Vacation Rental Secrets with Best Selling Author, Brooke Pfautz

Speaker 1: 0:00

We'll start the show in just a minute, but first a word from our premier brand sponsor, casago.

Speaker 2: 0:06

Casago's founder, steve Schwab, has been quoted as saying you can only be a local in one place. This simple yet profound statement is the basis of Casago's franchise model, which allows locally owned vacation rental management companies the ability to compete at a national level by leveraging the system, software and support to buying power of a much larger organization.

Speaker 1: 0:25

As a Casago franchisee, you have the freedom to run your business with the support of a community of like-minded professionals, while leveraging the economies of scale and buying power to increase profitability and reduce operating costs.

Speaker 2: 0:38

Visit casagocom forward slash franchise for more information.

Speaker 3: 0:43

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. With more than 35 years combined industry experience, alex Hussner and Annie Holcomb have teamed up to connect the dots between inspiration and opportunity, seeking to find the one story, idea, strategy or decision that led to their guest's big aha moment. Join them as they highlight the real stories behind the people and brands that have built vacation rentals into the $100 billion industry. It is today and now it's time to get real and have some fun with your hosts, alex and Annie.

Speaker 1: 1:21

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex.

Speaker 4: 1:25

And I'm Brooke.

Speaker 1: 1:26

Wait what.

Speaker 4: 1:29

I've hijacked Annie. I got rid of her.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Oh my gosh, she doesn't look Annie. You look so different. Oh no, brooke is so good to see you today. Thank you so much for joining us everybody. We've got Brooke Fouts, who is the president and CEO of Ventore, among many other things, but here with us today. Thank you so much for joining.

Speaker 4: 1:48

Absolutely, Alex. I'm so excited to be here. Sorry that Annie couldn't be here, but glad to jump in nonetheless.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Yeah, absolutely. I know she wishes she was here for this conversation too. Unfortunately, something came up, but we are going to rock and roll and still keep going with it, and I think this has been an episode that's been a long time coming, and we are just very excited to hear more about what you've got going on, not only with Ventore, but with the book that is literally just breaking all records across the industry right now. But before we get started, can you give our audience just a little bit of history of your background and your involvement in the space?

Speaker 4: 2:27

Yeah, again, thanks for having me on here, but, like everybody else, stumbled into the space. I was actually in mortgage banking and then, unfortunately, in 2007, 2008, we know what happened there. So I started a company, not knowing anything about Vacation Runnels, called Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, maryland. Ended up just and I don't even live down that way. I live in Baltimore. So every Monday I drive down to Ocean City and just kind of talk to anybody that was stupid enough to listen to me my vision of building this grandiose Vacation Runnel company, and that they usually called me out and said how many people tried to come across the bridge? It'll never work. I was like, thank you, I appreciate it, but do you know anybody else that's dumb enough to talk to me? And struggled through it, got it going. The first year was really rough but ended up finally getting a little bit of momentum and ended up growing that company to about 500 properties under management. Sold that company in 2013. Took a job down in Orlando where I was commuting back and forth via Southwest Airlines, was chief business development officer, got into purpose built vacation homes down there and I went over to Livera's where I was VP of sales and marketing. That's why I fell in love with SAS and then about Alex. About four and a half years ago. I found it was like everybody had the same pain point Everybody was struggling with getting inventory and there wasn't any solution out there that did it. It was something that I was really passionate about, something I absolutely loved and something I was blessed to be pretty good at. Decided to help more people with that inventory growth efforts, so launched a inventory about four and a half years ago. Since then, we've helped over 600 companies with their inventory growth efforts and, as I like to say, riches and niches, we focus on one thing and one thing only we will never build a PMS, we will never get into OTAs, we'll never get into operations. Our niche, if you will, is really just focused on helping professional vacation home managers get more inventory or get more supply, and that's what we're sticking with.

