From Vision to Triumph: Unpacking Hostfully's Growth Story with CEO, Margot Schmorak

Alex Husner  0:02  
Welcome to Alex and Annie the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex. And I'm Annie. And we are joined today for the second time by Margot schmorak, who is the co founder and CEO of Hostfully Margot is so good to see you today.

margot schmorak  0:16  
Thank you. So happy to be here.

Annie Holcombe  0:19  
It's been a while since we've seen I think we saw you at the Women's Conference in dorm in Nashville back in December, right. Yeah.

margot schmorak  0:25  
And I was like, I traveled so much in the fall, I was so burnt out, I'm traveling. I mean, I love our industry. But I was like, done now I'm, I'm much better. But yeah, it was great. It was great to

Annie Holcombe  0:40  
end the year with all of our friends. But I think everybody was equally just exhausted. Because we just came up Verma. And then like, the fall season in the US is just so many shows, but it was good to see you. And so we're starting a new year and hopefully had a great last year. Really wonderful, great year. And so love to hear kind of a recap of last year and where you're looking forward for this year. Last year,

margot schmorak  1:01  
it was an amazing year for the company. I don't know how many people know this. But the year previous, we had made a bunch of investments in our team. And we grew our team and and that year was like a little rocky, because there were a lot of startups that started to kind of like, get nervous towards the end of the year, and really sharpen things up in the business to make sure everything was effective. And so we were really committed to a couple of things. And hopefully, you know, shoring up our customer success and support organizations investing and investing a little bit in sales, but also in product, and mainly the customer facing functions. And so we made a bunch of big bets in the business and in the end of 2021. And, and had to kind of like hold firm through 2022 and 2023, to make sure that they all panned out, but 23 was a great year because the team had been in place for some time. And all of a sudden, like things just started to gel. You know, like we just we had an amazing year, we had actually zero employee attrition all year long, we had incredible growth, we had several months of cashflow positive from a business perspective, we're just in a really, really great situation these days. And I think we were able to thoughtfully invest in the product and thoughtfully invested in the way that we work with customers in more sophisticated ways than we've been able to in the past. And it's felt really, really great, especially in the in the, in the kind of the context of like impending inflation and like, right, going on with the industry and like lots of m&a happening in vacation rental software, you know, we were able to just like kind of hunker down and do a good job basics. That's

Alex Husner  2:33  
awesome. You have to have the foundation right to be able to move forward and refine, you know what that future vision is for the company. And you mentioned a lot of conferences last year, there was a lot of conferences, and I think you guys probably went to just about every single one of them. But you know, in those different events that you've been to and being around different types of property managers sizes of property managers, has your vision for who hopefully caters to change at all? Or are you still on the same mission of being able to provide a service no matter what size pm it is? Or is there like a sweet spot that you've refined to?

margot schmorak  3:07  
Yeah, I mean, we see ourselves gradually moving up market. So like, we did have like a little bit of a larger customer and average customer of that larger last year. But actually the investments that we're making that are going to the product kind of the end of 2023 and into 2024 are really going to cater to larger customers. We're rolling out some exciting features around multi unit around AI, both in terms of messaging and also in terms of the guest experience like a self service API tool, which is actually already in our guide books today. What else Oh, we're also, we've also been working on upgrading our API. And this is all kind of like background platform stuff. But it's really important, especially for larger customers to be able to operate at scale with a lot of security around how their data works. So we've been investing in that. So yeah, we're we are gradually moving up market. I think as our company grows and gets bigger, though, we're like better at finding the kind of customers that are the right fit for us. And so one of the really exciting conferences we went to was in Mexico, we went to Expo RV, which is a wonderful conference put on by Manuel. It's like a totally different vibe than the ones in the States. Actually. It's

Alex Husner  4:12  
amazing. I've seen pictures from and it looks so cool.

margot schmorak  4:15  
It's so fun. And actually I met a couple amazing women there who were also like, like you all, like just have had a really long and storied and interesting career. And they were like, Yeah, I wanted to come to Mexico. And like I happen to have a property here. And one was like, I don't even have properties here. But I check it out. So you should definitely think about it. It's a really fun conference. But that conference was interesting because we were in a new market. I mean speaking Spanish, which is like a whole other thing, but lots of customers very excited about the kind of like lightweight, nimble but tech forward solution that we offer. And I don't think our messaging has actually changed that much. I think the industry has been shifting and maturing and so now our message is more appropriate for more customers. But I don't know if we've actually shifted that much in terms of the strategy Do you for hosts really, that's pretty much the same. I was reading some

