Tech Innovations in Vacation Rentals with Direct Software CEO, Wes Smithe

Alex Husner  0:01  
Welcome to Alex & Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex. And I'm Annie. And we are joined today with West Smithe, who is the co founder CEO and chairman of direct software. Wes, it's so good to see you today.

Wes Smithe  0:51  
Hey ladies, longtime listener first time caller. Thanks for having me.

Annie Holcombe  0:57  
Well, welcome to the show. Before we get started, why don't you give everybody a little bit of your history bio, how you became top dog direct?

Wes Smithe  1:07  
Sure. So hey, everybody, my name is Wes Smith, co founder CEO and chairman at direct to start out without direct I guess to industry outsiders direct is a vertical SAS platform offering asset management, booking and back office software tools for professional vacation rental managers and RV rental managers. We also streamline distribution to top channels on the vacation rental side Airbnb VRBO, Google vacation rentals, Expedia booking.com, and on the RV shares on the RV, side or other RV share all of which were directly integrated with. And then I guess to industry insiders direct can simply be described as a PMS and a channel manager. And a do it yourself direct booking website builder that I'm excited to talk about today. But I guess in addition to those six channels were directly integrated with and growing, we also offer a marketplace with dozens of third party integrations you're able to connect with. And we also have a very robust public or open API that you can really tap into to direct and build and connect any external websites or apps. Just just a bit of background on on direct in terms of what we do. We have hundreds of vacation rental managers and RV rental managers powered by direct throughout the US and pockets across the globe, Caribbean, Latin America, UK, EU. And we've got a really, really great product. Thanks to our tremendous team that's growing this year. We've got 15 full time employees currently and a bunch of contractors running around yeah, just make making the magic happen.

Alex Husner  2:28  
That's awesome. I remember when we first met, this is going back probably 2018 or 2019. And myself along with the team at condo world, we were just really impressed by you because you had a kind of a fresh look on software that at that point, a lot of the companies we have been talking to just didn't have and it was mostly everything was closed off systems, no open API's. And if you wanted to get into an API, you have to spend $50,000. And you're like, No, let's let's work together. Let's figure something out. And I think you've just kind of continued to do great things in the industry. And that's really the the position that anybody for the future needs to continue to have. But really interesting, too, that you've gone into the RV side. And that's one thing that none of your competitors has done that and I think that's really a unique thing. But where did that come about? Or how did that come about?

Wes Smithe  3:17  
It's been a journey that I've been on, been in the short term rental technology space for 13 years now in May. Just a quick background before I get to RV side of things. Got my start with a very niche list of the niche vacation rental marketplace called ganda housing, which is where we connected single family homeowners near football stadiums and college football towns with traveling fans for football weekends and Commencement weekend's that's how I got my start, I then co founded a spin off for the greater vacation rental marketplace called base days. And at the time, we were trying to go up against you know, Airbnb, and VRBO, you can believe we were that crazy, but we were trying to get supply. And we ended up integrating with the three largest SAS platforms at the time streamline, V, 12, and escapia. And that allowed us to scale our supply north of 25,000 listings to get the marketplace going. But along the way, it gets the challenges to your point Alex have API integrations and what I mean that was extremely time consuming and costly to integrate with those DMS is and the level just disenfranchisement, I guess that the suppliers have faced as the customers of these platforms had for the software that they ran on during and post onboarding was was pretty palpable. So that was when I made the decision. I became CEO of the company, and chair of our board directors, and it made a decision to start to pivot to building direct from scratch in 2018 to kind of go after a more modern and scalable solution. So that was seven years ago now that the idea it was it was kind of born. We started to come out with product in early 2019 ish, and then had to go through COVID which was challenging for everybody but I think for our kind of stage and type have travelled startup was extremely, extremely hard, but kept going building product integrations to different channels and all that. And then now to answer how we got into the RV category at the end of 2020, rvshare team reached out to me and he started to get to know them. And the background of their leadership teams background, and just the RV category in general is super fascinating. So John Gray, the CEO of rvshare, was was the Chief Revenue Officer at HomeAway when they got acquired by Expedia group, and he was with them from the start, I think Carl Shepard and Brian Sharples brought him on first, I think he was the first employee, if I'm not mistaken, but he got out of that the vacation rental side of things and saw that the RV rental category, it was kind of headed in a similar direction. So they reached out to us to see if we were interested in being their preferred software partner. And we kind of took a look at the space. And it really is, you know, to this day, 10 or more years behind the vacation rental side of things. So we are just at the end of q4, we launched the integration with rvshare. And the support for recreational vehicles on the platform. And there were virtually unrivaled in the space. So there's technically no other PMS other than us, there's one alternative, that's a wholly owned subsidiary of one of the larger channels, which you can kind of like into homeboy software and escapia back in the day, but there's no channel manager to speak of. But there are six decent sized channels, it's a really big opportunity for us and over a decade behind. But you know, direct is going to bring the category forward in a much shorter period of time than vacation rentals, looking back to early condo world days, you know, with using things like spreadsheets to do certain things. You had your own proprietary tech, but it's a lot of the same sorts of workarounds right now.

