1st of the Month Bonus News Announcement: Extenteam Announces New Staffing Program for Hosts of All Sizes

Alex Husner  0:00  
Welcome to Alex & Annie: The Real Women of Vacation Rentals. I'm Alex 

Annie Holcombe  0:11  
and I'm Annie, 

Alex Husner  0:12  
and we are joined today with Ari from Extenteam. Ari, it's so good to see you.

Ari Eryorulmaz  0:18  
Likewise. Thanks for having me. 

Annie Holcombe  0:20  
Glad to have you.  We've had a couple of people from extenteam on with us before, and know a little bit about what you guys do, but we'd love to hear it from your perspective, from the person that founded the organization, kind of learn about your journey within vacation rentals and hospitality in general.

Ari Eryorulmaz  0:35  
Sure thing. So Extenteam was really like a side gig for me, like I was a property management company owner, like in California, since 2009 managed about 200 plus properties in several states, and when I was on home, ways, software divisions, advisory board, one of my fellow peers, like came to me and asked For my help. They were having a hard time finding college educated and trained hospitality workers, so I told them, like, sure thing, I'll help you out. And I was just running it through my side LLC, just to help him out. And then covid really accelerated our growth. So I switched sides, and rather than being a property manager, like I became like a vendor, and it's been an exciting journey, you know, like I was able to, I'm able to apply, like, what I've learned as a property manager to serve our customers and fellow property managers in the ecosystem.

Alex Husner  1:39  
Awesome. Well, that's that makes two of us. So I certainly understand, you know, just it's different when you have the inside of being on both sides, right, and then the products that you guys come out with, and you just have that understanding of what really is needed, and you know how it's actually going to get executed on. But it, you know, we, I feel like we talked to at least one person a week that's using extent team. It seems like everybody is using you guys now, which is great. Yeah, it's great. And in this over the last few months, Annie and I have had the opportunity to interview some of your clients that we've had, you know, different testimonials for them in some past shows, and just been really great to hear from their perspective, how much extant Team Services have helped them optimize their operations and run more profitably. And we all know, at the end of the day, human capital is the most important capital, but it's also really hard to find. And you know, to be able to deliver on a professional experience, it's tough to have a full support staff there all the time. So I think what you guys have built is really great.

Ari Eryorulmaz  2:46  
Thank you. Appreciate that.

Annie Holcombe  2:50  
So one of the things that we've talked about, and Alex just touched on, again, the challenge of finding staffing and so coming out of covid, people moved all over the country, and I think it opened people's minds to the ability to not or the ability to have staff everywhere, essentially, so they weren't as reticent to to take on some of these virtual assistants, or these assistants living in other areas. Do you feel that, for you guys, that that the growth and that is continuing to happen, or or is it slowing down, along with the companies that are saying, Oh no, we need people back in the office. Do you think that the back to the office is hitting the hospitality as much as it's hitting the corporate world?

Ari Eryorulmaz  3:33  
Excellent question. I believe in like more in the middle approach at extending, we have some corporate positions where we require people to be stateside, like in an office as well. So I, I'm not a I'm a believer, of like, some positions, as long as it could be measured correctly, the output could be measured correctly, like it could be done from anywhere, not, not for every company. It's it's definitely not a good fit for every company, for but for most of our clients, it's proven to be successful for several reasons. One property manager, especially in destination resorts, they have such a hard time finding local talent, and we fill that gap at the end of the day like what the guests need there needs to be taken care of, whether it's people stateside, sitting in a physical office at a cubicle at the destination, or in a different state or in a different country, like the guest cares about getting responses to their communication, and that's the problem that we solve. We're not really seeing a slowdown per se, like in terms of growth, but we're seeing perhaps, like a change on why people are choosing us. I would say that during covid, people used to come to us because some states it was impossible to find local workers, right? And. Now, like we see people coming to us because they realize that, and it's not fair to stereotype and generalize, but some some people come to us because they're having a hard time retaining their local talent at at the rates that they can afford to pay. So people come to us to increase their employee retention rates, and they don't want to hire like another college student or a temp for the season and have to find someone else and train them from the get go. So the logic and the reasoning behind why people choose us is changing. I would say that makes sense. Yeah.