Annie Holcombe  5:03  
skip reporting this week. And they were talking about where the demand is going to be kind of globally. And there's a lot of demand that's going to be in South America and Asia. And I remember back when I was at Expedia, back in like 2012 2013. And it was a very similar situation like Brazil was really growing. And that was when, like, China was really starting to travel all over the place. So it seems kind of going back to those days when it was like the Asia and South American markets were really big. Do you see you guys growing up? Because I know you do global but I think your biggest footprint is in the US if I'm correct, right? It is. It's

margot schmorak  5:39  
about like, I think 75% of our business, somewhere around there is in the US, of some business in Europe, we're kind of had like kind of a long tail of like other regions that we're in. But we're really excited about Europe, we're excited about Mexico, Central America, regions like Costa Rica, and like the Dominican Republic, places like that Brazil, and Argentina have really unique challenges around payments. And those markets are very challenging for an outsider to be able to do very well because of the challenges that they have around facilitating money, basically. And so we don't see ourselves leaning into those markets as much as Mexico and other parts of Central America that are just a little bit easier to do business in Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  6:20  
what about the Asian market is that some some because the Asian, I feel like Asian travel overall, there's a lot of opportunity there. But I know, in talking with people, the technology for them is, is very, again challenging, and I don't know if it's money, or if it's this, the whole landscape of it,

margot schmorak  6:37  
it is really more about the payment processing than anything else. So a lot of the payment, like we use stripe and Pay Pal vacation rent payment as the third party payment processors that we work with it hosts really and you know, even if we were to build our own, those Asian markets are very different, like China. Totally different, right. And like Vietnam is, is a market where we actually have a lot of our team members also very different in terms of payment processing. So you need to find like a local payment processing partner in some of those markets. Even in China, like there's a lot of rules and challenges around transferring money. And you know, where the travelers, my bank account is where the property manager bank account is, you know, how many payments, what's the fees, like, it's, it's very. So that's where you really run into some big challenges. And we won't be investing as much into those markets. Now, also, accounting is a big deal, you know, parts of the US you have trust accounting as a requirement. And Australia, that's also very common. So that presents new challenges too, because not only do you need to build an accounting solution, but you need to build an accounting solution that works for that region. So we want to be thoughtful about how we have a relatively small team. And honestly, we have a lot of really important features that we just need to roll out at the kind of foundation of our products. And we want to focus on those first before we go into specific geos.

Alex Husner  7:51  
Gotcha. So now at this point, you don't have trust accounting,

margot schmorak  7:54  
we don't have trust accounting, we use partners for that. So we have a QuickBooks integration, we partner with simplify, we also work with them extend team, like there's a couple of third party services that we work with to help provide our customers and ability to use trust accounting with hopefully, but we don't provide it as part of the platform, it's really,

Alex Husner  8:11  
there's a lot to provide, and just looking back on KMS is over the last, you know, five years, I mean, the development has just been astronomical from what they did at a very core basis to now the things that you kind of have to have. And it's like, if you don't continue to innovate and go in those directions, you end up you can get lost in the dust, but at the same time, you can be kind of okay at a lot of things and really great at one thing. And so it's you know, I feel like pmss have to make that decision on what is the main thing that they're going to be really well known for, and best in class versus are they going to do everything, you know, kind of okay, or at least up to, you know, basic standards. But how do you how do you make those decisions? As you look at new emerging technology that's coming down the line? How do you decide what is going to be something that's going to stay for the long haul? Or is it just a trend? And you want to make sure that you're in front of the pack?

margot schmorak  9:06  
Yeah, I mean, it's all customer centric thinking. So it's like, what do what can our customers absolutely not live without? Right, and the first thing they need is bookings. So we must, if we don't invest in our partnerships with Airbnb, booking.com, verbo, Google, other bookings, platforms like that, that is where we put a lot of our energy and time, we're really excited to be part of a special accelerator program with booking.com. And actually, my two co founders are in Amsterdam this week, working closely with them. So it's funny, I think there's this misconception that in the PMs world, you can kind of build something and then it's, you know, you can have to add to it, but actually, because the OTAs the the channels are always developing their API's and their software. We're constantly needing to innovate with them. And that's a lot of energy to listen to, what their roadmap is to consider how works with our roadmap to put in To the time and energy and the development efforts to make sure that that's all working properly to test things to monitor things, like we're spending a lot of energy in, in making those partnerships really robust. And it's paid off because we're, we're a preferred partner with all three of those, the big companies, and there's not that many other property management software companies that are preferred partner, and if you're out there shopping, by the way, like, don't take my word for it, go and look at their, you know, their partner preferred partner, see who's on there, there's only a handful of property management software companies that actually satisfy the requirements, all the different ones and are like official partners. And that's, that's an important thing to look for. So that's number one. The number two and number three, are a little bit more about like the innovation of customers, or I'm sorry, of our customer solutions. So the second one, I would say, is our API, you know, my co founder Steph, built before this company, he built API's on the top of social networks. And so we really know how to build great API centric platforms. And we invest a lot in that. And so that gives our customers tremendous flexibility in how they want to use the software, and also a lot of like transparency and visibility into how it's going to scale because you can sort of look at the API documentation and see where we're headed with our product. And then that translates into the number three, one, which is our integrations, right, we have over 100 integrations with different software partners around the industry, we're often the first property management software that businesses want to work with, because our API works so well. And because we have this healthy network, we really lean into CO marketing and educational opportunities with our integration partners. So in that way, we're like, really a tech company, you know, it's like, like, we want to lean into being a tech company. And then of course, you have the guidebooks, which offer like a hospitality solution. And then of course, you have amazing customer care and support. And for me, it's like, those five things, it's my job to make sure that we don't lose sight of those being our core, our core competencies, and do really, really well, if those and the other stuff layered on is like the things that you know, make us a shiny object. And that's fine. But like, we cannot lose sight of those basic core tenets of our strategy. Yeah, those