Annie Holcombe  6:34  
Yeah, yeah. When I was at Expedia, the last couple years I was there, I was on their key account, global account team. And I did what they deemed was all like the non traditional lodging. And so RV parks fell into that and we had had, so when when they got into vacation rentals that, you know, there was a lot of that opportunity out there to like, work with some of these mixed use camps that had RV sites, and had cabins and RV rentals and stuff. And it was I worked with a company, I think they were called 1000 trails. And it was so fascinating to me to think about how we could put a site like just a pad on a website on Expedia, and that somebody would go on there and rent that. But that was how people were doing it, like through que OA and all these other things like and I, I didn't know much about it, because I stayed in an RV like one time and swore I'd never do it again. Because it just was a bad experience for me. But I had no idea how vast that segment of business is. I mean, there's like hundreds and 1000s it's just it's it very much rivals, like a small sector of like the hotels, like maybe independent hotels, I mean, it's just, it's huge. So you're in like a space again, doesn't sound like anybody who's trying to knock you off the throne. So you're, you know, you're doing all the right things with the right people.

Speaker 2  7:50  
Yeah, it's super exciting. I look back at my very early pitch decks, thinking through direct like 2017 before we got started, I think even 2016 I imagined a future where any rental asset class can be managed in a single platform. And that's that features went direct promises and you know, we're still moving forward on it. But today, the platform can support all types of stationary, I guess we'll call it short term rentals from vacation homes and cabins, we can support boutique hotels, we've got a bit more work to be really strong there. But we have a glamping customer. And then on the mobile side of things, all types of recreational vehicles class ABC RVs, travel trailers, fifth wheels, toy haulers, all that sort of thing. And then next month, we are unlocking manufactured homes, which are also known as Park Model RV. So when you think of like the Sunday Valley or Margaritaville type resorts to your point, any you have kind of different ways to stay there, you can bring your vehicle and rent a space, a pull in or whatever type of space or you can rent you know, one of these manufactured homes, these lodging on site. And it's just pretty cool for us to we're very passionate about our industry, we're also really passionate about technology. And from a technological standpoint, they're all overnight assets. They're all short term rentals. So what we've done is pretty cool, it's just it's still direct. It's not a separate code repository, it's not a separate application, you're just going in and adding a new listing and that that listings a vehicle listing you're managing it the same way and distributing the same way messaging and handling reservations and all that and there's there's certainly nuances things that I know more than I thought I would have known you know, but things like how much how much wattage the generator has or how much how many leaders are in the water tank those sorts of like fields that like just they're not in a vacation rental listing just not

Annie Holcombe  9:34  
you know, I remember the content conversation around like what you needed to have for amenities and so it was like, you know, is there a dump station? It was like donate it was like no, you can't dump on site and I'm like, do I really need to put that but it's like those are important things for those people that are traveling in that space but things that you would never think about with a true vacation or a traditional vacation rental exact difference that

Alex Husner  9:57  
I have no excuse for sure that Do you want to present? Do you have clients that have rentals in more than one type of segment right now?

Wes Smithe  10:06  
Yeah. So before we launched the RV category we had, you know, we've had examples of vacation rentals and boutique hotels, or vacation rentals and glamping, you've even had workarounds to rent out just boat slips or renting out a Range Rover that's available kind of thing. Obviously, we're not ready for doing that the right way. And it'd be a distraction at this point. But yeah, since we launched just to about three months ago, now, we've had really good, really tremendous traction in terms of new fleet accounts, fleet managers, and there's been a couple recently who talked about having Airbnb getting a list their short term rental on Airbnb, which we're exploring right now.