Alex Husner  5:39  
Does this happen when you get clients, though, that they they they need somebody, they know that they need additional services, but they don't know where to begin. Of, like, how do I even take myself out of the business to write down all the things that I need to do? Like, just curious if that you guys kind of end up being kind of more like a therapist, counselor, kind of to get them, like, in line on those things 100%

Ari Eryorulmaz  6:01  
that's why, like, we have a partner, success team, and they do a phenomenal job, like, literally, like understanding our partners needs every every partner is, like, slightly different, right? We work with large companies where they're they have their SOPs, like, written out in a knowledge base, like a confluence, or like notion, and then we also work with very smart and intellectual people. You know, they're good at hospitality, but they're not necessarily, like, they never worked at a corporate job, or like they they're like, good at hospitality and the day to day operations, but they're not really good at documenting their processes or setting up processes. They're just winging, winging stuff, and they're running around like their head. That's where, like our partner, success and onboarding processes come in, where we work with them, try to understand their business needs, and rather than just throwing a buddy out the problem, we strategize with them to to come up with systems and processes so that they can run their businesses more efficiently,

Alex Husner  7:05  
right? It's like everything's in your head. They know how they're doing everything, but it's like they've never, a lot of you know, Legacy older companies, they've just never taken the time to really document that out. But yeah, I'm sure that once they start working with you guys, it's gotta just kind of be a big anxiety relief in a way. Of, like, Okay, now this is something that's streamlined, and I've got people that are actually going to be able to follow, you know that SOP and that, that, that bill of how it should be done. So,

Ari Eryorulmaz  7:33  
yeah, like, back to what you asked earlier. Like, I would also say like that some some clients, like, some partners, like, choose us because they just need additional stuff, right? Like, maybe, like a large company out of Florida with few 100 units, they know that they need four more, like reservation agents or Guest Services team members. On the other hand, like some people choose us because of a lifestyle decision, you know, they no longer want to be picking up the phone in the middle of the night, giving guests, like, checking instructions or Wi Fi codes like that. They've emailed to the guests eight times already. Like they just want to spend time with their families. They want to be able to, like, focus more on their hobbies. Like we're seeing more and more operators like using us for those reasons as well.

Annie Holcombe  8:24  
Goes back to the conversation we always have about, you want to work on your business, not in your business, and if you can fill in these positions, it allows you to go out there and think bigger about what your business could be. And I think we're seeing a lot of people who are diversifying beyond just property management, like, you know whether they're going into real estate or they're going into flipping homes, or maybe they're going into local attractions, those type of things. I mean, I think what you guys are doing is offering the ability to breathe and grow their business in different directions.

Ari Eryorulmaz  8:49  
Yeah, and I guess, like, it's always like, as an entrepreneur myself, you know, like, it's a constant challenge, like, to step away from working in your business and on your business. Our EOS Coach Brad like, helped me a lot. Like, for me to, like, step away from the day to day, and sometimes I still find myself, like, on this operational Slack channels adding comments. But I believe, like, it's better, like, if one doesn't spend their like energy on the day to day operations and growing their business to achieve their goals, otherwise, it's, in my opinion, at least for me, it's not sustainable. Like to do everything on your own, you just need that support.

Alex Husner  9:36  
Yeah, and you end up you're treading water and not really ever advancing when you go that route. But I think one thing that's interesting too, about how you've built the company. I mean, you guys just focus on the vacation rental industry right as far as the workers that you have.

Ari Eryorulmaz  9:52  
So we have, like, a small, multi family, traditional rental division where we work with a handful of publicly trade. Good real estate investment trust, but 95% of our businesses coming from vacation rental, short term rental operators

Alex Husner  10:08  
and the people that you hire, did they? Did they have any knowledge of it ahead of time? Or do you guys just really focus on training them so that they become kind of experts in this,