Speaker 1: 4:13

You guys do a great job and I think your role in the industry has been very important. There are obviously those 600 companies, but even just in the information that you're sharing at these events and just making people more knowledgeable and aware of what the practices and tactics are that they should be doing for business development, and I think, when you hit the nail on the head, it is a niche thing, but a lot of people really don't know where to begin on that side of marketing and especially companies that have been around for a long time. We've all have a lot of experience in guest marketing, but not so much on the homeowner side, and I think there's two parts of it. There's the actual marketing, the letters, the handwritten letters, the postcards, the true letters, the digital marketing that you're doing to recruit those owners. But then there's also the in-person the connection, the realtor meetings, being the community figure, and it's a complex thing to do and it requires full-time attention. But I think what you've brought these companies is different levels of how they can engage with you. I'll share a little bit about that as well.

Speaker 4: 5:19

Yeah, first off, you're absolutely right. It blows my mind. Everyone spends all this time, money and effort on getting guests and you have to do that right. Guests are really the lifeline of your company, but very few companies go out there and have a proactive strategy to go out and get new homeowners. Maybe they lob out one postcard per year. They're like, oh shoot, I need some more homeowners. I just churned, I just lost 10 or 15 new properties, or 10 or 15 properties. I need to get more homes, and they just they scramble about it and they don't have this proactive strategic play in getting new properties. And again, it's actually it's the greatest lever that you can pull that has the greatest impact to your bottom line is growing inventory. We've actually done a study on this. It's four to six times the impact of marketing and revenue management. But yet again, it's the thing that very little people put any kind of proactive thought into, just like you have, I'm sure. When you do proactive marketing to get guests, you have the whole marketing calendar laid out for the entire year. What exactly? What's going to happen? Very few people are doing that with homeowner acquisition. But, in a nutshell, our platform really comes down to a couple things. The first is data. We have the largest database of vacation rental homeowners on the planet. We get that data from multiple sources. We get it, we direct APIs directly with all the county courthouses. We go out there, we scrape the OTAs or we scrape an Airbnb verb, bookingcom. We then go out there and get vacation rental permit lists, because guess what, if your city, county or township requires a vacation permit, guess what? There's a list out there that you can get. We then append it to get emails and phones and other contact information to build up a really robust database. We have over 8.5 million records in our database currently, and again, these are just of vacation rental or absentee owners within the US. The second part is we have a campaign engine, so we have cold email outreach. We have our version of Canva built into our platform where you can send out postcards and letters, and we have tons of different templates. Again, we've done this over 600 with 600 different companies, so we've got lots of templates that we know are proven to work. Like you mentioned, we have handwritten letters that can go out automated, that look very handwritten but they're actually written by a robot, and then we have some digital marketing efforts as well, whether they're managing pay per click, whether they're actually doing what's called list based targeting. We're actually sending up leads directly to people in the database through LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and then, once people raise their hands, say they're interested in doing something, we've got a really cool CRM and marketing engine that kind of nurtures those leads all the way through completion. And then we give you a whole bunch of other tools Like we have, like web based, html based performance, parental projections that you can send out and a whole bunch of like lead magnets and landing pages and all the tools you need. Everything you would need to acquire new homeowners is our solution and, again, staying focused on the supply side.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Yeah, it's been really exciting in the last year that I've been at Casago to see how much you've been able to help and your program has helped our franchisees and your one of our preferred partners, of course, and that's just. It's really. It's a great service that you offer and I think in most cases the main problem that I see when I talk to companies and other areas is that they do want to. They'll do one in October, maybe one in November, and then they won't do anything until March or April and then they'll wonder why didn't we get anything from that postcard? We should do another one. But it's just, you have to be consistent with it and the life cycle or the conversion time period from a regular guest booking reservation is much, much smaller than these homeowner leads. But at the end of the day, the people that are doing it right are doing consistent efforts over time and knowing that you're not going to get a return right away. But if you're doing the right things and you've got the right list and the right message, it's it once it starts to gain up some steam. Now you've got a pretty steady and consistent stream of leads that are coming in.