Alex Husner  12:07  
five are vitally important. And I think the service is definitely something that, you know, we hear about this a lot that property managers, the number one thing they complain about is the service that they get from their property management systems, or lack thereof, yeah, communication. But I have heard great things about your service. And I don't know how you do it differently. But it sounds like you've figured out something and maybe it's just having enough people to be able to service your, your customer base, you know,

margot schmorak  12:34  
I don't think it's about enough, actually, I think there's a couple things. One is we have a heritage of being property managers, ourselves, and actually 18% of our staff have been a property and active property manager of a short term rental. So there's a lot of empathy, you know, with our customers, and we don't let anyone in the door unless they can, like, have that empathy and really, like reach through the computer and make someone feel like they are listening. And they can have a real conversation with a real human and, and that involves like, being empathetic and being sympathetic, but it also involves, like using humor and like, and also designing processes that make it more efficient for people to get to the answer that they want. And, like, we just have an outstanding team who, who really cares. And that really caring thing is actually like the reason why I'm here as the CEO, because my vision for hopefully, was to build a company where everyone is really excited about their job and like loves doing what their job is. Because then there's so much less overhead of energy and time and thrashing around because people are not motivated, or they're not doing the right things. It's like if you hire the right people and the right jobs, and they're really passionate, like you don't have to do much like I don't push hardly ever.

Annie Holcombe  13:50  
It's interesting, whenever I see your team out, I think when you go to shows, you know, people are drawn to booths by like the activity. And Alex and I are firm believers in like, the energy that you put out there is the energy that you get back and your booth always has this magnetic energy that you just get completely drawn in. And I've never been at any of the shows with your team where I felt like there was like it was constant pitching or selling. It's just your team is so relationship driven, but not in a not in a bad way not in a like space kind of way. They are they are just all like again, they they are all on the same page everybody's there to to provide the service and I just the energy is so it's so palpable whenever you're around the host Philippe weed, like I just I love it and your team is amazing. And it always reminds me like when you guys brought the sloth into kind of your marketing and, and the jackets. Yeah, and you go to the conference now and it's like a really big thing. Like I go now and it's like I get a picture taken with a sloth leather jacket and Frank and Dave and like, it's just you I think it just speaks well to what you wanted and the energy that you give You're getting back from your team. And they're putting it out there in the in the, in the universe. So I

margot schmorak  15:05  
applaud you for that. I want to show you something. So we had an all hands meeting this morning. And I actually, like did a reminder and which I haven't done in a long time of one thing I really care about, which I think actually helps the team feel that way. And I thought it'd be fun for your people. Yeah. So what I was saying is like, I want everyone to be putting creating time on their calendar for all of these activities, wellness, you know, whether it's working out or whether it's doing music, or you know, whatever it is for you, wellness, eating, make sure you carve out time for lunch for breakfast, personal time, make sure that you're carving out time on your own, or with friends, or whatever you need. Work. You know, of course, like we all talk, we talk endlessly about work efficiency, right, but I wanted to go, and also sleep, which is like the most important thing.

Alex Husner  15:55  
What about the calendar, say, Don't forget? Well,

margot schmorak  15:57  
I basically told the team, like, I want to be explicit that these are priorities for you, and that you should be protecting your calendar, and I'm at the CEO, and I'm telling you, like, create the time and space for these important parts of your life. And that's like part of being a good employee at host flea and, and I think like, this is the kind of stuff that creates that energy. It's not about like a mission statement. And it's not really about like getting people excited about the next thing. It's not about paying them more. It's about treating people as humans and respecting them as like whole people. And we really try to do that as much as possible. So I thought that'd be fun.

Alex Husner  16:33  
I love that. That's how you build a team. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but I think I feel like you you think in fives because you had the five like core tenets of what mostly has to do at the end of the day. And then the five things for the calendar and for lifestyle work life balance.

margot schmorak  16:50  
I think I just think in frameworks though, like your framework, yeah, that's what that's

Annie Holcombe  16:57  
what is do now defer delegate and delete? Yeah, yeah, that's

margot schmorak  17:01  
not always in fives. But yeah, okay.