Ari Eryorulmaz  10:20  
I would say, like it's a combination, both in Latin America as well as in the Philippines, where we typically source our talent from, as well as in Mexico, we built a reputation for the short term rental and industry workers, hospitality workers as well, where we pay above average salaries, we take care of their mental health packages, their health insurance, we take care of our team members, and as a result, people refer their friends and colleagues to us. So we already have, like a pool of hospitality trained team members, but in case, we in case like, we have like, an influx of like demand, and we can't source people that have short term mental experience. We've partnered up with Kennedy training network. Doug helped us curate our extent team University, along with some other coaches. So we we train the basics and like differences between like American culture and different cultures and so on. So we do a little bit of both. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  11:25  
it's really important. Yeah, I work like the team I work with at next packs. We're based all over the world, and we have people in Europe, and I'm sourcing some people in Latin America. And it is interesting culturally, how just from the day to day, um, coaching your teams like that, how different, different or countries, or, you know, or just like they, they just take and receive feedback in a different way, and you have to know how to approach it, so that you're not insulting them, or in, you know, in the reverse, you're not giving them the information that they need. So I think it's really important that you have a diverse strategy that can handle, you know, multicultural, multicultural teams. I did want to ask, from the property management standpoint, I'm assuming that you guys are interconnected with property management systems. So like, how many, how many connections do you currently have in place?

Ari Eryorulmaz  12:15  
So initially, we started as a professional services company, right finding educated, trained individuals, and we were, like, matching those individuals with property management companies throughout the years, like we pivoted or like added on top of like, the Legacy product, if you will, which is dedicated team members, where we built our own, uh, tailwind product, and we currently integrate, I don't know the exact count, but Christina and our partnerships team is working very hard, like, to integrate with bunch of PMS, as well as the major OTAs. I don't want to name them because, like, with some of them were, like, in the negotiation phases, negotiation phases, but we integrate with a lot of major PMS is, and even if we don't have a direct integration, we can pull guest communication straight from Airbnb or verbo or through email and text messages, so we can service clients that are on any major short term rental PMs in The US.

Speaker 1  13:18  
Gotcha. So am I allowed to

Ari Eryorulmaz  13:21  
like name? PMS is

Annie Holcombe  13:24  
like, how you you can name whatever you want. I just was curious how many you had. You don't have to. We're not looking for that by any means.

Ari Eryorulmaz  13:30  
Most, most of our clients are like, either on streamline track guests, the host away, hostfully, logify, hospitable. So we have, like, a big escape and live res legacy clients like, so we have, we work with over 200 companies.

Alex Husner  13:51  
Yeah, and what is the purpose of having the API integration to it, like, to all the extent team agents log into one place and then they can access whoever's PMS that they're working within, or

Ari Eryorulmaz  14:04  
excellent questions. So like, the reason why we decided to build our own product is because a lot of companies want to go up market, right? They want to work with larger companies. In our case, it's the opposite. We already work with, like, sizable companies that have need for like 510, 20 team members. But as you know, like Alex, any like, a big chunk of the portfolio size, big chunk of the inventory is managed by like, smaller operators that are managing less than 20 units. So those operators heard of like, how great of a job our team members are doing, but they did they don't necessarily need, like, a full time person or five or six individuals if they need around the clock coverage. So we built the platform so that we can store the policies and how we should handle the guest requests. What. It's like an early check in request, or like an extension request. There are like policies on pets and whatnot. It's all stored in our system and through the API connections, like a group of team members, hospitality trained team members can handle multiple accounts at a more affordable rate for smaller operators. So hence the need for the API integrations.

Alex Husner  15:26  
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, because even even within one property management system, where one company puts their policies and procedures or booking rules, could be completely different than where another company stores theirs. And sometimes they're in more than one place, and sometimes they're they don't even they don't match. They're contradictory, right? So I think for what, what you've built, that makes perfect sense to keep the information just super organized. For those people that they're not having to go scramble to try and find answers,

Ari Eryorulmaz  15:54  
definitely, but I have to, like, reiterate, like, the biggest advantage of like, the API connections, even if someone has, like, only two listings or three listings, they can subscribe to our like, guest communication service on a per unit per month subscription basis, where, like, our team members would be able to pull the reservations data, pull the guest data, everything straight from their PMS, everything would be visible to them. We would be able to respond to guest communications, whether it's over the phone or to text or okay messages. It allows us to provide guest communications at an affordable price point to smaller operators. I think that's the gist of it. For the API integrations.