Speaker 4: 9:06

It's a flywheel. You're absolutely right, and that's what we pre-preach from the beginning is, the companies that are most successful with inventory acquisition are consistent. They just, month after month, they're doing some kind of campaign. They have to continually do something. The ones that rush into it, they jump in. It's like the tortoise in the hair. They jump in and then they jump out and then they do it again. It never works. The ones that are consistent with it, it always works. I always say that, like people are in different phases of the buyer journey, you're just trying to nudge them one little click over to the right, get them closer to that point, and you want to be at the top of mind. You want to be in front of them when they're ready to, when they're ready to do it. And here's the beauty of especially with direct mail, where big proponents and direct mail, it has a really long shelf life. We've seen people a year and a half later because we track, we have call tracking numbers on all every single marketing campaign we do, and we've seen people call back and we've actually had some of our partners tell us that they're holding a postcard that they sent a year and a half ago and then eat them on the property. It works.

Speaker 1: 10:00

I love that and I am definitely a big fan and proponent of direct mail, and I think, as everything has turned to digital in the last 10 years or so, companies that used to do direct mail just they just don't anymore, and so the ones that still do it you've got so much more of an ability to reach people because they don't have piles and piles of mail in their mailboxes anymore, and I'm one of those people that sounds like the ones that get your postcards that if I see, if I get a good magazine like a fashion magazine, a store I like, or something like that, and there's interesting information there that I want to keep because I want to buy something later on, I keep it and I'll go back to it later. But you can't. You don't do that with emails nearly as much. We all get just inundated on the email side. It makes sense. Are there markets that you would say a? I know some markets perform better, but are there any commonalities that you've been able to notice for markets that do perform the best versus ones that maybe are just harder to break into, or is that not really an issue?

Speaker 4: 11:00

You do look, some of the more established go-to very competitive markets I think of the Outer Banks or I think of Vale or Breckenridge. Look, if you're new coming into this space and you don't have a brand nobody's ever heard of you it's going to be really hard for you to break into that market and try to disrupt because there's 20 other very successful, very solid companies. We always go back to what's unique. What is the differentiator with you? Why are they going to go with you over all these other companies? That's one of the things we talk about. We actually build out, we have a template. It's called the Seven Key Messaging Building Blocks. It becomes the baseline of all your marketing that you want to do. But you got to have some really good compelling offers. You got to have some really good risk reversals and you got to have some really good features and benefits. But it's really hard to break into those. The companies that we're seeing right now, a lot of our partners are just crushing it across the board. But the ones that we see that are really excelling, they're actually going into more secondary markets. It's not the tried and true Outer Banks, breckenridge Vale, it's Broken Bow, oklahoma. It's Fredericksburg, texas. It's these smaller markets that maybe are a little bit off the beaten path, that weren't always crazy huge, traditional. The Keystone markets those are the ones. Hudson Valley, new York, those are the ones where they're absolutely crushing it and doing really well because there's not a lot of competition. If I were launching a management company and gosh, I don't think you could pay me enough money to get back into that side of business, because it isn't right. I've been there, trust me, but if I were to do it, I would try to find some kind of more new, up and coming type of market, rather than the tried and true markets, for sure.

Speaker 1: 12:37

That's really good feedback and I think that pretty much mirrors what we've heard when we go on these market visits and talking to different operators, so very interesting. We want to talk about your book that just came out, and I think not only the book, but you did an incredible job at the marketing and the deployment of the book and how you built the excitement around it. I was honored to be included in it and I've got a picture of me on Pikachu, which was my horse that I had in Mexico when I was at Custico University for two weeks. I think it's amazing how you brought together so many great people within our industry to share their knowledge. I know it started all on LinkedIn, but can you tell us a little bit about that journey and how it became a book?