Alex Husner  10:43  
Interesting. Yeah, that was gonna be my next question was do you do boats? So like overnight boats? Yeah, nothing and watersports.

Wes Smithe  10:51  
Yeah. So I think the infrastructure that we're building out will allow us to execute in these new rental asset classes relatively quickly. So one thing that's really cool is, when you're adding a vehicle listing or system is subscribed to a vehicle gym, that basically is completely dynamic. We're not, it's not our database, but you'll select your make your model your manufacturers, I think when you're on like Carvana, or auto trader kind of thing, they all just populate it. And there's a new year, and there's new inventory that just comes in automatically. So there's going to be those sorts of ways we can leapfrog. I think if we were to get into something like boat rentals, I think house boats would probably be something that might come sooner, it's a big world out there. And then you kind of get into where the lines blur with, you know, residential, long term rentals or corporate travels, the in between there or bigger hotels, again, these are distractions for direct right now. But we've had people use workarounds to you know, they have a short term rental on their program that isn't performing well, or whatever. So they move it to a long term rental, and they've used workarounds to handle these payments, indirect, which isn't ideal. I wouldn't, frankly, recommend it. But.

Annie Holcombe  12:01  
So, you talking with us today, I think you've got some big things in the works that we wanted to kind of dive into and have you share with our audience, you guys are always innovating. It sounds like and so you've got something new on the horizon?

Wes Smithe  12:14  
Yeah, we do. So this, this is something we've been working on for a very long time. So I guess in the really rapidly evolving and constantly changing, vacation, rental and RV rental sectors right now, like having a robust online presence, digital presence, and really like direct presence is LTE, their view would disagree is really essential right now. So just when it comes to building a brand for the business that you've worked so hard to build and reducing margin compression from channels that are charging quite a bit, it's something that we're really, really excited about, we've been working on it for a long time, a lot of market research. But I guess to start out with in the rapidly evolving vacation, rental and RV rental markets, I don't think either of you would would disagree that having a robust online presence is really essential. You've built this brand, you've worked so hard in having more of a direct presence and increasing your direct booking volume is usually important and reducing margin compression from the channels and reducing your reliability on the channels which can do unpredictable things really important right now. So we're direct is at the forefront of this with a revolutionary new content management system. CMS and a brand new direct booking engine that we feel not only addresses the very unique needs of short term rental managers, but also sets new industry standards in terms of performance and quality and ease of use. So really, really excited about it. But I guess before I kind of dig into what the CMS can do and what the booking engine can do from a really high level, the CMS itself is very easy to use and fully customizable, the CMS just to be clear, where you'll customize and edit your homepage of your website, and all of your landing pages terms of the booking engine, it's very user and Google friendly, the system is also multi brand compatible. So for larger operators who are inquisitive or have a presence in multiple markets and have multiple brands, it seamlessly manage them all in one system. And then it's also relatively easy on the wallet compared to the other alternatives out there. So now kind of moving into the CMS itself, website management can be very time consuming. So we've designed our CMS to be as easy to use and efficient as possible. So starts with a prebuilt homepage template that allows you to fully customize and tweak while you get to get to learn the system, which isn't hard to use, because we have built a visual page editor that employs recall slices, which you can think of like content blocks, they're reusable, fully customizable, and you can mix and match and rearrange slices in really endless possibilities, but they really allow you to move quickly. Design quickly. Deploy releases quickly instantly, actually, and in a really maintained Your brand consistency in the process. So it's a really cool interface that that our team has built. And then in terms of the booking engine, so the shopping and booking engine is what's going to be the search page, the listing details, pages, the checkout page, success, flow, etc. That's also a completely brand new and the whole package together, I would really challenge anyone to take a look at it. And let me know if you can find another PMS that has anywhere near what we've come up in terms of ease of use, and just how sleek the sites look, in fact, head to outer space.com to see a demo of a booking site. It's not a real real site, but you can build one just like it really easily.

Alex Husner  15:37  
And I actually got to see it last week. So you we got an A demo, and you showed me around how it works. And it is I mean, it's definitely it's extremely user friendly. And in my new business as not direct but directly Alex, I'm getting to talk to a lot of these website companies and seeing the connections between the PMS. And I have not yet at this point, seen anything that works in the way that you guys have built it. So I think that's definitely a very much a differentiator within the market. And no surprise at all, I think it's great that you came up with that. And that this is going to be something that just kind of makes things simpler for property managers, if we talk about it all the time, there's so many choices that you have to make between your technology and your marketing and the business services. Like just make things simple for people. And I think that's what you've done.