Alex Husner  17:06  
But at the end of the day, I think what you're teaching your staff is that your team is that I mean, you You're showing them that you care about them, and you want their you want them to be happy, you want their well being within the walls, or the virtual walls of his fleet to be a positive experience, but that they're also able to have their own lives outside of work. And, you know, I think companies can get too hung up sometimes on mission statements, and you know, this and that, but it's like, you know, we're all real people. And it's, this is very much a relationship business with the people you work with. And then that translates to your customers. So you know, what Annie was saying about your booth is always so just welcoming, and the people are always there. Sometimes I feel like I'm asking more about what's going on with the software now, because they just want to, there's one chat, you know, it is relationship. And that is where business is, you know, really comes from if it's authentic business, and authentic was the word that we use, in the title, the last time that you came on the show, which is 100%. How I feel that you lead the company very authentically.

margot schmorak  18:03  
Yeah, I'm, you know, I feel like, life's too short. To not be

Alex Husner  18:12  
authentic, the right people and opportunities will make their way to you. And yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Annie Holcombe  18:16  
Yeah.

Alex Husner  18:17  
Live coming

Annie Holcombe  18:18  
off a great year last year. What what's what's your roadmap for this year? I mean, you said you had some new things that were coming new things that were in the works, I can't even begin to understand, from a tech perspective, how far out you have to roadmap things to get it done. And again, and you throw in, you're dealing with all the other pieces of the industry that you connect with other, whether it be the OTAs, or these other services, like how do you how do you do your roadmap for the year and not get overwhelmed and like really set a vision so you don't get derailed and mired in the details, I guess,

margot schmorak  18:52  
it's really challenging. Our roadmap actually extends like five years now, it doesn't mean that we know with absolute certainty when things are gonna get done. But like, we have a very, very well built out roadmap that goes very far out. The real challenge is figuring out the prioritization and the dependencies between different things and balancing them. So like balancing, you know, stuff that's coming up for customers with like a new thing that we want to release. And we have several people in our team, actually, our two lead product, people are active daily users of the product. So that really helps, definitely. And then, of course, David's also an active daily user of the product. You know, we have on our senior leadership team, we have people who have, who will heavily empathize with all the challenges that our customers have today. And then also, we're excited about where the company can be going when it comes to changes. Some of the exciting things this year are a new API, a new version of our API, which is going to be better and just more functional and more scalable, our multi unit capabilities. So we have a lot of customers coming to us and they want different ways of managing their inventory that we can offer today. So we're gonna be working on that, we've got this wonderful mobile app, which is really one of the top performing ones in the industry, it took us a long time to get it out. But when we did, we just had a tremendous ly positive response to it, we're making additional changes to that, because we know that a lot of property managers are on the go. And they need to be able to do what they need to do, you know, from their phone. So that's, that's a big priority for us. Also, to support some of our language expansion stuff, we are going to be rolling out some more language flexibility in the product. So it's like, I think mobile is going to be in a couple languages very soon, the platform, the the main desktop app app will also be localized in new ways. And so like, there's just a lot going on of the multi unit. Oh, and then of course, some of the AI stuff. So we have an AI trip generator actually works really well, i we i used it recently to plan a trip to Alaska. It's just in the guide books. And you could add it and it's just a little prompt and it has you basically chatting with Jaggi do GPT. But it gives you a little bit of a structure and a framework for how to have that conversation. So it gives you a pretty good itinerary back, we also want to look at, you know, bringing in those capabilities to our messaging platform so that property managers don't have to sit and type a message or look for a template. There's like a suggested template there. There's a suggested message based on history. Those are the kinds of things we're looking at for this year. For 20. That's a lot. Yes, a

Alex Husner  21:18  
lot. Yeah. But it's just it's very things. Yeah, yeah, I think AI as far as the messaging thing, I think that's probably where AI is gonna have the biggest impact initially for vacation Rome managers that is going to significantly cut down on time, and just on being able to improve review scores. And you know, efficiency is going to be, you know, a big thing there, too. What about like property descriptions or using anything in there?

margot schmorak  21:42  
We haven't looked at that yet. And I feel like we have a couple partners that might even be doing that already. You know, like the AI stuff. I mean, everybody's running their own little experiment. So like, I was surprised if one of our partners actually offered that first before we did, which is like a marketing audit, per se. That kind of thing of the properties. Also, this is, I mean, someday, that would be amazing. If we could solve this problem with AI. But you know, the property descriptions on the different platforms, like there's different SEO for Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so we do our best to help the user to help users to help property managers figure out how to manage that. But like one day, it'd be really cool if we could use AI for that, too. Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Husner  22:22  
Absolutely. Well, transitioning a little bit, the last time that we had you on the show, you share just some amazing nuggets of information just on you know, your own personal development and your own career development and what mentorship has meant to you and mentorship also in the form of community that you talked about. You had this group of women that got together that were all VC mothers that were raising money, and you all had gotten together, I think it was like your retreat that you had was right around the time of the recording that they all came to your house. And, you know, there's just you know, a lot of great information there, but, and you call them micro communities. And I think that's a great way to put it. Annie and I have our own little micro community. We call it the house of baddies. We've got a great group of gals that are all within the vacation rental industry. And we're all on a group chat that sometimes I look down at my phone, I don't even dare to look how many are on there right now. But it's probably about 60 unread messages at this point, that it's just going all day long. Do you have any any updates on your group or just any other, you know, insights to share about how much those micro communities have meant have meant to you?

margot schmorak  23:32  
Yeah, I'm actually really excited to ask that question, because we just crossed over 400 member and VC backed MMA. Oh,

Alex Husner  23:40  
wow.

margot schmorak  23:42  
It's insane.