Speaker 4: 13:22

Yeah, so first off, for the record, I had no intentions of writing another book. I did write a book earlier from 500 properties in five years, but I did not intend to write another one. But yeah, it was a cool story. It was Easter Sunday last year, or I guess earlier in the year, and I just the whole entire extended family just left. We were exhausted. I just sat down, poured myself a big glass of wine, sat down, pulled up my phone and pulled up LinkedIn and I saw this post in a completely different industry. It just said hey, would you mind sharing your top 10 mistakes? And I just thought something was so cool about that. First, is you learn from your mistakes. That's where you truly get learnings. And secondly, there was something about being vulnerable and explaining to the world publicly that you've made these mistakes. And I was like that's pretty cool. So I emailed it to four people really quickly. Ryan Dame was one of them, with Casa Goa, of course, and he was actually the first person to respond, actually like that night. And I posted on LinkedIn the next day and it went viral. The feedback on this thing was unbelievable. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm onto something. And then I pushed out the other three, and I really didn't have any intentions of doing this like a whole entire series about this, but the feedback and the text I was getting based on this and the emails on the phone calls and just the comments on LinkedIn were just fantastic and I was like man, I got to keep this going. And then people started volunteering to me. They would just start tending me their top 10 mistakes that they made Some people I never even met before and I thought this was fantastic, so I just continued to do it. So, alex, for the next 52 days straight, every single day, at 6 am, I pushed out a new post on somebody's top 10 mistakes and here's where it turned into a book. I was at Northwest VRP conference and a gentleman came up to me I've never met before and he introduced himself. He said Brooke, I just want to let you know these posts are the most valuable content I've ever read, ever in this industry. In fact, I actually print out every single one of them and I put it into a binder and I'm like so wait, so you're creating your own little book. And he goes that's exactly what I'm doing. At that point I was like this content is too good. I've got to share it and luckily I had a little bit of experience of writing a book previously. I then took the information and I'm a big I love chat, gbt and AI so I dumped it all into chat GBT all the 520 mistakes, 52 contributors times 10 mistakes. We had 520 mistakes dumped it into chat GBT and said, hey, summarize this into 10 buckets for me. And it did it and I knew where it was going to be anyways, but it gave me 10 leg chapters or 10 kind of buckets and then that became really the basis of the book. So the format of the book is this the first half is everybody's mistakes 52 contributors and then the second half is broken down into 10 chapters, with each chapter picking a new topic. And I tell you what, alex, I wish I had this book when I launched my company. I would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars just from the learning lessons from this. I believe that this book becomes the kind of the good to grade, if you will, by Jim Collins of the short term big, key, strong industry. I just think it's that powerful. And again, I don't say that just because I hold it all together, but just the content is so damn good and there's so many lessons in there that I think will really save so many people a lot of time and money and effort.

Speaker 1: 16:38

Yeah, I think the collective pooling of brain power and knowledge is just incredible within that book. In some ways, when you look at it, a lot of the mistakes are they were based on what was going on at the time, so things that are technology-based or that maybe in the future wouldn't necessarily be an issue. But I pick out a couple that were of your favorites, that weren't necessarily tied to something in that realm, something that you feel like could stand a test of time, whether it's now or 20 years from now. What would you say?

Speaker 4: 17:10

a couple of the two biggest ones would be and this one resonated with me because I spent so much time on the team. So mistake number two was really the team. I love Clark Twitty, I'm a big fanboy of his. He said and this is the quote, that kind of started the chapter. He said this business, as with so many others, remains very simply all about people. It contains a lot of other things, but everything is wrapped up in good people and I just thought that was so true. So all the way from hiring to talking about personality assessments, to firing and nurturing and delegating, those were the main sub points within the realm of people and so many people. It was a big chapter. So many people made a lot of mistakes when it came to that.

Speaker 1: 17:53

Yeah, I think you're right on that for sure, and it seems like in our industry too I think you've been a big proponent of this but the personality type test, the culture index predictive index that seems to be taking off with incredible speed now, and not that they're new tests, but within our industry you're just you're seeing a lot of companies that are leaning into that information as they're making hiring decisions or even as they're just looking at their current team but moving people around on the bus, and I think that was a lot of what was shared in the book and then also in the webinar when we all got together and went through the feedback. But what is it? What is your role then in that? How did you adopt Culture Index into your product offering at Ventore?