Wes Smithe  16:26  
Yeah, I mean, it's fully native. So we're not relying on any third party system whatsoever. So it's 100% Direct. So just as easily as you can go into our listing manager or property manager and edit a listing, that's instantly going to apply to the listing on the website. So you can you go in to the CMS and if you have updated copy or updated background video or, or new photos or new properties, you want to feature anything like that, you can do it really easily. So it's not reaching out to the to the web guy and asking them to do it and then getting a bill later or not having the capability to easily customize and in the system that you're using did

Annie Holcombe  17:04  
this come about because a customer of yours had a need? Or was this just something that you saw as a progression for direct as a as a software company,

Wes Smithe  17:13  
the genesis of the name direct, and the idea was actually first rooted in direct booking websites, believe it or not, so there was like a white paper would be a really generous, like a Google doc in like 2016 or 2015, where I titled that vase days direct. And the idea was like we built this marketplace called base days, and we had this shopping and booking engine. And you know, at the time in 2014 2015 sites were really, really, really rough, direct booking sites for rough. So the idea was like, maybe we could repurpose this, this engine to allow for X manager in the Panhandle who's running on direct running on base days listed rather on base days to have a really modern website. But as we kind of got more in today's days and saw what was going on the PMs world, there were a lot of additional, you know, problems that we could solve. And frankly, other applications have the word direct. But that was kind of where the name initially came from to fully registered trademarks. So just be careful, Alex with your business.

Alex Husner  18:19  
Li on the Alex.

Wes Smithe  18:23  
But yeah, I think in terms of like the need today, going back to how quickly things are changing. Having this really strong, direct digital presence is hugely important. Like the world is getting getting smaller, there's there's going to be less big places to go to, but there's going to be a lot of little places to go to. So having a really nice direct booking website. And a world of nice direct booking websites I think is going to help consumers and then from the supplier side of things the operator side of things, why not have your own personal Airbnb for your brand.

Alex Husner  18:52  
We'll be back in just a minute after word from our premier brand sponsors extend team and turnout.

Ad  19:00  
My name is Jane field, I work for Del Mar vacations and manage the Guest Services Department. And we just started using extended team in the first week in January of 24. So we're a pretty small local company here on Cape Cod and all of our staff is local, we have up to 400 houses that we manage and we need to be available 24/7 for any guests that are in house and any problems that they're experiencing so that they can call us and we were having a hard time with staffing to be able to provide that coverage. You know, we have a lot of inquiries that come in, especially from like Airbnb at night. Guests are looking to book pretty instantaneously. And if we're not responding to them pretty quickly, real time. We're less likely to get them to book because I think they're just looking to book right then and there. So now we have somebody that can answer any questions or anything coming Real very quickly and get bookings for us, which is good. And then like I said, she's also helping with some administrative tasks that we in the office just don't have time to do throughout the day to day. Since working with extended team, it's helped us provide after hours coverage to in house guests and also be able to help ensure that we can get bookings all day long. And that guests aren't waiting for communication from us, you know, until the next business day, which has really helped us.

Alex Husner  20:47  
I'm Caitlin, why did and I've been a turnover user for about two years. And I have placed turnover and marketplace cleaners through hundreds of properties. Throughout three or four states across the country. I had worked with cleaners for years, but I couldn't find cleaners that would understand the urgency that I wanted to have on damages. So cleaners wouldn't tell me that sheets were stained and needed to be replaced, like two weeks after guests would be there. You know, like finally, they wouldn't get around to doing the laundry. And by then I would have had already rated the guests five stars, and so they could stay. And other great guests and and meanwhile, they weren't the cleaners that, that I found on turnout have been just remarkable. The turnover marketplace is full of these amazing cleaning companies that have so much capabilities and accountability. And they do just a really, really great job. The first time I used turnto, I was set up with a cleaner, and his team came in and I trained them all on how to do the listings, then the next day, they they didn't show up. But because I was on turnout, it was okay, because turno knew that they weren't going to show up. And they pulled in another cleaning company. Turn a customer support is this like a huge team, there's literally hundreds of them. It's acid. Everybody's just like a great team over there that the customer service is really skilled in understanding the back end of turnout. What I appreciate a lot about the turnout customer service is that when you tell them, you're having trouble with something they don't, they don't just write you back didn't tell you like step by step how to do it. Like they write you back and say, I did that for you. And if you want to do it yourself next time, this is how you do it. Through the automation, it's available in the Toronto app, I have been able to streamline and automate so much of my Airbnb business, the activities that you can handle and the automations that you can handle inside of Toronto really do automate so much of the cleaning process, which has helped me save so much money and increase revenue.