Alex Husner  23:43  
How many were there when you? You came? Oh,

Annie Holcombe  23:48  
five or something? Yeah, it was? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So

margot schmorak  23:53  
it's been amazing. And it's just it that group is so cool. Because as a business owner, and I'm sure YouTube can relate in people listening to this, too. Like, you gotta have a group where you can talk about the ups and the downs, right? Yeah, yeah, one of the most proud things that happened that I'm proud about is two things. First of all, it's a moms group. So we'll I'll address the less exciting thing. And then the more exciting thing, the first moms group. So of course, you're going to talk about breastfeeding and what everybody did to write, and breastfeed, and I did this. And we had this very long discussion last week with no judgment. It was like, This is what I did. This is what worked for me, like, do whatever works for you. And you know, just sharing my best practices and it was like a really lovely conversation. So I was just like, proud Good job, everybody for like, and doing that. The second thing that happened is a little bit sad, but it's good. Is it that women started saying openly like I need to shut down my company and I would really love some help and support just emotional support as I do, but just like tell me like, how do I do this? How do I show Yeah, my company like, what do I say? Who do I talk to? How do I communicate to different team members? Like, well, how do I move on to the next thing? What do you wish you would have known? And sometimes those I'm going to shut down, my companies end up being like, Oh, I'm going to be purchased by another company. Like, sometimes they can turn out, you know, in ways that you didn't expect. And you just have a community where like, you can just go and be like, yeah, it's not working and like, I need some help, or I need to know how people have gone through this challenging situation. Or it's whatever, you know what I mean, with motherhood, with relationships with company building, I think that it's so important to have that safe space. So that's just been really, really cool. And 400 Members, I mean, I have, I'm on the admissions committee, I have like 16 emails right now in my inbox from new people who've applied since January 1.

Alex Husner  25:51  
You do I'm sure you must do some sort of events that you're not just hosting at your house anymore.

margot schmorak  25:57  
It's yeah, there's events happening all over the world dinners and webinars, and we've had a bunch of education, like partners come in and do virtual events and stuff for us too. But no, it's all word of mouth. And it's like not even through the leaders of the group anymore. It's just like through other people, and that's just really great. Like I think I think it's really cool.

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Annie Holcombe  27:58  
What a great thing to be a part of to be able to be there again with the highs and the lows. And I think that's one of the things that Alex and I have learned is like if you just surround yourself with the right people, it doesn't matter if you're having a good day or a bad day, they're going to be there to kind of help you navigate all of the ups and downs. And and even if it's just to say like, I don't know the answer, but I'm here to hold your hand or I'll help you find the answer. I mean, I think that that that's just something that so many women have lacked, not to say anything that men aren't going to help but I think it's just a it's a unique situation to try to be a mom doing something like this. So I mean, I just I kind of got chills you talking about somebody having to say that they were going to shut their business down because I imagine it's almost like losing a limb or you know, losing a person. It's a death of something. And it's a very emotional,

margot schmorak  28:44  
yeah, it's emotional. And I think there's a lot of shame in it. Like I failed and you know, and but it's like these women like there's there's not really enough any failure here, right? Like they're just learning and growing. And we can support each other. And like, I just think you need a place where people are people are willing to take big risks and not to be a place where you're afraid to talk about any topics, including, like managing, like parenting teens, you know.

Annie Holcombe  29:12  
Lots of advice on that part.

Alex Husner  29:15  
But yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, it comes down to community and community can look like different things, whether it's inside a community, whether it's your family, your local community, whether it's your local group of friends, whether it's a mastermind, or within our industry. And I actually I just got back from Vegas a couple of weeks ago, went out there for a mastermind that had people from all different industries and brilliant, brilliant people and I just had amazing conversations and the one thing that I came away from it with was everybody just wanted to help each other. And that was kind of the theme of it was David Meltzer that put it on and one of his number one things he tells people for advice is ask for help ask for help. I mean, there are people out there that will help you get somewhere faster. And in this case, in going into this group, I didn't know everybody, but everybody just wanted to help. And you know, sometimes it takes talking about an issue around people that don't know your particular situation, or they don't know, your particular industry to get you to see things differently. But it's good to have those, those different groups where you're able to just express yourself and get outside of your own head.