Speaker 4: 18:37

Yes, I was introduced to Culture Index by Steve Trover about 10 years ago Actually, when I had Vantage at the very end of Vantage for resort reality and I wish I had it beforehand and I've been a big proponent of that ever since. Steve obviously runs predictive index. Now he's moved on from Culture Index. He feels the predictive index is better and it is a great platform. So just use something and it is a fantastic. So what it does is anyone can interview really well, anyone can fake it a little bit in that process, but you don't really know who they really are unless you just absolutely worked with them before. It's really hard to understand what makes them tick. And just like a football team doesn't have an entire team of 358-pound linemen or a bunch of 180-pound wide receivers. It's made up of different people and your team needs to be made up of different strengths and weaknesses or different strengths with different team members. And like the top salesperson is not going to be a really good operations person and, conversely, what I think predictive index and Culture Index and all these psychometric personality assessments do is allows you to put the right people in the right seats and it's been critical and then so it's not only great for hiring and getting the right people on the bus, but then, once you do that, those right people make sure you get them in the right seat. So adventurally, luckily, we've been using it from day one. So every single team member from day one has gone through this and I would argue look, I do a lot of things really poorly, but one of the superpowers that my team tells me I have is we've been able to recruit and build an incredible team. We've got over 50 people on our team and everybody from day one has been gone through this. So we've got the right personality profile. So they're doing what they're naturally gifted at doing and what they're supposed to be doing, and when that happens, magic happens, alex Like when every single person on your team is doing what they're naturally gifted at. It doesn't feel like work very often and it's been pretty special to see that we have 4.9 stars on Glassdoor. I'm very proud of that. It's probably one of the most proud stats I have and those are 100% authentic and legitimate reviews. But again, I think the only reason that is, or the main reason that is, is because everybody you can count on the people to finish the job and do what they're supposed to do. So it's been a critical part of our success here at Ventory.

Speaker 1: 20:51

Yeah, for sure, and I think in our industry it's like there's so many people and companies and I know you know many of them too that they wear so many hats and they wish that they had more people. But at the same time I think that's just an issue that a lot of us have as a little bit of control of. They don't want to give up that control and bring more people in because they know that they like how they do it and they know how they deal with their homeowners and their guests. They just don't want to give up that ability to somebody who they don't know if they can trust. But at the end of the day, this eliminates that fear. So I think, as this becomes more widely accepted within the industry, hopefully that'll make it so that some people aren't just as burnt out as they've been.

Speaker 4: 21:32

for many years. You said something there. It's look, hiring these resort markets is very challenging. It's very difficult, as Steve Trover calls it. It's not a talent pool, it's a talent puddle, because it's just so small, and that was one of the mistakes I think that a couple of people mentioned in the book as well was actually not relying on remote workers. It doesn't have to necessarily be overseas or offshore type talent, but just over. In general is hiring people remotely. That was one of the mistakes that I made is thinking that everybody had to be located there in Ocean City and that's not the case, and luckily now I think more and more people are a little open to it. But we have some old school thinking and some people feel that everyone needs to be in that market and I actually disagree with that. I think hire Look, you need to have some core people there, absolutely, but I think you can also get away with using some other talent remotely. That's the lousy, to hire the best people Like. So for me, I really wanted a lot of our team to have a vacation experience and unfortunately I live in Baltimore. If I had to hire people that had vacation experience in Baltimore, there's three of us and the other two I don't think that there's other two I don't think are that good. No offense to those other two people, but we hire remotely, we, and that way I'm able to hire the best talent regardless of where they live. Now do we lose some things from not having everybody? They call it like the bumping in the hall kind of thing, or but yes, but at the same time I feel there's a lot more benefits and we see a bunch. We try to really leverage the travel schedule with conferences, to really hang out with the team members too.

Speaker 1: 22:55

Mm-hmm. Yep, absolutely. So, beyond the team, what's another one of the top 10 kind of tenets that were in the book that you feel transcends time and would still be relevant in 20 years from?

