? So what happens during the holidays, right? During Christmas time or New Year's, when people are booking your rentals and they're staying at $1,000 a night, even though they maybe goes for $100 normally. 10x. Their expectations, that's why they're the worst guests because they're like, I paid $1,000 for this. You kidding me? I demand this, this, and this, right? So just because somebody has really good reviews does not mean that they're making money and that they're a successful short-term rental. Cool? And same thing with bad photos. Understanding that bad photos, Yeah, you guys get the whole thing. So static pricing, the whole thing. Type of listings, it's gonna be a lot easier. Everyone knows this, but I, well, you guys probably know this, but I wanna reiterate. Getting a self-manager to commit to you. All right, let's take a step back. Taking a rental here that is a long-term rental, let's say an apartment building, that's a long-term rental. You have to convince that person that landlord, that owner, sorry, the owner, that hey, you can make them, that your property can make more money as a short-term rental. So you have to convince them to go into short-term rental. Then you have to convince them to not self-manage. And then you have to convince them that you're the best property manager. That's 3 layers of convincing. It's a really hard sell. Versus, hey, that property is already with another property manager. So they already made the decision that they wanna be with a property manager. They understood that they don't wanna self-manage. And they already made the decision that this is the property manager that they wanna go with. So all I have to do is convince them that I'm a better property manager than that property manager is. That's a lot easier of a sell than the latter, right? So those leads are the low-hanging fruit. I like to go after low-hanging fruit, especially when I'm not trying to grow really fast. I go after properties that are already managed by somebody. 'Cause those are the easiest sells. Um, so outreach like text, call, and email. Fantastic. Calling. I know there's— EU has laws and regulations. Make sure you're abiding to the laws and regulations of like texting and calling. I know there's restrictions there. Um, your offer positioning. Okay, this is an idea that I like to bring up because when you go into a sales meeting, A lot of times people don't realize that their offer has to be really good. So who here has read Alex Hormozi's— does anyone know Alex Hormozi? Yeah. Who ever read the book, uh, $100 Million Offers? Fantastic book. That's the whole same principle, right? You can have the best sales process ever. You can come in and be like the person they 100% want to work with. But if your offer is 40% management fee, and you take on top of cleaning and all that, and everyone else is at 10%, you're not getting that deal. Or very— it's gonna be really hard. Let's just say it's gonna be really hard for you to get that deal. Unless you have a 10x better product, then you can get that deal. So you gotta understand your positioning in the market, right? And it changes depending on where you're at, right? So for— so talk about, do you own your listing? Or do you co-host? Do you lock owners into 1-year contracts or you do month-to-month? Do you offer other platforms besides Airbnb? Or other platforms besides VRBO? Is your commission fee lower than your competitors? What do you offer in your commission fee that others don't? And do you charge any fees for onboarding monthly retainers? So now, to understand that, you have to know what your competition's doing. I will admit something. I have called competitors. Acting as somebody that wants to— I don't know if this is like frowned upon, I'm sorry, but I have called competitors and tried to see what their positioning is so that when I built my management company, I knew how to position against them. So if I did, if I just started calling all of them and they started saying, "Yeah, one-year-long contract, one-year-long contract. Oh, you have no, you can't, nobody can leave before a year." I was like, Easy. 30-day, 60-day outs, month-to-month contracts. Boom. Call their clients. Hey, you want flexible contracts? You guys stuck in that position and you don't want to be in that position anymore? You don't have to be. Come with me and you have 30-day out. But eventually that— there's a trade-off to that, right? But when you're starting out, being more flexible could be your position. Right? And once you get bigger, you can start converting all those people that you already built trust with in 30-day, you know, intervals. Maybe they are on the contract for 30 days. That's how we did in the beginning. That's how we grew so fast. We grew from zero to— for a lot of reasons, we did buy management companies, but we did also get a lot of organic. We went from zero to 100 in one year. A lot of that was because we were selling people on the month-to-month, and we We took on properties that probably we shouldn't have taken on. But nevertheless, the way we did that is we had a really strong offer. Everyone else is year-long, month-to-month. You don't have to pay for fees for onboarding. You don't have monthly retainers. I was like, I'm gonna earn your business every single day. Now granted, now where I'm at, I do 2-year contracts. Kind of funny, right? How then things change. But I know that those 2-year contracts to me are more valuable because when I'm positioning the company to sell, or potentially positioning the company to be sellable if I do decide to sell, whatever the case may be, or you wanna position your company so you have value, understanding that your contracts have value is a really important part of that, right? And so with that in mind, you know that you need to get those people long-term. But here's the thing, when they were 30-day, month-to-month, by the time they became year, or sorry, sorry, by the time I was doing the year-long or 2-year-long contracts, I already built trust with all those people. I could convert them into the, I started converting them. I just started reaching out and being like, hey, "Hey, I've done really good over the last year." And they're like, "Yeah, you've done fantastic." Great. Well, we changed the way we do business now, and here's our contract. Yes, we do get some pushback here and there. I explain, "Hey, if you want me to continue