margot schmorak  30:22  
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that exact topic recently. Because I think as I've gotten older, I'm just more attuned to my own emotional well being and to be honest with you, that's the most important thing as a CEO is to be able to be in a healthy place, I call it psychologically, you know, I'm very good at coping with challenges, you know, dealing with shit, basically. And so I tend to kind of swallow it and move forward. But creating a little more space and knowing when to ask for help, or like when things get really tough. It's really, really important. And like, even since January, I've actually had like, Oh, two or three times where I've been like, you know, I just like, like, My heart hurts, or like, I was really upset about that. And I just spend some time and they don't, I don't kind of like try to brush it aside anymore. I just like, just really, like, sit with it for a little bit. And maybe it means I could do call a friend or something. But I don't really brush it away anymore. And I think I can be so much more of a present and effective leader if I'm if I'm able to tune into that better. Yeah, and we're acknowledging ruin. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think that's like a great, cool thing that comes with age, you know, just knowing for sure, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  31:31  
I always talk about that the give a crap meter. You know, at some point in your life, you just finally realize that it's just like, there's things that you need to give a crap about, there's things that you don't find the balance in between the two.

Alex Husner  31:42  
Yeah. Well, you realize the things that that yeah, the things that you that used to really bother you that just don't bother you at all anymore. And the things that you used to care about that you don't really care about in my life, life changes, and it doesn't, you don't know that it's happening unless you really do what you're doing Margo, of like, when you feel a certain way, if it's a way you haven't recently felt, why do I feel this way? You know, really looking inwards on what that emotion is inside. And, you know, determining that forward versus just kind of pushing it away and moving forward, as most of us always do. It's kind of like an uncoupling mechanism. Right? So when we were at the Women's Conference, Were you part of the mentorship group? No,

margot schmorak  32:25  
I want it to be but I was actually like, speaking at so many sessions, I was like, I don't think anybody wants to hear me talk anymore. Okay. There's not that many women in tech in our industry who are in leadership positions, there's like their ID. And then there's Julie, and then me, and there's a couple of smaller companies, we

Annie Holcombe  32:41  
need to have you on stage as often as possible. That's, like, really,

margot schmorak  32:47  
I don't know, sometimes I feel like a broken record. But you know, as long as I stay present, I think it's okay. But how was the mentorship thing I want to hear more about it, I

Annie Holcombe  32:53  
actually am doing it and have two mentees that I'm working with and it was so well received. And I will say that it was actually really fascinating. The sessions that were kind of surrounding it, just like listening to people and then have them talk about where they were in their space and their journey and just like just lacking to have somebody that they could go to, to to ask questions. And it wasn't necessarily having somebody that was, you know lightyears ahead of them in terms of experience, but just understanding that, like they're trying to survive and trying to figure it out. And they just didn't have they just felt like they didn't have access to people. And so I think the the concept of it was so needed that people just didn't know that it was okay to ask for somebody to mentor you. Like, it's just like, one of the things that I remember was striking, when I first met you, as you were just always like, you know, put 15 minutes on my calendar, if you want to talk like just I always made time for that. And, and that's really important. And I think that it took me a long time until when we started this mentoring thing for the Women's Conference, when it initially came up, it was that we needed to encourage people to not be afraid to ask I think that people got to a point where they get they're intimidated by female leaders, because some female leaders just they come across, they're very assertive, or they're, you know, that whatever it may be.

margot schmorak  34:13  
And that's okay, too. But yeah, it's just

Annie Holcombe  34:14  
yeah. So it was it was it was great to be with a bunch of people that felt like they could be vulnerable around strangers and ask the questions. And so I think we matched 50 or 60 people with mentors. And the hope is that, you know, it'll do we'll do three months at a time and if people want to extend they can and then we're just have a meeting today. I wasn't able to make it but they did like disc assessments. So everybody could kind of get a good idea on things. And so it's just everybody that was involved in it was very passionate about wanting to share their experience or as I said, I didn't have any mentors when I was coming up or any female mentors, for sure. Had a lot that I looked at that could have been had they wanted to but instead I think that the generation that I was behind coming up was had been forced to be so strong and so independent, that they wanted that next group to have to struggle like they did and really weren't. Not every one of them was open to saying like over here, here's how you navigate the world in business. And so I do think that that is desperately needed. But it was just more of like getting people the confidence that they could go out there and seek somebody, whether it was just for coffee or just an ongoing conversation.

margot schmorak  35:26  
Yeah, that sounds really cool to hearing you talk about it reminded me of something else that happened at the conference. Can I bring it up? Yeah, please, I did a session around tendencies, like female tendencies and leadership. And I did it with Megan Gerard on my team. By the way, it was her first time speaking, she did an amazing job and pushed her to do it. And she was she was not that happy with me the whole time. But she did a really great job. One of the things we did was like to go through a bunch of the tendencies. But then at the end of the day, I ended, asked people to sort of congregate in different groups around like, which of the tendencies did they feel like they might do more they want to learn more about and explore. And there were four of them. So you would expect to see like kind of an even spread 25% in each group. But it ended up being that 60% of the entire group went into the fourth one, which was how to have conflict, how to conflict. Oh, wow. And it was really interesting watching so many women who literally day to day have to deal with the most difficult situations with guests. Yeah, yeah. Like, I don't know how to have a conflict. I think that that was it was really enlightening to me. And you know, next session next year, I'll do a session all on conflict conflicts, yeah,