Speaker 4: 23:08

now I would say chapter number seven, talking about inventory acquisition, because that's obviously self-serving here for me. But I'm going to go one step further. I'm going to go chapter eight, because this one was very common. It was taking on the wrong owners and the wrong inventory. So the kind of the quote that started the chapter was from your boss, steve Schwab. He says the ability to offer quality service that you can be proud of will always be highlighted by an owner that isn't aligned with your vision. Like Sarah Bradford talked about this all the time, like taking on the wrong properties that weren't a good fit and, even worse, taking on owners that had red flags all over them before they even signed on. Jennifer Muccius said the same thing, which was a common thread across the board that many people in their early days of launching their vacation management company, it's like they would leap across the conference room with a contract to get it signed. But once you get to the critical point and you realize you're like you know what 90% of my pain, 90% of my problems and are coming from maybe one or two toxic owners, it's just not worth the stress on the team. So what? We saw that time and time again, it was just taking on those wrong owners and the wrong inventory and then going through that process of pruning. So I would actually so kind of good news bad news in Ocean City is we didn't really have these evergreen contracts we had. We actually got our contracts renewed every single year, very similar kind of ways done, like out our banks. So what we would do at the end of every season was we would go through, we bench ranked all of our properties in three categories. The first was the revenue to the company. The second was like kind of trouble tickets or just maintenance tickets and problems and guest complaints. And the third was we would rank every owner a PETA score, so pain in the ass score. And if we had and we did it like a green, yellow, red system, I think it was like the bottom 10% would be red. And if we ever had any owner that was in red in all three categories, we didn't get, not that we didn't get rid of them, we didn't ask them to renew their contract, we showed them the door to our one of our fellow competitors, if you will. So that was, that was the way we crooned. If there was maybe two out of three, we would look at it and make a case by case decision. If there's one out of three, and the other ones were in yellow, we decided. So we really had these, what we call our buckets, and one of the buckets was obviously we wouldn't renew, one was we've definitely renew, and then the ones were in the middle or a little bit questionable. That's where we would. We would say you know what? We can welcome you back, but you have to do these changes to the property. Or we just flat out tell them, like you're paying to deal with this stress to the team and ask them to shape up, or we're going to show them the door. And sometimes they said screw you and they walked out. Sometimes they actually they didn't realize they were being jerks and toxic owners. So they actually did change, change their ways.

Speaker 1: 25:50

Yeah, interesting. Do you see any locations that are using the culture index for their homeowners?

Speaker 4: 25:56

So that's so funny. You say that I always with a big proponent of doing something like that, but we actually never did. We had a handful of owners that I'd play around with and we'd ask them to do it. But I actually think it's a great idea because then you know how they work, they know you work, and then you can actually build out a kind of a custom platform and know how they want to communicate and but I think it's a great idea, but very few people, I think, if anyone's actually doing that, but I think it's actually probably a smart idea.

Speaker 1: 26:20

I think people probably would not want to ask homeowners to do it just for fear of them saying, no, I'm not taking that test. Why are you giving me a test? But at the end of the day, I think it's all in how it's explained to people and I think it puts the company in a little bit of a position of power. That in a good way, that we're both evaluating each other right now. I don't know you, you don't know me, but for the same reason that I don't want to do business with you if we don't get along, vice versa, yeah, we'd rather you go find a company that's going to be more catered towards your needs than stick with this and then have to switch again, because I think a lot of homeowners fall into that bucket of switching rental companies. It's like switching banks. Nobody wants to do that. You definitely don't want to do it multiple times, but a lot just stay where they're at because they don't want to have to go deal with going through it. But there's a lot of. There's way more choices now than people used to have. There's way more new companies that have come into the industry and people that are just doing very niche. Five properties, five to 10 properties. So there's a lot of options out there, but I think setting the expectations upfront is always going to be a good thing.

Speaker 4: 27:28

I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1: 27:31

So let's look at. Actually, I would like for you to share a little bit about the deployment and the launch of the book, because I think there's something. Just as a marketer, I saw that and I'm like, oh my God, this is brilliant. But tell us a little bit about how that just inspired.