And the interesting thing is to I mean, 2016 or so when you came up with the concept for that. I mean, direct bookings were even if the websites were bad, were certainly more of a thing back then, because it was kind of a slow roll of everybody getting on board with VRBO and Airbnb. But I love that now in this new iteration, I mean, you're still you're truly living to your core of what you intentionally set out before you even really knew that it was going to be as much of an issue as it is now. And I think, you know, with all the competition that's on VRBO and Airbnb, I mean, 55% increase in listings just in South Carolina area last year, when people are finally starting to understand if they haven't been in the business that long that this is why you have to have that direct booking strategy. And when Andy and I were just on a panel for an str, it was an STR women's Stacey St. John's online panel. And in the comments, there were so many women on there that were asking it was about direct bookings, they kept asking, Where do I go to get a website? Like how do I do this? How to do that. I mean, there's so many people that are just like, they're so fresh into this that they don't know a lot of those questions. So I guess that leads me to my next question for you. And most of your clients that we know at least are somewhere in that mid range size manager. But do you work with? Do you kind of span the gamut of small, you know, under five units and how far up do you go in terms of enterprise just

Wes Smithe  24:39  
to be perfectly clear, direct is extremely scalable. So while we don't have clients with 1000s today, the system can absolutely handle it. And going back to those early pitch decks and ways of thinking Steve mile I've actually known since 2014, or 2015. Remember before we integrated with the escapee as of the world integrated vase days with it, the first thing that we did was scraped homeboy.com. And I had an Excel spreadsheet with like one and a half million rows in it. And I remember just creating pivot tables and trying to find who the who the big dogs because I was like hitting the phones and closing, you know, somebody with one or two properties took just as long as closing somebody with with a lot. So they found Steve Milo and remember just like begging him to like list on face days. And he's like, no, no, no. And then finally, we ended up building a scraper tool that allowed us to take his availability and update base days. And he said, Yes, and we think we're probably in our best year with him with Bass Days, maybe a quarter half million dollars booking volume, which is a total drop in the bucket for me even then, but it was enough to get his attention. And we've had a nice relationship since then, as we were kind of like thinking through how we would architect direct to be scalable, we thought of the steam eyeless of the world who have who are inquisitive, who have multiple brands, and have multiple markets that they're operating in. So one of the key functions of direct is our inventory segmentation, that allows you to create a high level portfolio, think like a Florida market or a Colorado market, and then have sub portfolios within that, that portfolio for maybe beach neighborhoods on 30. A, or in Destin or whatever, you've got various complexes that you have numerous units and, and then below that, there's more levels, like unit groups and stuff where you might have like units that have similar identical pricing or availability strategies. But the power of inventory segmentation, and its implication on scalability comes in a variety of ways. Number one, and this goes back to thinking of the Steve Miles of the world, like if he or she who runs the company signs in there, the super admin or whatever, they see all the data that they want to see, right, they have access to everything. Whereas a local property manager in Gatlinburg, when they sign in to this account that has multiple markets, they're just going to see the data pertaining to Gatlinburg, they're just going to see those in those units. Rarely, and it's the listings, the bookings associated with those listings, the people associated with those listings, the reporting, etc, you can take it a step further to a housekeeper or an owner who signs in, you know, somebody works at the front desk at a complex in Gatlinburg, just gonna see the inventory related to that complex. And then the final level, I guess, that's about to get to is, you know, the owner or whatever, who, when they sign in, they just see their one or two or three units of inventory. But it's really inventory segmentations. And scalability, it's very powerful, because you can associate the segment's with a variety of different objects in the system example I just gave are related to people in the system. But it also has impact on on recording and filtering and sorting data in the system and associating with like objects, like rules, like fees and taxes and stuff. So you go in and you add a new fee or a new tax. And when you're configuring the tax, or you're configuring the fee, and you want to associate it with inventory, you need only click, you know, the portfolio or the sub portfolio, and then instantly all of the listings are associated with that. So it's just really, really fast way. But I guess Long story short, if you were very scalable right now on the vacation rental side, or average number of units is around 70. We do have some I think our smallest is for an RV rental side, we're at 17 average right now, where