committing to you, you gotta commit to me. Because nowadays, we'll get you new photos, we'll do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we'll set up your property again, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever." And then you convert them into the longer contracts. But it doesn't, I mean, it's not the end of the world to start and position yourself that way when you're growing. Right? And so you gotta understand where your market is at and what your positioning is. Does that make sense? Cool. Um, I was talking about this before. Um, building an exit from day one. I mean, granted, none of— if you're building a company and you're not looking to sell and you wanna build a lifestyle business, that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But I've seen time and time again, 'cause I've done— once again, I've been a part of dozens of acquisitions. I've seen time and time again people think that they can get this EBITDA number and are so confident they can get that and then realize, crap, I have month-to-month contracts, I have no assignability, all these things are not in place. I don't have systems in place, I'm doing all the work. I don't have VAs, I don't have whatever. And they're looking to sell and they go up to a buyer and they're like, well, no, I want all cash. It's like, So you're making— you're saying you want me to pay you all cash upfront, $1 million for your business, when I know that day one when I take over your business, everyone can decide to leave because it's month-to-month contracts? That doesn't seem very fair to me, right? So what we're going to do— that's when the terms turn against you. What we're going to do is now we're going to put 10% down and we're going to do a retention clause. And now you have to be in this, stuck in this retention clause because you have no, no, nothing sticky. You're co-hosting all of them, whatever. When you own the listings, you have assignability, you have ways, you have SOPs, you have systems, you have people, you have something that even if you don't decide you don't want to sell one day, maybe something happens in your life. Kid gets sick, you know, you get sick. Life, life happens. Life is brutal. Life happens to people sometimes, and you might need to liquidate, and you might want to sell. And when you're in dire need to sell, you want to be positioned in an ability to be able to do so and liquidate, correct? And so that's why I highly recommend that. And so this is kind of like, you know, if you have— this is more 1 to 1.5x management revenue is like the value that we're kind of seeing multiples, at least in the United States, sell at for companies that are maybe smaller, like 30 units, 40 units, or maybe not enough EBITDA. Once you hit like $250,000 EBITDA, you start getting better multiples. But your multiples are gonna depend on how strong your contracts are and how strong your position is, right? So you wanna make sure to understand all these things. Does that make sense? Who care— actually, yeah, no, that's good. I wanna go through a real quick exercise. I'm gonna kinda bring through this 'cause I know we're kinda ending on time, but I wanna get through some of this stuff. When you set, when you walk, when you get into your car, what is the first thing that you do? You set your GPS, right? You set about where you're going. You're saying no. Well, you got good, you got a good understanding of direction, right? Maybe for the direction challenge out there, just like myself, you probably put in the GPS, right? But for, but here's the thing, in our lives we plan more in our day-to-day, like, parties and, you know, our 30th birthday. You plan the 30th birthday more than you plan your own life. That's what's crazy, right? We don't spend much time being very intentional about where we wanna go in our lives. And that's why I always say set the GPS. Why do we talk about how many units you wanna go to? It's a GPS location. It's a place where we wanna, even if you don't end up switching that GPS location, at least you're going in the right direction. All right, so let's, let's do that. And by the way, the first thing that you do when you hop in a car is put your seatbelt on. So you guys were all wrong. It's not the GPS. In the next 90 days, I want you to answer this question: What must happen in the next 90 days to stay on track? Okay. Actionable items. What obstacles are standing in your way right now? And what are the weekly non-negotiable actions? What are the things you have to do every single week to be able to achieve that? Just like I had to say no to that property in Big Bear, what are you saying no to, to focus on the things that you need to focus on? A lot of times people make excuses for what they should be doing. They end up doing the things— they know what they should be doing, but they end up doing the things that they know they shouldn't be doing because they feel like it's a way— does that make sense? People every day are like, well, no, I gotta do my laundry, right? And so they'll start doing their laundry instead of actually doing the work and sitting down at the computer of what they were intentionally trying to do. It's all, you know, that's human nature. We avoid the things that we don't like doing, but those delays us from getting to where we need to go. We gotta do the uncomfortable, because where does growth happen? The growth happens in the uncomfortable, right? When people become better people after having a kid, why, who here knows how to take care of a kid before they had a kid? 100%. No, nobody does. You have it, it's a fucking surprise, Maybe it's planned, but it's a surprise in the sense that it— you don't know what you're doing, but you figure it out, right? Same thing with business, same thing with your life. So throughout the session, what do we, what do we have done? We picked your market, we're writing your positioning statement, we identify your power stats, we join a local Facebook group, we defined your unique value proposition, the thing that makes you different, and we set SMART goals. So I want you guys to finish up and tie this in a nice little bow and say, write one thing that you'll complete in the next 7 days when you leave this room. Be different from the 90% who forget everything by next week. And here's how you can get in touch with me. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate your time.