Speaker 4: 27:47

Yeah. So again, it wasn't planned. I didn't have this grandiose plan to do this, but it just worked out that way. You think about it. We have 52 of some of the probably the brightest minds in this short-term rental industry, so let's leverage that. We decided to obviously have a webinar for this. We sent everybody a handful of copies of books that they could then push out there and really a lot of it happened organically, like we didn't even ask specifically to you had to go market this. A lot of them just were proud of the fact they were part of it and people really enjoyed being part of this. So now it wasn't just me marketing and it wasn't just my team marketing this. I had 52 co-authors, 52 contributors that were now marketing this on our behalf. And again, just to be clear, I'm not making a dime out of this. Actually, it's cost me thousands and thousands of dollars to produce this book and all proceeds, 100% of the proceeds, go to charity. They go to advocacy efforts for the short-term rental space. So we don't make one penny from this, but it's obviously good for the industry. I think it's good for obviously, bill helps build the company's brand, but I'm just really proud that the contributors here, the co-authors, could really be part of it and felt like they were part of something, because they truly were and I think, as a testament to the fact that we had on that webinar, we had I think like 43, 45 of the 52 people made it to that. Alex, we had over 400 people register for that webinar. We had 189 people actually logged in and listening to it and two hours in which it went a lot. Two hours in I was amazed. I don't know what I was thinking, trying to keep the 45 people under an hour but two hours in, we still had a hundred people on that webinar and just the feedback I got from it it was just. It was so powerful, it was so good and, yeah, if anybody wants a copy of it, feel free to email me brookadventorycom and happy to send you a copy of that webinar because there's some great feedback in there Again, the brightest mind. So it was, again, not a crazy strategic plan. It just worked out that way and it was pretty organic and sometimes those are the best ones. So we will be giving out these books at conferences and it's to me, it's the ultimate swag. So, rather than me buying a Cousy or a Stress Ball or something like that that's gonna go in the trash can and fill up our landfills a couple of weeks from now, I'd rather give you, give people something that they actually get some value out of it, they can learn from it and hopefully it has a long pun intended. It's got a long shelf life, it sits on their bookshelf and they can go back and reference it and things like that. So I think in the end it worked out pretty well.

Speaker 1: 30:14

And it's great to give at conferences too, because, as people are leaving and going back home, now you've got reading material for the planes, so that's also a very smart deployment of it and it's an easy read.

Speaker 4: 30:22

right, it's super easy read.

Speaker 1: 30:24

Yeah, yeah, I think it's excellent. So what would you say is going to be next on the roadmap as far as you said you're not gonna write another book and you said you're not gonna open a rental management company again? But what's next on the roadmap for Venturi for the rest of the year and just moving forward?

Speaker 4: 30:42

Yeah, our product team is just pumping out new features left and right. I'm so proud of them. We just pumped out this, the one that I know that Casago is using. It's our Lightning Performa Tool. So it's a rental projection, web-based rental projection tool. So if you, when I was a property manager, I was doing it for 10 years Performa's were and there's rental projections were the bane of my existence. I couldn't stand it. I spent hours and hours producing a rental projection and then you email it out. It's in a spreadsheet. You gotta convert it to a PDF, Like it's just so one of the things we did is we built a really simple tool that allows you to go in the back end of our system and enter in the numbers. Well, it actually guides you. It actually you type in number of bedrooms, number of baths in the property address and it'll guide you on what the property we predict will do. But then from there you can customize it any way you want and then you can just email a link. So a quick copy paste it right within the platform. We actually have some email templates already written within our CRM and marketing automation platform. That pushed it out and it sends you a web-based, really beautifully designed Performa and it shows what it actually pulls in a picture from the property. You can either upload your own or it'll pull directly from Zillow, because we have an integration with Zillow. It'll go ahead and give you the rental numbers and it'll also show you a nice little graph about the seasonality and then you can put in your features and benefits. So talk about your dynamic pricing, talk about your marketing. All those things are set up from the beginning. So you take something that typically took maybe 20, 30, 40 minutes to produce and you can produce it in under two minutes and the best part is it's just the link. You send it to them and then you can actually get. You actually can see how often people are looking at it. So let's say you send out this link and nobody's clicking on it and all of a sudden, three weeks later that they're looking at it and you see the spike in clicks. You can then reach out to that homeowner and because they've been looking at it or they've been forwarding it to their significant others, so I'm just proud. That's a cool feature and we're just constantly it feels like every two to three weeks we're pumping out new features like that and we do have I can't tell you now, but I will tell you that VRMA. We're gonna launch it. We have a whole another platform coming out which is gonna be a complete game changer. Nothing like this has ever been done, alex, in our short-term rental space.