Annie Holcombe  28:24  
do you see, I guess your biggest opportunity because one of the things that Alex and I talk about a lot is trying to get people to have that strategy of direct booking from the very getgo. And the problem that we've seen is that people start out with two or three units, they get on Airbnb on VRBO. And mostly on the Airbnb site, I think because of the ease of use for them. And they grow and they scale and all of a sudden before they know what they've got 50 units on Airbnb NFL they've got and they never built a brand to back it up. So they have it's almost like having to go back to the beginning and start over for them. But what you're allowing for people to do is start from the that first unit start out that way. So do you see yourself really focusing on that smaller operator? Or do you kind of feel like you have a good opportunity at all sizes?

Wes Smithe  29:08  
I think it's fair to say that right now there's some interesting things happening in the market in terms of PMS, things that are having an effect, I think on how their customers are viewing the future working with them. So I think from like a medium to large side of things, I think we're getting into another cycle here where we've got an exciting several months and years ahead. Yeah, as far as like the smaller ones. I think I mentioned earlier on the pod that we've got, maybe I didn't on the RV side of things, but we've built to onboard is pretty remarkable. It's a single click onboarding. So basically, RV fleet manager will come from initially come from RV share, and then they come to direct for the redirected to direct to create their account which takes just two minutes inside of the URL as a parameter. or that includes their RV share account ID. And then when they get into the dashboard for the first time, there's a button that says sync and import, and they click that button, and all their listings, all the photos in the right order, all the amenities, availability, pricing, all the descriptions, headlines, all listings are built all the past upcoming reservations about all the messages in the inbox, all the reviews, all the people, everything's important in like our largest says 150. It's like 10 or 15 minutes, max. So one click onboarding, we're working on something like that on the vacation rental side, that is not feasible for someone who's large, if you've got your eggs in a lot of baskets, and you've got listings on this site, and that site, like we all know, well, single click onboarding today isn't isn't something that's realistic. But to Alex's question, I think on the smaller side, those Airbnb only hosts, yes, there's a huge opportunity for that. And in the second quarter of this year, we should have that rolling out officially, which is super exciting. That's awesome.

Alex Husner  30:56  
That's super cool to hear all the all the things you've done in a relatively short amount of time. And, you know, I mean, just kind of looking at the the broader scale here or the broader perspective of the business. You're also one of the younger CEOs of a software company, I would say. I mean, you've had quite a journey, like, tell us a little bit about that. I mean, just building the business, and what are some of the things that as you look back on the last seven, eight years that you look back, and you're just like, wow, either good or bad.

Wes Smithe  31:28  
It's not for the faint of heart, by any means. Yeah, I would liken it to Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a hill. And a lot of times, my co founder, Chad and I, we've talked for years about it being just a roller coaster. Some days, you got all figured out other days. You're like, what the hell's going on here? But yeah, in general, it's a very good question. And nividia CEO and founder Jensen Wang had a good interview where he was asked if he started all over knowing we don't know is how and was going to start a startup like what Startup he's like, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't I wouldn't start a company. Just, you know, just would you say the same, I think, no, but I would say like, when I got direct started, my first daughter was born. And then two years later came my second daughter, and then I've got a 10 month old son now. So it's been challenges and growing not only like professionally, but also personally. And it's like as the years go by Sure. I'm like younger, I'm 38 and September, but as the business has progressed, so too, as of our lives, and you know, our kids have gotten older and stuff like that. So it's been funny, I say this a lot like, I have three human kids. But it's really for direct, this is the fourth baby to be the most, the most demanding of them all. But I would liken it to one of the stripe brothers, I think Patrick Collison said that as you hone your craft, and you grow a business and you learn from mistakes, and you get smarter and you get fitter. He likened it to running a 5k. So when you run a 5k, for the first time burns like hell, and you keep running five K's and you get really good at running five K's, it still burns like hell, every time you run a 5k Just you could just do it faster. So that's, that's kind of how if I were to wake up and my my brain and body from six, seven years ago, I wouldn't be equipped to solve the challenges and and make the decisions, snap judgment type stuff that I can do today because of what I've been through and adversity and and as a CEO of a technology company, probably every company, we have a really amazing team and amazing problem solvers. But there's some problems that I'm the only one who can solve. So it's like, yeah, distillation of the worst problems come to the CEO. And that's something that you just have to be okay with, and live with to be able to survive as a CEO. Yeah, it's