Annie Holcombe  16:37  
I think that's that's really smart. We at next packs, we have a system that we built out to use in Latin America, because a lot of people don't have the connectivity down there, and it's super expensive to use some of the US or legacy PMS is so the affordability to get them the tools is what's really important, to be able to get them into the into the world of Vacation Rentals and short term rentals, and then, like, just have the tools. I mean, I think that's one thing that I've learned in working with PMS in Mexico, is a lot of them are have hundreds of units, and they're still doing them on ledgers. Like, that's how they're manually managing their reservations, and how they're doing their their their check ins and checkouts and handling all of the operational things, which seems so archaic, but it is just, so, you know, cost. It's just, it's, it's too costly for them to do it. So what you guys have done is enable them, people to access, and I think that's one thing that Alice and I'd like to talk about is, you know, the education of a newer manager, like, how do you get them in the system so they learn the proper way to be able to manage and access the information. I was curious for you guys, so you have a lot of your staff, that is what you know us, they would say offshore, so they're not based in the US. But how many organizations are you working with some property managers that aren't in the US, that maybe are like in Europe or in Latin America and Asia? What does that look like for you?

Ari Eryorulmaz  17:59  
Excellent question. Like a big chunk of our clients are based in the US, right? That's where most of our corporate team members are based in as well. Coincidentally, like we hired our first UK based head of sales. We used to work at rentals United before today as his first day. So we're going to be bullish on Europe, like we only have a handful of employees in Europe. Those are mostly our programmers and engineers. At the moment, I would say that we have, like, less than 10 clients in the UK and in Europe, but we will be pushing hard, like, to expand our footprint outside the US as well.

Alex Husner  18:42  
That's super exciting. Super exciting. I mean, really, what it is is you're allowing these smaller hosts now to be able to operate, you know, on a very professional level, having, you know, the access to staff that can respond to people quickly. And somebody said this to me the other day, and it's so true, even having to wait five minutes when you need an answer. If you're locked out of a property and you don't know what the door code is, that five minutes is absolutely awful, you know. So the quickest that you know, the soon as you can get an answer, is, you know, that's that's just a game changer as far as review scores and, you know, making people feel like they're staying in a safe and professional environment. So I'm sure, for the smaller hosts, that is definitely a big help, 100%

Ari Eryorulmaz  19:25  
and primarily like, we'll be focusing like, obviously, you know, like US Canada, but we want to expand into Europe, and potentially Australia and New Zealand will will be primarily focusing on English speaking countries as well as Europe.

Annie Holcombe  19:42  
Very interesting. Now you guys this, it's show season. So people are heading out to all the shows, the PMs shows. Are there any? Are you going to? Guys going to be at the RMA? So if people are interested, they can come by your booth.

Ari Eryorulmaz  19:53  
Absolutely like I'll be moderating a panel at the scale Dubai show in the. In two weeks, and then I'm I'm hopping back stateside, and we'll be at Verma in Phoenix as well. So feel free to swing by at any of our boots. I believe we're doing, like few other shows towards the end of the year as well. Very

Alex Husner  20:16  
cool. Yeah, that's Dubai and Verma. I think they back up to each other pretty close. So that's gonna be a whirlwind trip for you guys.

Ari Eryorulmaz  20:28  
I was able to upgrade, like, that's like a 16 hour flight from Dubai to La so,

Annie Holcombe  20:33  
oh yeah, you definitely want one you can lay down and take a nap, right?

Alex Husner  20:37  
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're super excited to hear about tailwind, and that is, you know, gotten some wind behind the tails, and is moving forward for you guys and and doing great. And just, it's been fun to track your progress. And as I mentioned earlier, just getting to hear from your customers that we already knew or ones that we didn't know, use extent team that it just seems like your name comes up all the time in conversations. So great to see the growth you guys are having, and we'll definitely look forward to seeing you this fall at the shows. Thank you.

Ari Eryorulmaz  21:07  
See you. See you in Phoenix, yes,

Annie Holcombe  21:11  
yeah. Unfortunately, yeah, we'd love to get a Dubai, yeah.

Alex Husner  21:15  
If Ari, if anybody wants to reach out and hear more about extent team or chat with you. What's the best way for them to get in touch?

Ari Eryorulmaz  21:21  
Like people can go to our website, extend team com, or if you want to email me personally, R, E, A, R, I at extend team.com I'll be happy to introduce you to the right person at the company.

Alex Husner  21:35  
Awesome. Sounds good? Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I, you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and until next time, thanks everybody.

Ari Eryorulmaz  21:44  
Thanks everyone. Bye, bye.