Annie Holcombe  36:38  
I'll be going to that one.

margot schmorak  36:40  
I do think I'm sort of qualified in that I'm married to an Israeli, we don't have the same opinions about things. He's very, very vocal, his his, he like automatically comes right at me, like on all. Usually rolls over about most things. At the end of the day. There's just a lot of conflict. And I come from a Midwestern background, I'm a woman that, yeah, you know, there's not a lot of like, learning that I did as a child. So a lot of the way that I operate today, and also in the business world, like when I'm negotiating is all around finding my way to work in a man's world, which is business, right, because like the system, run business are built originally by men. But I do think that I'm a pretty decent negotiator. And I do things a little differently. And so like, I want to talk about conflict and negotiation next time, but I just wanted to share with your listeners that if anyone is like, struggling, like it's the same thing about the mentorship thing, it's like, if you're struggling with something, you might be surprised and learn that, like a lot of other people in your industry are also struggling with the same thing. Like how great would it be to, you know, find mentors or friend community around that, and also to address some of those challenges head on, and I'm happy to share some strategies that I use, I think it will be cool. So

Alex Husner  37:55  
and I think that's, that's a topic that if people are able to give examples of things that, you know, true examples of conflict that they're having, you know, whether it's at work or at home, that's the best way to work through that. And just to see how other people are handling those types of situations. Because, you know, it's easy to say, okay, just, you know, meet the person where they're at try understand their side, but in the moment, I mean, that's easier said than done for a lot of people and especially when you know, you're depending on who you're having a conflict with, everybody, the other person operates likely different than you do. And, you know, trying to, you can't always match where where they are. But how you get to a resolution is sometimes it helps just by hearing other examples of how other people have dealt with it and aligning yourself if you see that your personalities are kind of similar that you can see yourself in that situation the next time.

margot schmorak  38:48  
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting frameworks around thinking about like, your emotional state versus like the specific tasks or like, the hand also thinking about the short term versus the long term. Also thinking about like how we are individually, like, conditioned, like how much harmony do each of us wants to seek, it's different depending on who you are. Some people want more harmony than others. And so like, it's important to just know where you, you land on the spectrum. And so you know, how to manage through those tricky situations. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  39:21  
I need that class. So if you do offer it, make sure the conflict

margot schmorak  39:27  
like Let's pitch it to Amy for next year. We

Alex Husner  39:29  
can do Yeah, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  39:31  
I love. I'm a conflict avoider. My husband laughs because I just I'm a I'm a harmony driver, like I want everybody to, to get along. So yeah, I could definitely use use that cord. Yeah, I kind of want

margot schmorak  39:42  
it to be a little bit of an extended workshop because I think it's really valuable when you can break out and do some reflection and then talk to some other people about things so well, so

Annie Holcombe  39:49  
I wanted to switch gears and go back to business. I was curious, one of the things that we've been asking people about the last few months kind of topics that maybe aren't being taught talked about or need to be talked about, you're in the tech space. So you're seeing a lot of advancements and a lot of movement. And I would imagine getting through the what's important to do and what's not important to do is hard. But what do you think within the technology space is something that maybe people aren't considering? That they should be considering?

margot schmorak  40:18  
I'm just gonna apologize for all of technology, which is that like, well, in technology, use words and judiciously, you know, like, they will say, Oh, yeah, you know, like, we have API connections with every with this and this and this or like, you know, I'm glad you asked the question, Alex, about do you offer trust accounting, and I was able to answer it straight in a straightforward way. I think that oftentimes, you're gonna hear from like, lots of different technology vendors, a lot of gobbledygook language. And it's really hard as a random consumer to like, sort through it all. Absolutely.

Alex Husner  40:47  
Property managers are not technologists at their core. So it is very confusing.