Speaker 1: 32:53

Wow, I can't wait to see what it is.

Speaker 4: 32:55

Yes, it's gonna be complete game changer and it takes Venturi to the next level by far.

Speaker 1: 33:00

Let's say, a pretty good hint there, so something we'll have to look forward to. I can't wait to see what it is.

Speaker 4: 33:06

Stop by and see us at the booth.

Speaker 1: 33:07

Okay, yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, I'll have to make sure that Annie can come with me. Maybe we can do a quick little live video to see what it is. But no, I love that on the performers and I think, just from my past experience here in the Myrtle Beach Market, whenever we would do those it takes a long time. It didn't come across. It wasn't like a pretty presentation of it and we were looking mostly at historical data being in condo buildings of saying this is the range of three bedroom units within this building. But that was just based on what we had produced. But the way that yours pulls information, that's looking at beyond just that company's experience in the building and it's looking at that individual unit. But do you have the ability to edit it at all or to put in some other? information there, so it's not just on that property, but like what you, as a management company, could potentially generate.

Speaker 4: 33:55

Yeah, that's the best part. So the first thing is you can actually set up a formula on the back end of our system that'll generate a kind of a rough range of what the property will do, but so right out of the gates it gives it to you. But the best part is you can override it. So if you say you know what this property is special, it's got a pool or it's got just a themed room or a game room or something that just really makes it dynamic, maybe it's penthouse as opposed to the fourth floor or something like that, you can customize it any way you want. So ultimately you have the control. So it's not somebody's other platforms where it's just giving you numbers and you can't override it. This one you can completely customize it down to really the penny, if you want, for what you think it'll do on that property. Or if you just wanna go with kind of the format and the formula set up from the beginning, you can do that too. So again, it makes it really quick but also fully customizable too.

Speaker 1: 34:45

And realistic. That's probably the best part. 100% because it's your numbers.

Speaker 4: 34:49

Yeah, there's nothing worse. It's your numbers. It's not pulling from AirDNA or some of these other sources.

Speaker 1: 34:54

Yeah, we were in Gulf Shores last week and talked to a company that. They said one of the best things that we get as feedback from realtors or just individual property owners when they bring they ask us to pull these numbers, is that our information is like 99% accurate. And there's a lot of companies out there that are definitely not providing accurate information and I think that's really been a detriment to the industry and also to the companies that are trying to be fair with these owners that they don't necessarily understand. You wanna know what your net income is at the end of the year? That's the most important figure you should be looking at. But if you're not comparing apples to apples, that gets pretty confusing for a homeowner. Yep, You're a tester. All right, Brooke, thank you so much for being here today. I think you did a wonderful job as Annie for her step in for the day.

Speaker 4: 35:41

I don't know, don't replace. I can't fill her shoes, for sure.

Speaker 1: 35:45

No, she's got little shoes but big shoes to fill. But we'll look forward to seeing you at VRMA. We'll certainly come stop by and see what all the hype is on this new product. In the meantime, what's the easiest way for anybody to get in touch with you?

Speaker 4: 35:58

Yeah, it's easy, obviously, find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Just Brooke Fouts or under Ventory, or email me brookbrokecom.

Speaker 1: 36:08

Awesome, and if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I, you can go to alexandannipodcastcom. And thank you everybody for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Music PLAYING.