Annie Holcombe  33:50  
lonely at the top. One thing that we love about the vacation rental industry in general is that it's a pretty loving, supportive, you know, a collaborative community, you're obviously in RVs, as well. So you're kind of like getting outside making sure no, but do you have you found for when you started and to now that you had the support? Obviously, working with somebody like Steve mile and getting him to take notice is super helpful, because he's a brilliant man. And he can provide a lot of feedback and honest feedback. So it helps you, you know, it helps you be better. But have you found other people along the way that have been able to be there to kind of say, like, Okay, this is what you should be doing. This is what you shouldn't be doing and just be a sounding board for? Yeah,

Wes Smithe  34:29  
absolutely. I mean, there are a few individuals in our space that I'm incredibly close with, and, you know, look, look to them, like Big Brothers, you know, and you know, what I've had to deal with getting through certain challenges. It's a lonely, lonely life, you know, work as a CEO can be lonely, but, you know, mentorship and advice from folks who have either been through the same situation or can liken what you're going through to something else that they've been through is just hugely impact. fool and allows you to keep going. But yeah, this industry is a wonderful one to be in. It's very tight knit, as you all know, and it's exciting. Where do you

Alex Husner  35:07  
see yourself in the next eight to 10 years and direct? I mean, is your plan to always keep it private? Or would you go public or sell or

Wes Smithe  35:17  
crystal ball is out. There's a variety of ways that it can go. And I've obviously thought through various strategies and exit, and you know where this could go. But really day to day, I'm focused on on the mission, and the vision. And the mission is to provide great technology and solve for the unique challenges that short term rental operators have at a really high level. And then the vision I go back to is really just Just imagine a system where you can manage any rental asset class from, you know, one single application, not all tons of different applications. So we'll see where the industry goes. But I think that with consolidation, you know, continue to happen on the b2c side and b2b side, you know, today, in the US stick for classes, the biggest one, right, but in 10 years, or probably with just how fast technology is changing, probably in five years, there's going to be 10 or 15 of the classes that are that that large, money's going into that and I think that there's going to be a need for a system that can handle the scale of a very large operator, who has a diverse portfolio in terms of asset classes. That's the vision and that's what we're we're charging towards, but it's not a vision you can't can't be focused on every day, can't be distracted by the vision, you have to break it down into small projects and plans and try to execute on those small projects and plans as flawlessly as you can. And then you come back and do it again, with a

Alex Husner  36:48  
really great mindset. Yeah, for sure. You've got to trust that you're making the right decisions on a daily basis that are all adding up to those, those goals and what that vision is. And there's one thing that Andy and I know when you can, when you look backwards, that's how you connect the dots. And you know, seemingly, they all just really seem like they all were meant to happen the way that that they did. And sometimes when you're in the moment have one of those dots that can be a little alarming that you might think it could have straight away. But it all makes sense. In there. Well, we're super excited to see you roll this out and the success that you're going to have with not only for direct, but for your customers and it's just an exciting thing for the industry. Where are we going to see you next you're going to be vrma or springside executive summit

Wes Smithe  37:33  
me personally. Well, 100% the at Varma in October, I won't be at the spring forum personally. But we'll see we've got I've got a pretty pretty busy schedule right now we've got a lot of things rolling out. And as much as I'd like to be out and about more, it's not one of those times where I can as a CEO, I can rubbing shoulders, but I'm looking for it at least to October and hopefully some shows this summer,

Alex Husner  37:55  
right? Well, if anybody wants to reach out to you, then what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Wes Smithe  38:00  
Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Wes Smith. And please check out outstays.com If you want to check out our new direct booking site demo, build the redirect there to the product page where you can learn all about the CMS and just reach out to our team if you're interested in checking it out.

Alex Husner  38:13  
Sounds good. Well, if anybody wants to contact an a&r, you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com And until next time, thanks for tuning in everybody.