margot schmorak  40:53  
Exactly. And like, you can kind of say things like, oh, yeah, like, we can totally distribute your listings on VRBO, or Airbnb. But like, if you're not like a preferred partner, you might not have full access to the API, but like, translate, translating that into like, what that means the property manager is just hard to explain without a lot of detail. I think one of the overlooked things, though, is like how much how much companies are really leaning in to that, that interoperability between software, like if they can't, and I've said this before, I'll say it again, like if, if they can't supply API documentation, if they can't tell you when it was last updated, if they can't, if somebody's a technical person cannot look at it, and say, like, this makes sense, you know, or this doesn't make sense. Like, it's probably not a very good API. But it's really hard as a property manager to understand or appreciate that until it's kind of too late. So that's like one big thing to think about. I also think that because of the way that property management businesses work, and they're all like a unique snowflake, you know, like, you know, they have this, everybody has their own unique configurations, whether it's based on the region that they're in, or the type of inventory that they have, the type of owners that they have, or the type of guests that they have, or the the length of stay that they have, like those things, can those all those all that variety and makes, it makes it so like the optimal solution has to be one that gives you flexibility to choose. Yes, yeah. And the idea that you can just do it all in one software is just a dumb idea. I mean, yeah, no way. It's we're not talking about, you know, even on the iPhone, I mean, Apple never wanted to have apps on iPhone app. Apple wanted to just control the whole thing, because it'll be a great user experience. And you know, they did do that. But like, Apple Maps still really sucks, right? And like, yeah, you need to have, you know, the millions of apps on the App Store. Now, they invest very well in that and they're good. And they have a vetting program and everything, but like even Apple that has like, billions of dollars of cash can't build all in one solution. So like, How can a property management software possibly think that they can?

Alex Husner  42:53  
Right? Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.

margot schmorak  42:57  
So like, I think, you know, the leaning into the partnerships with the OTAs. And the platform piece, those are just two things Annie that I think are like underappreciated from outside, I'm also really curious about how all the different consolidation investment in our industry will impact companies. And I think it's gonna be a big mix, I think some, some investors are gonna come in with the right assumptions about what is supposed to happen, and what you know, and actually, like, support the industry and moving forward in a healthy way. And I think other investors are going to do things that will force companies to do weird stuff, right? Try to grow too fast or like, try to get new customers that aren't actually a natural fit with the business or merge companies together that don't make sense to be merged. Right? And so like, I don't like saying, you know, like, all that is bad, by all means. It's actually good. We want more investment in the industry. But I think there's going to be a big mix of like, what those outcomes look like, and I'm really curious, and I'm hopeful, actually, but I'm curious about how that's all gonna play out.

Annie Holcombe  43:59  
I would agree with you on that last point. I think that that's going to be an interesting game to watch for sure. Yeah.

margot schmorak  44:04  
And it's, it's hard, you know, that's hard to even for me. I mean, it's hard for any tech company in it navigate because like, I don't know what's going to happen next five years, right. And like, it's hard for me to make to predict with any sort of like certainty how that all will play out. But I just keep going back to the fact that you know, we have a really solid team, they love working on this product, they love working on this company, things are going really well for the business, like back to basics. And what investors want is they want reliable returns. So if you're generating returns with a good business, like that should continue. Yeah,

Alex Husner  44:34  
yeah. Are you still are you still raising more capital? Or is it

margot schmorak  44:39  
No, I mean, we are not really burning any cash right now. So we're not we don't we don't need to raise any more capital for the time being. We decide to raise capital to fuel growth in a area that we haven't haven't decided to do yet. But you know, nothing specifically on the horizon for us.

Alex Husner  44:55  
Yeah, that's gonna be kind of nice for you get a little bit of a break and then focus on And we're internally

margot schmorak  45:02  
I want to talk to you like after this but last January I was like sobbing with my team when we hit our first month of cashflow positive, because after we're doing this for so long and like, finally have our first our first month of cashflow positive felt so incredibly good.

Annie Holcombe  45:18  
Yeah. Like you could breathe, right. Yeah.

margot schmorak  45:24  
Worry about people's jobs. And it's a tough time out there for a lot of people. So I love being able to give people certainty about their,

Annie Holcombe  45:31  
their position. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just having you as a as a guidepost for our industry for female, what female leaders can do and are doing is just, it's so great, and we're so pleased to be able to highlight you whenever we can. Thank you.

margot schmorak  45:46  
I love being on your show, too. You too, are like the top brand, for sure. And I'm just happy to be a guest and see your journey. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Alex Husner  45:57  
We appreciate we appreciate you, we those first early episodes that we did. And you were certainly one of them, you know, set set the tone for whether or not this was going to take off or if it was going to just go into a tailspin. So we get a lot of credit to those early guests that came up and helped us get this started. The first time we recorded with you was also pretty kind of all over the place. So we appreciate your patience. Not that it was a whole lot better today. We still had issues but that's the life of podcasting right there. Well, if anybody wants to reach out to you Margo, what's the best way for them to get in contact?

margot schmorak  46:29  
I just email me Margo at host flea.com Mar geo T and host felida Calm. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to anybody help happy to share resources. I'm good at checking my email. So yeah,

Alex Husner  46:41  
you said that the last time or two Yeah, I love that. That's a very good thing. It's it's there's not everybody's gonna checking email. So I appreciate that

margot schmorak  46:50  
challenge but I tried to stay on top of it. Well,

Alex Husner  46:52  
if anybody wants to get in touch with Andy and or you can go to Alex and any podcast.com And until next time, thank you for tuning in everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai